The name Kimberly Peirce is most closely identified with Boys Don’t Cry, her award-winning independent debut that saw an Oscar win for star Hillary Swank. Just as much as Boys Don’t Cry is a real life horror story, the Stephen King classic Carrie is grounded in issues of schoolyard bullying and overbearing parents. I sat down with Kim to discuss her take on the Carrie story, how she physically and emotionally transformed Chloe Moretz and Julianne Moore, the use of visual effects in storytelling, and her favorite Stephen King movie adaptation.

What was it like for you to work on a Stephen King story?



Kimberly Peirce: It’s an honor. I’m a huge Stephen King fan. I was in a book club so I read the book as a kid. I was a literature student at the University of Chicago so  I read it when I was in college and then, of course, I re-read it when they came to me to do the movie and I was just blown away by how amazing of a story teller he is. It’s a classic tale that is incredibly timely to his era but it’s also incredibly timeless and is more relevant today than it was then. The things that blew me away about it when I went back to it was that I always love a good central protagonist. It’s what I love about movies. I love Carrie White. I love that she’s this misfit and this outcast who wants love and affection, which is what we all want. She’s up against huge obstacles. Certainly the girls at school don’t want her to have it and when she’s at home, her mother is also constantly feuding with her because her mother thinks that she’s the seed of sin. She represents the mother’s sin of having sex and enjoying it and so they’re locked in a love affair in a feud right in the very beginning, in the new scene that I added. That escalates all the way through and then I amplified the climax so that that’s even stronger.

The other thing we give you that’s extraordinary is that, at the end of the day, it’s a superhero origin story. Carrie discovers she has super powers and those super powers make life, which is largely intolerable and painful, acceptable. Talent makes life bearable and that’s what these superpowers do. I love that she explores it and doesn’t have control of it. She doesn’t understand the magnitude of it. When she goes to prom, we don’t know if it’s gonna come out. I absolutely love that it’s a Cinderella story.  What does she want? Love and acceptance. When the handsome boy invites her out, one, Sue should not have asked Tommy to ask Carrie out. Sue should have said, “I’m sorry.” Sue is doing what rich people do. She’s relying on charity. Charity doesn’t always solve problems. Tommy comes Carrie’s way and Carrie can’t say no. The most handsome boy in the school, why is he there? There’s something up. But the desire to have the Cinderella night and to wear the beautiful dress and go to the ball and dance with the handsome boy and have the night that we all dream about having, she just can’t say no. We can’t say no. We fall in love with being the Cinderella.

I’ve debated about this with people, and you can agree or disagree with me, but we want to take her to the height of the Cinderella night but then we crave seeing it turn on its head. I think we want to see it all go badly. When it goes badly, we stare, because we’re glad it’s not happening to us. We’re glad the blood is not on us. Then I think what’s amazing is that we desperately want her to get revenge on the people who did this to her. We all want to get even with the bad guy. That’s amazing to me. To me, the equation was: we had to fall madly in love with Carrie White and only by being madly in love with Carrie and wanting to see her succeed would we ever support the revenge tale. If we do, then it’s a blast because everyone loves a revenge tale.

One of the things that really distinguishes this version from earlier version of the story is the visual effects that you’re using. How did having access to advanced visual effects alter your approach to telling the story?

KP: I think what it did was empower me. When I read the book, I see in my mind’s eye this largely entertaining, using superhero powers and the world being affected by Carrie and her powers. She can move books but then she loses control. In particular, at the prom, when she wants to get revenge on somebody, she can move them out of the way, she can throw them into a door. The scene with Chris going through the windshield took a lot of time to think through because I had this vision where it was “let the punishment fit the crime.” The beautiful girl Chris is a total narcissist so what’s her punishment? We’re gonna eff up that face. Well how do you eff up that face? She had to go through the window. What’s fun about my job is how do you put someone’s face through a window? You can’t put an actor’s face through a window. You can put an actor’s face through sugar glass or you can put an animation through fake glass or an actor can fly forward on a green screen, so that’s a series of a ton of composites, which was really a blast for me. It’s a real actor, it’s an animated version of the actor, it’s real glass, it’s fake glass, it’s drawn glass. That’s really state of the art because there are all these layers and you’re using animation to visualize it and then you’re affecting the speed of it. There’s a lot of work on how fast she hits and how slow she comes out the other end. It’s all expensive so the more precise you are, the better. I direct the CG the same way that I direct the actors, which is what is the story, what’s the need, what’s the action? It was fantastic. It was really fun also having the car crash into an invisible wall. You can’t have a car hurling towards a human being, certainly not a minor. There are no invisible walls that I know of.

In this film, the revenge sequence is much more drawn out and taken beat by beat than, say, Brian De Palma’s version and that is largely due to the available effects. It’s hard to not enjoy getting more visual about that whole revenge portion.

KP: Good, that was my whole goal. I wanted you to have the most satisfaction and the most enjoyable. The whole movie, I was building up to how do I make this really fun. What I love is the Chris and Billy relationship. Chris has Billy wrapped around her finger and she’s calling her dad, and he’s like, “What the hell are you doing?” and she’s like, “Well what the hell are we gonna do?” and he says, “We’re gonna leave town.” The question is: is she willing to leave town with him. When they get trapped, I just love when she says, “It’s Carrie” and they’re hurling towards her and she says, “Run her down” and he looks at her in disbelief and is thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding. I’m not gonna kill someone for you.” “Run her down. Run her down. Run her down.” That’s their whole relationship. Again, you’re supposed to get reignited by them being jerks and therefore Carrie really having a right to punch it to them. If you notice, Carrie doesn’t though. She lets Chris destroy herself. For the revenge tale, it was vital that that worked.

How many times did you guys have to film the pig’s blood scene?



KP: Twice. I was actually told that I could only do it once because the clean up on it was huge.

Getting it off her skin must have been brutal.



KP: Well one, it’s a whole rig. Two, it’s gonna splatter all over the stage, because it’s a wide shot. Three, if it hits her and it’s on her, she’s a minor so I could only do it once in a day because I would lose three hours for her clean up. I was told, “If you can do it in one that’s great.” So I said, “How many cameras can I get?” and they gave me three. I got three and put them at all the best angles. I would have gotten more but I didn’t. The first time, I was a nervous wreck because I didn’t think it was gonna work. We did all this R and D and sometimes it hit, sometimes it missed, but it hit perfectly and then of course, the DP said, “I gotta do it one more time” so we did it one more time. That was it though, we couldn’t afford more because of the clean up time. You don’t think about it but with a minor, they can legally only go so many hours so that is that.

For me, one of the scariest parts about the movie is Carrie’s mother’s devout Christianity where she believes that everything she does, including attempted infanticide, is for God and blessed by Him. I’m wondering how you think devout religion can such a scary thing these days?

KP: I want to make it really clear that Margaret (Carrie’s mom) has her own religion. She was in a recognizable religion at some point but she had sex with her husband, she got pregnant, she defined it as a sin because she enjoyed it and then skewed off into her own religion. That religion is something that she defines and she has her own iconography. As Carrie says, she changes things in the Bible to mean what she wants and as Julianne will tell you, she’s delusional. In her mind, her utmost responsibility is to protect her daughter. She believes that she protects her daughter by using corporal punishment and by repressing her. At the end of the day, her daughter is her evil and she exposes her sin by infanticide.

You did a great job at disguising Portia Doubleday in this film, she has such a different look and character type usually. Same goes with Julianne Moore who is equally playing against the loving, if spunky, persona she usually inhabits. It’s interesting to see these performers playing against type here.

