Emily Mortimer Gets Lost In The Horror Of Relic [Interview]

The Sundance Film Festival can be a strange beast. Having caught Natalie Erika James’ directorial debut “Relic” before the festival began, I assumed it would prompt a ton of interest from mini-majors and streamers alike. The drama is an impressive example of prestige horror with fantastic performances from Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote, and Robyn Nevin. It’s scary, moving and directed with expert craftmanship And, no disrespect to IFC Films who made a deal for it, that didn’t happen. Maybe it was the competition. Maybe it was its premiere slot. Whatever the case may be, you can at least judge for yourself as it hits VOD on Friday.

READ MORE: “Relic” is a terrifying look at mental decay and intergenerational trauma [Review]

Set in the outskirts of Melbourne, “Relic” centers on three generations of women. Edna (Nevin), is the oldest who lives alone is increasingly suffering from dementia (or so it appears). Kay (Mortimer) is Edna’s daughter, a mother of her own to Sam (Heathcote), who is convinced her mom needs to be put into a facility that can cope with her decreasing mental faculties after she disappears for a few days in the woods. Sam is more sympathetic to her grandmother and the strange events in what appears to be a typical suburban home. Surprise, it isn’t.

The result is a drama with a thrilling third act that begs you to question your thoughts on dementia and your genuine compassion for it.

Mortimer jumped on the phone last month to talk about her work on the film and taking a chance with a newcomer such as James.

Note: There are some spoilers about the creature teased in the film’s trailer below.

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The Playlist: Hi, Emily. I hear you’re in the UK.

Emily Mortimer: Yes. I am.

Are you staying at home or are you about to shoot something?

I’m maybe about to shoot something, but I don’t know. And I don’t think I’m allowed to talk or discuss it. But it’s like everything else, it’s all up in the air and there’s no knowing. So at the moment, I’m very happily in the most peaceful English countryside feeling not knowing anything for a second. Well, I guess that’s maybe what we’ve learned. It’s hard to be at peace with not knowing anything.

Absolutely. It’s been up and down. Sometimes it’s great and sometimes not so much. Let’s talk about Relic though. Congratulations on the film. I was a big fan. What about it made you want to jump on board and be a part of it?

It just got sent to me through my agents the normal way and I felt immediately, on reading it, that it was just incredibly special. It was obviously written by a filmmaker. It was written by somebody that understood how to make the movie. You just felt that from the beginning of the read, it was just written very visually and it was telling the story in pictures as much as anything else. And it just felt incredibly audacious as a screenplay, and it all stretched out. So, like the movie, I think it uses the genre brilliantly but it also transcends the genre and becomes just a brilliant movie that isn’t just a horror film. It uses the genre to depict the real life horror of somebody you love dying and their body and their brain distingrating in front of your very eyes. For anyone that’s gone through that, that’s much scarier than anything you could ever see in a horror film. And I felt, reading the script, that she’d really used the genre to get at that feeling in a way that was just so audacious and entertaining and funny at times, and also heartbreaking and moving, and just sadder. And then I met Natalie and when you meet her…the weird shit that comes out of her brain is just amazing. I could tell when I met her that she was totally in charge of herself and what she was doing and that she was the real deal.

Not only that, she made a film that’s pretty ambitious for a first time filmmaker. Just in terms of the production design and how the story is integrated into the different worlds the characters are sort of sucked into. Did she have that all sort of laid out beforehand? Or was it just the script?

Yeah, it was just the script. I mean, she is charming but it wasn’t that she was charming. I just felt like she quietly was in total charge of what she was doing and what her intentions were. And I didn’t ask for the storyboards or a proof of concept or anything, but I just felt that I trusted her and that’s a huge thing and that’s kind of rare actually, and whether or not someone’s made a movie before. And so I just went with it. I just felt like, if it was half as good as the script, it was going to be great. And I think it’s better than the script, as it turned out. The only part I’m proud of is that my instincts were right about her, but I’m mainly just proud of her because she’s pulled off something amazing. And it’s true that it was quite high concept and I guess if I’d been more…what’s the word? Canny? Conscientious? Or sensible, I would have asked questions about that because it was going to be quite a big challenge to pull that off on a low budget. I didn’t think to ask those questions, I just trusted her. But she did it. I mean, that puppet or that being that the final kind of a third of the movie revolves around, was an extraordinary accomplishment and obviously, incredible kind of artists made that thing. And every step of the way she was [into] everything. And she managed to pull something amazing off. Also, with the design of the house and the labyrinth and everything. Yeah. I should have asked more questions about that. [Laughs.]

