My first exposure to the work of Irish-born writer-director Ciarán Foy was when I saw his debut feature, 2012’s nightmarish CITADEL, when it premiered at the SXSW Film Festival; the deeply personal CITADEL ended up winning numerous awards on the festival circuit, but that film actually came after Foy had been making short films for more than 10 years. But it was CITADEL that brought Foy to the attention of SINISTER writer-director Scott Derrickson, who had decided not to direct the sequel to that film but wanted someone who could both match the intensity of the original and bring in a fresh style to the story’s different approach to the legend and continuing adventures of the Boogeyman-inspired Bughuul.
I first met Foy on the set of SINISTER 2 in Chicago a year ago, but once I saw the film a couple of weeks ago, we chatted via phone for a more extensive discussion of the film and how he was brought in to direct the sequel’s script (one again from Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill), which, like CITADEL, focused on a group of creepy children. Shortly after our conversation, it was announced (via Deadline) that Foy would be continuing under the Blumhouse Productions banner, directed (and presumably writing) the 1960s Ireland-set thriller THE SHE, based partially on Irish folklore. In the meantime, please enjoy my talk with Ciarán Foy…
Ciarán Foy: Hey, Steve.
Capone: Hi, Ciarán. How are you?
CF: I’m good, man. How are you?
Capone: Good. I wouldn’t expect you to remember, but I was one of the people in that came to set in Chicago about a year ago. I think it was just a couple of days into the shoot in Chicago. I have such a specific memory of seeing CITADEL at SXSW, where it premiered, right?
CF: It premiered there, yeah.
Capone: I remember seeing it and thinking immediately that I knew it had to be a very personal story. It felt like someone’s actual nightmare. With SINISTER 2, did you find ways to make it more personal for you in a similar way?
CF: Yeah. It was something that occurred to me at one point when I was on the festival trail with CITADEL, and I was talking about the personal angle and how that made me engage with the drama and the emotion in such a way that it was a great communication tool to convey to the actors what I would be feeling, and there was a commonality there about experiences. I remember thinking, most people have quite a boring life [laughs], so how am I going to keep doing that for every movie? I remember thinking to myself, I guess the way in—and I think this is probably how my favorite movies are made—is if you can find some form of personal way into a given emotion, if you have some connection to what’s happening to the characters. Obviously I’ve never experienced Bughuul or anything like that, but at the same time, I totally identify with Dylan and with being bullied at that age and with sibling rivalry and that sense of, where do I fit in? Being on the cusp of adolescence is such a precarious time, and in many ways, starts to define who you’re going to be as an adult. So that was my way in, to let me access the story through him. I’m glad you’ve picked up on that.
Capone: I remember something Scott said on set about the church in particular, that it was something that he lifted out of a childhood memory of his of this “haunted” place. Does that inspire you, that pieces of this are actually coming out of someone else's personal experience? Does that sort of make it easier for you to find the humanity in this story?
CF: Yeah. I spoke to Scott about what that place was. It was a red-brick church, and where we were in Illinois, we were finding mostly white wooden churches. But the fact that it’s coming from a personal place, his personality and his memory is going to leak into the script, and you could feel that on the page. If I could get the emotion right with the characters, if I can get the drama to feel real, if I can get the performances to feel authentic, like all of my favorite horror films, if you can do that, then capturing any sense of paranormal, terror or dread is like capturing any other emotions in other movies too, like a sense of wonder and awe.
Whatever it is you're asking the audience to feel, if the characters feel real and the performances are authentic, then I think it just amplifies any sense of the extraordinary that you’re asking people to feel. So when there’s authenticity in the writing, then I can come along and carry that baton into the performances and into the general mood of the movie. Atmosphere to me is a paramont to a good horror film, and it’s something that is not easily achieved, because it’s not just a case of getting your sound design or your music right. Every department needs to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Your production design needs to feed into your costume design into whatever angles you're going to shoot at. Everything needs to be creating this atmosphere.
Capone: Speaking of that, since you are working on a sequel, and it’s someone else’s script, did you feel beholden to the way Scott made the first film and some of the visual and stylistic choices that he made. Or did you have more freedom than that?
