The idea of a film about a deaf-mute woman alone in a cabin in the woods, being terrorized by a sadistic killer may seem a bit exploitative for some, but the new film HUSH from director and co-writer Mike Flanagan (ABSENTIA, OCULUS) is something unexpected. It’s a film in which the lead character (played by co-writer Kate Siegel) is resourceful, intelligent and downright brave, as she uses her strengths to keep this psycho (John Gallagher Jr., most recently of 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE) at bay outside the home.
For a single-location film with no budget, the resourcefulness of the filmmakers is evident. The movie’s use of sound is remarkable and critical to the overall success of the final product, and the way Flanagan establishes the geography of the house at the onset of the movie and then tests our knowledge of it later in the film when Siegel’s Maddie is in need of a place to hide or set a trap is so skillfully done that you almost don’t notice it. In a strange way, the film is also about writer’s block, since Maddie is a novelist who has troubles coming up with endings to her stories—a fact that factors heavily into the ending of HUSH.
By year’s end, we’ll be hearing more from both Flanagan and Siegel. He already has another film ready for release, BEFORE I WAKE, starring ROOM’s Jacob Tremblay, Kate Bosworth and Thomas Jane; and the pair are working together on the already-shot OUIJA 2, set for release in October. They’re great fun to talk to, as well, and bounce off each other like they’ve been working beside each other for decades. HUSH is out now on VOD and on Netflix. With that, please enjoy my talk with Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel…
Capone: I wanted to talk about WAIT UNTIL DARK, because you’ve essentially done a take on that with a deaf-mute woman rather than a blind woman. Can you talk about how deep the roots of your film go into that film?
Kate Siegel: Well, I wouldn’t say our roots go very deep. There are some real structural differences between the two films. I think it was a huge inspiration, though. That’s a movie that takes a basic concept of the genre, which is home invasion, and turns it on its side with the addition of something that you think is a weakness and ends up being a strength, and I think that movie really inspired us in that way to think outside the box. When you’re watching a scary movie with someone who hates scary movies, you can say “Cover your ears,” because often times the deepest part of the terror comes from the sound, and we were just shocked to realized that no one’s really messed with sound in that way before. When we found out this movie hasn’t been done before, we were flabbergasted.
Mike Flanagan: Yeah, it was one of those moments when, you look at a movie like WAIT UNTIL DARK which is one of those high-concept thrillers where the concept itself seems to have just fallen from heaven. It’s such a clean set up for a movie. With this one, we were both very surprised that no one had made it yet, and that’s typically a sign that your concept is sound. You can look around like, “We’d have to make this now before someone else does.
KS: We wanted something simple, because the scariest things are the simpler things like “What’s under my bed? What’s in the closet? What’s outside?” These simple concepts that touch something inside of you, so the more you can distill what makes your movie scary, the more successful I find it to be.
Capone: I’m sure you’ve seen that “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” episode “Hush,” and that is not this at all, but at the same time, it’s an idea that’s “What’s it like when we can't speak?” Did that play into your film at all?
MF: Oh, certainly. At that first dinner when we were first talking about this movie, we started with us talking about things we liked. WAIT UNTIL DARK is the first thing we mentioned. Then I was talking about several examples in television where removing dialogue had a great effect. That episode of “Buffy” is certainly one of the things we talked about. You’re right, that’s a very specific supernatural reason for removing the dialogue. It’s such a cool episode. I am deeply in love with that episode because it’s Doug Jones, who I’ve now worked with a couple times now as one of the Gentlemen. So we talked about that. We talked also about something way more obscure than “Hush” was. Back when TNT did “Nightmares and Dreamscapes”…
Capone: The Steven King shorts, sure.
MF: Yeah, the opening episode was called “Battleground,” and it was William Hurt verses an army of little tiny toy soldiers.
Capone: That’s right. Yeah, I remember that.
MF: Not a word of dialogue. I thought that was an amazing hour of television.
KS: Yeah, I think all those things are, for a lack of a better phrase, on our inspiration board as we approached HUSH. Things that played with dialogue and sound and things that really added to the creepiness factor.
MF: I was so aware of the “Buffy” episode that initially we had called this movie SILENCE, and because of the Scorsese movie with the same title, we weren’t going to go with that.
KS: It’s crazy how Scorsese wouldn’t budge at all.
[Everybody laughs]
MF: So then it was like oh everybody really likes HUSH for it and thought it was appropriate and my initial reaction was well, we can’t do that, not after Joss Whedon used it. And it was like, well, it’s been 20 years, and we’re very different stories so maybe we can look at that as a loving nod.