I’m curious about the house itself. At times it seemed like you guys were shooting in a real house and then other times you were on a soundstage or were the interiors all a soundstage?

No. Some of the interiors with the real house. It was only not real when we got into the kind of labyrinth. So the fitting room and the upstairs bedroomS. And then the labyrinth and the bathroom and I guess the mother’s bedroom was the set, but it was a studio, but it wasn’t really a studio. It was, A Storage space somewhere on the outskirts of Melbourne that was very windy and full of birds and every time the rain came, you could hear every drop of rain on the roof. And so, it was a real kind of feat pulling off those scenes, especially for the sound. That was the hardest, most challenging part was kind of three days in that fucking labyrinth just losing your mind. Covered in water and plaster and very confined spaces on a handheld camera and having to dredge up all this terror and horror. Yeah. That was really wild.

I think people think it’s easy to be scared on screen or to act scared, but it necessarily isn’t. But not only that but for most people, it’s emotionally draining, isn’t it?

Yeah, it is because by the time you’ve gone into that kind of… I mean, in real life you’re never experiencing that degree. I mean, when people do experience that degree of horror, officially their lives will be changed forever by it. It’s like when PTSD hits. So you are having to dredge up feelings in a protracted period that you would normally only feel kind of momentarily. And so yeah, it’s really tiring and you really have to sort of think about horrible shit for a long, long protracted period of time. And you can’t really phone it in because it just doesn’t work and if you do. So yeah, that was quite extreme. But worth it in the end. And then there are moments where its kind of almost funny. Actually reading the script, I almost found that there were moments when I almost laughed, but when I watched it at Sundance for the first time, I was kind of laughing at times, kind of just at this sort of audaciousness of how fucking awful and miserable and funny moments can be. And I do feel like that’s true of real-life experiences. I mean, for anyone that has gone home to kind of help a loved one or a parent dies or whatever, and you’re all cooped up together and you’re going through this just unbelievably sad and horrible time, the awfulness of it can often be funny. I feel like there are moments in the movie where I was laughing, like when their grandmother dives through the wall and we’re all falling all over each other fighting and this kind of incredible fight sequence with this 70 something-year-old, demented woman. I couldn’t believe it as I was watching it. I was just thinking, this is wild and it’s hilarious, but it’s really reminiscent of a real feeling. That’s what’s so cool, is that however bold and crazy she gets, it always makes you feel like, oh fuck. I know what that’s like. It somehow gets the reality of experience, somehow.

No, it does. I think one of the things that I really appreciated about the film is especially in the first act you might not know that you’re actually watching a horror film. I just thought your performances were all so grounded and you all understood the relationships between these three women. Did you all have time to rehearse? Was it just something that you guys all came to on set?

Well, huge credit goes to Natalie because she was incredibly specific about these relationships. There was more in the script originally that got cut out, that was kind of going into more of the backstory of their kind of… The three of them and their relationship and the relationship between each other and everything. And so there was more specifics about kind of, quite what the tension between us might be. But in the end, I think it was right that it didn’t end up in the final movie because it’s sort of every man’s story, in the sense that every time, I think, anyone goes home to their parents or their grandparents to kind of deal with one of these milestone moments, there’s all sorts of baggage and shit. And everybody’s got a lot of pain and a lot of confusion and a lot of misunderstanding along the way, and through the years together, a lot of guilt. I mean, both as a daughter and a mother I think I really related to the guilt that you feel as well as the love. The feeling that you weren’t there enough, or that you didn’t do enough or that you picked yourself when you shouldn’t have. I think that’s a really kind of a universal feeling and I think that when people feel guilty they often behave badly. And so yeah, we were all into that and we all really got along. They are such great girls, those two. I’m still in touch with them all the time, not just because of the movie, but just because I really love them. They’re really funny, bright, unusual people, who are not like other people. It’s really fun acting with people that you just are into because you don’t want to let them down somehow. You think “Oh my God, these people are really cool. I’ve got to be good. I don’t want them to think I’m lame.”

“Relic” is available on VOD on Friday.