Lucky Director Natasha Kermani Talks Shudder’s Satirical Slasher Flick
RLJE Films and Shudder’s horror film Lucky is now available on VOD, digital, and DVD. Directed by Natasha Kermani, the film stars Brea Grant, who also wrote the script, as a self-help author tormented by a killer.
“Life takes a sudden turn for May (Grant), a popular self-help book author, when she finds herself the target of a mysterious man with murderous intentions,” reads the official synopsis. “Every night without fail, he comes after her, and every day the people around her barely seem to notice. With no one to turn to, May is pushed to her limits and must take matters into her own hands to survive and to regain control of her life.”
ComingSoon’s Sabina Graves spoke with director Natasha Kermani about the film’s themes, its use of sound, and much more.
Sabina Graves: I really loved that this film is a collaboration between you and Brea. Can you tell me a bit about how that collaboration started?
Natasha Kermani: So Brea and I already sort of knew each other socially just from the scene. But we had never worked together. So her script was sent to me and I was really excited to read it because I had a sense of her sort of ethos and her sense of humor and all of that stuff. So I read the script and I was really intrigued, as you may imagine, by sort of the stuff she was putting together. It was this really interesting sort of blend of some genres and very funny and very dark. So I gave her a call after I finished the script and I was saying, “Hey, I really, I think there’s something really interesting here,” and we just sort of connected on the broader themes, the bigger metaphors, sort of her intention, and then what I thought I could kind of bring to the project.
Just from even that initial conversation, I think because we were already sort of friendly and there was a casualness to our interactions, I think that was really a great way to go into a working relationship because it just sort of strips away any sort of like ego or weird vibes. It was just very honest and down-to-earth. I think we’re both pretty straightforward people. So I think just establishing that baseline sort of honesty and trust and mutual respect was really important. Then we can just kind of go about the business of making the movie happen. It was really great. She’s incredibly collaborative and I think we’re fans of each other. So I think that really helps when you’re sort of throwing ideas around and she at a certain point was really happy to sort of take off her writer hat and put on her actor hat and just sort of throw herself into the role and just focus on that aspect of it. That was sort of how, how things unfolded
It’s incredible that she was able to step in into that role that she created. I want to know more about how you wanted to use May’s emotions and psychological state to create that sense of anxiety and discomfort. How did you take that from the written word to just visually create that sense of fear?
She’s written as being very sort of uptight, but I really loved that. Brea wrote this sort of imperfect person that felt very grounded and real at the center of this horror movie, especially since we usually see this sort of like virginal perfect final girl. She just felt very grown to me and very real. In the original script that I read, the character of May actually had a child, she had a young son and we sort of through our conversations decided to get rid of that character. Just let her sort of be fighting for herself and not feel like we sort of needed this child or to make her mother to make her more sympathetic or any of that kind of garbage. So it was a lot of conversations about that, about how to just bring forward the grounded and realistic aspects of her, especially since the world is so crazy and we’d go into like bizarro land. It was like just making sure that we were really grounding her. We really knew where she was in her journey, even downstairs, really like specific things like, okay, now at this point she hasn’t slept in 30 hours and her hair is starting to come on, she’d been wearing these same socks for several days. So just getting into those really realistic aspects of where she was, was really key and then everything else around her could just sort of explode into weirdness and into crazy though.
I just loved the details, even in the sound design that kind of enhanced the horror you created. How did you decide to go about certain uses of like the score and the sounds that are in it that kind of like ramp that up?
I’ve always really focused on scoring. That’s always a really, really key element. So we worked with an incredible composer named Jeremy Zuckerman. We were actually lucky enough to get him on board really early on in the process. So he and I were having conversations even before we had started filming or even were finished casting. We were already talking about, okay, this is sort of what May’s theme sounds like. Here’s the instrumentation that we like for her versus here’s the man on the other side. So building out these two sounds and sort of how they interact and talking about how the music helps emphasize maybe the humor, right? Like those sort of satirical satire side of it. So not just like hitting the horror beat, but actually being a little bit cheeky about it and acknowledging like, yes, this is really a satire in the skin of a slasher movie and using these horror tropes, but sort of subverting them a little bit. All of those conversations were happening really early on in the process. I think that especially on an indie where you sort of have limited time and money, bringing on people who are creatively excited and have something interesting to play with, they are eager to come on and really make sure we’re doing something cool.
I specifically like the sort of rhythmic sounds that were coming into play at many points. It’s so unsettling, but fantastic.
Yeah. We wanted the villain’s sound to be very percussive and not feel organic at all versus May’s character is associated a little bit more with like female vocalizations and breath work and just like stuff that feels very like from the human body. Sort of interplaying between those two sort of opposing dynamics. A lot of the movies is opposing things, right? So May’s color is blue and the man’s color is red. So it’s a lot of those left, right-brain dynamics interplaying throughout the whole song.
RELATED: Interview: Lucky Star & Writer Brea Grant Discusses Horror Film’s Themes
Those little details, I just love. This goes into spoiler territory, but there’s a lot of social media podcasts, self-help books that like thrive on mental health and sort of like positivity content about things that we endure on the daily. With Facebook, for example, what do you feel is the importance of giving her that space to express her sensibility to her like battles and how ultimately that kind of comes into play later on?
Brea was really fascinated by the idea of having one of these sort of self-help people, whose job is to like know about life. She was really interested in putting that person in sort of like a crazy situation like this. Just was interested in exploring that type of person who would do that for a career. I think for me also, there was so much to play with because it’s basically somebody whose job is to come up with answers who finds herself in a total like impossible, no solution Twilight Zone scenario. That’s sort of a great sort of dramatic place to be from a filmmaking perspective to sort of like keep throwing obstacles in her way and sort of see her try to solve it the way that she’s sort of prescribed in the past, right?
Like this is a person who always has had a solution, always been a way to sort of like muscle through a problem. Now suddenly she can’t solve this problem, you know? I think for us as well, it’s a little bit of a statement on what Brea calls business lady feminism, which is this sort of overemphasis on self-reliance and moving away from the idea of community and kindness and connection. Like an overemphasis on like tough it out, go it alone. You are self-reliant, you can do whatever you need to do by yourself. You don’t need anybody else. Sort of the tension of that approach and that philosophy being exactly not what she needs in this scenario. So sort of part of the tragedy is that she’s not able to connect with the other women in the story.
She sort of is alone, trapped by it, but also that’s the way that she survived. That’s the way our society kind of tears us apart is by sort of teaching this false gospel of self-reliance. So that’s sort of the deeper stuff in there, but again, we didn’t want to hit it over the head, but that is sort of why she does that. We also thought it was hilarious. It’s also just very funny to have her be a self-help book author.
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