There’s something different about Betty Gilpin’s hero in The Hunt. The film is an action-horror-comedy hybrid about liberal elitists who kidnap conservatives and hunt them for sport, but they picked up more than they bargained for with Crystal, Gilpin’s character, who has the skills necessary to take the fight back to the oppressors and kill them instead, in brutal and hilarious action sequences.

But Crystal isn’t the typical action movie hero, or horror movie hero. She’s a remarkably eccentric character, prone to bizarre anecdotes and baffling little noises, and that’s just the way director Craig Zobel likes it.

In a recent interview with Bloody-Disgusting, we asked Zobel for insight into how Crystal became the instantly iconic horror hero that those of us who’ve seen the film absolutely love.

“You know, there is a way to play Crystal in this movie that would just simply be John Wick. Right? Kind of a cipher, a person who doesn’t, like, you don’t get to know much about,” Craig Zobel says. “And by the way I love John Wick. That’s not a diss. There’s simply the role could be enigmatic and kind of cryptic.”

“There’s some sense that we wanted to keep it like that, but it was fun with Betty to… well, for one, just allow a female actor to get to do that because that’s not really a role that’s often afforded to female actors. They mostly are asked to play support roles and things like that,” Zobel says. “But part of it between me and Betty was, let’s both lean into what is enigmatic and mysterious about Crystal, but also get to reveal what is strange about her over the course of the movie. Like, let’s lean into the reveals.”

“That became a constant, like almost every take of every shot of every scene in the movie we would say, okay, well, we’ve got the traditional version of what this would be. How do we do the crazy Crystal version of this movie? What would Crystal do?” Zobel recalls. “Now that we know how to do what I would call ‘The Linda Hamilton Take,’ then we’d say like, ‘What is the version that is Betty Gilpin going for it and just being kooky?’”

“I would say that we occasionally used the Linda Hamilton take, but we mostly used the Betty Gilpin take,” Zobel explains.

Mild Spoilers Ahead!

There may be no better example of “The Betty Gilpin Take” than the scene in which Crystal has to kick somebody out of a car, and slowly prepares to do so by making a tiny high-pitched noise that builds and builds in intensity until she unleashes her attack. It’s weird, it’s hilarious, and it’s very different to explain why it’s one of the best parts of the movie.

“As originally intended it was an action beat, right? It was simply an action beat,” Zobel says. “When we sat down and did it, the car that I had picked, it was not quite that easy to get your feet up to kick someone. So I sat with Betty and I was like, look, we have to figure out how to make it where you can be ready to do this before you do it. How do we move you around? How do we block this, essentially?

“And in doing so she was like, ‘I was thinking I could do this.’ And she made the noise almost as an explanation for what she was doing, and I was like, that’s great! Just do that noise,” Zobel says, before correcting himself.

“I don’t even think I told her to do the noise at first. We shot a take where, we were shooting [a] rehearsal, and she did it, and then we did another take, and I went, ‘Wait, will you do the noise again? The noise has become really important to me,’” Zobel laughs.

“It’s very weird, and I don’t know that Betty could explain to you exactly what it means, and I certainly don’t want to either. It just felt very what Crystal would do,” Zobel explains.