From Glass Boxes to Open Water: Simon Stone Brings His Visceral Theater Aesthetic to The Woman in Cabin 10

Australian writer/director Simon Stone is known for building visceral theater experiences around female actors. He encased Billie Piper inside a glass terrarium in his adaptation of Lorca’s Yerma; she holds the title as the only performer to win all six of the currently available Best Actress awards in UK theater. Janet McTeer created shockwaves at the National in Stone’s updated version of Phaedra. Alicia Vikander is currently getting soaked eight times a week in Stone’s adaptation of of Ibsen’s The Lady From the Sea the Bridge Theatre (alongside Andrew Lincoln and Joe Alwyn). Stone’s formula is to construct his scripts while in rehearsal — a high-octane method that creates gripping evenings.

Stone has crafted something similar for Keira Knightley in his new Netflix film The Woman in Cabin 10, a loose adaptation of Ruth Ware’s 2016 thriller in which a journalist (Knightley) is invited on a mysterious yacht trip by a billionaire, only to witness a fellow passenger being thrown overboard. A nod to Hitchcock and old Hollywood, it’s Stone’s most visible movie yet (he also directed the smaller-scale, Carey Mulligan-led The Dig for Netflix in 2021), and the one that has taught him the most so far. He likes a good challenge — and The Woman in Cabin 10 provided it, while fitting right within his oeuvre.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’re primarily a theater director, with only a handful of films under your belt. What did you learn from taking on a project of this magnitude? 
I like the challenge of working in art forms that I haven’t earned my stripes in yet. I always try to put myself in situations where I’m the least experienced person in the room, and that’s always meant that I’ve had to learn very fast. The way you work isn’t set in stone, and that’s both exhilarating and necessary if you’re going to keep reinventing yourself.

How did that apply to The Woman in Cabin 10?
It was the first time I had five cameras shooting at once. One of them is on a drone, one is on a boat looking at another boat, another one’s on a third boat, looking on those two boats. You have to imagine what those composite parts would add up to when you cut the film together. In theater, it happens in front of you and you know what’s going to work. In film, I can add a visual effects shot that I did months ago to the background of another shot, or I can add a bit of performance to another bit of performance that the same actor did weeks beforehand. You have to see a quarter of what it’s going to be and go, “I can see the other three quarters.” Film is all about imagining what it could be, and in theater, it’s all about focusing on what it is right now.

I think back to seeing Yerma and wondering how Billie Piper managed to do that performance eight times a week, and I felt similarly when I was watching Keira Knightley in the film. Her performance is so unrestrained—but obviously she only had to do it however many times you shot the scene.
In theater, your main job is to help an actor find a sustainable way to do it multiple times a week. If you’re too fast in telling an actor what you want, you can get in the way of that person discovering it inside themselves. Billie was able to do it eight times a week because I told her she could do it differently every time she did it. It’s not actually the same thing eight times a week, but it’s always from a place of truth.

With Keira, in some ways, it was more intense, because she needed to see a dead body 100 times over four hours from so many different angles. Keira is really good at this kind of selective amnesia, going, “I’m going to walk away, listen to some music, and come back and pretend that I’m saying it for the first time.” Which is an incredibly hard thing when someone is as intelligent as Keira is. There’s a willful ignorance that actors have when you’re making films.

In some ways, it feels like it’s a classic old Hollywood thriller, with a protagonist who’s determined to uncover the truth, no matter the cost.
Usually, at the core of a movie like this is the integrity of a man that chooses to find out the truth even though it’s an unpopular decision. It is not a role that is typically cast with a woman, and what a lot of filmmakers lean into is the gaslighting aspect, the believability of a woman, like, “Was she imagining it? Is she balanced emotionally, mentally?” I wanted to pay a little tribute to the films that do that, but never, ever have our lead character in doubt by an audience. Other characters are trying to put her into that movie, and there’s no moment where she goes “Am I going crazy?” I wanted her to have the same integrity that Robert Redford has in All the President’s Men.

But it also encompasses many other genres, too.
In the 1970s, they weren’t afraid of genre mashup. Nowadays, we go to horror for horror. We go to comedy for comedy. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock has action sequences, cultural comedy with Jimmy Stewart not knowing what hand to eat with in a foreign context, and Doris Day singing “Que Sera, Sera” at the piano. There are jokes and horror and a musical number.

Hollywood used to really embrace that complexity, and I wanted to nod to it all.