KP: What I told Chloe when I hired her, “You are an incredibly talented, precocious star. You have a family around you who always loved you. You could not be further from Carrie White.” She has to be a misfit, has to be fragile, has to be scared, has to be timid and broken down. For me the fun is moving Chloe from her to her, very much like I did with Hilary Swank to Brandon Teena and even Channing Tatum to the solider, which is now a role that he plays a lot. That transformation ins everything for me. Not for the sake of transforming but generally, you start with a person who is her and a character who’s here, and at the end of the day, the character is generally the original person plus a big change. Chloe had to be fragile and timid and scared and have a lot of hostility at home, which she doesn’t have in real life, but when she gets to prom, then you see glimpses of the Chloe Moretz that you know. The same with Julianne. I knew that Margaret White is going to be fiercely devoted to religion, I know that’s she’s going to use corporal punishment., I know that’s she’s a scared woman, so then I hired Julianne Moore who is warm and charismatic and brilliant and beautiful and loves her children because when she makes that transformation, then there’s subtext. There’s all that stuff underneath. Yes, they’re transformed but I want them to leak through. I want you to say, “That’s the Portia that I love and know,” not, “I don’t even see Portia in there.”

With Julianne, beneath the intense religion fundamentalist woman who’s willing to use corporal punishment, you have that warmth there to draw from. One of my favorite lines in the movie is one that Julianne and I picked out of the book. She says, “I’ll be the preacher, you be the congregation” and Chloe just surrenders down to it because Carrie surrenders. Carrie just really wants her mother’s love, and thinks she’s gonna get it, and does, because the mother is tortured.

Were Chloe and Julianne always your first choice for these roles?

KP: Yes. For Chloe, we looked at a easily a few hundred girls throughout the states and throughout the world, because now you can get test tapes from all over. Myself and the brilliant Avy Kaufman were casting it and she was my first choice once I’d seen everyone who was out there. Really, I’m very much a structuralist so I knew that you needed to fall in love with Carrie White and want to adopt her. The movie didn’t work unless you loved her. Chloe has the ability to make you love her. I wanted to adopt her. You needed that. It’s an amazing thing that she has that ability onscreen to make you feel that way because if you look at her roles onscreen, Let Me In; she’s odd and dark and strange; in Huge, she’s beguiling, and then Kick Ass. It’s really a testament to her that once we defined what make the character tick, that she was able to bring that to life.

Other than the prom scene and the crash scene, do you have a favorite scene that you worked on?

KP: I would say I love the sequence where Carrie comes home. She’s got blood all over her and crying, “Momma, momma, momma.” I wrote that in because I wanted her to regress to being a little girl again. I also love the bath scene. She’s looking at her hands and saying she’s sorry, she’s crumbling back to being a vulnerable girl. I almost cried when she was doing that. It’s beautiful. She’s just a child. I love when she gets up, she really thinks there’s a chance. “Momma and I are clean. I can forget about the prom. I didn’t want to pray at the beginning but, you know what, screw you and your religion, I’ll pray. I’ll pray all you want.” That scene was like going to prom, you’re like, “You must be kidding? You’re gonna go to prom with the most handsome boy? That girl’s got it out for you,” it’s the same thing here. This woman, since you’ve been born, has been feuding with you and loving you. Relationships don’t change but she still surrenders because she so desperately wants love and acceptance. To me, I always love to stay on point and it’s a continuation of what we set in motion from the beginning. I love their fight. I amplified that and I love how we see the cuts on the legs and on the arms. I wanted that to be as violent as I could make it.

It comes out of this tender moment that they’re sharing which makes you realize that even though Carrie has powers, she is still very much the child to her mother.

KP: Yes and her powers protect her. When the mother does that to her, the powers shoot out and subconsciously  protect her.

Stephen King is an undisputed master of horror and has really touched on every area of fear. What is it that scares you the most?

KP: Certainly the dark in the specter of something coming out of nowhere and attacking me. It’s absolutely terrifying. If I’m watching a scary movie at my house and the drapes are not drawn so you can see out of the window out into the night, I don’t like that. The unknown. It’s interesting as a filmmaker because it’s showing restraint. I love horror films and I love when they can scare me or when I don’t get scared. I love when I’m with friends and I’m being tough because I didn’t get scared but I’m betraying myself. I’m a filmmaker so it’s easy to not get scared so then I’m like, “Get scared.” I love when your friends are watching or you’re on a date and they’re clutching you and you’re feeling brave. Scary movies are great because there’s something so human about it. We’ve been scaring ourselves and have been afraid of the dark forever, telling ghost stories and whatnot. It’s fun to be part of that and having audiences wanting to go to your movie and get scared.

In the final scene, much like in the original, there is this foreshadowing element where the crack runs up the gravestone that leaves it somewhat open-ended. Is doing some sort of follow up something that you may be interested in pursuing?

KP: I certainly couldn’t tell you the answer to that question outright but I can say that if this movie is successful, we love Carrie White and we love who she is and what she wants and her powers. Her powers have a yearning to want to stay in the world either with her or somebody else. It was honoring our love of Carrie and the mysterious and the magical and the unknown.

What advise would you give aspiring filmmakers just getting into the field or pursuing that career?

KP: Make sure you really love the job. I find a lot of people will say that they want to be a director but I think a lot of people think that it’s glamorous, and there are moments when it touches a kind of glamour, but the bottom line is: you have to love character and story and work. When my family comes and visits set, they go, “Oh my God.” It is 100 hours a week but what it is is an obsessive attention to the love of character and the love of creating them. Every detail is under your purview so I just feel like I love it. All hours of the day I’m thinking about it. But not everyone would love it. If you do, take the time to take the right classes and study with the right people. I was lucky enough to go to Columbia University and study filmmaking and writing and directing and I studied acting for years, I also went to Sundance and studied there. If you have talent, it’s not enough. You have to work really hard and study a lot and also really have to love story and character. If you do, you can create great things. It’s a great, great business but it’s a lot of work, but it’s good work. You’re always telling your story and then protecting it. Just dive in and tell your own stories. If you’ve got some crazy family, then tell that story. If you’ve got a great story about race, religion, gender identity, whatever your way of moving through the world is, you’re probably gonna have a life experience that other people don’t have and that could be interesting.

Carrie aside, what’s your favorite Stephen King movie adaptation?



KP: It’s obvious.

It is. 



KP: I’m just gonna say it. The Shining.



Yeah, obviously.



KP: It’s a perfect movie.

It’s one of my favorites.

KP: But it’s also what I love about this which is an amazing main character. Even when Jack Torrence is doing bad, I love him. I love the house. I love the family drama of it. I love the red. I love the introduction of Steadicam. I used that Steadicam quite a lot in this movie pulling Carrie through the house. Also just his love of character and story. I would aspire to be as good as Stanley Kubrick. And his thoughtfulness and his sense of humor and his oddness. He’s fantastic.

Agreed. It had to be The Shining.

KP: I do love Misery too. It’s amazing that that worked and I love what Kathy [Bates] did. I do think what Brian [De Palma] did with Carrie was phenomenal too. It’s really amazing if you think about the fact that he was the first one to do it and his understanding of camera angles and casting just made for great stuff.

