Exclusive Interview: Simon Barrett on His Haunting First Feature SÉANCE
Séance writer/director Simon Barrett has penned some of the most popular horror movies of the past decade. Such as You’re Next and The Guest, his frequent collaborator Adam Wingard directed both. He’s so well known in genre film it’s hard to believe he’s just now directing his first feature.
Simon Barrett wrote and directed Séance. It stars Suki Waterhouse (Assassination Nation, The Divergent Series: Insurgent) and Madisen Beaty (Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Plus Ella-Rae Smith (Into the Badlands, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), and Inanna Sarkis (Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, After franchise). Seamus Patterson (Channel Zero) also joins with Marina Stephenson-Kerr (Channel Zero).
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Séance stars Suki Waterhouse as Camille Meadows, a new girl at an elite school for girls. After Camille arrives, a group of girls invites her to take part in a ritual. There they attempt to summon the spirit of a former student who allegedly committed suicide at the school. After they perform the ritual, students start dying. Now the girls have to try and figure out what’s going on before more of them die.
We here at Dread Central are thrilled to speak with Simon Barrett. Not only about making his directorial feature film debut, but his inspiration for Séance. Plus, his previous films, and a lot more. Read on to find out what we talked about!
Synopsis: Camille Meadows is the new girl at the prestigious Edelvine Academy for Girls. Soon after her arrival, six girls invite her to join them in a late-night ritual. They call forth the spirit of a dead former student who reportedly haunts their halls. But before morning, one of the girls is dead, leaving the others wondering what they may have awakened.
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Dread Central: I really enjoyed Séance! You wrote and directed and it’s your directorial debut, which is hard to believe.
Simon Barrett: Yeah, I always thought I’d be directing, ever since I was a little kid. It was my one hundred percent career goal. Even though I was growing up in a small town in mid-Missouri. So I didn’t know how that was practically achievable for a long time. But when I was working with our first few projects together with Adam Wingard, I was very kind of creatively involved in those productions. To an extent that I think screen editors aren’t normally. Because I was kind of the main producer on them. At least on things like A Horrible Way to Die. And projects like our VHS wraparound, You’re Next, things that were being made for well under a million dollars. There was a lot for me to do hands-on on those sets.
I was very involved in pre-production and the post-production process. It was more when we became more successful and we started making films like The Guest. There we had a real budget, that I realized there kind of wasn’t as much for me to do. And I was starting to feel like just a screenwriter, hanging out on set, eating craft services, annoying the actors.
I wasn’t running around all the time like I was on You’re Next, working 18–20-hour days alongside Adam, because we had better people for that now. I think kind of notably people were surprised that Adam and I stopped casting ourselves right around the time we did The Guest because we could get better people now. We didn’t have to worry about actors not showing up because we were barely paying them, so we had to put ourselves in our movies.
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By the time we had real budgets,The Guest was 4.5 million, there was nothing for the screen editor to be doing in terms of arranging for equipment, so that’s when I really started thinking, “I need to be directing, doing projects, just off on my own.” Because at the end of the day I think what makes Adam and I great collaborators is that we are very different people and we do have somewhat different creative sensibilities. When it comes to certain projects there is stuff Adam is into and I’m not and vice versa, and I think Seance is a perfect example, something that is very much my sensibility, kind of old-fashioned, murder/myster/slasher.
Adam is obviously way past that point in his career, so I kind of started thinking, “Okay, it’s time for me to start developing my own voice as a director, whatever that means.” Because when you’re making a movie like Seance you don’t really develop your voice so much as you are trying desperately to make a movie that has a beginning, middle, and end, but after that you’re like, “Well, maybe there is some of my personality and original vision in here, who knows. Those are the muscles I need to start developing, I guess.”
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DC: What inspired you to write the story for Séance?
Simon Barrett: Truthfully just my love of classical murder mysteries, gialli and slashers. Mysteries and ghost stories are among my favorite types of fiction to consume, and they have been for my entire life, since I first started reading novels as a kid. So, I knew I wanted to try to tell a story in that creative space.
DC: How did it feel to finally be on your own and direct a feature?
Simon Barrett: Oh, it was awful. [laughs] I was responsible for everything, I stressed-puked every morning, didn’t get any sleep. I mean I love it, that’s the job, that’s indie filmmaking, so I was thrilled. That’s the conundrum of filmmaking; it’s the best and worst experience. I spent the entire time, we only have four weeks of prep, twenty-two shooting days, we were casting literally until the last minute.
There were so many crises every day that you were just kind of living moment by moment, putting out fire after fire. You’re so stressed out because you care about the film and are trying to make the best film possible and basically just trying to stop a slow-motion explosion and that’s low-budget filmmaking. Nothing ever goes right. It’s like, “Okay, if we only have two hours to shoot, and can’t get back to this location, maybe we can get these seven shots, then that will be enough to get out of the scene.”
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And of course, with Seance I had no contingency, no reshoots, nothing like that, so that’s the fun of it. At the same time, it was incredibly gratifying to be able to compose shots, work with actors, just kind of do my own thing, and I had a lot of creative freedom. I think they understood that this wasn’t a normal movie and had to be my vision, whatever that was, and kind of hope for the best. They weren’t spending enough money that they were really worried, but I don’t think anyone understood what I was going for. Even now I think there might be some confusion there. On one hand it was a great, phenomenal experience and on the other hand my mental and physical health deteriorated substantially, but I think that’s just the job and I can’t wait to do it again.
DC: Historically, genre film has a reputation for casting female characters as victims. This film deals with complex female relationships and female empowerment. And I think that the relationships feel really real, which is what makes the movie work for me. How difficult was it as a writer and director, who isn’t female, to make those relationships feel authentic?
