A billboard in Times Square

In 1998 Dunne came up from the R train and found a Godzilla-sized ad for his movie lighting up One Times Square. Every director's fantasy, checked off.

“It's a filmmaker's dream to imagine their work lit up sky-high.”

Same poster, new number

Walking the same block recently, he saw the artwork again on a bigger screen, with a huge 2 behind it. The sequel brought the memories back.

He actually hates magic

Top hats and hidden rabbits bore him. A magician once pulled him into a card trick at his birthday party, he fumbled the instructions, and the other kids laughed him out of the room.

“Ever since, witches, wizards, and dragons have bored me silly.”

Sandy made the call

Bullock was attached and pushed for him to direct. They had hit it off at a Sundance party where she saw his short film.

The lunch that became a scandal

He flew to London to meet Kidman on a day off from Eyes Wide Shut and spent it grilling her about Kubrick. A paparazzi shot of a cheek kiss ran as a tabloid affair story.

“Who is This Cad Nicole Is Cheating on Tom Cruise With?”

The second read changed everything

Going back through Alice Hoffman's novel, he found themes running parallel to his own life. That was his way into a story about belief.

Three generations of women

The Owens women come in pairs of sisters across three generations, fierce and devoted to each other. Dunne recognized the shape of his own family immediately.

His grandmother, immune to scorpions

Mexican aristocracy who left her fiance at the altar for a gringo across the border, then raised her daughter on a cattle ranch in Nogales, Arizona.

“She was a tough old bird who'd been stung by scorpions so many times she was immune to their pain.”

A mother who sang mariachi

His mother's lonely childhood was filled with books and Deutsche Grammophon records. Only mariachi music pulled her out, songs about sad cowboys and two-timing women.

His sister Dominique

She suffered no fools, mastered gourmet cooking and Italian, and could sense a suffering person from across a room.

“an empathy that could detect a suffering soul like a dog whistle only she could hear”

A curse is just trauma

Hearing the phrase generational trauma on talk radio unlocked the book for him. The centuries-old Owens curse was the same thing under a different name.

The real family curse

On October 30, 1982, Dominique was strangled by an ex-boyfriend she had left after his first attempt on her throat. The trial ended in an obscenely light sentence.

His mother turned it into law

MS had already taken her voice and her legs. She founded Justice for Homicide Victims and passed victims' rights legislation now enforced in 25 states.

“like the Owens sisters, she turned tragedy into a form of power”

Why he needed to direct it

Imagining Jimmy Angelov choking Gillian meant picturing his sister's last moments, something he had lived with for years. That turned a job into a necessity.

The hardest night on set

Shooting Gillian's attack in the back seat of the car, watching Kidman's surrender to terror and her fight to live, remains the most grueling work of his career. He told nobody why.

“remains the most emotionally grueling experience I've ever had on a set”

And the most satisfying

Killing Jimmy was a pleasure. Needles in the eyes, which the studio made him soften, a corpse in the rose garden, then finishing him off for good.

A flop that refused to die

The release landed so flat he groaned when a flight announced it as the in-flight movie. Decades later a packed Australian theater shouted the lines back and danced to Coconut.

“We couldn't have made the second one if Griffin hadn't made the first one and set the tone.”