Alexandre Aja Interview: The ‘Never Let Go’ Director Is Your Tour Guide to Terror [September Cover Story]
Alexandre Aja has helped shape the modern horror landscape as we know it, especially with his 2003 French inversion of the slasher, High Tension. While divisive in its depiction of queer identity, it’s an ultra-violent, daring take on a well-known subgenre that shaped this writer’s life when she was in college.
Aja is also seen as a pillar of the New French Extremity, a film movement born post-9/11, where directors created horror films packed to the gills with gore to speak more deeply about the nihilism and hopelessness of the times. Since then, Aja has played in almost every subgenre, making monster movies like Piranha 3D and Crawl, tackling franchise remakes like The Hills Have Eyes, and even romance in Horns. Now, he’s tackling the apocalypse and parenthood in his latest film, Never Let Go, starring Halle Berry.
In the film,
As an evil takes over the world beyond their front doorstep, the only protection for a mother, played by Academy Award® winner Halle Berry, and her twin sons is their house and their family’s protective bond. Needing to stay connected at all times—even tethering themselves with ropes—they cling to one another, urging each other to never let go. But when one of the boys questions if the evil is real, the ties that bind them together are severed, triggering a terrifying fight for survival.
I spoke with Dread Central’s September cover star to get a tour through his latest vision of terror, one that speaks to the complexities of parenthood, trust, and what lurks between the trees. Take a look at my conversation with Alexandre Aja below.
Entering the Woods of Never Let Go
Aja’s involvement with Never Let Go started with the director simply looking for his next movie and reading through a lot of scripts. “You never know when you open a script which one is going to be the one. But I believe that you always need to fall in love [with the material],” he said. “Something you can always go back and say, ‘Oh, this is why I’m here instead of being somewhere else’ when you’re really fighting to finish your day or if you have problems.”
It may seem like a simple ideology when it comes to picking your next project, but it’s an important one that keeps you not only working on things you love but also keeps your passion alive even on your hardest days on set. And Aja truly felt something special with the script for Never Let Go, written by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby.
“[With] this one, I remember reading it and feeling, not moved, but questioned. The script was so layered in terms of psychology and in terms of the time we are living [with a] story about a mother that trying to protect her kids in that world that has been destroyed,” said Aja. “One kid believing whatever mama says, and the other one questioning felt like something that was in the back of my mind for a long time.”
Confronting Parental Fears
But Never Let Go also presented Aja with another opportunity: to explore parenthood, protecting your children, and the dangers overprotective parents can inflict upon their children. “This is something that was, for me, very important,” said Aja. “[I wanted to look at] how a parent can be the most caring and the most loving person for his children, but also the most dangerous one.”
In Aja’s mind, Never Let Go posed the question, “Where is the line between protecting your children and taking their freedom away?”
As a parent himself, these questions were crucial to grapple with in his latest film. But importantly, this isn’t necessarily a film that marks a shift in Aja’s filmmaking sensibilities, particularly when it comes to blood and gore.
“It’s interesting because I never really thought, ‘Oh, I was much more graphic and gore before I was a father than after’, but I was already a father when I did Piranha and Maniac,” he said. “So I feel that it depends on the stories. Sometimes you want to do something that’s super graphic and sometimes—I was watching Longlegs a couple of days ago and it is not graphic at all, but it’s so scary. I felt so good. I haven’t gotten that scared for a long time!”
Aja Never Walks Alone
Coming along on this journey into the woods was frequent Aja collaborator cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, who’s worked on 16 movies with Aja over the years. As a filmmaker, Aja has made it his goal to build up a team of collaborators that are both talented and easy to work with.
“For me, the first step [of filmmaking] is to spend the time to rewrite the script or to develop the script in a direction that feeds the vision I have in my mind. And then it’s about choosing the right team able to bring that vision to a higher level,” he said. “After years and years, you learn and there are people that become not just the best collaborators but also the people that you really know how to work with.”
That’s why Aja and Alexandre were able to come together and figure out the visual style, which was a challenge due to the amount of trees and forests they had to film.
“I was really worried about how we would film the forest, how we could be sure that we have all the layers that the eye can see when you are in the middle of trees,” said Aja. “That’s why we chose to shoot with a 65mm camera, [which also has] a wider, much bigger capture. But that led also to another aesthetic: being in a grounded fairytale world. But that was also kind of to bring that reality. I don’t want to do something that’s over-stylized. I don’t want to do something that’s taking you away from the experience of being in the movie. What I’m trying to do in every story I’m taking is to be sure that you never lose, I would say, that rope that tethers to the screen.”
For Aja, filmmaking is about creating an immersive experience and that’s impossible without working with Maxime, the production designer, everyone, especially the actors.
The Magic of Halle Berry
Enter Halle Berry. She read the script before knowing Aja was attached and was incredibly drawn to the material, not unlike Aja when he first read it.
He recounts the first time they met, explaining that “she was really worried that I came to that story with another approach, that I will not be ready to fight to defend what makes it so singular and so layered and so simple in a way, but not going into the most obvious studio direction that a classic development will take the movie usually.”
Thankfully Aja was on the same page as Berry from the get-go, with both wanting to take what Aja called “a more radical approach”.
“When I say radical is not because the movie is super graphic or scary or violent, but more about the topic and what it talks about and the fact that [Halle Berry’s] character is not the expected character,” he said.
Berry’s Mama is many things, but first and foremost she sees herself as a mother. She loves her children more than anything and wants to protect them. But that love isn’t always a positive thing. She’s overprotective and stifles them, which inversely puts them in danger. And for this team, that’s what’s so attractive about Never Let Go.
“That complexity of what you feel as a parent is definitely something that I think where she responded and she was so scared that we would lose that along the way,” said Aja. “I think the more we started working together and the more she understood that was exactly the same reason why I was making this movie, the more connected we became and the more amazing the collaboration was.”
He continued, saying, “By the end of the world post-production process, I know that both of us are very proud of the movie we made. Without her help, I don’t think I would have managed to [tell Never Let Go] in such a simple yet multilayered way.”
A Long History Of Complicated Women
Berry’s performance follows a long line of strong, complex female characters seen in Aja’s filmography, from Marie in High Tension to Haley in Crawl. So why is Aja so drawn to stories about female characters and their survival?
“I mean, it cannot be a coincidence because there’s so many of them,” he laughs. “But I remember when I read Crawl years ago and it was the story of a woman [going] to save her dad. To be honest, I didn’t read it like this. I read it like me trying to go save my dad. In the same way when I was writing High Tension, when I was working on Oxygen, it’s an instinct thing. I always very feel like those characters. At some point, I feel that it transcends gender.”
The director isn’t ignorant of the genre’s more misogynistic tendencies, but he never wanted to fall into those traps (“Maniac might be an exception,” he said). Instead, Aja merely finds himself gravitating towards these characters because of his ability to identify with them, their struggles, and their stories.
A Filmmaking Refresh
At the end of the day, Aja doesn’t just make films to craft spectacle. He makes movies so he can craft interesting stories that he personally can fall in love with. And really, the biggest change he’s seen in himself as a director has come as his children have grown up.
There’s an amazing period where with your kids, you start witnessing your own childhood through watching old movies. It’s almost like a nostalgia cruise through your early childhood years, discovering movies again through your kid and through seeing them watching movies,” he said. “Becoming a parent, for a director, is almost like a reset button, but not a reset button to change. Just to refresh your approach to filmmaking.”
Never Let Go comes exclusively to theaters on September 20, 2024, from Lionsgate.
Categorized:Cover Stories Interviews