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If you haven’t already, take a look at our review, or read the following snippet to get an idea of our thoughts:

In 1826, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” (Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are). Morphing throughout time to arrive at the now common idiom, “We are what we eat,” (a sentiment mostly passed down from overprotective moms encouraging their chubby kids to lay off the potato chips and eat their damn vegetables), has never been more penitent than in Jim Mickle‘s cannibal-horror We Are What We Are. Forced to consume a set of distressing ideologies (centered around a medieval virgin-consuming ritual) alongside their main course of human meat, the Parker family  – a sneaky riff on the uber-sterilized Partridge family – is the centerfold of this gloomy tale of distorted moral recompense and dietary wrongheadedness.

From why he doesn’t like remakes, to ideas for prequels and sequels, and his thoughts on his favorite film endings of all time, Jim spilled the beans on what made We Are What We Are worth making.

Why did you choose to remake this film for an American audience?


Jim Mickle: Well I didn’t really choose to really. It was brought to me and originally I was very much not excited about the idea. I’m not a big fan of remakes, I’m not a big fan of US remakes of foreign films. I feel that they’re usually done poorly and didn’t want to become part of the problem so I had avoided them in the past. I was approached by a couple of producers who had the rights to do an American version of this, not necessarily a remake, and hemmed and hawed about it for about a good month and Nick Damichi, the guy who wrote the film, the two of us sat down early on. I think I had mixed feelings about it but ultimately I think we approached it in a way to make an original film out of it, to make it based on our story. We both really liked what the original film did and themes and the structure and what it was trying to say. I thought it was really interesting and pretty bold for a horror film and that was the kind of thing that I wanted to do. He found a way to honor the original film but also make something that was our own.

What about this cannibal story makes it so that it needs to be told in a modern day context? How was the time period an essential part?


JM: Well I think that the basis of the original and what made it so cool was this idea that they were a family just like any other family. The original film is set in a really gritty city in Mexico and part of the allure of it is that it is everyday seeming. It’s happening right under your nose. And that was one of the pulls of the original. At the end of the day though, it’s really not about cannibalism. It’s more about tradition and faith and family values and what gets handed down and I think that to do that, we wanted to create otherwise normal seemingly people. The first film I think kept its distance a little bit from the characters and we wanted to put you in the family or have you feel like you can understand what was going on and relate to them. We thought to make them common, the better.

In my review, I talked about how the most horrifying part for me is just this idea of parents having total control over their children, to the point where they can just spoon feed them human meat and they’ll eat it. What horrifies you the most about this story?


JM: I mean, just that. Not necessarily the eating human meat thing but deep absolute faith. To me, it’s terrifying when people follow something so closely and so literally that they sort of turn a blind eye to pretty obvious mistakes. That can be pretty scary and I think that is what we wanted to draw comparisons to. Doing anything in the name of a higher power.

Going off that, what frightens you the most in real life situations? Is there anything from spiders to tight spaces?


JM: I’m very claustrophobic. It’s a pretty universal fear but I’m not a big fan of flying and then, kind of in line with the movie, organized religion. Those are my big three fears

One of the things I was thinking as the movie going along is that we don’t know too much about Bill Sage’s Frank character. I was wondering if you ever conceived of an origin story for him and how he was indoctrinated into this tradition and whether he went along with it pretty easily or if he was hesitant and rebellious like his own children were?


JM: We’re actually working on that write now. Nick is writing a screenplay off of that backstory.

Oh very cool, can you tell me anything about it?


JM: It’s in the middle of the process right now but there’s a concept there and stuff that is pretty interesting. There’s no real foundation put in place yet though.

So the whole atmosphere of the movie is so gray and rainy and bleak and downtrodden and there really is no place for comedy in it. Why did you take this really hard-nosed approach without any of the camp and asides. Why did you feel that that was the appropriate way to approach this film?


JM: I think because we’re taking our themes really seriously. I am a fan of horrors but I think a lot of times horror movies apologize for themselves by being campy and going “ha ha” but I really appreciate that our movie had the courage to draw comparisons to bigger issues and take it straight on. At the end of the day, we wanted it to be taken seriously. We’ve done two other films and those are horror films but both have sociological things and political things and bigger issues that they’re tapping into. There’s a big level of the b-movie to both the films but it was really fun to play with. Here we had something where the characters were strong enough and the story was strong enough that we didn’t have to let it breathe or go “Ha ha, it’s just a movie”. We really wanted to give it a feel of a drama. People do a lot of absurd things but one of the themes of the movie is that people do do a lot of absurd things in life. We’re just so used to our perspective that we don’t always see it.

The only time that I really laughed at the film, and I don’t want to spoil the moment, was the final confrontation within the family because it’s just so over the top and so absurd and you just don’t really see it coming. Obviously you need to honor the original, why did you feel like in the context of your story, it need to end like that?


JM: Well it didn’t end like that in the original. That whole film is very, very, very different. It has a similar opening scene but then it goes a really different direction and fundamentally they’re really different. We flipped all the genders, the original story is about two brothers who lost their father and there’s very little cannibalism, if any, that you actually see and the ending is all ours. Just for that reason, we wanted that ending. It’s a huge story and I guess thematically in terms of what is being said comes down to three or four characters sitting around a table setting but thematically, the consequences of what is going on is so huge that we wanted an ending that would kind of capture that. I think anything else would have felt unearned or undeserving of the rest of the story. To me, that ending is beautiful character-wise and it’s also fun to see the reaction from people in the audience because people either love it or hate it. I think a lot of it is that we keep the audiences down in sort of a dark, dingy, repressed place and then finally give the characters and the audience have a bit of a release, which I really enjoy. It’s a magic ending and will divide people forever, but I think those are the best kind of movies.

For me, it was my favorite part of the movie. Going off that, what do you think are some of the best move endings of all time that do pull that final punch and really make the whole thing great.


JM: Good question. For some reason what comes to mind is La Haine, the black-and-white French film from the 90s with a very young Vincent Cassel. That had a great ending and I took that with me. Another great ending is Sleepaway Camp. That’s got a great ending. John Carpenter’s The Thing is also amazing with Keith David sitting there by himself.

As the movie caps off, we see the kids driving away and you hint that they might be continuing down this path because they’ve taken this old book which is a relic of their past with them. Just as you’ve considered what Frank may have been doing before this story, have you asked yourself what you think this kids will be doing from this point on?


JM: I have my ideas but I kind of like that people can interpret it differently. I think one of the best things is hearing people talk about their interpretations, and all of them are right. I think it’s something that’s really fun to just let people come up with their own ending. I have my ideas but those are best left unsaid. After our ending, the original director, Jorge Michel Grau, he is at the moment shooting a film and then working on a sequel to our film with our characters.

That’s a cool system of passing the material back-and-forth that you guys have going on. Right now, you’re filming Cold in July with Michael C. Hall and Vinessa Shaw. Can you tease some of that for us and tell us what it’s about and what it’s been like making it?


JM: I’m actually editing it right now. We wrapped about a month ago. It’s set in the 80s, it’s sort of a Texas kind of revenge story/thriller. It’s a little bit uncharacterizable plot-wise, which I like. It’s a sort of fast, serpentine story and you never know where it’s going. It’s based on a Joe Lansdale novel who does these great southern-fried noirs. He does these kind of contemporary noirs that don’t really follow any structure, which I really love. It was really different from We Are What We Are which is fun. It’s got a lot of humor in it which is fun to get to do.

How was it working with Michael C. Hall?


