In a recent interview, Hugh Grant described his current phase of his career as his “freak show” phase, which I thought was funny, but also undersells how good he’s been over the past decade and how interesting he’s been. As an actor on that set, what is he like to direct during his freak show phase?
Bryan Woods: He’s great at underselling himself, to your point, he’s a great under-seller. Working with Hugh is like, he’ll show up on set and he’ll go, “All right, well, you know, let’s just do a really bad, just a bad version. No acting. We don’t need to act. We’ll just read. We’ll just say the lines. Just say the lines. It’s not a big deal. Let’s just say the lines. It’ll be fine.” And then he’ll just show you the most amazing performance you’ve ever seen and just crush take after take.
There were scenes where there’d be 10 pages of dialogue and we would kind of all amongst ourselves agree, “All right, let’s just do five pages.” And five pages is like climbing Mount Everest. “Let’s just do five pages, let’s do half of it, it’ll be fine. No pressure, no pressure.” And then he would crush it. He would go all the way through 10 pages, put a cherry on top, we’d call cut, the crew would burst out into applause. It felt like watching live theater, it felt like watching, I don’t know, Daniel Day-Lewis at the top of his game. It was really something special to see, and we can’t be more grateful for what he gave to this film.
Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton are depicted as being really smart, canny characters. How would you escape the pitfalls of writing characters who are smart enough to escape the average horror movie but not smart enough to escape your horror movie?
Scott Beck: Yeah. I think the balance and the gut check that we have early on is being allergic to convention or being allergic to the obvious answer of how you get yourself out. So if you put your characters — I mean, I think we first encountered this when writing both “Haunt” and “A Quiet Place,” seven, eight, nine years ago, where it’s like, you get your characters into situations and we as the writers or directors may know where we want to go next with them, but if the characters start pushing up against that and being like, “No, I’m smarter than the next scene that you want to write,” we try to follow that instinct. We try to make sure that we are being as genuine and surprising to ourselves during that early process as possible so that we don’t just, we’re like, “Ah, but this character has to go into the next room,” and so we’re just going to write them going into the next room.
It’s like, no, if they need to go through the exercise of, “This is dangerous. I need to try the door, I need to try the window first,” they’re going to do that and we’re going to have to engineer and try to think on our feet and push ourselves to be a little more ahead of these characters and the audience as possible. What that usually brings up is we find ourselves in more unpredictable situations, and that’s really where the exciting place is to start creating the scene and creating the movie, to surprise ourselves and go to the unexpected.
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