KS: Yeah, and also, we’re coming for you, Joss.
Capone: With so little dialogue being a part of this, what did your script read like? Is it just mostly description then?
MF: It’s a bizarre read. It really is. The script is still substantial. It’s like 83 pages? So it pretty much is about the size of the script that you would expect for our running time, but it’s entirely blocking description, notes about Maddie’s performance and character.
KS: I think because we were writing knowing I was going to perform the character, we really built in a bunch of acting notes in the script, so on the day we could remember like, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how scared is Maddie right now?” So we could keep the tension escalating.
MF: We wrote this script after we had sold the idea to [producers Jason] Blum and Trevor Macy. We never took this out to the market, so the script was, more than anything, just a blueprint for production. So there were also a lot of camera notes that I put in there about ways I wanted to stage certain scenes, and there were a ton of sound design notes as well—all the areas where the audio dropped away and Maddie’s perspective was all scripted. We also would talk about which ambient sounds or hero sounds we’d be focusing on for certain sequences.
KS: Yeah, but it’s a strange read.
MF: Very weird read.
KS: But I would say Mike hit the nail on the head: it’s a blueprint if nothing else. I mean, all scripts are blueprints, but this one specifically felt like “Notes to department heads.”
MF: Yeah, it really was. When we got to Alabama and gave it to the crew, it really was like, “Hopefully just about everything you need is in here.” Because in a lot of ways, the movie is a performance piece, and to script something like that, you’re putting choreography down. It was tough to get out of the way you usually try and prepare the script, which is to make it as entertaining to read as possible so that a studio or executive or somebody thinks they can see a version of a movie and they want to buy it. This was way more a technical manual for our cast and crew about how to execute this specific movie this way.
KS: And because Mike tends to work with the same crew and the same department heads from the producers all the way down, he kind of knew who he was talking to when he was writing the script. He knew how to talk to [production designer] Elizabeth Boller about how he wanted the house to look; he knew how to talk to sound guys about what kind of sound he wanted.
MF: Yeah, I’ve been lucky enough to have basically the same crew now on four movies in a row. We’ve developed a short hand. This script was pretty much designed with a lot of them in mind. I remember one of our key grips Eric Damazio has been on all the movies, had read the script, and was like, “Well, I think the way you’re writing it, this script deserves two condors and a crane for the outdoor sequences.” And we couldn’t afford that, and he was off trying to cash in his favors to try and get us the equipment. That’s the kind of shoot it was. A bunch of us who knew each other, scrounging favors and donations to make it happen.
KS: But I also don’t mean to say that it isn’t an interesting read. Like it’s not like “Hey Eric. We need a condor.” It is an interesting read. It is a tension-filled read, but it reads more like a novella than a script because there’s so much description.
Capone: Kate, with you playing this character and co-writing this script, did you sometimes get lost in the writing and how cool the film, forgetting that you actually had to do a lot of this crazy stuff? Was there a moment when you were shooting like, “Man, I actually wrote this, didn’t i? What the hell was I thinking?”
KS: Yeah! Well, this was my first time really combining those two sides—writing something that I was going to act in. So I absolutely got lost in the writing part of it, and I’d write a sequence I thought was going to be so cool, and I look over and Mike would be looking at me with a skepticism, and he’d be like, “You realize you have to do this.” And I’d be like, “I got it. Don’t worry about it.” One day, we had this scene to shoot where I have fallen through a window, I bounce off the desk, and I hit the ground. I just thought, “That’s great. She’s really throwing herself into this escape.” And we get to Alabama to do it, I’m working with the stunt guy, I’m padded up, I’m like, “Alright I’m ready, I’m ready.” And we try it once, and it doesn’t quite work, and I hurt myself.
And I’m like well there’s no one else here to do this stunt, so I better shake it off and get back outside and throw myself through the window again. And I did it and after about five or six times, we all felt comfortable with the stunt and so they rolled the master, which by the way has me not in focus—it’s really focused on the crossbow—and Mike yells “Cut!”, and I jump up like, “We got it!” And was ready to move on. And he’s like, “That’s the first of eight setups for this scene.” And that was when I realized that maybe this wasn’t the brightest idea.
Capone: The layout of the house, and us as the audience learning the geography of the house, is pretty crucial for this thing to work. We start thinking about places where she can hide or she can run to, but when you're writing it, how did you make that work? What house were you thinking of and how did you make the adjustment on location?