JM: Amazing, he’s unbelievable and I’m just getting to the point now where I’m sitting down to edit and seeing his performance. Onset there’s so many things going on so  I really didn’t fully realize how great he is until the editing room. It’s gonna be great for him, I hope, because it’s really different from Dexter and Six Feet Under and really shows a side to him that even I didn’t expect out of him so I think audiences will have a lot of fun with it when it comes out.

Very cool. He’s definitely just emerging into the film world after his 12 year stay on premium television. Finally, is there anything that you have already planned in the future after you wrap up editing and post on this or are you just gonna take a breather?


JM: I think take a breather. Whatever comes comes. For a long time, we’ve been trying to work on Cold in July because we’ve had the rights to the book and have been working on it and trying to pull it together between other things and this time, we actually got to shoot it. It’s kind of a crazy moment for us because we shot We Are What We Are last year, and premiered it very quickly after that, and then shot Cold in July after that very quickly and am editing that very quickly. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next after all that. I’m psyched to see what opportunities will come from making these two incredibly different films.

Check out the trailer for We Are What We Are right here:

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James Ponsoldt is quickly shuffling his way to the forefront of the independent movie scene and I had a chance to sit down with him and talk about his film The Spectacular Now, which is currently sitting as my favorite film of the year thus far, as well as his plans for the future.

Infectiously cheery, James was happy to talk through the process of adapting the film from a popular novel, working with Shailene Woodley, Miles Teller and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie ‘Pure’ he’s working on and why he keeps letting alcoholism play as a central theme in his films.

To see our thoughts on The Spectacular Now, check our (glowing) review.
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Were you familiar with Tim Tharp’s novel before you received the script or was it new to you?

James Ponsoldt: The producers of the film gave me the screenplay right after Sundance 2012 when my film ‘Smashed’ played there. I knew Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber who wrote the script for (500) Days of Summer and I had heard of Tim’s novel because it had been nominated for a national book award back in 2008 but I hadn’t read it. The screenplay was the first thing that I read and it blew me away. I never really wanted to direct someone else’s script and I was flattered that they gave it to me but I was so moved by it that I immediately bought Tim’s book and read that and was equally moved by it in some of the same ways and some different ways.

This is your first film where you didn’t have a hand in writing, what was that experience like for you just hopping in and doing someone else’s work?

JP: It was good. I didn’t know what to expect. My concerns were probably the same ones that anyone would have which is do they not want me to change anything or are we not gonna see the same things because I didn’t want to because writers get short-changed. As a writer, I didn’t want to turn around and be a hypocrite and disrespect these writers. I really wanted to collaborate with them and they were the best. I wanted them involved and on set because they know this story better than anyone – because they spent so much time adapting it. As the screenplay evolved, as any screenplay does, they were there by my side and working agelessly and tirelessly to make changes specific to the actors that we had and things specific to where we filmed, things that had to change. They were down for it because they saw the screenplay as a blueprint and the film is something different. It was great but it was different. I like collaborating with really talented people at the end of the day and there were so many talented people including the writers so it was a blast and it was humbling and made me reflect on my own writing.

Having read the novel and the screenplay and contrasting that to your feature version of the work, do you think there are many differences between the three versions?

JP: I think they’re all true to the same spirit and all starts from Tim’s novel. Scott and Mike’s screenplay is really great and the way that the screenplay and the novel deviate the most is that the novel has somewhat of a different ending that I think works in literary prose but onscreen people might see as more potentially nihilistic or dark. What was great about what Scott and Mike did is not that they gave it a “Hollywood ending,” it’s still a really honest and ambiguous ending with a hint of hopefulness to it. I think there’s a hint of hopefulness in Tim’s novel but there’s more that’s left open-ended. They all have the same spirit and are coming from the same place of emotional honesty and trying to dig really deep into the lives of some young people, deeper certainly than most films do about young people.

It really does transcend the high-school genre film and is not anywhere in the same realm. What are you hoping that audiences take away from this film?

JP: I’ve heard so many different perspectives from people. People can talk about the same subject or plot point and have wildly different takes and wildly different emotional experiences and it’s all totally valid to me. If it was the same for everyone than we would have made something closer to an advertisement or propaganda. There’s no judgment over these characters and no morals or lessons or anything like that. There’s nothing prescriptive about how someone should feel. I hope that people will be entertained and that people can find something of themselves in the characters and be able to identify in some way.

All three of your major motion pictures have had alcoholism as a key thread. Is that a wild coincidence or do you have a personal connection to that issue that makes you put that at the forefront of your films?

JP: The second film I did Smashed that was a major component of it and I wrote that with a good friend who is one of  the funniest people I know but is also very open about the fact that she got sober in her 20s and started going to AA. I did have a number of friends who did deal with similar things, substance abuse, alcohol, so it was something I just kept seeing. I realized that I’d been at the third or forth wedding where the bride and groom were just blitzed out of their minds and I was like this is really funny but when they have kids in two years this is not gonna be really funny. I’m really interested in this because I keep seeing this. As we get older, the type of behavior that was totally normalized in college [becomes weird]. No one teaches you how to ween off. You just don’t sleep and do whatever in college and you just have to figure it out for yourself and some people don’t. It’s always been interesting to me. It was definitely a question that the producers had when they gave me ‘The Spectacular Now’ which was, “Hey, we know you have a movie that dealt with alcoholism and this character drinks. Is that a problem?” and I just wanted to read the script. I was glad that they articulated their concerns but I found the script so honest and I didn’t find the story about alcoholism or an alcoholic. It was part of who he is but everyone is damaged in some way. Someone loved us too much or too little and we’re all self-medicating either through something a doctor prescribed or something that we’ve figured out. I think we’re all trying to make our way through the world and be ok with ourselves and be able to look ourselves in the mirror and live an honest life and be good to people around us. I like seeing the way that people wrestle with that and I like seeing that in people who are very human and non-judgmental.

Do you plan on sticking with smaller, independent projects or are you open to doing a larger studio movie or would you feel that would be sacrificing too much of your independence and control?

JP: I like good movies. I watch everything. I watch tons of T.V. and movies. Whether it’s studio movies or independent films or foreign films, I watch them all. A lot of my favorite films are studio comedies or sci-fi movies. I like things that are good and are honest and have good characters and aren’t boring. That’s kind of it for me. I am right now developing a couple movies with studios and we’ll see how it is when we actually get into the making of them. There’s a couple that I’m writing that I’m really excited about with a bigger budget and there’s more opportunity to realize things on a bigger stage and have more special effects and things like that. One of the things that I’m working on is a science fiction film. It’s totally of interest to me but I can’t tell you what the finished experience will be like. You’ll have to ask me in a couple of years and maybe I’ll say, “Never again!” But I’m excited. I’ve had plenty of friends who have gone back and forth between studio films and independent films and they have good and bad things to say about both. I don’t think that the independent film world is necessarily a sacred space. I think it has a lot of shortcomings and problems and nice people and crummy people just like there is in a studio world but it’s nice to be able to make the film that you want. The more money there is, the more that people want to put their two cents in.

Can you tell me a little more about this sci-fi feature that you’re working on?

JP: The sci-fi one is called ‘Pure’ and it’s based on a novel by Julianna Baggott and I’m adapting it for Fox 2000. It’s a post-apocalyptic story that’s pretty crazy. Then I’m gonna be adapting a couple things for the Weinstein Company, one of them is the musical ‘Pippin’ which I’m writing but not directing. Then there’s another one by Matthew Quick who wrote ‘Silver Linings Playbook’, his new book that’s coming out in the fall. Very different stories from each other.

