(suspenseful music)
- The producers sent me the script, they said,
"Would you do a horror movie as an actor?"
So I was looking at it just as an actor,
and I wasn't going to do just on the basis
that it was a horror movie,
which is so ignorant and stupid.
I was so incredibly moved by the power of this family.
Yes, the movie's scary, and yes it's so much fun
in how we explore the world and get you to be scared,
but to me the only reason why it's the type of scary it is
is 'cause you care about this family.
We had just had our second daughter
three weeks before I read the script.
I mean it was a gunshot as far as right in my heart,
I was so moved by this
incredible, powerful metaphor for parenthood.
So what I did in my rewrite was I was able
to bring my own experience to it.
So I really drilled down even more about this family dynamic
and how everything that the father and the mother did
was for the family.
And at the end of the day, I know it sounds insane,
you look at this poster, and you're like, he's nuts.
But this is my love letter to my kids, it really is.
To actually share this process for the first time
was pretty awesome, and pretty emotional,
and pretty exciting.
And so what I learned about her are probably things
that her cast and her crew knew before me,
which is how insanely professional she is,
how insanely talented she is,
but also what an incredible collaborator she is.
She has such good ideas, she's so smart,
and she brings an enthusiasm to the project
every single day that really makes everybody
do better work.
So to me I guess it's almost just experiencing that
and getting to see what makes her such a great actress
first-hand rather than just on the screen was massive.
They always say, don't work with kids
because it slows things down and they have school
and they never get it right, and whatever.
But the truth is, I probably slowed these kids down.
They are so good, so professional, such incredible actors.
But more than that, they're such great people,
and I actually was a little worried
about some of the deeper, darker underbelly of this movie,
and talking to kids about stuff like loss or fear
or losing your parents and stuff like that
is really intense stuff,
and these kids went head-long into it.
And Millie is an entirely different experience.
I mean she is not only one of the best actresses
I've ever worked with,
but being deaf, which was a non-negotiable thing for me,
to cast a deaf actress,
I needed her as my guide to walk me through
what it was like to be a part of a family,
being someone who's deaf, does she ever have regrets,
does she ever judged, does she ever feel empowered,
all these incredibly personal things she shared with me.
She was the reason why I learned ASL so well,
because she was the most amazing teacher.
It is truly one of the more special experiences
I've had in movies.
- I think our children should even see this
until they're at least 40, anyway,
just so that they're fully prepared.
I was more than anything just so impressed
by his abilities, and not only visually,
but his ability to communicate with everybody,
to be everything to everybody on set,
and it's such an all-consuming job,
so it's sort of stress-management more than anything,
I was like how are you not, like, up all night?
You know, the whole birthing sequence
was like a week-long event,
and I probably should have just been checked into rehab
after it or something.
It was just pretty wild shooting that sequence.
He just said, you know,
"This film just needs to grab ahold of you
"and never let go."
And he didn't want the respite for anybody.
And I think that's what he achieved, you know,
he always knew he wanted to make something
that was concise, not a long film,
but I think the skill of his storytelling
and the way he planted seeds
and the payoff with the set pieces is pretty incredible.
I don't even know how his brain works, honestly.
It's a bit disturbing.
- 'Cause there were only a few of us,
it was much easier to, you know, form these bonds
because there wasn't new cast members coming in every day.
So yeah, we felt like a family.
- I think that John is very open-minded,
but his heart is also very open as well.
He really loves children and you can see that
he developed a really special relationship with us
and also working with Noah for me
was a wonderful, just the perfect person to be with.
And John was very open with all of us on set.
Regan is very rebellious and she's very brave.
But she's also very sad and depressed,
and she's not in a good relationship with her father
at that time, and those are difficult emotions,
and in my life, I have an amazing relationship
with my father, and I don't feel guilty about anything,
and I don't have, you know, something that I'm holding on to
that bothers me and weighs me down
like the character Regan.
So those were feelings that I had to discover.
For me, if something got really difficult in a scene,
and it made you really sad, or it was really dark,
John would always pull me aside,
and talk me through the scene,
and we'd spend time for a few minutes,
and he would ask me questions about, you know,
what would you do if this were really the situation?
What would you naturally do?
And he really guided my through it,
and he just had away of explaining things so beautifully.
- And for me, you know, I felt like this,
the role was challenging,
and the role had it's downsides,
like you had to do night shoots,
and it was tiring, and the emotion
was on the top level the whole time.
But when we finished it,
it felt like we'd achieved an amazing achievement.
And I think it all paid off,
because we have an amazing movie now,
which is great.