Fair Play Director Chloe Domont on Making ‘Post-#MeToo’ Thriller Personal: ‘I Write My Fears’ (Exclusive)

Chloe Domont opens up about the all-too-real — yet “bats— crazy” — inspirations behind her new film.

Fair play stars Phoebe Dynevor (Bridgerton) and Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) as a passionate couple trying to separate their personal relationship from their work at a cutthroat hedge fund firm.

A promotion that doesn’t go the way they expected turns their romance upside down, revealing a toxic masculinity that audiences are sure to recognize, especially amid the ongoing crackdown of the #MeToo movement.

Although a work of fiction, Domont, 36, tells PEOPLE that the film was “15 years in the making” because of the real-life gender dynamics that influenced it.

“This elephant in the room that no one could ever talk about,” says the writer and director, is that “a man’s success is a relationship win. When it’s the other way around, why is it a threat?”

Domont, who also directed the episodes Billions and Ballersopens her feature debut and how its story provided a painful but cathartic reflection of her experiences—both in personal relationships and in post-#MeToo Hollywood.

PEOPLE: Gender dynamics in Fair play feel so specific and authentic. What – or should we say, who – inspired you to tell this explosive story?

Chloe Domont: The real core came from that feeling I had at a certain time in my life when my career started to take off. I suddenly had this feeling that my success didn’t seem like a complete victory. It felt like a loss on some level. And because of the types of relationships I was in with men who adored me for my ambition, they adored me for my talent, my will, all my strengths. But at the same time, there was still a sense that they felt small because I was big on some level.

Nothing was ever talked about. It was just felt. And the way I normalized that dynamic, the way I started to undermine my excitement when I got certain jobs — that played out over the years in different relationships and different shades of it.

It got to a point where it became unsustainable for me, realizing how much influence these entrenched power dynamics still have over us, even in progressive cities, and even with progressive men. So that’s something I wanted to put on the screen and just go crazy with it.

The men I’ve been with would never admit that a woman threatened them. Because what would that say about them? And I would never want to admit to my friends that I was with someone I threatened on some level. Because what would that say about me?

It’s always the bats—, never the weird, safe experiences that make a good Hollywood movie?

No, no, never. Yes… I wouldn’t know how to make something or write something that I don’t feel on a deep level. I write my fears. I write what terrifies me.

It’s always been my exhaust valve. The cathartic part of that is taking something incredibly personal but putting it in a different world with different characters. It’s the combination of the personal element and putting it against new territory that makes it a little more cathartic because of that separation.

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Chloe Domont directs “Fair Play”.

Slobodan Pikula / Courtesy of Netflix

Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich give stunning performances here. What was it like working with them?

They are the heart and soul of the film. It’s funny, someone said to me a few months ago, “It must be hard as a director when you have the best version in your head and then you don’t get that version.” And I’m like, “Dude, what are you talking about?” If you act well and you have the right people around you, the right collaborators, it takes the best version of you that you have and it becomes something you never thought about because of what other people bring to it.

The level of humanity that these two actors brought to it, the duality of emotion – I just feel like that’s what makes us human. It’s not when we feel one thing. It is that we feel opposing things that completely contradict each other. This idea that we want to love someone and hurt them at the same time. This idea of ​​wanting to support someone, but also wanting to surpass them and the opposite feelings of jealousy and love.

What moments on the set surprised you the most? How did Phoebe or Alden elevate it to that best version?

The things that they brought that surprised me in moments were just the pain – the pain and the inner struggle that Alden brought to this role, to Luke. He is someone who struggles deeply with what he feels. He’s not happy about it. He struggles with it but he doesn’t know how to deal with it because he doesn’t know how to talk about it because he can’t even face it. And so it becomes a poison that comes out in really ugly ways.

If you’re willing, can you talk about how the world of finance in this film reflects Hollywood or your experiences in the industry?

I mean, being a woman in any industry, you face this. That’s why so many women came up to me at the end of the film and said, “I’ve never felt so seen before,” because of what they face, these kinds of challenges in the workplace, but also behind the bedroom door. And there’s a reason why I wanted to explore that kind of toxicity in the workplace at the same time that she’s experiencing that kind of toxicity at home. Because these things are quite parallel, especially if you are a woman who wants her share of the pie.

So this story could have been told in any industry?

I really believe it could. The reason I chose high finance is because I could relate to the life or death stakes you feel in a work environment. That feeling in finance is very similar to the high stakes you feel in film and television. There’s a lot of money on the table and if you don’t make your day, it costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That feeling and that rush of adrenaline, I think, is actually similar to finance. So I felt that I could emotionally feel what it was like to be in that environment even though I had never worked in finance.

Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in “Fair Play.”

Sergej Radović / Netflix

Where would you say this film is part of or reflective of the #MeToo movement?

This is a film for the post-#MeToo era. Are we asking the same questions we may have asked a moment ago? In a way, yes. And I think that’s the problem.

In some ways, being in the post-#MeToo era, it’s harder to talk about these things because no one wants to admit that it’s really still happening. How can we address some of these issues if some of us can’t admit that we still deal with some of these entrenched gender dynamics? I feel like we’re stuck because we don’t know how to talk about it, because we’re afraid to bring things up.

Fair play currently streaming on Netflix.

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Source: HIS Education