Yeah, there’s certainly a lot of the table for you. In this film both Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller were just absolutely brilliant, what was it like working with them?

JP: They’re the best. I really, really loved them. I can honestly say that about all the actors I work with. My rule is do I want to hang out with them, and not just in life? Do I want to watch this character, even in a 600 page script that is just terribly boring and just follows every detail of their day, wake up, have cereal, take a shower. I want to just watch them and be in their lives and find them compelling. Those are kind of the people that I want to work with. I spend time with them before to see if we will creatively jive because you have to spend a lot of time together and a lot of stressful time. When it’s overtime and late at night and not going well, those are the people who are either gonna make things better or make things worse. Whether as an actor or a production designer or a DP, you’re working with people who have gotta be strong and imaginative and kind in crisis. Shailene, I loved her in ‘The Descendants’ and that’s what I knew her from before this. I wasn’t aware of her before that and she gave this performance that was revelatory for me. It felt so preternaturally honest and grounded and intelligent with no BS or veneer. It reminded me of early performances of Sissy Spacek and Debra Winger and Barbara Hershey, actresses that I really loved from earlier generations. That’s what it reminded me of and there was no vanity. When I met her, she was one of the most profoundly decent and kind and just knew exactly who she was even though she wasn’t what I was expecting. I had a real collaborator there. She knew her character so well, even better than I did. I’m this 34-year old dude and when we met she was a 19-year old girl. Of course, I leaned on her so heavily to help figure out who that character was. Miles is one of the best actors I’ve ever met and one of, if not the most, charismatic people I’ve ever met in my entire life. If you look at him on one side in ‘Rabbit Hole’, which is a serious drama acting opposite Nicole Kidman in his first feature film, and then you see him in ‘Footloose’ and they are diametrically opposed films, one’s an indie, one’s a studio, one’s a drama, one’s a comedy, and yet somehow he’s so grounded and honest. Regardless of the demands on him, he’s someone you want to spend time with. He feels like a regular guy. He doesn’t feel like an actor pretending to be a regular guy. Hanging out with him before we shot the movie, I really got a sense of him and how much we have in common and I couldn’t think of any other actor who could play this role like he could. It’s a puzzle when you put together an ensemble and he and Shailene made something so compelling. Their energy was just wonderful, there’s something about them where you could watch them do anything. I thought if I don’t screw this up and just capture one iota of this then we’d have something really special.

I was not really familiar with Miles before but it definitely seemed like a star-making turn from him. In contrast, a lot of people say that Shailene was robbed of an Oscar nomination for The Descendants, do you expect any push for her in terms of some award’s buzz? Personally, I thought it was a worthy performance and she’s just fantastic.

JP: That’s awesome. I obviously agree with you but I’m obviously partial. I think she’s amazing and I think she was robbed for ‘The Descendants’ and I think she’s really phenomenal in this film as is Miles and all the cast. I hope they get all of the acclaim for these performances that they possibly can. Obviously, there’s a million things that have to happen right and the life of a film is not something you can predict but I feel like we have great support from A24, our distributors. They really fell in love with our film at Sundance and wanted to take it off the table the opening weekend right after the premiere and they came in really strong and seemed to understand the film and what made it unique from other films about young people. What’s been really great thus far from the festival circuit so far is people do seem to be universally falling in love with them individually but them also as a couple in this film. I assume that they’ll continue to gain critical support for these performances.

You’ve worked with Mary Elizabeth Winstead in your past two features, do you plan to continue fitting her into roles in your films?

JP: I would love to work with Mary again. Honestly, I hope to make a number of films in my life and I would love to work with all of these actors again. You have to find people that you think are perfect for the role and an actor that you love might not be perfect for a certain role but all things being equal I love the idea of having an ensemble, like a stock company of actors that I can keep working with again. The same thing that excited me about working with Nick Nolte on my first film, I’m still excited about that and I would love to work with him again. I love really great actors and I love watching people who can make me laugh and then break my heart.

If you were handed the keys to any superhero or supervillain movie, what would you want to do?

JP: That’s really tough. I feel like my take on heroes is really specific and human and flawed that I don’t know if the people financing the movie would want me to make it. It’s hard for me to say because I would…we live in the golden age of superhero movies where we have really damaged characters but I would probably want to push them even further. This book ‘Pure’ that I’m finishing the adaptation on, I wouldn’t call it a superhero story because it has more in common with ‘Brazil’ or ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ or ‘City of Lost Children’. One of the main characters is a 15-year old girl with a doll for a hand. It’s futuristic Baltimore with all these detonations so people have all these things fused to them. One of the main character has birds growing out of his back; another guy is fused to his brother. It’s really strange and somehow funny and weird and moving. It’s a great adventure story that reminds me of ‘Wizard of Oz’ in some ways, which is one of my favorite movies.

Do you have anyone attached to star in that yet?

JP: No, not at all. It’s really early stages. Most of the main characters are teenagers so we’ll see. Casting teenagers is so tough because if you shoot a movie in 2012 and do a really extensive casting search and meet all these great American and British and Australian actors, you can get a sense of where the acting talent is in that year but if you shoot a movie 3 years later, most of them are probably too old so you have to go out and rediscover. So who knows. I’m sure the actors that will be the best actors for those roles aren’t even on my radar yet. Some director will put them in something for Sundance next year that will blow everyone’s minds and that’ll be them.

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The Spectacular Now has worked its way through the festival circuit and will be hitting theaters in limited release on August 2.

With his film releasing in limited theaters and VOD this weekend, I had a chance to sit down with Matthias Hoene (pronounced: who-na) to talk about his zom-com Cockneys Vs. Zombies. Following a clan of bumbling Cockneys trying to be cons, Horne frames the zombie genre in the light of a first-time bank heist. For all their trouble robbing a bank, the real trouble lays outside as Terry, Andy and Katy are trapped by a horde of brain-gobbling zombies.

The synopsis, per Fandango, as is follows:

“Two Cockney siblings lead the residents of a quiet retirement community in a bloody war against the undead in this horror comedy from director Matthias Hoene. Andy (Harry Treadaway) and Terry (Rasmus Hardiker) were in the middle of robbing a bank to save the rest home where their grandfather lives when the zombie apocalypse struck East London. After arriving at the nursing home heavily armed and with cash in tow, the two brothers prepare to fight their way out with the assistance of some trigger-happy seniors. Michelle Ryan and Honor Blackman co-star.”

Horne talked about what inspired him to make the film, the biggest hurdles and challenges he faced, his upcoming sci-fi project, and our cultural affinity for the supernatural.
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Obviously the whole zombie sub-genre is really at a pinnacle of popularity right now. What did you feel that you could bring to that sub-genre in order to distinguish it from the rest and put your own spin on it?

Matthias Hoene: Well, of course, making a movie takes a long time and I came up with the movie in 2008 or 2009, a few years ago. At the time, everyone was doing vampires so you do zombies and everyone was doing fast moving zombies so people were telling me I couldn’t do slow moving zombies because they aren’t scary and cinematic and no-one likes them and I was like, “No, we have to go back to the original – Romero. I’m also a big fan of Peter Jackson’s “Dead Alive”, those kind of films. It’s gonna be perfect. I was very aware of the “Walking Dead” comic books and I’m a big fan so I was very excited when that got made. Even before that got made, I mentioned to my producer that we should do a “Walking Dead” tv series and he just laughed at me and said, “Yeah, you’re not big enough for that.”

Yeah, it took a talent as big as Frank Darabont to bring that to life.



