Were there any specific haunted house movies that you were pulling from, or that influenced you?
No, not really actually. Collectively, definitely. Collectively, it’s soaking up atmosphere. It’s not a reference, but I saw “The Changeling” when I was in prep. I was in New York to see Carrie and Jude, it was actually our first meeting, and “The Changeling” was playing, a film print, and I went and saw that. The viewing didn’t influence “The Nest,” but what I remembered was that seeing that movie as a teenager influenced “The Nest.”
If horror movies, generally, are built around a specific antagonist, who or what is the antagonist of “The Nest”?
So I really struggle with understanding traditional structure. And like, when I’m writing I’ll often go back to screenwriting structure books that are like, “Who’s your protagonist?” “Who’s your antagonist?” And I’ll make these graphs to try and understand my script. I can never quite crack it. I’m like, “If Allison’s the protagonist, is Rory the antagonist? Well that doesn’t work, because Rory’s the protagonist!”
But if I had to boil it down, I would say it’s ambition, you know? Ambition is the antagonist. This sort-of weird version of the American dream that he’s [Rory’s] chasing. This bigger is better mentality, this idea that there’s some better life around the corner, the financial culture that he’s living in, these are the forces working against the family.
Did that play into your decision to set the film in the 1980s?
Yeah, definitely. It started as a personal thing, I moved from England to New York when I was 11, and that was in the early nineties, and the two places couldn’t be more different. I mean, an immediate atmospheric change. And when I went back to New York in 2012 to make “Southcliffe,” the two places felt quite seamless, something had really changed [for me] in that time.
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