By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Teresa Sutherland’s first produced feature screenplay was 2019’s THE WIND, about the terrors befalling a woman on the American frontier in the 1800s. She has now made her feature directorial debut from her own script on LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP, once again focusing on a female protagonist facing deep fears in the wild, only this time the setting is contemporary.
On VOD tomorrow, February 22 from XYZ Films, LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP stars BARBARIAN’s Georgina Campbell as Lennon, a young woman who takes a park ranger job in an expansive national forest. Already troubled by mysterious events in her past that she’s anxious to unravel, Lennon becomes increasingly haunted as she makes her way through the trees, as it seems a dark presence is shadowing her. RUE MORGUE spoke to Sutherland following LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP’s world premiere at last year’s Fantasia International Film Festival; you can read more of this interview in RM #216, now on sale.
Being isolated in the era during which THE WIND is set was very different from being isolated now, when LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP takes place, so can you talk about that contrast?
When the concept of THE WIND started forming, that era just seemed like an obvious time to set a horror movie, because we wouldn’t have cell phones or anything like that; we didn’t have to be like, “Well, there’s no service!” [Laughs] LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP is present-day, and we do have those things, but this back country doesn’t give us the capability of that kind of communication. I did a lot of research, reading different ranger accounts of their walkie-talkies and how sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, and they have to figure it out. I read this book where it said you pack batteries and hopefully the thing doesn’t die, because you won’t get a [supply] drop-off for a while, and then when you get a new one, it might not work! It’s just touch and go.
We kept Lennon’s cell phone as more of an entertainment device, where she’s downloaded a bunch of stuff she can listen to. But she’s not getting service, and she’s going to lose her battery pack eventually, and all she has as a tie to the world is this walkie that’s so unreliable.
It’s almost scarier than in THE WIND, where being unable to communicate was a fact of life; here, you have a protagonist who’s used to that communication and can no longer rely on it.
Well, Lennon is a very self-isolating character. She’s kind of lived her life with this trauma, and hasn’t actually lived a life at all. She’s been obsessed with this since she was a kid, and I almost feel like the rangers around her, like Jackson [Nick Blood] and Zhang [Wai Ching Ho], are the first people who are able to pull her mind and her self out of it, in a sense, and the first people she has connected to in a real way. She is finding her community among these rangers, and it’s the only place she feels that she belongs, where she feels at home.
Did you explore national parks yourself in preparation for the film?
I grew up camping with my family. We went to all sorts of places, camping on the beach, in Yellowstone, and when I moved to LA, we camped in Sequoia and Yosemite, and those were really the kind of place where I wanted this movie to be set. They just feel so rocky and wilderness-y, and have a completely different vibe. But we wound up shooting it in Portugal, which had a very similar look to the West Coast parks. Like so many things with this movie, I just feel like I stumbled luckily onto Portugal; it’s gorgeous, and I don’t know if you’d be able to tell it apart from the U.S.
How did you come to shoot there?
The financiers and producers who put it all together were QWGmire, and they are great at finding resources. They said, “We have this place in New York that we can use,” and we were all planning for that, and then my reps told me, “Hey, Josh Waller read the script, and his new production company is based in Portugal, and he’d really like to talk to you and show you pictures, because he thinks you’d really like it.” So we talked, and Josh came on as a producer, and once we saw the photos of Portugal, we were like, “Let’s do this, let’s use this place!” It was just the right look.
The waterfall is an especially striking location.
We had a retired ranger as our guide through one of the national parks there. We just parked on the side of the road, and everybody got out, and we walked like a mile back, and it just opened up on this waterfall. We weren’t sure we would be able to lock it, we weren’t sure it was going to work out; we saw an alternate, and I said, “That other waterfall is really the one I want!”
Lighting it all up at night must have been a challenge as well.
