“The Night House” and “The Ritual” both find characters continuing to wake up from what they’re experiencing, unsure if they’re conscious or unconscious, whether they’re haunting themselves or being truly approached by something. For you as a filmmaker, where does that drive toward dream logic come from?
I’ve always been fascinated with the idea that there is a coherent dream logic that we all share, that exists and is interpreted largely through metaphor and symbolism. We decode our dreams in somewhat specific ways, and we all share a language in how we do it. And yet, we demand that our entertainment be very linear and have a solid fourth wall in place. Narrative structure demands stakes and anticipation. There’s a reason when someone says, “Oh, my God, I had a dream last night, and I want to tell you about that,” for just a moment, your heart sinks. You know it’s about to be a very boring story, because they’re going to string together a bunch of random ideas, and you’re going to have a purely symbolic conversation about what it represents. It’s impossible to have tension when you cannot estimate what might happen.
I’m really fascinated with getting surrealism into the cinema in any way we possibly can but finding a way to structure it, so that it can be a wild ride. Sometimes, you’re asking the audience for permission to play that game in one way or another. That might mean compartmentalizing it: with hallucinations that someone experiences in the presence of a deity, or that exist somewhere between someone spiraling in a state of grief, anxiety, and depression and also interfacing directly with supernatural forces and ideas. Once we know we’re playing that game, we can make certain moves. It’s all in pursuit of a feeling, something uncanny, in that weird liminal space. And there is a rhythm and a frequency to it. Sometimes, the elements of the film come together to hit that note, which is a very exquisite feeling.
Jump-scares are often discussed in a pejorative sense, but this film makes a case for them as supplying the level of jarring impact you need for a story with this emotional thrust. The synergy of the sound design, the way your camera’s teasing the audience, the brutality of the editing – how do you put together sequences like that?
We didn’t talk much about the jump-scares. It seemed like requisite moves to some degree or another. We spent more time talking about transition, the feeling of being catapulted from one state of mind to another, in the way that a panic attack can come on suddenly. You’ve got to lead it; there’s always that thought, “Oh, my God is something about to happen.” And then when it does happen, it happens faster and more deliberately than you’re prepared for.
That has to do more with just setting a tone. I do think there’s a sense of play to it, and that “teasing” is a good word. Usually, in the process, when we’re talking about how a scare is going to function or where it’s going to come from, even with material that can be this heavy, when there’s a grin behind it, and everybody in the room talks as though they are in on a joke to some degree or another, that is the spirit of it, to a degree. There’s some basic showmanship.
If that stuff ever has an effect, in my experience, it has a lot more to do with when it happens, not the exact timing of an edit so much as when it comes in a film, and where your mind is at that time. It has so much more to do with the scenes that predicate it: what’s your emotional involvement with them? If you’re involved in Beth’s journey, noodling on her story or what she’s experienced, the film can come out of nowhere and waves its right hand at you while slashing with the left. You feel caught off-guard. It feels a little inappropriate that the film would do that to you.
The fear I felt watching this movie was rooted in a real unease about Rebecca Hall’s performance. She’s terrific at keeping you on edge as to Beth’s psychology.
She’s ahead of you in so many ways. From our early conversations, I knew instantly that she understood the material on a gut level. She had said that she wanted to have an intuitive approach to this, and I didn’t really know another way to do it. I didn’t feel comfortable trying to construct or overproduce the character arc, or the performance, in any way.
As a character, Beth had gone farther in some ways than I had as a person. She’s just seen some things that perhaps very few of us have seen. In a way, I found the perspective of the film shifting. When she’s in scenes with her friends, who are trying to help her out and guide her back on the path, you relate more to the friend than you do to her. In those moments, you’re watching someone you admire teetering on the edge of the cliff, You’re not sure what she’s going to do next.
She’s confrontational, she’s frank, she’s funny, she’s dark. And she’s also reeling off this impossible event. When someone goes through tragedy in their lives, and they’re in that hyper-conscious, very early stage of grief, we’re afraid of them. And I was afraid of Beth. For Rebecca to tap into that and lean into it was a fascinating experience for me as a filmmaker. I didn’t know where she was going to go, or what she was going to do, and I learned very quickly that the best thing for me to do was hold the filmmaking apparatus back and just try to capture it, to give her space to have an experience.
Given everything that we’ve talked about in this conversation, what’s something you feel that you’re carrying out of “The Night House” and that will manifest in what you do next?
I’m in [“Hellraiser”] right now. It’s sometimes hard to see the forest through the trees. What’s crystallizing a bit is a certain reliance on intuitions, whereas previously I required more evidence to make certain decisions. “The Night House” was a very quick shoot. It was dealing with big ideas and actions, but it was very hard to see the way it would come together. That required faith, and it was a delight to be out on that wire and not know how it was going to work out. I feel a bit more comfortable with the idea that’s always the case. Maybe the moment that you know exactly what you’re doing is the moment you’re not doing it anymore. You should just embrace the unknown.
“The Night House” opens in U.S. theaters August 20.