By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Director Alexandre Aja first ventured into forest-bound terror with a trio of characters in his breakout shocker HIGH TENSION, and now he presents a very different story of woodsy terror in NEVER LET GO. RUE MORGUE spoke to the filmmaker about his latest excursion into fear, its meanings and its cast.
Scripted by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby and released by Lionsgate, NEVER LET GO stars Halle Berry as Momma, who lives with her young sons Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) in a house deep in the trees. An evil force has blighted the land, and Momma imposes strict rules of survival upon the boys; the key one is that they must never venture from their doorstep with being connected to it by a long rope. Strange, ghostly/demonic creatures seem to lurk beyond their safe haven–but is the threat real, or an invention of Momma to keep them housebound? That question leads one of the boys to rebel in ways that threaten the family’s survival.
How did this project come to you, and what was it about the script that spoke to you?
It’s always kind of the same situation: You read a lot of material, and read books and graphic novels and think about using the story, and sometimes one comes along and somehow, you know that this is the movie you have to make. It’s like falling in love. There are many levels and layers in NEVER LET GO, and the principal reason I knew right away it was something I wanted to do was the unexpected turn that the script took, starting with the story of a mom trying to protect her children, removed from the world that is gone or has been destroyed. I thought that the exploration of the psychology behind that and what it is to be a parent, what it is to be a child, what it is to trust your parent, what it is to trust your child–all these questions were very intriguing.
I feel that sometimes, genre and scary movies allow us to question ourselves, to question who we are and what we will do, and to have a bigger reach, perhaps, in terms of thinking about where we are in the world and what it is to believe, what it is to question, what it is to accept. It’s similar to the way the classic dark fairy tales used to be; it hits you so hard and has such an impact on you when you’re a kid, and I guess it has been like that for centuries. And when you think about how they deal with our fears, all genre cinema has had the same role to play as those dark fairy tales from the past centuries.
Obviously, the idea of believing or questioning what we’re told, and misinformation, is very relevant nowadays…
Yeah, and the screenplay’s original title was MOTHERLAND!
Did you accentuate that even more as you developed the movie?
Yes, the intention was to explore how there are people who believe and people who question, and it’s all about how you can free yourself from the past and move on in life, and defeat the evil, depending on what the evil is.
How did you handle that question that runs throughout the film about whether the evil really exists, or if it’s just something Momma is telling the boys? That’s a delicate balance the movie walks.
Everyone, I think, will have an opinion. I do have an opinion of what it is [laughs]; I had it from the beginning. But it was interesting, because this was an ongoing conversation up to the end, because some of the producers, had a different interpretation. What I wanted to create was a movie with multiple possibilities that could be explained one way or another. I know that sometimes movies tend to be pretty clear about, this is what it is. But I’ve always been fascinated by movies like THE SHINING where there is another layer. I was watching LONGLEGS a couple of days ago, and this is also the type of movie where so many things are possible. It depends on what you believe and what you don’t believe. There is a whole approach in classic literature that seems to have gone away a little bit, where multiple explanations of whether something is real or not could be possible, and to go back to that Edgar Allan Poe type of horror was something I really wanted to do with NEVER LET GO.
Even though the stories are very different, NEVER LET GO kind of harks all the way back to HIGH TENSION, with three characters in the woods in a very intense situation. Did you see this as a return to that kind of elemental filmmaking?
Well, I love to tell stories that are set in a very controlled world. Of course, HIGH TENSION has the night, the forest, the house. But OXYGEN as well has that confined environment, and CRAWL has the crawlspace with the storm outside. I feel that when you create that type of universe and set a real survival story within it, you invite people to live an experience. And that immersive experience is even stronger when you have the time to present a world that is kind of limited. I’m always concerned about stories that will involve too many locations, or too many years; it’s very hard in those cases to create that immersive feeling I’m looking for.
And this story about a mother living with her two sons in a forest, and the concept of the rope, where you’re safe as long as you stay connected to the house, or you stay inside the house–it’s a simple idea that’s very strong, where you can play and explore it in a way where it becomes more and more scary. And HIGH TENSION was pretty much the same concept: just two friends on a weekend in a remote house, and the killer in the night and how do they survive? So yes, I guess there is a bridge there, even though they are 20something years apart.
Talking about the environment, you have a great, haunted-feeling forest in NEVER LET GO. Was that all shot on location, or did you create any of it on soundstages?
