How Hitchcock Movies And Screwball Comedies Inspired ‘Adulthood’

(Left to right) Alex Winter and Josh Gad of ‘Adulthood’ pose in the Getty Images Portrait Studio during the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, Ontario.

Getty Images for IMDb

Director Alex Winter’s Adulthood might be about the secrets and struggles of America’s middle-class, but there’s something very British about the darkly comedic romp.

“My people keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s like a modern-day Coen Brothers movie,’ but my influences include Fritz Lang and, most of all, Hitchcock’s British period,” the actor-director explains as we chat over Zoom from the Toronto Film Festival. “I’m talking about films like The Lady Vanishes and The 39 Steps, but Shadow of a Doubt is probably the biggest influence on Adulthood. What that movie did was create a whimsical examination of the complete absurdity of what we think of as normal middle-class existence. It’s so good at it, it’s not offensive, it doesn’t talk down to anyone, and everyone is sympathetic, including the killer. It’s also intentionally funny as hell at times and also very disturbing. I said to my team, ‘We’re doing that.'”

“I’m British, and a lot of my sensibilities have that more sardonic, wry look at things that are very much about class and social structures. Adulthood is a film about classism. Billy Lourd’s character is obviously lower working class, and she resents the hell out of this extremely banal middle-class family, who are barely surviving. That grew very much out of those kinds of stories and that kind of worldview, but hyper-modernized.” Winter, best known as an actor for his performances in The Lost Boys and the Bill and Ted movies, was born in London, spent a lot of his life there, set up a production company, and directed commercials out of there for many years.

Adulthood sees Josh Gad and Kaya Scodelario as brother and sister, Megan and Noah, who uncover a long-buried corpse in their parents’ basement. As they try to take care of it, they stumble into a wildly escalating spiral of crime, cover-ups, and murder. The deeper they dig, the harder it becomes to escape. Adulthood, which also stars Billie Lourd and Anthony Carrigan, lands in select theaters on Friday, September 19, 2025, before heading to digital on Tuesday, September 23, 2025.

Both leads got what Winter was looking to achieve and attached themselves to the film even before it secured funding.

“Being British, my instinct is always to go towards the dark comedy, as opposed to big, colorful, bright things,” Scodelario, known for The Maze Runner, Skins, and The Gentlemen, confirms. “I like the darkness and the absurdity in life. There’s a tube strike today, and the whole country is losing it. It’s unbelievable. There are definitely those moments where one thing happens. Then it triggers this domino effect of bad decisions and heightened ridiculousness over and over again, and I definitely felt very comfortable in that arena.”

Gad adds, “Farce is very much one of my favorite things to play, and I think there’s an element of farce in some of my favorite movies, even though it doesn’t seem obvious. The Coen Brothers’ films are a great comparison for this film, because it’s exactly that. It’s a series of bizarre, unforeseen circumstances that these deliciously weird characters find themselves in, and once they’ve committed the initial sin, there’s no turning back. I love that pressure cooker for these kinds of characters, it’s a thrill to play in that world and to create two characters that have to deal with the very real consequences of their actions.”

‘Adulthood’ Hilariously Captures A Touchstone Memory Many Of Us Experience

Something Adulthood spotlights is the touchstone memory in every adult’s life when we realize that our parents had a whole other life before they had kids.

“And here the skeleton, the closet is literally a skeleton in the closet, well, a wall,” the filmmaker laughs. “All they’re confronting is the reality of their parents, and looking at them as adults from the perspective of adulthood for the very first time. It’s like, ‘Oh s**t. They are human beings. They had things going on that we didn’t know about, and problems that we didn’t know about. Now I’m an adult, and I’ve got problems that my kids don’t know about.’ That pattern is repeated.”

“I’m 60 years old, my mom is 87, and I’ve already lost my dad. I’m living very much in the world, and all my friends are in this world at this point too, dealing with aging parents, or have parents who are gone, and some of us have kids. I have kids who were completely oblivious to the fact that I’m a normal person, and it’s only their trials and tribulations that matter, but that’s the nature of youth. God bless them, let them have that denial, but you know that’s all in front of them.”

Scodelario adds, “I was quite intrigued with wanting to know more about what their character’s mum’s life was before. I feel like we get a sneak peek of it, and I’m like, ‘Damn, this woman did some stuff. Let’s find out what’s under all that.’ Alex does a very clever thing by not revealing that fully, not giving us a logline of what happened; it is the thing that we all have with our parents, where we go, ‘I know they had a life before me, but I don’t actually really want to think about it too much.’ That makes it too real. It’s like with teachers. When you suddenly realize that your teachers were 23 and you were probably a real as**hole to them, and they went home and cried.”

Gad Saw ‘Adulthood’ As A Chance To Reflect On His Own Hollywood Experience

Winter created backstories for both lead characters to help them with their characters; however, he encouraged them to make their own. Gad got it right out of the gate as his character is trying to carve out a career in Hollywood.

“Noah’s backstory was one that I can relate to,” he admits. “I was a struggling actor coming out of college and a wannabe writer hanging on to the one thing. I did an episode of ER, and it was the only job I had done for something like three years, and I hung on to that as this great achievement that was going to propel me to greatness. That is Noah’s arc. He is this person who has been in one writer’s room, and he’s grasping on to the fumes of that experience as if it is going to open these doors and make him the next James Cameron.”

