Queen of Earth is a psychological horror movie with echoes of Repulsion and Persona in its story of childhood friends (Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston) who find their relationship tested when they vacation at a lakeside retreat. I recently spoke with the film’s writer/director Alex Ross Perry about the film.
Elisabeth Moss is phenomenal in this as a woman becoming mentally unglued. How much of her performance is the result of you having collaborated before?
If you asked her, she would say a lot or almost entirely. She’s been making movies and acting in television since she was 5 or 6 years old, but this was the first time she’s made a second movie with the same director ... It was something she’d never done in terms of the performance and the character and the tone of the movie. I think there’s a lot of protection against embarrassment and failure on both of our parts, which is what I feel having made four films with the same cinematographer (Sean Price Williams) and many other key crew members ... It becomes this fun challenge of just wanting to impress and please and entertain these collaborators who you respect.
Meaning, having her go places that are maybe more emotionally raw?
Yeah, and just freer. Emotionally raw is of course the nature of this film, but mostly it’s just this uninhibited sense of discovery and exploration that we were all able to bring together. That was definitely my idea in making the movie. I learned on Listen Up Philip what value these wonderful, professional actors can bring and how many ideas they have about what they’re doing, and it became very important to make sure this film was structured in a way that there was breathing room for all of those moments to be brought in by the performers at all times.
Do your performers have more freedom in a film like yours?
I think so. I mean, I’m sure if you’re a great actor you stretch in everything you feel passionate about. But it’s just less intense. It feels less like going to work, I would imagine, because we don’t have any sense of professional decorum. There’s really nowhere for anyone to go so everyone’s just hanging out. The crew is only about a dozen people, and we’re all going to the same diner every night and having a meal after we wrap. That low-stakes camaraderie does tend to inspire actors to get a bit more liberated with some of their ideas. This is a film where both actresses could say to me, “Hey, I’ve got a really out-of-left-field idea of something to do in this scene. Do you want me to tell you it or do you just want to see it while we’re filming?” That’s not a question you can ask on most movie sets. And my answer to that is always, “Yeah, I’ll just see it, don’t tell me it.” I think just being able to even be in a working environment where that question is not only welcome but encouraged is really a liberating place for actors.
Can you give an example on Queen of Earth where you were pleasantly surprised during a take that ended up in the finished film?
One moment in the script it says, “Catherine is in bed zoning out and we sit with her for a minute.” That’s probably all that was written. We did it a few times with like a 50-second zoom, moving the whole time, getting tighter and tighter. It wasn’t even until the fourth or fifth time I watched the footage that I was like, “She doesn’t blink in any of these takes.” We did this three times and that’s three times where she doesn’t blink for a minute. That was a pretty astonishing surprise. There’s a lot of stuff like that. The surprises are less in the footage because I was right there while we were filming but, working with Elisabeth before, I know there’s a lot of tiny modulations in her performance—that even if you’re in the room they don’t necessarily register because she’s acting for the camera. She’s giving little tidbits of performance to the camera that don’t even really register if you’re not as close to her as the lens is. Discovering that in the footage and then making sure it’s well represented in the film is really the fun of working with her.
The production design was my favorite aspect of the film. It’s hard to tell when the film is taking place because the sets, props and clothing make it seem like it could be anytime from the 1970s to today. For example, the cordless phone has an obvious narrative function, but it has an aesthetic function too. What was your intention?
Well, a version of that is what we’ve done on every movie now. The cordless phone was an improvement on the technology in Listen Up Philip, where the phones are not even cordless. Having a giant, blocky cordless phone was our step into the modern age. But you’d be surprised about the mileage you can get from stripping all the modern stuff out of a room and replacing it with the sort of stuff that recalls whatever era you grew up in. Because it’s really not that complicated. It’s certainly easier than creating an accurate, up-to-date modern aesthetic, unless you’re shooting in the Apple store. And then it easily and efficiently conveys a sense of timelessness that, combined with a shooting style of shooting on film, really gives people a lot to hold onto. This comes from having made a handful of small movies where you’re very limited by what resources you have access to. It’s easier to come into a house and get rid of the television and get rid of the router and get rid of the computer than it is to go in the other direction. If you leave a television there, then it looks like nothing. It looks like a house. If you get rid of it, then everyone who pays attention says what you just said. Now you’ve created a displaced sense of time that leaves people wondering during the movie a lot of the right questions such as, “Does it matter when this is taking place or, more accurately, what am I supposed to be feeling about the fact that I don’t really know that?”
Queen of Earth opens in theaters on Aug 26. Chicagoans can catch a sneak preview at Elevated Films' rooftop screening on Wednesday, Aug 12, after which Perry will participate in a Skype Q&A.