Murder is a dirty business, but not as dirty as cleaning up after a murder. In director Christine Jeff’s follow-up to Sylvia, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt star as two sisters who strive to add a splash of color – specifically red – to their lives by entering the “biohazard removal business” and cleaning up the blood, guts, and body parts at crime scenes and suicide sites. At the film’s bustling premiere at the Racquet Club on Friday, Jeffs, Blunt, screenwriter Megan Holley, production designer Joseph T. Garrity, and other principal crew had a bloody good time with the audience’s questions.

Q: How did you come up with the idea?

Holley: I heard a story on NPR, and I thought that it would be an amazing backdrop for a film. And I really wanted to do something that wasn’t exploitative of the macabre element of it. When I heard that interview on NPR, they talked about how it was so strange that they were so intimate with these people that they were cleaning up after but never met. And so I wanted to explore that idea.

Q: How did you cast the film?

Jeffs: Well, I guess the key thing is that we had to put a family together. I mean, basically, we thought that they’d be great sisters, and then we sort of cast the family around that.

Q: What did Amy and Emily do to create that sisterly dynamic?

Blunt: We met on Charlie Wilson’s War, because she was in it, and I was in it for a bit. And so we talked about it a lot. And then when we got to Albuquerque, we rehearsed and hung out over tacos. So it was really good. And we just got on very, very well very quickly. And she still feels like my sister now. But to form that kind of relationship with someone and to have that kind of ease, I mean you just have to spend a lot of time with them. And we’re very similar. We have a similar sense of humor. And we were given these houses there, which was really nice, and we would cook dinner for each other. And we would talk about the film obsessively, because we had all fallen in love with these girls and with the story and with these characters, and it was a really unusual script. It was so offbeat and so moving, really. And so we were all on the same page when it came to the film. And I mean we’re in Albuquerque. You’ve got each other, and that’s it!

Q: Where did you get all of the film’s great props?

Jeffs: Joe Garrity’s our production designer. We basically used a lot of actual locations, a lot of the dressing. And it was really interesting learning that whole crime scene side of things. I didn’t know much about the business, and we did some research with a real crime scene cleaning guy.

Garrity: He showed us some pretty grim pictures, too.

Jeffs: He didn’t show them to me. It was a bit gory.

Garrity: It was pretty horrific when you get into that.

Blunt: I braved the file [of photos]!

Garrity: Really?

Blunt: Yeah. It was awful!