Ford V Ferrari actor Tracy Letts laments work on The Woman In The Window

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

While Tracy Letts has had an acting career that goes back over thirty years, the thespian is mostly known for his writing work. Letts won the Pulitzer Prize for his play August: Osage County and wrote the film adaptations of his plays Bug and Killer Joe. Recently, Letts experienced a first in his career, as he was hired to adapt material that wasn't his own. The theater vet was hired to write the adaptation of author A.J. Finn's The Woman In The Window. The film was supposed to drop last month but due to the Disney/Fox merger and poor test screenings, the film was pushed back to May to allow for rewrites and reshoots. Although situations like THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW's are common, Letts was quite candid about his experience:

"It kind of sucked. I read the book and I thought, oh this will make a good movie, I can do this job. And then I got into the weeds of it. I was like, oh shit, this is hard. And I was also working with a lot of producers, a director and they had a lot of notes and it was hard.”

Although Letts was happy with his eventual script, the studio wasn't, which led to the aforementioned reshoots, something which confused the actor:

“I felt we made the movie we set out to make, so I’m a little confused by that. But it’s a thriller and people have certain expectations about the way a thriller works… I haven’t seen the redone version and we’ll see what it looks like. You always try to choose those things carefully because it is going to take a lot of time out of your life. So you want to choose those projects very carefully, but there’s only so much you can do to safeguard against intangibles, things you don’t know are coming down down the road.”

Now listen far be it from me to tell Disney how to do their job but it seems to me that if you have a Pulitzer Prize winning author, you may want to let him do his thing. If you read between the lines it sounds like the finished product is going to be very different from what Tracy Letts originally intended. He still has writing credit on the film, however I can't help but wonder if THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is going to be Disneyfied for audiences.