MH: Yeah, it needed someone like Darabont to make that happen. I’m glad it did happen and turned out so well though. Really the crux to me was how to make this really unique because I kind of felt that there was “Shawn of the Dead” – which was like a rom-com-zom set in middle class, Northern London that was very twee and British. What gave me the idea was working with a bunch of Cockney actors on a web series involving vampires and they were so funny. They were only side characters but the way they face this supernatural enemy is so funny because cockneys never show fear. They don’t go, “Oh my god! It’s vampires!” They go, “What? Fuck, vampires? Shoot them then.” They just face the supernatural threat with literally no fear and no bafflement to it. That sort of gung-ho, don’t-take-any-shit-from-anything kind of attitude that cockney’s display. Mind you, they have been defending East London for many centuries against the Zulus, the Germans, the old bill [police]. Anyone who tried to invade their turf, they fought off valiently with a stiff upper lip and a big shotgun in their hand. I felt that they’d never felt zombies before and that was the kind of niche tonally that I felt we could do something that was a little bit different in the genre that we haven’t seen and gives it a tone that might be fresh. I call it a “Cockney adventure with zombies” or a “zomventure”. The other one, of course, was the idea of the zombies being slow but the pensioners [retirees] being even slower. You have your walkers and your wheelchairs and I wanted to show like that slow motion chase between a zombie and a pensioner because we haven’t seen that anywhere. Throughout, James Moran, the writer, and I tried to put in as many scenes that you hadn’t seen before in a zombie film as possible to give it something in a well known genre that is fresh and everyone can enjoy. On top of that, we tried to develop a script for the characters to ring true. It’s the story about a family coming together- the old cockney who can’t express his feelings softening to his younger siblings and learning to respect them in their own ways. Also, it’s a story of over-development of urban structures and gentrification in the East London area and also, the story of people robbing a bank and shooting the shit out of someplace.

As you mentioned, there is obvious similarities to “Shawn of the Dead” here. To me, it felt like a mashup of that film and “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”. You even have the same actor in Alan Ford. Were you a little skeptical about following in the footsteps of “Shawn of the Dead”, which was such a monumental popular achievement, and were you afraid that people would see it as too similar or was that just something you wanted to fly in the face of?

MH: To me, that was a romantic comedy with zombies and this is a gangster movie with zombies. My references were “Dead Alive” and “Evil Dead 2”. Those ones were the ones I loved and were trying to reference. I think everyone has the same popular culture odes in films. There’s also “Zombieland” which is a great zombie-comedy and now there’s also “Warm Bodies” which is also fantastic. I think there’s a lot of good films in the genre. I say, go and watch “Dead Alive”. No-one thinks that it’s a zombie-comedy like “Dead Alive” but it is. I think it’s always been there. I did feel like if I was to do crazy, whip-pans all the time then people would think I just wanted to be Edgar Wright but I tried to avoid that but sometimes you need to have that energy in a film like this. I did try to avoid certain stylistic tropes on purpose.

What for you was the biggest challenge of making the film?

MH: I stubbornly refused to adhere to the budget that we had which should of been like a contained horror movie, like most horror movies on that budget-level. I said, “We’re gonna do a big, epic action movie that’s gonna go all over the place and shows London with wide shots outside with zombie crowds.” That was what made it difficult because every day was like a big deal. We had five to ten actors, forty background zombies, shooting, fighting, prosthetics. We had big movie days but very little time to do it so it was quite stressful to put it together and quite complicated as well. Every time you’d get into squibs and prosthetics and it’s difficult on set to put all the bits together and get all the angles right. All those sorts of things were difficult. Horror comedy is the most difficult genre to film in because the change from funny bits to heartfelt real bits, action bits, scary things, it switches so quickly and more so than any other genre in a way and that’s difficult to coordinate. I didn’t make it that scary but just moving from a joke to hopefully a genuine moment between two people is really quite difficult. It moves quickly. There was a bank heist so we had the caper genre in there. Just mixing those things and keeping it together was the most difficult. Making sure that the jokes aren’t just jokes for jokes sake but come from the character in their situation. Hopefully they don’t make you question the reality of the situation.

Speaking about genre, what is your personal favorite genre in film? Is horror the place that you’ve always grown from and drawn inspiration or do you like other genres more or just as much?

MH: Well I do like horror comedy like the Sam Raimi school but I feel like what ties all the films I like together is that they’re adventure movies in a way. “Cockney Vs. Zombies” is kind of a like an action-adventure with zombies, my next project I’m developing is a man-on-the-run thriller adventure story. That’s what I like, developing a fantasy story, an action thriller. I’m not gonna do a horror movie next because you get typecast as a filmmaker quite quickly. I love horror and I wanna dodge everyone’s expectations for a little while and say, “Look, I can do this as well.” I think what’s gonna tie together what I love is something that is fun and adventure packed. I like big rides cinematically.

Can you talk some more about your next feature?

MH: Well I’ve been developing a science-fiction screenplay with an American writer named Ian Shaw and we’ve had the great fortune to set it up at 20th Century Fox last month. The producer of “X-Men” and “Wolverine” is onboard. It’s exciting but it’s only one step of many.  You never know. It’s down to us now to develop it and get it greenlit within the system. It’s a great team to be with and all the people there are amazing. I’m keeping my fingers crossed and hoping I can live up to expectation.

What stage are you in on that project, are you still on the first draft or have you written a couple versions?

MH: We’ve done a few drafts and now we’re having our meetings with everyone at the studio and doing a few more drafts now. It’s sort of the next few drafts that really matter.

Can you boil it down to a brief synopsis?

MH: Well the capsule of the story is that there’s an inventor who starts receiving chrome capsules containing holographic messages from his future self. His future self helps him turn his life around, make better choices and become a better person and undo a lot of the mistakes that he’s done in his life and his life takes a turn for the better. One day, he receives a capsule saying, “You need to take $800 to this guy who will give you a Glock 9mm, file the serial number and go kill your boss because he will be your biggest enemy in the future.” When he refuses to do that, he becomes the target of other people who are trying to kill him and realizes that other people have been getting these messages as well. He has to figure out the conspiracy of the future to protect the present.

If there was a zombie apocalypse, how do you think you would fare and what would be your weapon of choice?

MH: I would probably call up Alan Ford and say, “Alan, come over and protect me” and I would give him a shotgun for the hard work and an AK47 to disperse the crowds a little bit. I would probably also use a shovel…actually, I think I’d go for the flame thrower. Especially if you’re stranded with the last woman on Earth, you want to have something that’s impressive.

Personally, I’d be an ice pick man. Just an effective one-and-done to the brain. Finally, if you had to prognosticate, where do you think the whole zombie genre is going from here? Do you think it’s going to continue on this slant of popularity or do you think it’s reached a cultural pinnacle and is going to start fading away again for now?

MH: I think all these genres, whether it’s zombies or vampires, and no-one goes, “Oh no, we have another action thriller”… I think if you do a good film in a genre, and we’ve seen lots of good zombie films, the genre is just a backdrop to play a story against. If there’s good characters and a good story, like everything, I think people will like it. Same with vampires and aliens and werewolves and all of that.

While do you think our culture has this professed obsession right now with the supernatural? It’s been around forever but in the last ten years especially, they’re like superhero movies in that they are dominating our entertainment culture right now.