No, no, we couldn’t. It was a forest I had in mind, which I discovered years ago when I was doing HORNS. HORNS had that kind of magical rainforest as well, and I knew when I was reading NEVER LET GO that I needed one that seems to be made of monsters. I scouted a lot of different ones around the world when I was making HORNS. I love forests; they’re always fascinating because they open the imagination so much and you can see so many different shapes, and they can be scary and beautiful, and at the same time, they always feel like they’re hiding something, and they feel very much alive.
But the type of forest we have in NEVER LET GO looks dead and alive in the same time, and I kind of saw that when I was shooting HORNS in Vancouver. So going even deeper into those woods, we found an even more spectacular tree or mosses or formations that were exactly what we were looking for. It’s a character of its own, and it was very important that the forest be part of the manifestation of the evil outside the house.
How did Halle Berry come to star in the film?
She read the script, and I guess she had the exact same feeling I had: She kind of fell in love with it. She understood that it was fascinating to explore a character who is at the same time the most caring, the most protective, the most loving mother, but also could become the most dangerous one, because overprotection can sometimes lead to extremes. She was very sensitive to that topic, and thinking about how you protect your children, how you fight for them. How can you be sure that they stay alive, even if it means for them to be almost like prisoners?
How about the younger actors? How did you find two kids who were believable as brothers and had the right chemistry with Berry?
That was a difficult one, because we saw a lot of kids, and really good ones, too. There were some amazing talents in the U.S., in Canada, everywhere we looked. We worked with a casting director, Rich Delia, who is really good at finding kids–and even for him, it was a difficult task. I remember the day we had the first audition with Percy Daggs IV, who plays Nolan, and by the end of it, we all had tears in our eyes. We saw something that was so strong and powerful. He was the character–he had this rebellious attitude, but he was also believably frail and fragile. He was just pure talent, you know? And we knew at the end that, OK, he’s in the movie.
And then we had to find his brother. Samuel is so different, and to find Anthony B. Jenkins was a very difficult journey as well. I cannot tell you how blessed I am as a director to have found those kids, because they are the key. It’s not about how beautiful a shot is, or how you move the camera or how scary something can be; it’s about the characters. If you feel for them, then you will be scared for them. And then to have a brotherhood that is believable, that you feel really exists and that they have a past together, was just as important.
I had a secret weapon as well, I have to admit: Andrew McIlroy, an acting coach who is really good with and specializes in kids’ training. There was only so much time I could spend with them in prep, to work with them and work on the script, and then during the day, as director, I could not be just with them and get them ready for their few hours of work. So I needed someone, and Andrew did a spectacular job of making sure they were in the right mindset, to remind them of what the scene involved, to coach them so that when they got in front of the camera, they were in the scene already, and I just had to guide them a little bit more. Halle was also amazing with the kids, because she knew exactly how much to push. She has acted opposite a lot of kids in her career, and all of us, with our various experience working with children before, I think really helped to create the right mood and working atmosphere to deliver those scenes that were sometimes very intense.
Do you have any other horror films in the works right now?
Oh, yeah. I mean, this is such an amazing time, to be honest. When we were doing THE HILLS HAVE EYES back in 2005, after HIGH TENSION, we were like, “We want to bring the genre back to the theater. We want to make movies that are really scary.” And 20 years later, that wave hasn’t stopped; it is still growing and, I would say, even more powerful than ever. To see a movie like LONGLEGS become a major success is something we all dream about as moviegoers, but that we never imagined would be possible.
There are so many stories you can tell, and I do have a lot of other genre projects that are brewing in different ways. There is one that I’m really looking forward to that I might do in the fall that I cannot talk about. We are excited to maybe make another CRAWL movie at some point. There are a lot of stories coming in every week, and I’m reading a lot of bad scripts, to be honest, but that was always the case. But then one will come in and it’s like, wow, I’ve never seen this movie before. I want to see that, I haven’t felt scared like that in so long. And that’s the exciting part. You never know when you open a script if it’s going to be the one, or just another cookie-cutter takeoff on something you’ve seen before. You always have that excitement.
People sometimes ask if I feel a little jaded about the genre, about making horror films, and I don’t, because I don’t feel that I’m making the same movie over and over again. You were talking about HIGH TENSION and NEVER LET GO, and yes, there is a connection, but it’s not the same movie. And I feel that every time; it’s something a little bit different.
