‘New Life’ Director John Rosman On How To Craft A Good Twist
John Rosman‘s feature film debut New Life is a stunning piece of deeply empathetic horror. With two complex female characters at its center, Rosman’s narrative orbits around them until an inevitable and disastrous intersection. It’s a deeply human and deeply terrifying story about human connection and loss of control over your own body.
In New Life,
Once upon a time, Jessica Murdock (Hayley Erin) had a life. She had a fiancée and a home, and then one day, for reasons she cannot comprehend, it was taken away from her. Now she’s on her own, on the run, scrounging for her next meal and trying to avoid the authorities. Random strangers briefly offer some kindness, food, and shelter, but Jessica knows she can’t stand still very long and looks to cross the Canadian border into some kind of freedom. But she’s not on her own.
On her trail is Elsa Gray (Sonya Walger), neither a cop nor a federal agent, but a for-hire fixer with the skills and intelligence to bring in someone who doesn’t want to be found. Jessica and Elsa both share a link that only one of them is aware of and by the time these two survivors finally meet, it can only end one way—tragically, and not just for them but possibly, for us all.
We spoke with Rosman about incorporating ALS into the film, how to craft a good twist, and more.
Dread Central: So where did the idea for New Life come from for you? How did it start? What was the kernel of this movie?
John Rosman: I think the kernel for it was really, I wanted to do a story [that starts] with a character covered in blood. Then we see them trying to escape and we don’t know what they did, but we quickly forget and it doesn’t really matter. But then as the story goes on, it starts to become more and more important. That was just one of the ideas.
DC: How long have you been working on this idea? Is this something that you’ve been sitting on for a bit?
JR: I think that as an idea, that was kind of floating around my head for a little bit, but the script actually came together pretty quickly. I was talking to some people about another idea that was too expensive, and I really felt a push to do something. And New Life, I don’t know, I probably started writing it in June, and then I was showing it to people in November, and then we were filming in March.
DC: I’m going to try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible because the twist is so important to this movie, but there is that huge twist where we find out what’s really going on here. I’m fascinated with how you write and develop a twist, and I wanted to hear about how you approached that with yours.
JR: I think the challenge with the twist is how do you make it feel organic and is it building towards something versus it just coming out of nowhere. If it just comes out of nowhere, it feels like a cheat. You as a viewer are kind of taken out of it and you’re like, “Wait, what?” And it’s frustrating, but you want to place breadcrumbs so people can follow along. But an audience is so much smarter than one person.
That was the challenge [in New Life] of how do you give enough information where we meet the characters, we’re seeing the things, and then it’s part of the twist, but it also feels like a consequence of past actions. Since it is the midpoint and after that point, you’re watching a different story, how do all those past actions influence the rest of it? That’s the balance. I think that was the hard part of the writing process for this film.
DC: Did any of that shift once you were on set?
JR: Yeah, of course. I mean, a lot of those changes take place around tension. Me and my DP, Mark Evans worked within a program that uses Unreal Engine and we mapped all the rooms and stuff.
DC: Wait, that’s so cool.
JR: Yeah, his process is really cool. We spent, I don’t know, something like 32 hours over the course of five days [mapping out everything]. He built all these rooms [in the program] and then we had these characters and then he placed the camera. The idea for both of us is we go in there and we have a printed-out storyboard. So worst case scenario, everything is going wrong, we’re running out of time, we knock out everything in that plan. But since you have that plan, you’re able to improvise and have fun with the framing, and because [that plan is] a fallback that works. So we have the printout, but it ends up looking so different.
DC: Backing a little bit away from the horror, you also incorporate ALS into this movie in a really incredible way. Horror films don’t often look at disability like this, and you really have this really amazing parallel storyline going on with Sonya Walger’s character Elsa. I wanted to hear more from you about incorporating ALS into this story and why that was important to you to have as a major part of the narrative of New Life.
JR: Well, respecting your wish to keep it spoiler-free, I think hopefully it feels like when you watch the film, there are all these interesting parallels about these two characters, and it really starts off on a basic level. There’s a woman running away and a woman chasing her. Then we start getting some information and we learn pretty quickly that Elsa has ALS. So this means that she’s struggling on the case, etc. But by the end of the story, we also see parallels between the ALS and what Jess is going through. And I like the idea of using something that you’re fully conscious of. It’s a really terrifying disease, your body’s slowly shutting down.
To me, I thought as a story, that’s a really cool way to explore this space. But then once we committed to it, of course, the actual work is how do you do it in a sensitive way? I mean, this is a horror movie and it’s entertainment, so at the end of the day, it’s not going to be perfect. But me and Sonia took that challenge really seriously. We interviewed doctors, family members, people with ALS. I had a consultant, this amazing journalist, Dagmar Munn, who writes for ALS Today.
The whole ALS narrative is influenced by a woman I interviewed early on in my career who wrote a memoir about ALS. So I think once I decided it was interesting to explore in the story, then the intention and the work is, well, how do we do this truthfully? How do we do this in a way that’s honest? Because the more details you have, the more colorful of a picture it becomes.
