Keke Palmer, Krystin Ver Linden, and Peter Lawson on Alice and Why They Love Pam Grier | Sundance

One of the many films to world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was writer-director Krystin Ver Linden’s Alice. Led by a fantastic performance from Keke Palmer, the film is about a woman (Palmer) enslaved on a 19th-century plantation in Georgia, who escapes only to discover that it’s actually 1973. The film is inspired by true accounts and also stars Jonny Lee Miller, Common, Gaius Charles, and Alicia Witt. Shortly after seeing the film, I spoke with Keke Palmer, Krystin Ver Linden, and producer Peter Lawson. They talked about what the film is about, how Ver Linden found the material to base the story on, what she learned about writing and directing from working for Quentin Tarantino for so many years, what people would be surprised to learn about the making of the film, why they decided Pam Grier’s Coffy would be the film the characters watch in the film and what Grier means to them, why they each wanted to tell this story, and more. In addition, Palmer talks about how she prepares for a