SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains plot details for the film Longlegs
Oz Perkins didn’t mean to scare you. Despite creating one of the year’s most jarring atmospheric horror thrillers, Perkins swears his cinematic concoction was cool and (allegedly) accidental. Longlegs, written and directed by Perkins, follows intuitive FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who is tasked with investigating a series of gruesome unsolved murders spanning from the 1970s to the present Clinton era of the 1990s being carried out by a potential supernatural entity known as Longlegs (Nicolas Cage).
Here, with Deadline, Perkins unpacks creating nuanced character dynamics, his fascination with women in horror and using his own narrative to create scares.
DEADLINE: First off, this movie is terrifying. How do you sleep at night knowing that you’ve dropped a movie that scares the hell out of everybody?
OZ PERKINS: I subscribe to the same ideology of “I didn’t mean it.” And I almost mean it like a kid who broke something and they’re like, “Nah, I didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident.” I only set out to make people feel good. I never set out to make people feel bad, and I don’t know that any film director does, but I know that I don’t. And I think people don’t feel bad. I think people dig the feeling that they’re having, so that’s great. But my intention was just to make something I thought was cool. That’s all.
DEADLINE: Longlegs is a ’90s period piece with many homages to Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac and other classic films of that nature. Why choose this particular time period?
PERKINS: When you’re an independent filmmaker in the noise of movies and TV and streaming and everything you’re competing against, it’s such a noisy atmosphere. And if you’re like me, I want to try to puncture that and break through and be seen just to give myself a chance to make a movie that someone will watch, even just know to know that it even fucking exists. You’ve got to find ways to stack your deck a little bit, right? You’ve got to find ways to help yourself out from the get-go, what are shorthands that you can employ to access an audience and allow an audience to access you.
So, if you look at all of this like a crossword puzzle in front of you, like, you open the New York Times, you’re like, “Fuck, I don’t know the answer to any of these. This is super difficult…Oh, actually, I do know 12 across. I know that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road.” My access point for Longlegs was Silence of the Lambs. I was like, “Well, there hasn’t been one of those in a bit. That’s about as perfect as it gets. Everybody enjoys that. Let’s just start with that. I’ll lay that in.” And if I lay that in, then I know certain other things, or I can start to make guesses, “Oh, it’s a female protagonist. She’s in the FBI. Oh, she’s got a boss. Oh, there’s kind of a wall of evidence. Oh, they’re hunting somebody. I wonder who that is.” So, it just starts to unfold that way. The ’90s was a formative time for me. I was graduating high school, these great movies were coming out, my father died, shit was happening, like a lot of stuff was very much coming together. It was that transition from childhood to stupid young adulthood, where you don’t know anything and you’re out in the world. So those elements just made it a good time to be in. It looks good, too.
DEADLINE: The films that you’ve written and directed, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and The Blackcoat’s Daughter, including Longlegs too, focus on women who experience a tragedy or a trauma combined with supernatural elements. Can you talk about making horror movies that derive from terror and tragedy from the female perspective?
PERKINS: I think I’m always compelled just by expressing some truth of my experience. I don’t know if my experience is better, worse, more privileged, or more damaged. I just know that it’s my stuff that I’m putting out there and what I’m trying to adhere to when I’m writing things. It keeps me honest, it keeps me interested, and there is a certain level of truth, no matter how fantastical everything becomes. So, I’m always setting out to do something that is about me.
I choose female protagonists because it creates an additional layer of curiosity, right? It creates an additional layer of romanticism because I’m making stuff up. Everything I’m doing is about me, but all the cover is all makeup, it’s all make-believe, it’s all playing with action figures, it’s all painting, it’s all taking pictures, it’s all creating stuff that doesn’t exist. So, to be in the seat of a female protagonist, for me, creates like a useful distance from the material for me, a useful curiosity. I can’t know what a woman is thinking, I have no idea all the time, and I mean that in the best possible way, and I want to sort of glorify that mystery in the movies that I make by giving the center stage to a lady who’s probably more sophisticated, sensitive, and intuitive than I am.
DEADLINE: What scares you these days? What do you consume, or what’s inspiring you right now in the horror space?
