Elizabeth and Damian Hurley called into The Bobby Bones Show to talk about their new movie, Strictly Confidential.
The director of the movie, Damian, had the idea for the film when he was 17 years old. He first came up with the story during a very devastating time in his life when he was dealing with the aftermath of losing a friend to suicide. Then, his own father took his life about a year later.
He first wrote the film when he was 17 but thought he was a little too inexperienced to make it at the time. He shelved it and then COVID happened. He made a short film after the lockdown ended and an executive at Lionsgate saw it and he got a call out of the blue when he first turned 20 saying they loved it and asked him to write a feature for them.
During that time, he had grown up a lot and felt like it was time for the story to be told and that’s when Strictly Confidential was born. He casted his mother, Elizabeth in it but at first she only had a small role. His mother’s role in the film has an affair with a young woman, when it came up, he decided to switch the roles and felt like his mother was the perfect fit for the role. He knew directing his mother in a sex scene would be weird, but it was an independent film and they had 80 shooting days so ever second counted and they were so frantic trying to get every scene they didn’t even have time to think about it.
Elizabeth shared that working with her son and him being her boss was a weird relationship. But ever since he was a little kid, he was always filming his parents, so it was almost a natural progression. She promised her son when he was 8 that when he made his first proper film, she’d be in it. When she read the script, she had never had a role like that before, so she felt great taking it and knew she was in safe hands with her son as the director. She felt it was a gift to give to her son, to give him all that time to follow his dream, so it wasn’t a difficult decision to make. Lunchbox asked how she’s remained to be a “hottie” all these years and she said taking care of herself, watching what she eats, drinking lots of water and working out.
When Damian looked back at his work the first few times, he felt panic because he was only seeing what he hated. When he watched it back the last time before it was released, he felt proud and happy of it. Damian shared that success with him with this movie is that everyone who watches it takes away something valuable from it. It’s been well over a year of his life working on it and he hopes people like it and take away something from it that they didn’t have before they watched it. For his future movie directing career, he loves making central mysteries and does not want to do a full thriller film. It’s important to him that the film is beautiful and the one he is trying to put together now is a little more grown up than Strictly Confidential.
You can watch Strictly Confidential now in select theatres and on Prime, Apple TV and on almost any streamer!