Exclusive: Director Steven Shainberg Talks Rupture
Steven Shainberg is best known for directing the S&M dark comedy Secretary, which was basically the Fifty Shades of Grey of 2002. As the principal director for advertising company Lunch, Shainberg has also helmed several high-profile television commercials.
But his goal has always been to make memorable feature films. It took awhile for the elements to fall into place, but now Shainberg is back on the screen scene with his gripping horror/sci-fi film Rupture (review), which stars Noomi Rapace and Michael Chiklis.
We had a chance to chat with Steven, and you’ll find the results below…
Dread Central: Since you’ve been wanting to make this movie for a long time, I’m assuming you had to keep yourself open for who might play the lead role. Seems to me Noomi brings the perfect combination of innocence and toughness.
Steven Shainberg: Yeah, I do actually think you’re right, that only she could bring that whole thing to the movie. It was a pretty short list of actors who could have done it, but in my mind it was actually a list of one. The part requires first of all that you believe that the actress could get through the experience physically. It couldn’t be somebody too fragile or not in shape or even just not athletic. It’s not like somebody needed to go to the gym, most people go to the gym now in Hollywood so they’re fit, but it needed somebody who had a certain type of athletic quality. But most of all it needed somebody who could be in the intensity of the experience and have the intelligence that we would believe she could figure things out and do the things she does and not go completely insane halfway through the movie. She had to be somebody solid enough psychologically that she could sustain herself; it’s just a pretty short list of people that you could imagine doing that.
The other thing is these movies, to a large extent, are if they’re damsel in distress movies, they’re generally pale-skinned blondes. There are several reasons for that; one of them is simply they take the light in scary situations so beautifully, but I really wanted to go in a different direction and make her sort of a powerful dark force and somebody connected to a certain kind of darkness that we associate with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Prometheus and so forth. We associate that with her, and it’s much more interesting to go through the experience with someone like that than, say, a fragile mom who’s blonde and pale, so there were all sorts of reasons to pursue her.
DC: This movie isn’t one that most folks would associate with you after Secretary and then the Diane Arbus biopic, Fur. So, how did Rupture come to you to direct?
SS: Well, there’s two things. One is that because of what you’re saying I initially didn’t think this would be a movie that I would be interested to direct and developing it initially with a producing project with Andrew Lazar, slowly as I worked on the script and the idea with Brian Nelson I realized oh, you’re turning this into a movie. It’s classic in the sense that it is a woman who goes into an experience that is challenging, frightening and revelatory and leads to her knowing herself much better in the end. That basic form, that basic idea does connect to Secretary and Fur, it made me conscious in a backwards way of how that fundamental experience is always fraught with fear and that I could into that sphere of change and what it actually means to look into oneself. Ideas that were in play in other movies, the fear could be super intensified, that was appealing, that was the first reason. The second reason is it’s much easier in Hollywood to get a genre movie made that to get a movie made “just about people.” It’s very hard, almost impossible to get those movies made and I’ve struggled to get one made for a very long time called The Big Shoe. When Lazar and I could not get that made I wanted to turn to a genre movie that would be easier to realize.
DC: As I watched Rupture, I felt a vibe of 70s cautionary sci-fi, like Coma, The Stepford Wives… were those some of your influences?
SS: Well, the main film that inspired me, to sort of have the original ideas to this, is a Japanese movie made by Teshigahara called Woman in the Dunes, it’s really amazing. It’s a captivity movie where a guy is held captive in a house with a woman who lives in the dunes and it’s always been one of my favorite movies. It made me interested in captivity movies because in that situation a very intense, intimate relationship developed very quickly between people and that’s always been appealing. On my list of movies to do, if you look at those lists it always has, what’s the captivity movie? I was telling somebody else, because I made Rupture there’s another captivity movie I want to make which is actually more of a comedy.
DC: Would you describe Rupture as a horror movie?
SS: Well, horror is about what you’re afraid of, that’s the essence of horror. You take one form or another, for example most recently It Follows, which I think is an amazing horror movie, it’s really about death eventually coming for you, in a slow, methodical way, it’s going to get you. That film I think is a pure metaphor film, which I love about it. Rupture is deeply a horror movie because it’s about the essence of fear that we all carry one way or another within ourselves and it’s different for every person. So in my mind, a movie like It Follows goes to a fundamental fear, a very specific fundamental fear but a fear that kind of walks with us through life and Rupture is an explanation of fear in a very similar way but just in a different context, essential fear. To me, that’s a real horror movie.
Rupture is in select theaters and VOD April 28, 2017.
Rupture is based on a story by director Steven Shainberg and Brian Nelson. Nelson wrote the screenplay. Noomi Rapace (Prometheus), Peter Stormare (Clown), Michael Chiklis (“American Horror Story: Freak Show”), Kerry Bishé (Argo, “Sex and the City”), Lesley Manville (Maleficent), and Ari Millen (“Orphan Black”) star.
Synopsis:
Renee Morgan (Rapace) is a single mom who is deathly terrified of spiders. While en route to meet up with a friend, she is violently abducted by a group of strangers. After enduring intense, yet strange questioning and examinations, some about her fear of spiders, Renee soon discovers that she is now the subject of an underground experiment. Her captors explain to her that she has a genetic abnormality that can potentially allow her to “rupture” and reveal her alien nature. Renee must find a way to escape before it is too late.
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