PERKINS: I really don’t watch it. It’s not something I seek out. I know that may sound weird to people, but I don’t see the horror movies that come to the theaters. Every once in a while, somebody will be like, “Oh, you’ve got to see Talk to Me,” and I’ll be like, “Alright, I’ll watch Talk to Me.” But for the most part, I don’t really look at that stuff. True crime is abhorrent to me and almost worse than that is people pretending to do true crime. I’m sure it’s really brilliantly done, but I have zero interest in that kind of grossness. I used to watch a lot of sports, but I don’t really have much time for that anymore. I try to watch older movies that I’ve never seen. I’d never seen William Friedkin’s Sorcerer. You know, you watch things, you’re like, “Oh, this fucking thing exists?” and it’s amazing. I try to just catch up on things that are great.
DEADLINE: Back to Longlegs Alicia Witt as Ruth Harker, the mom character and ultimate villain of the film, I’m wondering what do you want audiences to take from her character arc? Because the nuance is so fascinating to me. Obviously, I don’t condone her behavior, but you can argue that her murdering people in order to keep her daughter safe is the ultimate act of love.
PERKINS: You got it exactly as her character is intended, which is to say that you do what you got to do. Mama Bear will do the thing that she has to do to protect the baby bear. It’s just innate. It’s just spiritual biology or whatever you want to call it, it’s instinctual. And she says towards the end of the movie, “I did it for you, and that makes it right,” and for her, there’s no argument around that. It’s like, “I had a choice. I could either hurt a bunch of people or let you be hurt,” and for her, there’s no choice there. Does that make her bad? Kind of. Does it make her also like an ideal mother? Absolutely.
So, I think anytime you’re able to exist in the dichotomy of something or exist in the binary truth of something, that a mother can be both the creative and destructive force. God, people have plenty of those, right? “Oh, my mother, who made me, is also the person who destroys me the most.” That’s a common occurrence. So, I think that when you’re writing things, creating things, or working your way through things, the acknowledgment that there are poles and that both of the poles can be true at the same time is more interesting than being like, “Let me tell you, let me explain to you. It’s always like this.” There’s space in that.
DEADLINE: In deconstructing this film, it’s interesting that you show the inner life, thoughts, and loneliness of both Lee and Longlegs. A lot of horror films these days try not to let the audience know too much about what’s going on with the villain in their day-to-day lives. But in this film, we get a little bit of him without really knowing everything. Can you talk about the decision-making that went into pulling back the curtain?
PERKINS: When it came to Longlegs, the way we were going to treat his presence in the movie was going to be two things. It was going to be the hunted monster who because you never really see him, holds a real power. Because he’s able to sort of be omnipresent, and affecting everybody, and doing all these terrible things, and no one can understand how, and you just can’t find him. You can’t even see him. He’s like the summative power, the unseen hand. And then we wanted to juxtapose that against the fact of like, yeah, sure, he’s that, but he’s also just like a shitty person, and he’s a shitty person who’s been through the wringer. It’s not interesting to have someone who’s worked for the devil be like, “Ooh, man, you know what I love? Working for the devil.” I think it’s more like, “Man, I’ve been working for the devil, and sometimes it’s really hot, and sometimes I really get off on it, and sometimes it’s a fucking drag.”
Like life, right? Like sometimes it’s really too much, and he’s thinking, “I’ve lost the color in my hair, and I ruined myself with plastic surgery, and I’m fucking sad, and I’m just trying to be nice to this little girl at a hardware store, and she thinks I’m a fucking creep, because I am a creep, and I’m gross, and I’m lonely, and I’m sad, and I’m the monster, but I’m also lonely and sad.” And for me, that’s always about Darth Vader, right? As a central, mythological, mythical character. We don’t need to go to Hercules, Medusa, and all those things, which are obviously amazing, to find the Darth Vader thing, which is like, “Yeah, that’s the monster, man.” It’s also like a fucking sad, scarred-up dad under there, and I think that that, again, to say that the distance between those poles, totally in command, masked and covered Darth Vader, evil monster, that pathetic kind of shriveled-up white dude, both are true.
DEADLINE: Nicolas Cage gives an extremely uncomfortable performance that permeates the film even though it’s not in it very long. How did you work with him to create this dynamic of this character who oscillates between a childlike demeanor and intense sadistic behavior?
PERKINS: Well, it starts on the page. I don’t write scripts and be like, “Oh, it’s kind of going to be like this. We’ll figure it out later. Nic, just make it all up. I trust you.” Everything is written, so everything that Nicolas Cage says as Longlegs is written in the script when he gets it. And of course, I say to him on the first call, “Say, whatever you want, man. You’re Nicolas Cage. You don’t have to say any of my shit. You can do whatever you want,” and he says, “No, no, no. I want to just say what you’ve written, it’s immediately, you’re feeling good, you’re feeling good right away, you’re feeling comfortable and safe and confident right away.”
