By WILLIAM J. WRIGHT
During the 1930s, a series of intense dust storms brought on by severe drought and unsustainable farming practices ravaged the prairie lands of the central United States and Canada, devastating a demoralized populace already reeling from the Great Depression. Once lush farmland was transformed into deserts as deadly, blinding gales of dust swept the Great Plains. As poignantly recounted in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, thousands were displaced and forced on often fruitless sojourns across a bleak landscape to find work. Many others died.
It’s against this hopeless backdrop that Sarah Paulson (American Horror Story) plays Margaret Bellum, an Oklahoma mother struggling to hold on to her family and sanity in the face of the relentless black blizzards that have turned her community into an arid hellscape in HOLD YOUR BREATH from filmmakers Karrie Crouse and Will Joines. As Margaret labors to keep her young daughters (Amiah Miller and Alona Jane Robbins) safe, a tragic incident from her past and the foreboding possibility that the swirling dust storms contain something inhuman threaten to destroy all she loves. With her husband, Henry (Bill Heck) away on a desperate search for employment, Margaret’s fragile grip on reality becomes more tenuous when an itinerant preacher (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) – who may not be as holy as he seems – appears.
In this exclusive interview, Paulson sits down with RUE MORGUE online managing editor William J. Wright to talk about the horrors of HOLD YOUR BREATH and the challenges of her role.
Obviously, you’re no stranger to horror at this point. So, my first question is, what keeps you coming back to this genre?
In the horror space or psychological thriller space, I always feel like you are catching someone right when they’re sort of at the edge of something, and I think that lends itself really, really powerfully to playing very high stakes. And for me as an actor – and I think as a person – I always sort of operate in that place where everything feels incredibly important and vital. I’ve been that way since I was a child. My mother always called me “Sarah Bernhardt” because I was quite dramatic. For me, [horror] sort of allows for the full breadth of all of my emotions. And so it’s a little addictive that way from an acting standpoint – wanting to be able to push myself to go further and further. I feel like in that world, those opportunities are always present.
The setting of HOLD YOUR BREATH is one of its most terrifying aspects. In another kind of film, you might describe it as “post-apocalyptic,” yet this was the reality for thousands of people during the 1930s. Did you do any research into the Dust Bowl to prepare?
I sure did, but not as intensely as I would research things in another circumstance, partially because there was a suddenness to this reality for people in this part of our country. I didn’t want to have information that [Margaret] would not have had about the time because I wanted to keep the intensity of the perilousness of it present for her – and for me. So, I didn’t want to have too much information about how it all ended and all of that.
Most significantly, I watched the Ken Burns documentary about the Dust Bowl because it was incredibly special to have real faces and real stories being told about people who were there and who experienced it, and can talk about it. You could see the fear in their eyes as they remembered it. You could see the grief in their eyes as they remembered homes lost, lost livestock, lost people and how devastating it was for them. That was the most formative thing for me to sit with because it made it all so very real. It took it out of my imagination and into the actual. That was very helpful.
Along with Ken Burns’ The Dust Bowl, there are those famous photos by Dorothea Lange. Some shots in HOLD YOUR BREATH are right out of those photographs.
Yes, that was actually part of some of the work I was doing, physically, anyway. I was to try to recreate some of the physical story of some of those images that Dorothea Lange took. The women all seem to have a similar posture, one that had a bit of fatigue and heaviness to their physicality because of what they were enduring.
How did that bleak, dry environment inform your performance?
We were shooting in Santa Fe, which is a very dry place. And also we shot really far out from the town center, so we were really in the middle of nowhere. They built that house from the ground up. It was not a house that existed, so it was smack in the middle of literally nothing. No matter which direction I turned, I could see nothing but dirt and dirt roads. That just really put a very fine point on the kind of isolation these homes built in this part of our country at that time were in – not what we know today as neighborhoods in terms of houses upon houses upon houses.
There was so much space between homes that … you couldn’t walk down the road because you couldn’t see five inches in front of your face. You really couldn’t go anywhere. There was nowhere to go. That helped encourage a feeling in me of suffocation and being trapped and isolated, which was exceedingly helpful.
With RUE MORGUE being the kind of publication it is, I have to throw a bone to the special effects nerds. How much of that dust was practical and how much was CGI?
It’s interesting that you asked that. A lot of it is practical, and actually, it was really, really important to our filmmakers that it be so. They did this whole little short film that they showed me before we started shooting about what they didn’t want it to look like, and they cited all of these films – none of which I will name – where they weren’t doing it enough practically, and they were even talking about The Wizard of Oz and that first scene [with the Dorothy and the cyclone] and it is all practical, and that’s why it looks so good. Even though that movie was shot so long ago, there are plenty of special effects in it.
There are many scenes that you see of me outside battling the dust with my arms in the air, and that was these giant Ritter fans and the special effects team just blowing tubes of dirt at me. I remember having one day in particular of getting into a sort of argument with special effects, just begging them to do more and to turn the Ritter fans up higher so that I could have more to respond to and to really move through. They finally acquiesced because I said, “Look, I’m the one in there. The kids aren’t in this shot. This is just me. Just really hit me. I want to almost be knocked over by the wind!” And so they did. It was a real dance between us to trust one another. I would tell them if it got to be too much, and they would tell me if they felt unsafe.
A lot of it is practical, I think it makes a big difference as an actor to have something very real to respond to, instead of pretending there’s dust swirling everywhere that they’re going to add later, which just never looks as good.
How do you leave that disturbed headspace after inhabiting a character like Margaret for so long?
I think, at the end of the day, for me, I kind of don’t while I’m inhabiting the role and while I’m living inside [a character]. This was a movie I shot on location, so I was not home. I didn’t have the normal comforts. I wasn’t able to just go down the street and see a friend for dinner and sort of take myself out of that environment. I was in that environment all day, every day. And I think that could only be helpful for my performance – but not so great for my brain. My therapist got a couple of extra phone calls while I was making this movie!
HOLD YOUR BREATH is now playing exclusively on Hulu.