“There is the sadness of him in this state of arrested development, where he doesn’t have a backup plan, and it’s been long enough that he should. He is inconvenienced by the fact that he has to come home and be an adult. It’s the essence of who he is. He desperately pushes away this affection and this idea of needing codependence, and at his core, he desperately needs her codependence to survive as just a human being. It was a really great backstory to delve into and create with Kaya and Alex.”

Gad even took his character’s Hollywood history and worked it into his costume choices, donning an Alamo Drafthouse t-shirt. Does the Frozen star actor plan to work merch from his other favorite movie chains into future films?

“Maybe Olaf is going to wear a Nicole Kidman AMC shirt. We’re already planning it,” he jokes. “It felt so natural for the character and if you know, you know. I’s such a niche appreciation to have, and you get it as somebody who would be living in LA in this capacity, of course he would have that shirt.”

“I would love to know Noah’s deep backstory,” Scodelario chuckles. “I want a play-by-play of every meeting he’s ever gone into, every script he’s tried to write, and I would watch an entire movie of him just sitting down trying to write a script.”

“Her story is my idea of hell. She stayed in the same place and is stuck in this idea of needing to match what every other woman around her is doing. That’s quite an instinctual thing, and a lot of us do it, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable. I’m such a rebel that I desperately want to get out there, experience new things, and hide from my past, whereas Megan is quite comfortable in that space, or so we think. The reality by the end of the movie is that we realize that she actually isn’t, and she has all these emotions in her, this fierceness and darkness, and she comes to peace with that by the end.”

Something Winter wanted and needed to do with the film’s lean budget was to make every cent stretch. Part of that involved heading to Canada to double for middle America, with one caveat.

“One of the main reasons I shot in Ottawa was because of that location, so there was never a point at which I was willing to give that up,” the director and producer reveals. “I shot there because it was untapped territory. They shoot a lot of movies there, but they primarily shoot those Hallmark Christmas movies, often using fake snow or other effects. But there wasn’t a single location in our film that anyone had seen before. When I was scouting, leading up to it every day, I wanted to shoot somewhere that would work, but everywhere I was looking at, I was like, ‘I’ve seen all of this in movies already. I’ve seen all of Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg.’ I felt like I’ve seen everything already, and I wanted this to feel a little alien.”

Another reason for shooting north of the border was pulling off an action scene on a bridge that could only be shot using drones due to its remote location. Winter couldn’t get the cameras and cranes where he needed them to get the shot.

“Any other filmmaker attempting to do something as ambitious as the sequence that takes place on the bridge, without giving too much away, given our budgetary and time limitations, would be a lunatic,” Gad says. “When Alex first presented the amount of coverage he wanted to get in this sequence, which is a five or six-page scene, it was wild. I was like, ‘There’s no way we’re going to be able to do this.'”

“It is a tribute to Alex. He’s so well prepared and storyboarded the scene to within an inch of its life. When we were out there, we felt like we had a safety net; our director was going to get what he needed to get and not leave us stranded, proverbially and literally, on this bridge. Alex is a genius who knows what he wants, and he gets it.”

Scodelario continues, “There were about seven takes when we were just walking on our own up because it was on drones, and everyone was so far away. That is quite rare on set because you can normally feel the crew around you. I do think we both bugged out a little bit. It felt very vulnerable. Going into this scene, we have to make the decisions; there’s no lifeline, there’s no safety net here; we have to go for it. It’s a great way of showing scope and scale. It’s probably the reason we didn’t have any food for three weeks before, because all the budget was on the drones, but I’m glad they did it that way.”

Winter Sees ‘Adulthood’ As Key In Him Being Allowed To Keep Telling Stories

As well as producing and directing Adulthood, Winter also has a small but essential role. Did he consider not doing that, as he had enough on his plate?

“I thought it was a fun role to do, but I’ve got to be really honest with you, I was really worried about that role fu**king the whole movie up,” he laughs. “It’s so critical where he is at the very end, I don’t want to give the end of the movie away, and I was rewriting that all the way up till the night before shooting. It was pivotal what he said or didn’t say for the whole thing to work. I was very nervous about giving that to another actor and not having the time I needed, then getting into post-production and realizing, ‘Oh my God, our ending doesn’t work.’ There was a bit of a control freak thing going on there, too.”

Winter, who has made a slew of documentaries in recent years in between his acting, is currently in the final stage of prep for his Broadway return in one of the season’s hottest tickets, Waiting for Godot. It reunites him with his Bill and Ted co-star Keanu Reeves. Of course, he’s already planning.

“All I can tell you is that I’m banking on Adulthood to be able to keep making movies. That’s the only hope I have of being able to do this again,” he admits. “It’s a very tough time for making movies, especially movies for grown-ups. I started making documentaries 15 years ago because I had a narrative that I couldn’t get off the ground because nobody was making movies anymore. I made this film the same way I made my independent narratives in the 90s, with foreign-backed financing, attaching cast early on, keeping the price low, and being very organized in prep. I’m doing that again. I have another script right now based on a Megan Abbott book that I’ve optioned, an incredible noir that I’m building with a writer right now, and I intend to do the same damn thing again, if they’ll let me.”