At the premiere of her directorial debut Flash twice On Thursday, Zoë Kravitz took a moment to give special thanks to the film’s star and her fiancé Channing Tatum.
Before the screening at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles, Kravitz thanked the cast and crew who worked on the project and told the audience she was going to “take just a second to talk about Channing fucking Tatum” before reading a note she had written in her notebook.
“From producing to performing to giving pep talks to holding my head or feet while I cried on the bathroom floor thinking I messed everything up, thank you for letting me be a complete ODC psycho control freak. Thank you for your patience,” she said. “Making this film with you has been such an amazing adventure. Thank you for trusting me to direct you as a female director. It’s really cool to make a film, but when you get to do it with the love of your life, it’s even cooler.” The couple, who got engaged last year, also made their red carpet debut at the event.
Kravitz directed and co-wrote the psychological thriller, in which Tatum Slater plays King, a tech billionaire who meets cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) at his fundraising gala. He invites her to vacation with him and his friends on his private island, where things start to go wrong.
Admitting that public speaking is her greatest fear, Kravitz also used her opening night speech to thank the film crew for “taking the time to make this film what we dreamed it would be. You all worked harder than you were paid to. You all lost sleep and probably your minds over this project. You all got a series of weird fever dream texts from me at odd hours of the night. But not one of you rolled your eyes or called me a bitch, at least not to my face, when I said, ‘We’re not there yet.’ You all said, ‘Yeah, let’s keep going, let’s get there,’ and we did that.”
On the carpet, Kravitz said The Hollywood Reporter that she came into the director’s chair quite naturally because “I had a bunch of emotions and I didn’t know what to do with them, so I wrote something and then finally I was lucky enough to make it,” citing Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Penny Marshall and John Cassavetes as her inspirations.
Flash twice will be in theaters on August 23rd.
