By Paulette Cohn
It is hard to believe that Elizabeth Olsen has only been seriously pursuing her acting career for a year. But in that short amount of time, she has already landed roles in three films, including the lead in the horror thriller Silent House, opening nationwide on Friday, March 9.
Akin to Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1948 film Rope, Silent House is told in a continuous camera shot, following Sarah (Olsen) and the horrifying ordeal she encounters at her family’s summer home over the course of an evening. Where Sarah goes, the camera follows … and so does the audience as she tries to make sense of memories from her past and the mysterious figure stalking her.
“What I was so driven by with this film was the challenge of creating a performance in real time in a movie,” says the 23-year old younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. “It is a very difficult thing to do.”
In this interview, Olsen addresses her love for horror films, the difficulties in filming the continuous shots and the controversial elements of the film, which is loosely based on a real-life story.
Were you a fan of horror movies before making this movie question? If so, can you name a few?
I was a fan of horror movies since I started watching movies. I was the youngest of four kids and my brother, who is the oldest in the family, loved scary movies. I am very much his sister. Arachnophobia was one of the first movies I grew up on. That was something I loved. Then, I was probably in fourth grade when a friend of mine and I would sneak into her father’s cabinet of movies when he was asleep and we watched all the old classics like Carrie, and Children of the Corn. My favorite recent horror movie is the French film Them. I really love that movie. My brother made me watch it before doing this.
Are you one of those people who yells at the screen?
My friends really don’t like to watch movies with me because I’m the loudest one in the audience. I laugh at things that apparently aren’t funny to anyone else. I scream and then laugh after screaming. I am a very vocal audience member.
Can you tell us what you learned from making this film?
Going through so many takes in a scene that were completely unusable was difficult to deal with. That is just one thing where you have to learn you can’t get frustrated right now. You have to have an even temperament when you are working because so many things can throw you off balance. You have to find some sort of peace inside your mind not to get frustrated because that is not going to help anything.
I am learning to play the guitar right now. I said to my guitar teacher, “Why won’t my finger move there?” He said, “Frustration is not going to help you. It is not going to make your finger move there. It is kind of true about most things, so you need to work through it and not be miserable doing it.
Can you describe the process of doing this film? I know it wasn’t really done in one take, but the process of having to get yourself into: It’s another day. You have to rev yourself up to where you are in the script.
It was difficult because what would happen is we would choose to chunks at a time. I think what would happen was, on average, it was about 11 to 12 minutes a take. We would just rehearse it, run through the choreography and then immediately start recording it, so the DP could do playback and watch and see what he wanted to change. We were thinking on our feet, while we were doing this. He was improvising. I was not. We were trying to figure out what he likes best. We would then full-blown try and go for it by midday and usually we would get one or two takes that were literally the only takes we could use. We would get through like 10 min. and 30 seconds and something would so wrong, so everything that just happened would be obsolete. So it was heartwrenching that we couldn’t use any of that material.
So it was difficult and it was also difficult to try and maintain the barometer of, “Okay, we are in the 23rd minute, we have this much more to go, but you did just see something really terrifying. So you’re trying to figure out how you are going to create this arc of the story in the 12th hour of doing it full on. You wind up a little more tired maybe than you want the character to be at that moment. It is hard as an actor, obviously, you need everything to work in this movie. It is not usually that immediate. Usually you would figure it out later in the editing room, so I was part of the editing process. The DP and I would have an ongoing conversation. You are kind of dancing with each other. While we were filming, he would be, “Go faster; go slower. We were trying to figure out the rhythm because we didn’t have editing.
In so much of this film, you are the sole character, which means you don’t have anybody to react to. Can you talk about how much of this was without dialogue?
All I would try and focus on when I was working, when my character was by herself, is: “Okay, my character’s task right now is to find out which door is unlocked and then you go around and try to see which window you can get out of, or if you can’t do that, you say, “I need a weapon or something.” You always are trying to make sure there is a task and you’re not just going through the motions. When you realize there is another human being in the vicinity, you are always trying to remember where that person is in the house.
It was interesting. I saw the movie with my best friend Clay. It was just the two of us and he said, “I was so happy when you got in the car because you had someone to communicate to. It was like, literally, I could breathe.” I felt that as an actor, “Someone is here. Thank you. I was lonely.” I definitely learned a lot from making this movie. It was definitely difficult.
You mentioned the tension, because you very quickly reach a level of tension that is usually the crescendo. And then there is no release. It keeps climbing higher.
But then when I would go back, “Wait, but that’s her dad, so , of course, that is going to be crazy, so crazy things keep happening and it is trying to justify how you can create new beats in 90 minutes of fear. I do find it interesting to watch as an audience, experiencing everything in the present without a shot being framed so you know something is going to happen. Things just happen. There is no one telling you in the music or the editing that it is about to happen, which is really a cool thing to me.
Did they ever surprise you? Like you would get to a door and it wouldn’t open?
No. Because it would usually just blow a take. It would probably be like, “We got someone’s hand.” It was so choreographed that we couldn’t be spontaneous.
How was it working with [writers/directors] Chris Kentis and Laura Lau? Have you seen Open Water?
I won’t see Open Water. But my brother when it came out loved it, so I knew about it. I trust his opinion, but I am terrified of the ocean and sharks. There are some movies, you really don’t want to put yourself into. I know from so many people that is a terrifying film. I know all about the movie and the trailer. I know what happened when they were filming with real sharks. I can’t seen that movie. It would scare me more than I am already terrified of the water.
This film has a controversial element to it. How do you feel about that because it is loosely based on a true story?
It is based on a newspaper article that the Uruguayan guys found. But it is not non-fiction. For them it was, and then we just riffed off that idea. Laura and I talked about people who have gone through trauma and then block it out in their lives. People go through life with humongous physical scars and not know where they came from because they blocked it out and it was their father or mother punishing them as a child. We talked about that and how it manifests sometimes.
Without giving away what it is, it is dealing with an issue that has touched a lot of lives. How important is it to get that right?
I have a hard time putting that kind of pressure on me as an actor to be like, “Do them justice!” I just think of this person’s situation. I definitely have dreams because of researching and doing this. What I like to say is there is a great twist at the end that I think makes it a more horror film than a generic horror film. The scary movies I like end up being more psychologically driven and I think that is what this is. I hope.
Silent House opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, March 9
Want to explore more? Check out Paulette’s blog, The Hollywood Know!
Check out PCM’s Larry Cochran’s film review of Silent House here!
