No matter how many horror movies you’ve seen, Bring Her Back will make you squirm.
But for the jump-scare-averse crowd, don’t worry: The new A24 film from Talk To Me directors Danny and Michael Philippou isn’t just a horror movie. It’s also a character-study drama about a pair of siblings — Andy and Piper, played by Billy Barratt and Sora Wong — who move into a secluded home owned by their new foster mother Laura (the always-wonderful Sally Hawkins). She has another foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who is a first-ballot inductee into the Creepy Kids In Movies Hall Of Fame.
I recently spoke to the Philippou brothers about casting Bring Her Back, sound design, and chewing on knives. Just a note: I credited their answers together because a) I learned the hard way that it’s not easy telling their voices apart in an audio-only recording, and b) they so frequently and enthusiastically finished each other’s sentences, it seems like they share a brain, anyway.
So my first question is, where did you find Jonah Wren Phillips, the young actor who plays Oliver?
It was our casting agent. I put out a big net, and she brings in all these audition tapes. And it’s so weird when you see the character, when you see the actor, you know straight away that they’re right. There’s never two actors here, like, “Oh, it’s hard to pick between the two.” As soon as you see them, you know they’re right. So as soon as Jonah’s audition came in, we’re like, “Oh my God. This is literally the kid.” He’s perfect, and both of his parents are actors as well. So they helped get him comfortable. He’s incredible.
It’s — and I say this as a total compliment — one of the most f*cked-up child actor performances I’ve ever seen. He really blew me away. And speaking of great actors, how did you land Sally Hawkins?
She was at the top of the list. Like, there was a list that was made of 10 different actors that would be exciting for the role. And Sally was at the very top because we knew we wanted to have a really strong character actor, and because she’s never played a horror villain. Every single one of her performances, every single one of her characters, is completely different. The idea of her giving that skill set to this character was so perfect for us, but it felt impossible. We didn’t think we’d even have a meeting with her, but it got sent to her, and then she wanted to talk to us. We were afraid of a big Hollywood ego or something like that, but we had a Zoom with her, and she was the most amazing human being. And also had picked up all these nuances in the script that no one else had. She had thought about everything.
I appreciate any movie that doesn’t use obvious needle drops, so can you talk a bit about how you settled on the songs for Bring Her Back?
There’s an amazing music supervisor that we work with named Andrew Kotatko, and we always do temp music and temp edits when we’re putting things together. We knew we wanted there to be this upbeat sort of pop song that Laura’s blasting. She’s trying to get over her nerves so she plays loud music whenever she’s in an uncomfortable situation. What is the right track for that? When she’s in that unhinged moment and she’s lost her mind, [Kotatko] helped find this awesome Yoko Ono song, which is that really primal screaming and crying.
How hard was it, from a location scouting perspective, to find the house that so much of the movie takes place in?
We knew we wanted to find a property where the pool was at the heart of the house, and from every single window, there was a vantage point of the pool. And another thing was, it was in a valley, which was perfect because the sun would set earlier, so it wouldn’t be nighttime, which would help us create that overcast feel for the raining scenes. It was in Brown Hill Creek, like 30 minutes outside of Adelaide, and it was on this main road, part of public land, so people can actually walk through the front yard. It’s such a nightmare. You were doing these crazy scenes and there’s people just walking past, and you don’t want them to take videos or photos. It was strange seeing like this lady at 2 a.m. in the morning. She was just standing by the pool. She’s like, “I’m just looking at the pool. I’m allowed to do that.”
One of the MVPs of the movie is the sound design, in particular the sounds of chewing on a wooden table and chomping on a knife.
Emma Bortignon, she’s the sound editor. She’s incredible. She worked with us on Talk To Me as well. You don’t realize how much sound there is. We looked at the overall amount of layers: 750 layers of sound that’s happening in the movie. Air, wind, movements, footsteps.
Random people looking at the house.
As for the knife chewing, it wasn’t sounding right or sounding real, so I [Michael] came into recording one day, and Danny was just chewing on a knife and they were recording it. [Ed. note: they showed a video as proof.] And did the same with a table. So Emma, right now, if you look at her desk, there are teeth marks because Danny was trying to get that initial crunching of the bite.
I hope A24 has good dental insurance.
I’ll sacrifice my mouth a little bit.
How much of yourselves do you see in the siblings?
It was based on a friend and his little sister, and we filmed him take her to the set, and she felt her way through the different places and mapped it out herself. A lot of their relationship and their bond was based on those two. And then Billy was the same age as Sora was when he was in his first film, so he was able to mentor her. That was part of their bonding process, and it came across on the screen so incredibly.
I guess the one bit that’s sibling-related is when we were young, our sister, who is two years older than us, was jealous that we were getting attention when we were born, so she tried to poison us. She gave us Panadol. We had to get our stomachs pumped. She was such a young age, and she didn’t really know what she was doing, but she knew that you weren’t allowed to have that stuff, and she was angry.
Little did she know you’d be eating knives all these years later. Something I’m sure you hear all the time is people saying, “I don’t watch horror.” How would you convince someone like this to give Bring Her Back a shot?
I think by just letting them know that it’s a character-driven film and it feels like it exists as much as a drama film as it does a horror film. That’s always my favorite part of the process, to make the characters feel as lived in as possible. That they could hold their own in a drama film, that you could remove the whole horror elements and their arc would still fit. I would just pitch it like, “Yes, it’s a horror film, but also it’s a mother battling with loss and how she comes to terms with it — or that she doesn’t.”
Bring Her Back hits theaters on Friday, May 30.