‘Verity’ director reveals how Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson improvised 'iconic’ scene

When Anne Hathaway received the script for the new film, Verity, the Oscar-winning star assumed she was being considered for the lead in a cosy romantic comedy.

After all, the writer-director Michael Showalter made his name in comedy, co-creating the Wet Hot American Summer franchise, as well as the acclaimed series Search Party.

“I had no idea what it was about,” said Hathaway of the script. “I read the log-line and saw I was playing a writer. I’m like, ‘Oh, cool, we’re going to make a romcom about a writer!’ Then I read it… and it’s so not that.”

Verity is actually the furthest thing from a romcom. The latest Colleen Hoover adaptation is rather a deranged, psychosexual thriller in the vein of throwback hits like Fatal Attraction and Body Heat.

Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, the bestselling author of a grisly crime series, suddenly incapacitated after a mysterious accident.

We are then introduced to struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) who Verity hires to complete her latest book.

“One of the very first movies that I watched when I started working on this was a film called Jagged Edge, which was written by Joe Eszterhas, who also wrote Basic Instinct,” Showalter explains. “He has such a flair for the operatic qualities of these stories, and the glamour – you’ve never seen Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges looking better than in the movie Jagged Edge. I wanted to celebrate how gorgeous these movie stars are and how much we love to look at them.”

For Hathaway, who also produced the movie and is now completing its press tour heavily pregnant, the end goal was to make Verity as risqué as possible.

“We had to make the film as sexy as the book,” she said. “So all the sort of tingles – the so-wrong-it’s-right things about the book – we had to make sure that that was in there in the film.”

In fact, it was a moment of improvisation between Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson that gave rise to one of the film’s most memorable moments, which also ended up being author Colleen Hoover’s favourite part of the movie.

The moment in question being a passionate kiss between the actors that plays out when Lowen’s sexual fantasy about Jeremy morphs into one about Verity.

“Anne and Dakota were like, ‘What if we started kissing? What if it’s Josh, but then Josh turns into Anne?’” Showalter, director for Verity recalls. “It was first like, we can’t do that. Then, we have to do that, and if it doesn’t work, then we won’t put it in the movie. But it works quite amazingly.”