CF: I had the freedom and the confidence from Scott. He said to me right from the get-go “This is your movie.” But he also said one of the reasons why he was attracted to CITADEL was the fact that we’re, ascetically, not a million miles a part and have similar tastes in how we go about shooting a scene. So I think that gave him the confidence that I wasn’t going to go off and craft something entirely different. But every director’s different. I think wisely, rather than ask me to replicate anything from the first one, they were like, “Go make your movie.” Obviously, there are elements of what makes a SINISTER movie a SINISTER movie.—one of those being the kill films. With regards to that, that made sense to replicate as much as I could. But I think with regards to the brunt of the movie, it was its own beast on the page, therefore it needed to be its own beast in the movie. But I think we weren’t worlds apart in terms of what we wanted the final movie to be.
Capone: The kill films are interesting because they’re similar to what we saw in the first film, but they’re not identical. It seems like each one is shot slightly differently, especially the one in the church—it seems more elaborate. What were some of your goals in terms of just the visuals on those? I seem to remember reading somewhere some of them were shot in different film stock than the first film.
CF: Well, we shot each of them on 16mm, as opposed to—I think they shot 8mm on the first movie. And the reason why we shot 16 was each of these had some form of visual effects elements to them, whether it was environmental, snow, alligators, fire or whatever. So in talking to the effects guys, they were saying, “Please, please, don’t shoot this on 8mm [laughs], because it’s just going to be a nightmare for us. If you shoot it on 16, we still get that filmic quality but then we can give it that slight blur that 8mm has. We can scratch it up and make it look more like 8mm after we have the effects in.” So that’s how we went about doing that.
In terms of shooting them, I did want to give them a little bit of personality, depending on who was directing it. We know this time that it’s the kids doing it, so I would consider the personality of the kid. Peter who’s the kid at the electrical kill, is quite brutish, and the camera is just very to the point. Whereas Milo is flamboyant, and the notion that he would set up this opus to shoot was on my mind when we were shooting the rat kill.
At the same time, it’s incredibly hard to be surrounded by the same amount of crew that you would use to shoot the main body of the movie, which we needed because of the visual effects elements, and to have a cameraman who spent decades perfecting his craft, and then ask him to be intentionally crap [laughs], to be intentionally sort of amateur, because ultimately there’s an eight-year-old DP shooting this thing. So yeah, they presented their own challenges. But to be honest with you, the days when we were shooting a kill film, when I saw that on the call sheet, it’s like a bonus.”Cool. We’re shooting a kill film today.”
Capone: Was it like going back to your short film days?
CF: Absolutely. Totally. You’re like 15-16 years old again. Another thing about those scenes is, because on a movie like this, it’s a small budget and you’ve got 30 days to shoot the whole thing, for the main body of the movie, you need to know what you’re shooting because there’s not going to be much fat on the cutting room floor, and you’ve almost got to cut it in your head before you shoot it, especially if you want the film to be visually interesting with staging and blocking. But with regards to the kill films, I did want the freedom to be able to ad-lib some stuff on the day.
Usually when you’re making the main body of the movie, you’ve lit this one section of the set or this one section of wherever it is you’re shooting, but the nature of these kill films meant the entire environment needed to be lit because the camera could end up going 360 or whatever. You would have the scenario, for instance with the church kill—the scenario is presented right before you. The people are on the floor, and we could come up with shots in the moment, which cool and exciting to do that.
Capone: You’ve made two films in a row now that feature horrible children. Why do you think it is that we as adults are scared by children and hesitant to lash out against them even in the worst scenarios?
CF: I remember talking to people about this, and the answer everyone gives is that kids are supposed to be innocent and sweet, so when you subvert that, there’s a sense of “If this is not sacred, then what the hell is?” There are times when kids are just incredibly creepy. I think of my nieces and nephews, and sometimes they’ll look at you and say something, and you take a second look like, “Did he just say ‘You better watch out tonight.’?” Or I remember hearing a story where my friends four year old was standing over her with scissors. She was just standing there.
I think that childhood, especially from the point of view of adulthood, it’s reversed, because when we were kids, we looked at adults like, “Who are these strange people in their strange world?” And when we’re adults, it’s reversed. I don’t know what’s going on in their mind. But the straight answer is, I don’t know. With CITADEL, it was certainly a beacon for Scott to think that I’d make a good match for this movie. So I think that one organically led to the next, but I certainly don’t have any pension for just making creepy-kid movies. Of the two movies I’m working on right now, neither of them involves creepy kids.
Capone: Bughuul is meant to represent this vague idea of the Boogeyman across all these different cultures. Were there more general ways that you wanted to explore that mythology that you were able to inject into this film?