MH: I think everyone loves escapism. We’re apparently in a great economic recession, even though it doesn’t really feel like that, we’re not lining up to soup kitchens yet, but it’s the escapism aspect. Zombies are interesting because it’s a fate worse than death in a way but, at the same time, you can identify with the shuffling, mindless nature of the zombies because sometimes real life feels like that to us. We’re kind of stuck in this repetitive cycle. Vampires, I think are the romantic choice between eternal life and cold blood or a short life lived in a human, full kind of way. Those kind of questions are always going to be dramatically interesting. At the end of the day, the drama is in answering those kind of questions that people are interested in. Also, you want to believe that there’s something else in the world and more to it than just our mundane existence.

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If you’re a fan of zombies, horror, comedy, zombie comedies or…zombie horrors, be sure to check out the trailer for Cockneys Vs. Zombies.

Cockneys Vs. Zombies is directed by Matthias Hoene and stars Rasmus Hardiker, Harry Treadaway, Michelle Ryan, Jack Doolan, Alan Ford, Georgia King, Ashley Thomas, Tony Gardner and Honor Blackman. It hits limited theaters and VOD on August 2.

Curled up in leather chairs by a sputtering fireplace, Kieran Darcy-Smith, Felicity Price and I had a chance to talk about their new film Wish You Were Here. Director/screenwriter, Kieran, and leading lady/screenwriter, Felicity, worked through making a distinctlyAustralian film that is also universally human and found success.

With acting as divine as it is challenging and confident, unsettling directing from Darcy-Smith, Wish You Were Here has taut and introspective independent flair. For our full review of the film, click here or read on to learn more.

From Kieran talking about falling into a sewer on day one of the shoot, to Felicity recounting her youthful experiences as a traveler, this husband and wife duo really highlight the truly collaborative nature of their work and serve as an inspiration for working couples in the industry.

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What was it like for you guys as a husband and wife duo working on the film? Was it at all taxing on your relationship or was it a fun experience to work together day-in and day-out?

Kieran Darcy-Smith: It was the best thing that could’ve happened to our marriage. It was doomed prior to that. (Laughs)

Felicity Price: Basically, it was marriage counseling.

KDS: A lot of people anticipate that we would be admitting that there were tons of arguments and difficult but it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been more positive on a creative-level and a relationship-level. We’re kind of joined at the hip and the thing about this film is we were coming from exactly the same place. We had the same intentions and ambitions with it and things that we wanted to commit to and felt obligated to do so we were on the same wavelength which is important. Often, when you’re working collaboratively with someone you might be kind of jostling.

FP: I’ve attempted collaborations before and the projects very quickly kind of cave in because you’re just not seeing things eye-to-eye and you realize you’re making a different film. For us, it was the opposite of us fighting all the time. For people who are a couple and one’s in film and one’s not, suddenly they’re surrounded by how all-consuming it is and the other one is left out and also you’re surrounded by this kind of family that becomes your everything. For both of us, because this was Kieran’s feature debut and it was my first lead role in a film, it was both of our first produced feature length film so it’s been a wonderful journey to go on together. We’re also both sort of people who like to get completely absorbed in whatever kind of creative project that we’ve involved in so we are exactly the same in that way so we could talk about it all the time. It meant that we were brainstorming together and didn’t have to call up your writing partner on the phone.

All you’d have to do is turn next to you and there they were. So when you guys were writing this, were you, Felicity, always going to be Alice or was that something you figured out as you were going?

FP: No, I put her in the story from the beginning for myself. I had the idea for this treatment and when we sat down to write, we thought it was gonna be low-budget and I wanted to make it within the next 5 years rather than 10. So we knew it needed to be low-budget so we could raise the finances and I knew that I wanted a role for myself. Those were the two starting points.

KDS: Originally, the intention in the beginning was to make this film for 100,000 dollars. We were somehow going to scrape together five grand per friend and I was gonna play Dave and Felicity was going to play Alice and we were gonna rent a house in the suburbs.
FP: We were gonna rent the house, live in the house while we wrote the film and then shoot the film in the house. I was pregnant with our first child so we were gonna have Alice pregnant in the film and that’s where that kind of came from. In the film, I wasn’t pregnant but we originally were going to use the real pregnancy. It’s probably even harder to raise five grand from each friend then to raise the finances the way we did which was through the Australian government. Australia is a country where film is subsidized by the government so we were financed largely by Screen Australia.

In the opening shot of the film, we have Alice and Jeremy sitting on the beach and you ask the question, “If you could stay anywhere forever, where would it be?” and he says, “Here, or somewhere near here. Somewhere in Southeast Asia.” So had you guys been in Southeast Asia beforehand and is that what inspired you to set the story there?

FP: The inspiration for the film was kind of inspired by a true story that happened to a friend of ours. Kieran had gone to drama school with this girl and she knew the story fairly well and for me, it was something I vaguely knew. But this girl, probably about 20 years ago now, went traveling to Southeast Asia with her boyfriend at the time and another couple and the guy of that other couple went missing and to this day, he has never been found.

So it wasn’t as definitive as the ending of your film?

FP: For a couple of drafts, we also didn’t know where the character of Jeremy went but I think the thing is Southeast Asia is very close to Australia so a whole lot of Australians travel to Southeast Asia. Over there, your dollar is worth a lot so you come into town and you’re a king and you can stay in a nice hotel and dine out all the time and party. It tends to be a first port of call for young Australian travelers.

I lived in Thailand for a year and you would see Australian travelers on the beaches and all around more than any other nationalities. What made you guys want to set the film in a country like Cambodia rather than Thailand or Indonesia or these other highly visited tourist destinations?

KDS: We looked at everything. Originally, it was Bali.

FP: It moved around in the script for a long time.

KDS: Then I had a bit of a personal connection with Cambodia because my sister actually lives over there with her family. They’ve only been there about five years so they’d only been living there about a year before we started to write the movie. I’d been there a couple of times researching another movie and I’d always been incredibly attracted to the Cambodian history and was interested in the conflict there. When I first went there in the mid 90s, the war was still on but it was very quiet and sort of still a peaceful place. Phenom Penh was just a village with bicycles.

FP: It still is one of the wilder places of Southeast Asia.

Yeah it’s got a very different feeling from night to day in Cambodia even up around Siem Reap, where I visited.

KDS: When I went to Siem Reap the first time, it was a dusty little tiny village without a building over two stories.

Now you go down to the main drag and there’s just so many bright, neon lights that the electricity pops off every night.

KDS: And massive hotels, it’s changed so much.

FP: When I first went traveling in Thailand and Bali, it was such a different thing and now it’s really changed. It used to be so cheap but now it’s not, especially in the more high profile areas.

Cambodia does seem somewhat like the last refuge in everything being so dirt cheap.

KDS: There’s also a darkness there. There’s a tragic history and there’s a lot of lurking reminders of that. But on the flip side, you have these extraordinarily positive people who are letting all that go and just recreating their country. It’s a wonderful dichotomy. I think it’s as alluring as the first time I went to Thailand back in the 80s, it’s still maintained it’s danger and mystique. It’s slightly untapped, there’s been a couple feature films shot there over the years but not the many.

FP: Also shooting there was gonna be easy to get in and get out. We had a friend who was shooting ads there and in Vietnam. If you’re gonna make a film and you want to do it cheap, Cambodia is a great place to go. We had all the permissions to shoot in the areas but there’s not many permissions you need to get. It’s kind of just shoot whatever you want. You can use the whole country. It’s not like every street you shoot, you have to get a release form.

KDS: It’s very free. You just go over there with a camera and grab anything you want.

FP: Even in Thailand, they’re much more savvy about that kind of thing now.

