- Hi, I'm Alison Brie, and I play Sarah in "Horse Girl."
(soft music)
I did a lot of interviews with my mother
about her experiences with my grandmother,
the mythology of her and her mental illness
really colored my entire childhood.
It was a major trauma that influenced my mother's whole life
and the web of that kind of engulfed
our whole family and I'd always wanted
to make something artistic about her story
and it turned out to be much more abstract
than I think I initially thought that it might be.
But when I came back to kinda thinking
about why I was so fascinated by it,
my personal fear about having
mental illness in my bloodline,
I keep circling back to it imagining,
is that gonna to happen to me?
And that is a part of Sarah's journey as well.
I just wished that I could start over.
- We don't we don't need to go back or start over.
We can start from right here,
and you know, we've had great success here
and we have an incredible team
and I and they are 100% committed to helping you.
- Sarah is a bit of a socially isolated woman.
She is a horse girl.
She grew up riding horses and she still has a deep love
and a deep connection to her horse.
Physically I wanted to make Sarah a little reserved.
She's very shy.
She has created a world for herself
where she doesn't have to interact with other people
all that often but she still gets to do things she loves
like arts and crafts, and watching supernatural crime shows
and spending time with her horse.
Look what I made you.
Is that so pretty?
With other people she's not a force.
She's a little bit meek.
So her voice is a little higher than my voice,
and she speaks quite softly and timidly
there's like a sort of staccato
to the way that she talks and even stands.
I notice you were a little distracted today,
here I'll get that.
I just wanted to remind you
how important it is to really stay connected to Willow,
you know, when you're distracted and looking down--
- Yeah. - And around,
that's when accidents happen.
- I just got a text from my mom so I'm gonna.
- I'll take her tack off.
The costumes are always the best part
of any character for me.
We were so lucky to have Beth Morgan
do the costumes for this movie.
She's our costume designer on "Glow"
and we really wanted the costumes to look and feel real.
You know, it's a contemporary movie,
but also feel a little timeless
and certainly the way that Sarah dresses.
She's a woman who used to have means,
and doesn't really anymore,
so a lot of her clothes are a little bit dated.
It's a very specific type of girl
that we were trying to portray and I think Beth nailed it.
A lot of the character research
was baked into the writing of the film, you know,
I was in her head the whole time as we were creating her.
So that became very helpful.
By the time we were shooting the movie
I knew the character so intimately.
We had so many fun actors to play with
and everybody who signed on to the film was so brave,
everyone was so excited and just jumped right in.
So it was really fun.
All the dialogue in the movie is improvised.
Every scene is sort of heavily outlined
in terms of what people's objectives are,
what they're coming in to say and talk about.
But the specific dialogue is not written
and it's important to us,
and Jeff feels very strongly about
people just feeling real
and talking the way that people speak,
and a certain type of magic happens
when you open that door to let the actors
put it in their own words.
- Folklore comes from somewhere,
so at some point someone saw a big foot.
- Someone saw it exactly, they saw it,
and then they knew that the aliens were using the humans
as thermometers and bringing them back up
and like downloading all the information to learn
about our planet, you know. - Totally.
- And they could even be using human clones
because that would give them
more reliable information, right?
- Yes, that makes sense.
- I like to do things that scare me,
that are a little intimidating,
and just getting to be in the moment.
"Horse Girl" is out on Netflix now.
Check it out.