CF: Not really, other than in talking to tomandandy [who did the score for CITADEL and SINISTER 2] who did the music for the movie this time, we were saying that obviously in this movie, there is that scene where we’re told about how he exists across different cultures, and so they used elements from these monks, this very old form of Mongolian throat singing that they buried underneath the score whenever we saw Bughuul. It gave him a very subtle, ancient and cross-cultural quality. There wasn’t really the scope anywhere else in the movie to nod at that or bring in any references to other cultures.
Capone: You mentioned these other projects that you have coming up, are they things that you created, or are you working from other people’s scripts again?
CF: One of them is a thing that I’ve created, that I’ve been writing for quite a bit. The other is something that I didn’t create.
Capone: How was that experience for you—coming in as a director for hire on somebody else’s script. How did you feel about the process of making something that you didn’t create it from scratch?
CF: Some of my favorite movies from my favorite directors are ones they didn’t necessarily write. So I think when I first read the script, I remember having Skype conversations with Scott and Cargill, and it’s your job as a director to lift up every stone, to ask questions. Some of the ideas that I had, the guys put into the script. Some ideas were rejected, and that’s their job as writers to take the best ideas. And so when you start to do that, you start to feel more of an ownership of the project.
When you’re on set, I felt a little nervous for the first week, because there is this slight pressure, especially with the fact that the director of the first movie is also a producer on this and is a writer. So you don't know how that’s going to go. Thankfully, I think as Scott started to see how I ran a set and what the dailies looked like, you could feel a sense of relief where he’s like “Yeah, he’s actually got this.” And I felt a relief as that feeling of “What the hell is this going to look like?” went away [laughs]. So once I had that, I felt the freedom to run with it. And then as a director, you naturally start to develop more of a rapport with your performers. And as I found on CITADEL as well, even if I had written these characters, the actors end up knowing them more than you, so you really feel a connection with the actors.
Once that happens, in the edit, the movie starts to become its own thing, and then it’s all about everyone being on the same page and trying to craft the best version of what we’ve captured in the camera. So any anxiety I felt initially quickly went away, and then once I was on set, blocking it and staging it, you figure out all of that, and you’ve really got to sink or swim. The thing on a schedule like this, where you’re shooting four or five pages a day, you really don't get time to think. It’s just like “Next set up, next set up, next set up.” And we had a cast of seven kids, which that’s tough.
Capone: Because of the shorter hours?
CF: Shorter hours—you’ve got maybe half a day—and dealing with and directing kids is a slightly different process to adults. That has its own set of challenges, and absolutely my experience on CITADEL helped tremendously with that.
Capone: It’s interesting that Shannyn Sossamon’s character goes through almost the entire film completely unaware that there’s this supernatural force influencing her kids. And of course she’s dealing with a very different brand of horror in her life, with her abusive ex-husband. Can you talk about striking that balance and staging the very hard-hitting reality of this domestic situation with those scenes with the husband. Those are just as scary as the Bughuul stuff.
CF: Absolutely. They’re probably more scary. There was very much a thematic overlap between Bughuul and Clint, a real-world Boogeyman. With Shannon’s character, one of my directions to her was “Forget you’re in a horror film. Don't be thinking about the other pages or the kill films or Bughuul. You are a lioness protecting your cubs. You’re on the run from this guy, and you will fight for them tooth and nail.” It is almost these two worlds that happen—the world of what the kids are seeing and the world that she sees, with So & Sobeing the bridge between those two. And as it goes on, when we have that cat and mouse in the house, we see that adults can’t see these kids. But Dylan and Zach can. That was very purposeful, just so the drama could continue to feel real, and it wasn’t going to be a story about convincing someone that something paranormal was happening. I think the idea was to keep both of them separate and let them collide in act three.
Capone: She is basically in a family drama, while the kids are in this horror movie.
CF: Exactly.
Capone: Back to project you’re working on, are they in the realm of horror?
CF: One of them is a horror, and the other is science fiction. I’m a geek at heart. They’re my favorite movies. The whole reason why I wanted to be a filmmaker was being raised on a diet of Spielberg and Cameron. I don’t ever see myself— well, never say never—doing a straight-forward drama. My favorite horror films are always the ones that are about something else. As long as there’s room in this world to LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and all that other stuff, I’ll continue to do that. But at the same time, I do love how you can use science fiction to talk about other things. We’ll see which one happens first.
Capone: There’s certainly something to be said for keeping a foot in reality even when you’re exploring these fantastical elements, and that’s I think what you’ve done really well with both of these films. Congratulations and best of luck. Hopefully we’ll talk again down the road again.
