Taylor Dupuis on Why Anna Wants to Stay

For Taylor Dupuis, the trouble between Derick and Anna begins with a familiar disagreement: one woman's life is changing, and the other experiences that change as being left behind.

"It can feel like you're being abandoned because the other person's just growing in a different direction," she told me.

In Where the Hell Is Anna?, that feeling becomes part of a rescue story. Dupuis plays Derick, who arrives at a woodland wellness community determined to bring her estranged best friend home. But Anna has found something at Arcana that she does not want to leave. The history between the women gives Derick a reason to care, without necessarily giving her a complete understanding of what her friend needs.

When we spoke after the film's Nashville premiere, Dupuis returned to that difference. She wanted the audience to understand both women, and to recognize why the retreat's welcome might mean more to Anna than its warning signs mean to Derick.

Writing both sides of the friendship

Dupuis wanted to draw on the difficulty of her early female friendships as well as the close relationships she found in adulthood. The story needed room for codependency and resentment alongside a loyalty that could survive years of disappointment.

She wanted to explore "toxic love," she said, mixed with an "I'm here for you till the end of time kind of friendship." Neither feeling had to make the other untrue.

That approach meant giving both women reasons for how they felt. A friendship formed when someone occupies most of your life has to change when partners, family responsibilities, and different ambitions begin taking up space. Dupuis was interested in how that change could feel like abandonment even when the other person did not intend it as rejection.

When I asked whether one side had been easier to write, she did not choose the character she plays.

"I think I've been the Anna and the Derick at times."

She drew on friendships from elementary school through adulthood, returning to how she had understood those relationships at different ages. Even a small habit made it into the film: the voice messages exchanged between the friends came from her own practice of trading voice memos with a close friend.

The details give the relationship a life beyond the rescue. These are women who knew each other before the retreat, and whose expectations of one another did not disappear when their lives changed.

Why the welcome had to feel real

I asked Dupuis about a scene beside a stream, where Derick finds genuine comfort. Was that reassurance something the audience was supposed to trust?

Dupuis wanted the question to remain difficult. The women at Arcana, as she conceived them, are also people looking for relief from their own painful experiences. Their comfort in one another is not simply a performance intended to deceive a newcomer.

"I wanted people to feel a little confused with the darkness and the lightness of Arcana," she said.

The distinction matters to Anna. Dupuis describes abandonment as a wound that comes from several places in her life. At the retreat, she finds attention, community, and the feeling that she is at home.

"I think she felt seen and safe with these women."

That does not require Derick to be wrong about the danger. It gives Anna something more substantial to lose than a set of beliefs her friend finds alarming. Derick is asking her to leave a place where, in Dupuis's account, she has experienced a kind of care she needed.

Some of the retreat's language also comes from things Dupuis values personally. Asked about Aradia, the figure behind her production company's name, she spoke about empowerment and the different sides of women she wants to explore in her stories. Nature, an inner life, and connection with other people are important to her, and she brought those interests into Arcana.

Her description of the fictional community holds those things apart from the harm taking place there. The comfort is part of what makes the situation complicated; it is not something she wanted the audience to dismiss as foolishness.

When a joke belongs, and when it doesn't

Dupuis's reason for combining friendship drama, comedy, and horror was similarly rooted in how she experiences relationships. She remembers being with women in moments of distress when somebody suddenly cracks a joke. The shift does not mean the distress has stopped being real.

"I can be crying one second, laughing two seconds later," she said.

Making room for those changes in feeling did not mean keeping every joke. When I asked how she decided whether humor helped a scene or let too much tension out, she described revisiting that question through writing, pre-production, filming, and editing.

"Maybe this joke doesn't fit here," she said, describing the decisions. "Maybe we stay in the serious moment."

She was still considering how those choices landed in the festival cut. The themes had remained consistent from the project's beginnings, she said; individual beats needed more adjustment. A line could belong to the film's sense of humor without belonging at that particular moment.

The people who made the film possible

The contained setting had a practical origin as well as a dramatic one. Dupuis had another script that briefly visited a cult, and readers kept asking to stay in that world longer. A limited budget gave her another reason to explore what she could do within a concentrated setting.

The budget changed shots and locations, but she credits the people around her with making the film look as good as it does. Talented collaborators who cared about the team and the story were willing to do favors. Asked what winning Best Tennessee Feature at her hometown festival meant, she talked about being able to share it with her cast and crew, and about continuing to make work in Nashville.

"It feels like a launching pad to just keep building our Nashville community and keep making stuff together."

That enthusiasm does not make her account of belonging uncomplicated. Anna's wish for a fresh start is sincere, Dupuis says. She is willing to change because she believes something in her life needs to change. The film asks what happens when the people offering that change ask too much in return.

For Derick, finding Anna is only part of the problem. She also has to understand why her friend wants to stay.