And Nic is just as pro as it gets. He knows everything about what he means, he’s seen every movie, he can reference every performance that every actor’s ever given, he knows all the song lyrics that you know. He’s an extremely smart guy. Like not all actors are intelligent. He’s extremely intelligent and so quick. He doesn’t miss anything. And so, it’s like using a really sharp knife to cut something. You thank your good luck that you’ve got such an unbelievable collaborator, and you just start building the thing. You talk, you bring in references, you say the things you like, you listen to what they like, and you try to find happy mediums.
DEADLINE: Maika Monroe also has a nuanced performance in playing Lee Harker, who is very by the book and not initially warm or inviting but cares very much about the safety of others. What was the decision behind making this type of character and working with her on this performance?
PERKINS: Well, characters are just expressions of what we’ve been through, right? Like the things we choose to say, the way we look at people, how we interact with the world is just a manifestation of our early experiences as children and messaging that we get from our parents and the world and how we model and what we experience, right? And then you just sort of work it out constantly.
So, to know that Lee Harker had been sort of hijacked by this guy and all of his weird shit at a really early age and that she had sort of lost a connection to her childhood, it’s like the connection had been severed, so she didn’t really even know herself in a way. She had special abilities because of it, but almost like someone on the spectrum, she didn’t have a proper connection to the outside world. So, when that characterization is a result of the story, then you can see it clearly, and then Maika just knows, some actors just know how to do it. And I don’t mean to pass the buck, but I also kind of do, some actors are just good at it.
DEADLINE: What was the challenge of creating a film like this? Was there anything in particular that you didn’t think would translate well while you were making it but then seeing it on screen surprised you?
PERKINS: The first time she goes out with her partner, she sort of intuits that the suspect is in the house and then her partner goes and gets shot, and she sort of has to go make the arrest. That scene was not in my original imagination for the movie. I just didn’t have that scene. It went from her experience of Longlegs when she was a kid, and then the next thing you saw was the perception test. And the producers, my beautiful, supportive, intelligent, sensitive producers who know better than I do a lot of time, were like, “You just need an extra thing. You just need one extra thing of her being special, something that just moves up the ladder, one extra run before you get into the perception test.” I was like, “I don’t want it. I don’t want gunplay, I don’t want her to shoot a gun, I don’t want her to figure out the thing, I don’t need to see this, it’s boring.” And they’re like, “No, you need it.”
So I wrote it, we shot it, and it really works, and people really dig it, and it gives an additional kind of like, “Oh, shit, we’re in this now,” that I didn’t see. That’s why a movie is a collaborative experience; you’ve got to listen because other people know better than you often.
DEADLINE: What’s your secret to a good scare while you’re writing or directing something? What checks and balances do you have?
PERKINS: I’ll admit that there’s confidence in the writing stage, and then in the shooting stage, I’m always feeling a little bit like, “Fuck, I don’t know if we’re getting this or if this looks right. Are we doing this? Do we have enough coverage of this? Are we getting the beat?” It’s a bit of a mess. Then you get the footage to the editing room, and you’ve got a great editor, and then all of a sudden, everything’s OK again.
But it starts with the image or writing… The written word, everything starts with, and for me, it’s just about the uncanny, right? Like, what’s a little bit fucked up about this? Like Longlegs is kind of a guy, he goes to your kid’s house on their birthday, and they’re sort of a magician but kind of not really, he’s like a clown, but he sort of isn’t, and I kind of can’t see this, but there’s something uncanny about a guy who comes to perform at a birthday party, but he kind of doesn’t want to be there. You just kind of get into these uncanny combinations, “What if it’s a doll, but the doll doesn’t move? What if it’s really inanimate, but it’s used for magic somehow, like an effigy or something? That’s weird. What if it just looks and stares at you?” You just start to put together uncanny combinations, and then you come to hold your breath while you’re shooting it, and then it gets better again in the editing room.
I’m the only arbiter of what is good, right? I have to know that it’s good. It doesn’t matter. I have to believe in the thing that I’ve written and that it gives off the vibe of, “That’s cool. I want to see that.” Otherwise, what am I doing?
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
The post Writer-Director Oz Perkins On Conjuring Up Scares For Cult Horror-Thriller ‘Longlegs’: “I’m The Only Arbiter Of What’s Good” appeared first on Deadline.
