Interview with Resurrection director Andrew Semans
2022 has been a banner year for horror, with many films performing better than expected and being met with widespread critical praise. Recently I talked to Andrew Semans over Zoom about Resurrection, his entry in this year’s collection of terrors. We chatted about working with Rebecca Hall, what it was like on set, and, yes, the moment where THAT comes out of the oven. Read on for our spoiler-filled conversation!
Laura Riordan: I was wondering what the casting process was like for the lead role since it’s so focused on her world.
Andrew Semans: The casting process for Margaret was incredibly straightforward and boring. The story is fairly simple: we got the script to Rebecca’s agent, Rebecca’s agent gave it to Rebecca, she read it and liked it, I talked to her, and she wanted to do it! It was as simple as that, it was tremendous. I knew she would be perfect, she is perfect, she was perfect. I can’t think of an actor better suited to this role, living or dead. She had kind of a visceral response to this story and this character. It was something she responded to and she just wanted to dive in and do it. (Hall) is someone who does not shy away from a challenge.
LR: So in the film, (Margaret) has this very intense run she does a few times and as the plot goes on, you sort of see where that might come from. How did you work on creating the physicality of this character with Rebecca Hall?
AS: Well, this is actually one of my regrets. In the script for the movie, much more was made of the intensity of her exercise routine and how focused she is on her own body and being very physically strong. And certainly, that’s there in the movie but for various reasons, it isn’t as present as it was in the script and isn’t as present as I would like it to be. But I didn’t need to do anything. It was in the script and (Hall) just said I’m gonna get into shape for this, I’m gonna lift weights and I’m gonna look like an athlete for this part.
The strange thing is that running is something that can be tricky for Rebecca because of an injury, so it was something that we had to work with. But whipping herself into shape was something that Rebecca did pretty much entirely on her own.
LR: Also something that’s very central to the movie is this dynamic between her and Tim Roth’s character. I was wondering what it was like working with these two to create this very dangerous dynamic.
AS: You know, it was something that was quite easy to do because of the natural talents and predilections of the actors themselves. I mean, getting Tim Roth to seem malevolent and scary is very easy to do! He’s someone who just has this sort of sinister air about him very naturally. I mean, he is an extremely nice and gregarious man, but he has this thing he can tap into, this sense of evil or sense of violence. And Rebecca can tap into this kind of live wire energy, this kind of sense of anguish or anxiety. She can do that so readily that it was actually quite straightforward. They knew what to do so it wasn’t something that we really needed to spend a lot of time cultivating. You know, all the bullets were loaded in the gun, they just needed to fire. So it made the job of the director, my job, it made it very easy.
LR: As the film goes we see Margaret almost starting to control people in her life in similar ways to how David did for her. And I thought of it as a story of how you buy into your abuser's worldview and almost like learn their behavior so well it becomes hard to separate yourself from that. Did you write to that at all?
AS: I don’t know. That’s certainly not a universal truth, but I think both characters, David and Margaret, are in their own ways obsessed with control. David is obsessed with controlling and manipulating and dominating one person in particular, Margaret. Then Margaret is obsessed with controlling herself and her environment in a way to prove she is someone who is sane, capable, confident, someone of value. She does, out of fear and desperation, start to want to control her daughter in a way that is unhealthy and suffocating, and ultimately alienates her. They (David and Margaret) are both two characters consumed with control, they just direct it in different ways.
LR: I also wanted to ask you a little bit about the monologue that Rebecca Hall gives to her coworker detailing the abuse she’s suffered. (Her speech) builds so insidiously, it almost sort of creeps up with the evil that he’s done to her. Was that something you wrote intentionally to be this build?
AS: I mean, everything in this movie is a slow build. I do love a kind of slow burn, I like a very gradual ratcheting up of tension and intensity. I like a very gradual doling out of information, although you could say the entire backstory is delivered in the space of that monologue. But yes, it is meant to be delivered so as to kind of slowly acrew in terms of the horror, in terms of the sense of intensity, and in terms of the kind of surreal quality to the almost absurd nature of what she’s describing. It needs to build very incrementally, I just find that quite pleasing.
LR: And the other thing about that scene is it’s shot in this unbroken zoom. What was it like filming that on the day?
AS: You know, it was very straightforward. I don’t want to diminish my own contribution to this film, I did write and direct it, but I don’t recall talking to Rebecca about that monologue at all. We probably shot the first part of the scene before we did the monologue, then we set up for the monologue, I said action, and she delivered the monologue. (Then) we did it a second time, and she delivered the monologue again. Both times she did not drop a line, both times she was brilliant, and then we moved on. It couldn’t have been simpler. And it all came from Rebecca, she was prepared and she’s brilliant and she just sat down and delivered.
LR: I had a question about the central “horror movie” element of the movie, about this baby in Tim Roth’s character’s belly. I was wondering if that was inspired by the Greek myth of Cronus eating his children.
AS: You know, honestly, I don’t know. It might’ve been! I can’t remember where that came from. It might’ve been inspired by Cronus, maybe it was just Little Red Riding Hood?
LR: Oh, sure.
AS: You know, when the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood and then the huntsman, is it? He cuts her out. I don’t remember where that came from initially, but I loved it because to me it gives the movie a kind of Grimm’s Fairy Tale quality. I like the feel of something that takes place in a very familiar, naturalistic, mundane world but there’s this one element that is kind of completely outlandish, that seems to come from a totally different story. It feels like something that completely contradicts the reality as depicted in the movie and yet it is the driving force for the entire narrative. I became very enamored with that idea.
LR: From a special effects perspective how did you go about creating the babies that we see in the film?
AS: Well, the living baby was created by his parents who were kind enough to let us include him in our movie. But prosthetics babies were built by our prosthetics designer who was quite brilliant. There were a couple of different prosthetic babies, one for the climatic sort of “C-section” sequence, and then there was the burned baby in the oven. That was a puppet; it was an extremely disturbing object. It was very hard to look at and spend time with because it looked so real. It looked like a charred baby! It was truly repugnant, and a good piece of prosthetic fabrication.
RESURRECTION WILL BE AVAILABLE TO OWN OR RENT ON ALL MAJOR DIGITAL PLATFORMS FROM 30 NOVEMBER