Exclusive: Oz Perkins Talks The Blackcoat’s Daughter
Osgood “Oz” Perkins’ first acting role was in 1983’s Psycho II, in which he briefly appeared as the twelve-year-old version of the Norman Bates character his father, Anthony Perkins, portrayed. He acted here and there over the years and wrote two terrific screenplays for director Nick Simon. Now Oz is ready to take the reins with his directorial debut, The Blackcoat’s Daughter.
The eerie and mysterious film is produced by Bryan Bertino (interview here) and Adrienne Biddle. A24 and DirecTV released The Blackcoat’s Daughter in limited theaters and On Demand TODAY, March 31, 2017.
Dread Central: Did you always want to direct, and how did growing up on sets help prepare you?
Osgood Perkins: Well, it was a combination of just sort of being raised in the soup of all of it, with the right ingredients chopped up around me, for sure helps. When I was seventeen, eighteen I got to go to film school, being a film director was what I had planned on being when I grew up. When I was fifteen, sixteen I was obsessed with Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick and I felt like some combination of those two guys and it was exactly what I wanted to do with myself. then life just took its various twists and turns; I kind of got tossed around a little bit and didn’t make my first feature until I was forty-one years old. So by the time I had arrived there I had compiled an ongoing and deepening appreciation and education for the new guard and how they get films made and how they function. I had especially focused on screenwriting, which is the most essential component to any successful movie, so cobbling all those things together I felt reasonably confident on day one, what to say, how to stand, and what I needed. Really, that’s kind of like anything; it just takes time on the playing field to figure out what the fuck is going on. So yeah, I was reasonably correct, but day one was still day one. I didn’t have any shorts or student films or commercials or music videos or anything, so day one of photography was day one.
DC: The Blackcoat’s Daughter feels like a throwback to the 1970s. Was that just you, or was it calculated?
OP: I think so much of this stuff evolves out of your own personal taste. It almost sounds overly New Age to say that it comes out of your own biorhythm, but to a large degree, those of us who are off the rate, as opposed to directing someone else’s material or coming in on an existing thing. Those of us who are offering material from the ground up, it so much comes from me that it can’t help but be like me, and so the movies that I like are not the noisy, cutty, extreme close-up, talky, jittery movies, they never have been. I’d rather watch Rosemary’s Baby fifty times than see what the opposite watched, you know what I mean? I tend to come from a more appreciation of the literary side every bit as I come from an appreciation for the cinematic. The great thing about making movies is you get to marshal all of the world’s art forms; literature and dance and music and painting and all of photography is at your disposal. So I tend to want to pick from all of them, so constructions of movies that I make end up feeling like pieces of music, screenplays that I write tend to be more lyrical. Most of the time people are turned on by it, sometimes people feel it’s a little bit of a distraction, but I really don’t know how to do it any other way. I write all the sounds that are in the movie, all the tempos in the movie, that stuff is already on the page when it gets to the other artists.
DC: What was it like working with Bryan Bertino, who’s known more as a creator than a producer, on this? Did he have some input?
OP: Yeah, Bryan has an astonishingly acute story sense and he’s an exceptionally sensitive guy and that’s something I think drew us together, that commonality we have. You wouldn’t expect us to be because we’re kind of softies, the two of us, we’re kind of emotional, we kind of wonder what the fuck is going on and are a little bit hangdogged about what life has had to offer so far, I think we have a kindred spirit in that way. Even before Bryan came on as a producer on this movie, back when I was writing the script, I watched Strangers, which I’d never seen before, and I was so impacted by how humanistic the story is. Yes, of course it’s a terrorizing thriller, but it’s also a very sad movie about two people who… they’re at the end of their relationship, they just kind of want to be alone for the night to kind of mourn this love they’re not going to have, they just want to be at home and alone and quiet about it. And then it’s “knock, knock, knock,” and life is over. It’s really sort of non-negotiable in its sadness, which I found really powerful, and I was so surprised by that.
DC: What do you hope viewers take away after seeing The Blackcoat’s Daughter?
SPOILER ALERT
OP: I don’t know… I guess I hope they get out of it what they need, whatever that is. The best I can kind of do is to present my experience, and I don’t mean to make that sound self-important, but it’s like I said at the beginning… if I’m going to author this stuff, then I want to be putting forth a point of view, rather than it being a point of view on some issue or some politic. For me it’s a point of view on their feeling, and in this case it’s a feeling of grief, and grief is essentially this loss that can’t be made okay. You can’t grieve your lost phone because that could be replaced. Grief has to be with loss, forced to be with loss, and so that’s what this movie is about for me. I’m hoping by the time we get to the last shot of the movie, where Joan’s at the road and she’s got nothing and made a terrible, terrible mess of so many people’s lives and ends up with nothing, I want audiences to be okay to be with her, even though she’s theoretically the monster. I want to be able to show that the monster is also beautifully sad, and that’s classical horror movie stuff. That’s as old as Frankenstein and Dracula and all those guys; that’s nothing new. The Creature from the Black Lagoon… those are classic monsters, so this is just my 2017 version of the sad monster. It just happens to be Emma Roberts.
Synopsis:
The Blackcoat’s Daughter centers on Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), two girls who are left alone at their prep school Bramford over winter break when their parents mysteriously fail to pick them up. While the girls experience increasingly strange and creepy occurrences at the isolated school, we cross cut to another story—that of Joan (Emma Roberts), a troubled young woman on the road, who, for unknown reasons, is determined to get to Bramford as fast as she can. As Joan gets closer to the school, Kat becomes plagued by progressively intense and horrifying visions, with Rose doing her best to help her new friend as she slips further and further into the grasp of an unseen evil force.
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