Where did you guys shoot in Cambodia?

KDS:  Phnom Pehn and the travel down there- that little montage down the road. We thought that the cast would basically step off the aircraft in costume and we’d be rolling. We just shot everything we could all the time.

What was the biggest difference shooting in Australia compared to Cambodia aside from the expense?

FP: So many. Every time you shot even the side of a building in Australia, you have to have permission from all of those people.

KDS: There’s no real infrastructure in Cambodia. There’s not even really a local movie industry.

FP: Nor do they have very experienced film crews. These guys are like farmers coming in and swinging a light around. They don’t have that sense of pace. We didn’t take a make-up artist when we went to Cambodia and we got one there, who was probably the best in Cambodia, but he was so achingly slow. Also, the aesthetic was very different because their sense of television and movies are very different but we wanted to go for something realistic with hardly any makeup.

KDS: Everything was shot on location and things were just constantly evolving. Something would be pulled down and something new would come up. We’d been over there on a location scout a couple months earlier and locked in all of our locations and guaranteed they were gonna be fine and when we came back they were all gone and no one knew why so we had to start from scratch on locations. In Sydney, we were shooting with a very light on its feet crew so we could keep things small and flexible and spontaneous. Your camera department in Cambodia has about 30 people standing around.

FP: When you’re shooting in Australia, there’s always someone on your back about hours and regulations whereas in Cambodia, it was us, actors, heads of department, and we were all super keen about shooting whenever. It was more like everyone having a great time and being on holiday.

KDS: We had all local gear too. The lighting and everything was just old and falling to pieces plus we were really sick while we were there. Incredibly ill from dysentery. I fell into the sewer up to my neck on day one. I couldn’t even get washed down, I was covered in you can’t imagine for ages.

Kieran you said that originally you were going to play Dave, how did you wrangle the great Joel Edgerton into the production?

KDS: Full disclosure, he’s my really close friend. He was the best man at our wedding and is the godfather of one of our kids. We went to drama school together and then we moved into a house together so I’ve known him forever. Even when we decided to make this properly and go through all the hoops with the Australian government to finance it, we needed to get someone on board to play the role properly. I never considered that Joel would want to do it because it’s a low budget Australian films and at the time, we was filming these monstrous movies out in LA and I didn’t want to be rejected or put him in a position that was difficult. I was discussing with him all these other actors and he said, “Dude, what about me?” So he kind of volunteered himself. 

FP: Joel had seen every single draft of the script as a collaborator too.

Being his friend, what was that you for you Kieran to direct him and for you Felicity to act against him?

FP: He’s just such a great actor so it was so much fun.

KDS: As a director, I’m really big on performance. I’ve taught a lot of acting as well and I know that all good performance comes down to trust. If your actors trust you and you trust them and you have that total faith in one another and you have faith in the material then you’re gonna get a spontaneous environment where you’re gonna get great stuff. They’ll break their back for you but they’re not gonna do that if they don’t trust you. The great thing with Joel is we’d spend three years in drama school together, had lived together, had been in each other’s short films together. We knew each other intimately and what each other were capable of so trust was just there. Felicity also had trust in me purely because she knew me and I knew what truth was for her. I’d worked on movies where there are like five or six people in the lead and the actors weren’t trusting the director and so all the actors were directing themselves and doing their ego-driven version of the film.

So there is no singular direction.

KDS:  Exactly, you have seven actors trying to make seven different movies. I understand that, you want to feel safe and don’t want to come off with an egg on your face with everyone watching you. So if you have that trust, you have everything.

FP: I think the familiarity between Kieran and Joel and I really helped the film. In the movie, we’re not a couple that’s in the throes of love but in a fairly worn in relationship. Familiarity really helped because there was a leap that was already made that otherwise you might do through rehearsals. We only had a 25 day shoot. We did a week or something of rehearsals, I had a six-week old baby, we did it at our house, it was just Joel and I and we were just working though some scenes. We would go out to lunch and pretend we were a couple. Also, Joel knew very much where the story came from because he knew us.

The title of the film, ‘Wish You Were Here’, has been stirring in my mind as I try and figure out exactly what it’s referring to because it seems intentionally ambiguous and could go a couple of different ways.

KDS: Yeah. It was an eleventh hour decision and we went through many different names but we weren’t happy with the title that we shot under.

What was that?

KDS: It was called ‘Say Nothing’. It was more thriller-esque and generic but I knew there was something more evocative that had these other layers. I’d always been attracted to films with titles taken from a song lyric or album cover. Something with some familiarity. The Pink Floyd song ‘Wish You Were Here’, I’d grown up playing on guitar.

Which is equally melancholy.

KDS: Yeah, the great thing about it is that cliched sign off on the postcard “Wish you were here.”

FP: It’s the irony of that.

KDS: So there’s that reference and also it refers to, more than anyone, wishing that Dave was here, back with her.

FP: And on a more on-the-nose level, wishing Jeremy was back.

KDS: It referred to all of those things and seemed to encapsulate all of it. I knew not everyone was gonna like it but for me, it was the first one that had the musicality and cross meaning in its substance.

In the film, you paint Cambodia, as well as Southeast Asia in general, as this alluring place that also has this really seedy underbelly. In part, it does have the beauty of a postcard but there’s also this footnote where this is a cautionary tale.

FP: I don’t know how much this reaches the news here but there’s been these sad stories about dumb Australians who’ve got into trafficking drugs between Australian and these countries where you get the death penalty as a penalty. You would have to be insane to do it.

That last scene really spoke to me when you flashback to the Cambodia guy who is asking them if you want marijuana or girls because that really is what it’s like in Cambodia when the lights go down. You have these people coming up and really pushing you towards.

FP: At night during the shoots, we would see these 60, 70 year old white guys with these young beautiful 20 year old or younger. There’s a lot of that kind of stuff and it’s just awful.

KDS: That last sequence that you’re talking about is all the real deal. It’s at the back of the port, this little strip of dust called Chicken Village and it’s just madness down there. It’s where the poorest of the poor fisherman and dockworkers go to procure working girls and often the working girls are 20. It’s all mafia run and is dangerous and sketchy as hell. You couldn’t go there without permission but everything you see is real and everyone we used in the movie are all non-actors.

FP: In the writing of the film we were interested in this stuff. For me, I’d traveled in Europe as a young woman on my own and some guy would come up and say, “Do you want to do this?” and I’d go off. Now I go, “The things that could have happen”. In Southeast Asia, it’s often that guys will drink too much and people will see it and think the amount of times that they’re come that close. The difference is luck. You just didn’t meet the wrong person. We were exploring that idea that when you go on holidays, you don’t have as many inhibitions and you let yourself go a little bit.

What are you guys going to work on next? Do you have anything in the pipeline already?

FP: Yeah, we’ve moved from Australia to LA and we’ve got a whole array of things that are going on. Kieran is attached to direct a couple of films that he didn’t write that are really beautiful as well as directing one that he has written. I’m in the second draft of a psychological thriller. We’re about to start writing another project together for another director.

KDS: There’s an awful lot going on and right now it’s just juggling plates. Nothing is in production really. We’re all in various stages of casting and financing really so we don’t know what will go first. We’re really, really busy.

FP: I’m now going out as an actor for a lot of things.

Are you attached to anything so far?

FP: No. I got a green card just recently so I’ve only had a working visa since February.

KDS: I will formally attach you right now to a role.

Breaking news. Felicity is now cast in Kieran’s next film.

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