Actually, that’s day for night! I’m so grateful to WHITE LOTUS, the most recent season, because we were really struggling with the day-for-night look, and there are scenes in that where I was like, “That is day for night, and it is blue. Let’s just turn ours blue and see what happens.” I brought it to our color session and said, “This really looks like night; let’s try and match it.” So that’s what we did, and it really worked out.
Had Georgina Campbell done BARBARIAN when you made the film?
I didn’t know anything about BARBARIAN until we got on set, and even then she was just like, “Oh, I did this thing in Detroit, and I had to go back and do pickups,” and I was like, “Oh, cool. That’s awesome. Do you like it?” [Laughs] She’s just so good at making you feel like things are really happening to her. I had seen her in BLACK MIRROR, and she was top of my list. When we went out to actors, I was like, “She’s the first one we have to check off,” and she said yes, and I was like, “Awesome!” [Laughs] It was very exciting, and another case where I just felt so fortunate how things worked out.
One of the producers had a friend who did see BARBARIAN early, and they were like, “That’s gonna be a huge movie this fall, and that’s gonna help you guys out!” So we were all very excited to see how that did, and for her too. I’m a fan, and I can’t wait to see what she’s going to do next.
There’s a lot of ambiguity in LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP. Can you talk about sustaining that approach?
I am very purposeful in not wanting to feed audiences things too quickly, and give them everything. The story for me is Lennon’s story, and how she finds what she’s looking for. It feels pretty cohesive, and what happens to her unfolds in a way that I wanted to be a natural progression, and not just pushing her into it too quickly. I wanted to give people a chance to think, “These woods are beautiful; look at this place she’s in, this is gorgeous.” And then later in the film, that all changes. One of the things I love most about horror films is, they often have mystery stories in them, and the mystery of this was fun to play with, and play with nature. There are so many things in the world that we just accept, and we can’t know and won’t know. The biggest of all is death–all we know is that it’s gonna happen!
I’m curious about the title; how much of an influence on the film was the Robert Frost poem (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) it comes from?
I started looking for the title mid-writing. Titles are very special to me, just like character names; I spend way too much time on tiny little details! I had read that poem several times growing up, and I went back to it and read it again, and really saw connections to my story–how they were just stopped at this place and looking around, and it was unfamiliar and they were curious and wondering whose property it was and what it was all about. The line I took the title from is about, “I have a mission, I have something to do,” and it felt very relatable to Lennon and her story. She’s in this place that’s beautiful to her, and she does enjoy being there, but she’s on a mission of her own, and she can’t just stop and look at the trees.
Were you on set during the shooting of THE WIND, and if so, did you bring any of that experience to bear on LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP?
I was there for the preproduction in Santa Fe, and I was on set for the first day, and then I went back to LA. But Emma and I are good friends now; she’s such a generous director, and as a first-time writer, I certainly was not expecting somebody to just pull me in and be like, “You are with me. We are in this together.” And she absolutely did that. I’ve always wanted to be a director–it’s what I went to school for–and I just didn’t have the confidence when THE WIND was being made to be like, “I want to do this!” But watching and working with Emma, I gained so much confidence just being near her. She’s so giving; she texted me the other day [before the Fantasia premiere] and wrote, “You’ve got this! You’ve got this!” I’m so happy to have her in my life to have cheer on these things. We have projects that we do want to work together on again; I don’t want to direct everything, I love doing both, and I want to produce more too, and she has absolutely been a huge influence on me.
Do you have any directorial projects in the works right now?
I do; my next thing is a witch story, and it’s not as isolated. There are more people around, there are more things happening and it’s not set in the woods. I do feel like a lot of my style is still there, and the way the story unfolds is still there, but it is not as ambiguous. It’s a suburban witch film called HAG, and it follows a woman who has just become an empty-nester, and her journey into–in witch terms, there’s the maiden and the mother, and now she’s becoming the crone. Like, my child’s gone and now I’m me again, and what does that mean? We’ll see what happens with that.