MF: Well, we based the script entirely on the house we lived in together in Glendale, California. It was all based on our house, which has an open floor plan, a sliding glass door with a porch in the front, and a semi-flat rooftop. So we would act out different scenarios in the script using our house. And when we went down to Alabama and went location scouting, it was actually really tough to find a house that worked for the story that we had written. The closest we could find is the house that’s in the movie, which was a last-minute, surprise discovery that was actually our set carpenter’s mother’s house. He just mentioned it. He was like, “My mom lives out in the middle of nowhere. You should check out her house.”
KS: Your mom lives out in a murdery home.
MF: It’s the perfect house for a murder. And even then, the house I think it was like 80 percent right, and we had to sit with the script on the porch of the new house and rewrite elements to make it fit that location.
KS: Yeah, we added that sliding glass door to that house, too. They don’t have those in Alabama.
MF: In Alabama, it was impossible to find sliding glass doors. I don’t know why. They usually go into a screened porch. So we had to alter the house a bit to fit the script, but then the house itself gave us a bunch of opportunities. It was elevated on stilts and had a crawl space, which our house did not. So that gave us a whole other set piece, a couple of them actually, that we wrote just for that house.
KS: And also, early on the cat serves a couple purposes that are more story driven than pet driven, and one of them is we knew we needed to walk through the house with the audience before anything bad happened, so they could figure out where everything is and what’s going on. And I’m always wandering through our house looking for our cat, so that was something that was a gift by having the cat.
MF: And that was a scene I remember was in the script too that had to be a single shot. Like you said, for the audience to learn the geography of the location was going to be critical. Anytime you cut, you reset the audience’s sense of place. So it was essential that we had Maddie walk our camera through the entire interior space at once, which happens about 12 minutes into the movie.
KS: That was a hard day too, because the timing of that was so difficult, and the spaces were small, and Thom Valko was our Steadicam op, and it was maybe our third or forth day, so we weren’t quite in sync yet, and if you ever try to walk at a steady pace throughout your house up and down stairs, it’s very difficult to make that work with a herd of elephants above you.
Capone: Arguably my favorite part of this experience, and it’s actually connected to something else I really liked, which is Maddie is a writer, and you have this issue with her trying to figure out the end of her book, but then you find a way to incorporate that dilemma into this experience of being terrorized, and find a way to give her a voice in the process. Did that mirror your experience trying to end this film, and were you afraid people would think you were cheating when you find a way to give her a voice?
MF: Oh yeah. That sequence that you’re referring to is actually one of the more controversial sequences on a script level. And the producers were a little nervous about it. They said, “This could either be really cool, or this could pull people out of a movie and people might think you’re cheating.” We have very supportive producers, primarily because we’ve worked together before. So Jason and Trevor, when we got down to Alabama, basically said, “Look, we think this could be great, so we think you should do it, but try to have a plan B in mind in case it doesn’t work.” I think we abandoned the plan B.
KS: Well when we started shooting it, it became clear that it was going to work. I think it also has to do with shooting in order. By the time you get to that point in the movie, you’ve gotten as close to Maddie as you emotionally can without hearing her speak, and I think the audience at this very specific juncture of her battle needed one more in with this woman. They needed to know so they could really gather the energy inside of that to cheer for her final fight.
MF: One of the things that happens when you’re writing a script like this and any script really…I’ve been fortunate or foolish enough to have written more than 20 scripts in the last 20 years, and you always hit the same point where you get overwhelmed by the possibilities, by the different stories a road can take. Generally, you tend to visualize them, and they drive you crazy. They can also paralyze you.
That experience for me is such a recurring one and such a powerful part of the process. It was something we were dealing with working on this one too, of making sure we had explored all the options and tried to play each potential little narrative path out to its logical conclusion. You really want to make sure you’re not leaving a stone unturned. The opportunity to take that process, which is an incredibly tense and stressful process, a frustrating one, and to put that into a story that’s about the tension of trying to come up with the best solution, only the stakes are if you get it wrong you die, it seemed like such a shame to not try to put that in there.
KS: I also think in this day and age, people write or are familiar with the process of writing, and this writer’s brain thing is a familiar feeling. I know for us when we write scripts or when I write by myself, that experience bleeds over into my day-to-day life. I can drive down my street and see a yellow light, and I can see immediately: I go through a yellow light, and someone smashes into the side of my car, and then I die. I can also see I stop for the yellow light and I save a baby in a baby carriage. It happens to me on the daily, and when you start talking to people, lots of people have those active imaginations, and we thought that it would resonate in that way too. This was so much fun. It’s so great to talk to you.
Capone:Thank you so much, and best of luck with this.