So we need to catch this person, but our hero now needs to walk with a cane. Her motor functions are slowly failing her. Can she do it? It adds stakes to it, but you want to get it right. And I really commend Sonia because she did a ton of work as well. We held each other really accountable, and that was our number one priority throughout this whole film.
DC: That’s amazing. I sadly had a family member who had ALS. You don’t see these kinds of things really, especially with heroes in movies or your protagonist. It’s always such a tragedy. And while it’s sad here, she’s also a badass. Even though she is losing mobility, she’s never not a badass. We don’t often get disabled heroes.
JR: Well, that’s awesome. And I think Sonya broke open this mold with her character who she played in For All Mankind, Molly Cobb, she’s incredible. And she’s just an incredible actor.
But during the research phase of this project, and it ended up influencing the film, I went with a group to interview a young woman with ALS who wrote a memoir. She was my age, and she had ALS, a really advanced stage of it. It was terrifying and depressing, and she was going to eventually use Washington’s Death with Dignity Law. But she also explored this radical optimism in the face of all that. This idea of the power of acceptance really comes from her memoir that I read. And I just kept on encountering that with these people like Dagmar who ended up connecting us with Lisa, who’s an incredible actor in New Life.
And it really challenged a lot of assumptions I had. It’s a terrible disease, and we don’t know too much about it, and it’s awful. But it’s still life and it’s still the human condition. And these people are on the front lines of something so much deeper than I’ve ever gone through, and they come back with seeing something really profound. I found it amazing. And I thought that was cool to have a hero who’s experiencing that as well.
DC: I also think as this movie progresses and it gets more into a real horror movie, it’s really interesting how you play with the idea of nihilism, too. And I love that with this, even though you’re playing with hope, there’s also some nihilism.
JR: I think that ending stems from this thought that you never know if a cough is a cough anymore. That is the world we live in. And so I think that it is hard not to feel nihilistic when there’s always a storm or a forest fire or something. But within that space, you look at what’s happening in Hawaii and you also see a community coming together and helping each other out. You see in a lot of these disaster areas the best in people too, too. But yeah, it’s a tricky environment that doesn’t have an easy answer.
DC: OK, so I have been comparing this a little bit to, and this is spoilers, so skip this paragraph, everyone, but to Resident Evil a little bit, I think this is the best Resident Evil adaptation I’ve ever seen. I love how it becomes that, but not in the usual way. I’m curious if you yourself are a horror fan and if there are movies that you may be pulled from or were inspired by in creating this apocalyptic narrative at the end.
JR: First of all, that’s amazing and I love that. Thank you. And there is, when you’re creating a monster, how do their bodies work? If you’re writing a movie about whatever, we never use the Z word, but what are their movements? What feels honest, what feels like knee knee-jerk cliche? So this idea that the monsters are kind of conscious of what’s happening to them, but they can’t stop, adds this terror to it. I think it’s really scary, but it is also kind of coming back to this idea of the ALS thing where they’re out of control and they’re still kind of conscious of it, and it is terrifying.
And I’m a huge horror movie fan. I’ve been watching a lot since probably 14. My catalyst film was definitely seeing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and just falling in love with the genre.
But with this movie in particular, I was really influenced by The Fly, where we see this character we really love and we watch their body disintegrate and we want it to work, but we know it won’t.
I was really also in Repulsion where we’re following this main character, and we know there’s something off with her and there’s something terrible about her past that’s kind of hinted at, but we’re just rooting for her. Then by the end of the movie, you’re like, “What is happening? Who is this person? What’s going on?” I love that. A
And then also probably Chernobyl Season One. That first episode’s probably, I think one of my favorite horror movies. And then The Vanishing. I love that greatest slow burn of all time.
DC: Oh my God. I watched that movie for the first time a couple of months ago, and it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.
JR: It tests your patience. But then once it starts ratcheting up and into that last scene, it’s just like you’re left with, ‘What the fuck?” It’s a perfect movie and it’s terrifying. But I think those are the core movies that influenced New Life.
DC: So what’s next for you? What subgenre do you want to do horror next for your next feature?
JR: I definitely have some ideas that I’m working on. I think what I really like in this film and what I want to explore more of is just a lot of those moments of tension, playing with what the audience knows is on the other side of the screen. There are a lot of great films that do so much in that space. One is The Strangers which is the most cliche setup. Nothing should work about that film. But talk about nihilistic. It’s terrifying. It’s so scary.
DC: Oh, there’s no scariest movie. One of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t care.
JR: Also a lot of Asian ghost stories play with that, like Pulse. There’s so much patience and blocking and intention. So much of that tension is also like, “OK, there’s a person in a room and we don’t know what we’re going to see.” But it has to be more than that or else it doesn’t work. When it really works and when you really explore that space, you can do so much and you can really create a really fun atmosphere. So the next project is really taking that and just trying to ramp that as hard as I can, I think.
Categorized:Interviews
