“Verity” Director Michael Showalter On How Anne Hathaway, Hitchcock & Upstate New York Were Key To His Vision

Director Michael Showalter would only make Verity (in theaters October 2), a seductive psychological thriller, if he could do it his way with a filmmaking team that went the extra mile. In fact, it was around ten extra miles after his location scouts in New York found the perfect key location for his vision to play out.

Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel, the film follows renowned author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) and Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), a struggling writer, recruited and relocated to the remote Crawford estate to ghostwrite for an incapacitated Verity. It’s not long before Lowen uncovers what appears to be Verity’s chilling accounts of the death of one of her children and finds herself locked in a passionate affair with Verity’s husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). As things spiral, Lowen is caught in a maelstrom of her own making, trying to work out what’s real and what isn’t.

Showalter, a deft comedy director also known for dramatic work like The Eyes of Tammy Faye and The Big Sick, talks to The Credits about the Hollywood classics that inspired his vision, how local scouts found a needle-in-a-haystack location, and why mid-budget thrillers are key to a healthy box office.

Verity is reminiscent of many things, from classic Hitchcock to director Richard Marquand’s Jagged Edge, with the vibe of a mid-90s mid-budget erotic thriller.

Jagged Edge is one of the movies that inspired me. I don’t think that’s a movie a lot of people know now. One thing I love about Jagged Edge is how glamorous it is. The actors are so good-looking, the clothes are so nice, and the locations are so gorgeous. Hitchcock’s Hollywood films in the 1950s also have a sense of glamour. They felt incredibly aspirational and escapist. You mention the films of the 90s and the Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction) films, Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct), Brian De Palma (Body Double), and the Joe Eszterhas scripts (he wrote Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct) were all big influences. It’s also based on the book, which is very much an erotic thriller that is twisted, dirty, and a little kinky.

Let’s talk about working your vision into the constraints of pre-existing material. It can offer opportunities, but it can also create challenges.

This is my third or fourth movie working with Amazon MGM, so there’s shorthand and trust. Directorially, this was the tone I wanted, and I made that clear to everybody early on. I said, “If you don’t like it, then you shouldn’t hire me to direct the movie.” Halfway through, I didn’t want to have everyone be like, “Wait. This isn’t what we want.” We chose these incredible actors who feel like a Hitchcock cast. As a fan of these genre movies and a fan of Hitchcock, Dakota is in that lineage because her mother did De Palma and she and her grandmother did Hitchcock, so those connections were there. Colleen and her producing partner, Lauren Levine, were very much the proxy for the book’s fan base, so we had a lot of open communication about what they thought would work for readers, and we tried to meld all those things together.

At the start of Verity, there is a pivotal scene that you shot on location in Pershing Square near New York’s Grand Central. Using practical effects on a real location in the heart of a bustling city must have been tricky.

It’s an iconic scene, and it’s the very first thing that happens in the book. You meet Lowen, Dakota’s character, as she walks to a meeting. A guy’s head gets blown off in a car accident, and she gets covered in blood. It’s the very first thing that happens, but it has nothing to do with anything in the movie. I never considered doing it anywhere other than on location in New York, but what we changed was that we were originally going to show the car accident. We were going to have a stunt person on a bicycle get hit by a car, but we realized it would be too difficult to choreograph. My idea was to have it happen off camera, and the surprise is that Lowen gets hit with all this blood. We didn’t get to do it multiple times because that fake blood is so thick. It has the consistency of maple syrup, so it’s sticky and gooey. When that gets in the actor’s hair and on their face, it takes 45 minutes to an hour to remove, so any extra takes would have been an hour each time. We were hoping to get it in one take, and we did.

Verity’s house is a key location and a character in its own right, much like in movies such as The Haunting and The Shining.

It has never been filmed before, not for a commercial, a movie, or anything. It was built in the 1960s, so it’s mid-century modern and heavily influenced by Japanese architecture and art forms, and it sits on a beautiful lake in the middle of the woods. We could not have picked something more perfect. It was like, “We can’t make the movie if we don’t get this house.”

Where is it?

It’s in Armonk, about an hour outside of New York City. Verity’s room, where Lowen stays, the office, and all those hallways were built on a soundstage. The house is really the upstairs area. You go in, you see the lake and the kitchen, but then we recreated all those other rooms. The house is way smaller than it feels in the movie. Our production designer, Amy Williams, did a great job mimicking the wood and its look. It’s seamless. I wanted the house to feel otherworldly, creepy, and alluring. There’s very little description of the house in the book, which was an interesting choice by Colleen. She leaves it entirely to the reader’s imagination. It mentions that it was modern and there’s a lot of glass, but that’s about it. The house that I had in my mind was the one in the recent remake of The Invisible Man. Again, that house is a beautiful modern home, but something about it feels sinister and scary.

Did you have local location scouts?

Yes, one hundred percent, and they were literally driving around, almost going door to door, looking at houses, and they found this one. When you’re working in these cities and states that have tax credits, there’s a zone where if you can stay within it, you can pay less money, but this house was about ten miles outside of the zone. It meant we had to spend a little extra money to shoot there, but it was completely worth it. I can’t fathom how this film would work without it, and of course, the roof was key. When Lowen walks into the house and looks up, she sees those spiky roof fixtures in the shape of a V, like Verity, but they also look like teeth, and the film has a lot of motifs around teeth. Verity is constantly biting things, so walking into this house is like walking into Verity’s mouth or the jaws of this story.

Do you find New York, where you also filmed on Broadway Stages in Queens, a very filmmaker-friendly environment?

Very much so. I love shooting in New York. The crews are great, the locations are great, and there’s so much variety. There’s old, new, and just about anything you could ever want. Upstate New York worked perfectly for rural Vermont, which is where Verity is set. Also, the people who live around here are very film-savvy. They know the deal. I’m from the East Coast, so anytime I can work in New York and New Jersey, I get excited to be back there.

This isn’t the first time you have worked with Anne Hathaway. What keeps drawing you to her?

She’s a true artist; she gives 10,000 percent of herself to her work, and she’s a wonderful human being, but I love working with her because of what she brings creatively. She has a million ideas, so much passion, and as a director, that’s more than you could ever ask for. She is constantly trying to find ways to make her character more interesting and complicated; she’s totally fearless and completely committed. Any opportunity I can get to work with her, I will always take.

Why is it important that audiences support mid-budget movies in theaters?

I’ve seen Verity with an audience, and there is a communal experience. It’s fun to watch this movie, jump in your seat, grab the person next to you, and hear people around you reacting because this movie is pretty out there. A lot of crazy things happen, and that’s the point. That’s the fun. These mid-budget movies deliver a different kind of audience experience.

Verity is in theaters on October 2.

Featured image: Anne Hathaway stars as Verity Crawford in director Michael Showalter’s VERITY, from Amazon MGM Studios. Photo credit: Alisha Wetherill © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.