Simon Barrett: That’s a terrific question, no one has asked me that yet. My first answer is that obviously I know nothing about what it’s like growing up as a female, or any female experiences, but I do know the experience of feeling lonely and angry and scared. I’m not trying to say anything with Seance that is outside the realm of human experience and understanding.
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In other words, I think if I sat down and said, “I’m going to write some great female characters,” then I’ve probably done a terrible job. That is just such a weird creative perspective. To me, the characters kind of tell me who they are, the story kind of tells me what it is and because I respect all of my characters as human beings, I like spending time with them. That tends to guide me in the right way, rather than like coming at it, doing something calculated that I might fail at.
For me, because I basically view human beings as these kinds of cursed animals, that’s kind of my default narrative approach to creating characters. I think that kind of guided me, but I also read a ton and I have friends who I was able to show the script and ask if I was doing anything egregiously wrong, and that obviously helped a lot, too. You know, it’s an interesting question but I think as long as you just care about your characters and respect them as a filmmaker, you’re not going to run into the kind of horror movie cliches that make people dislike the genre, in terms of characterizations of female characters as cannon fodder for a slasher killer.
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I don’t think I have to constantly worry about that because it is inherently of no artistic interest to me, although I do sometimes enjoy those films. Obviously, writers like Carol Clover were very instrumental, reading Men, Women, and Chainsaws when I was a teenager, that was a big book for me in terms of realizing there were different interpretations of these things. I never took influence from that in terms of, “Okay, I’m going to try and do that.” For me it’s all about you care about your characters, they will kind of tell you who they are.
There are moments of connection between characters in Seance and again, I think regardless of where anyone as a viewer falls on the kind of gender/sexuality spectrum, everyone can kind of relate to being hurt and willing to take the chance on another human being. I think everyone can relate to being lonely. I think also there is something really lovely about two people who both have been in a difficult relationship kind of finding each other, and dynamics like that are just, kind of I guess to me, I hesitate to say universal because obviously your characters’ background and politics do inform you who they are.
That informs their life experience in our culture, and how people react to them but I also think there are things on an emotional level, that are somewhat inherently relatable to everyone. Because I watch a lot of things like anime, I feel like I kind of enjoy that sense of heightened emotion and connection between characters and I think that is what really guided me there.
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DC: I feel like the relationships work really well. They’re so believable.
Simon Barrett: Thank you very much! That is so awesome to hear, no one has said that to me. I really feel really strongly the same and there was a point where I had to argue to keep some of the relationship elements in the film because one of my financiers wasn’t that excited about that element. And to me, I was like, “I don’t know what this movie is without that because that to me is the main story of the film.”
The horror story is fun but kind of incidental to the major emotional arc that the story is telling, which by the way the movie is doing something different in its supernatural and murder mystery arc, tying in with its emotional and narrative arcs in ways that aren’t always following the same paths. Like the supernatural story informs the emotional narrative more than the mystery narrative to a certain extent.
That was basically the real reason I wanted to tell this story because I felt like You’re Next and The Guest, which obviously have a kind of John Hughes influence, mysterious stranger rides into town and starts a slasher plot kind of thing going. But I thought The Guest and You’re Next were very cynical films. I think I wrote You’re Next when I was much angrier and more depressed than I am now. Although I think I’m still angry and depressed enough to make good cinema. I was really in a much darker place and I kind of wanted, if I was going to do a conclusion to that trilogy, without Adam directing, if I can have the arrogance to say it can be a companion piece to those films.
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You know with myself directing instead of him. I knew I wanted it to be more optimistic about human relationships. I knew I didn’t want to do another movie about how we’re all lying to each other. And humans are inherently unknowable, and like genuine connection between them is impossible. I wanted to try and find a slightly more positive version and say something similar. And that was the reason for me to want to tell this story with Seance. But I haven’t told anyone that because it’s a spoiler and most people don’t care.
DC: Séance has such a talented cast. Especially Suki Waterhouse as Camille, Madisen Beaty as Bethany, and Megan Best as Kerrie. How did you handle the casting process?
Simon Barrett: My financiers on Seance were terrific about casting; they wanted some input, but they left it up to me to make the final decisions. And once Suki came on board, they kind of relaxed a bit, I think. Her vote of confidence in the movie was essentially what got it made. Once they knew they could put Suki on the poster, I think they started to worry less about the economics of what I was attempting. She was the first actor attached, and from there on it was a normal casting process.
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My L.A. casting director, Deanna Brigidi, convinced Madisen to read for me. I cast her instantly. I was already a fan of her work from The Clovehitch Killer and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And Megan taught a children’s acting class up at our Winnipeg casting director’s offices. So she was randomly there during my first meeting. They cast her in Nobody and she had such a great, gloomy energy when she read for Kerrie. So, I was very lucky to be able to cast all three.
DC: My favorite of your films is You’re Next. Do you have a favorite film that you’ve been a part of and if so, why?
Simon Barrett: You know, I also really love You’re Next. There’s an efficiency to the storytelling and comedy in that film that’s kind of unique to that project. And the character of Erin was so much fun to write. I’d like to think I’m a better writer and producer now than I was back then. But that was kind of a magical project, no matter how actually miserable it was to make at the time. That’s why we needed the Dwight Twilley song in it. So yeah, I really like a lot of the movies that have my name on them. And I genuinely loathe some of them. But You’re Next is always special.
Séance will be available in theaters, on demand, and digital on May 21st from RLJE Films / Shudder.
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