The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub moderates an exclusive Q&A with the creatives and star of horror-thriller
Strange Darling
following an advanced screening.
Writer-director JT Mollner, cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, star Willa Fitzgerald, and musician Z Berg discuss bringing this twisty horror to the big screen.
During the Q&A we talk film influences, shooting on 35mm, Kyler Gallner and Fitzgerald’s performances, challenges on set, that unforgettable ending, and tons more.

Writer-director J.T. Mollner’s sophomore feature immediately put him on the genre map. Since its Fantastic Fest world premiere almost a year ago, Strange Darling is that movie you whisper about behind your hands — “Go in knowing nothing.” Sometimes that type of hype is unwarranted, but trust us when we say a blind first watch is a must, making a second and third watch entirely new experiences.

Featuring outstanding performances by both its leads, Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner, Strange Darling is about a twisted one-night stand gone terribly wrong. We’re not going to spoil any more than that, but what we will talk about is what this movie brings to horror-thrillers and moviegoing audiences. During an exclusive Q&A following an early screening, Collider’s Steve Weintraub had the opportunity to sit down with Mollner, Fitzgerald, cinematographer and actor Giovanni Ribisi and musician Z Berg, to discuss film influences, intentions on set, mishaps, the haunting soundtrack, and tons more.

Check out the full conversation in the video above to find out which movies lent inspiration for Strange Darling’s unforgettable candy colors and fairy tale saturation, their passion for filming on 35mm and the challenges that come with it, and perfecting a “haunting and memorable” soundtrack that exists “somewhere between Julie Cruz and Leonard Cohen.” Without spoiling anything, they also discuss the nonlinear script, pivotal scenes to be on the lookout for, and more. Whether you’ve seen the movie and want to dig into the how’s and the why’s, or if you’re looking for your next horror fix, check out this spoiler-free conversation. You can also read the full transcript below.

Strange Darling (2024) A twisted one-night stand spirals into a deadly game of cat and mouse when a relentless predator chases an injured woman through the Oregon wilderness.Release Date August 23, 2024 Director JT Mollner Cast Willa Fitzgerald , Kyle Gallner , Jason Patric , Giovanni Ribisi , Ed Begley Jr. , Barbara Hershey , Steven Michael Quezada , Madisen Beaty , Denise Grayson , Eugenia Kuzmina , Bianca A. Santos , Sheri Foster , Duke Mollner , Andrew John Segal , Robert Craighead , Evan Peterson Runtime 96 Minutes Writers JT Mollner Expand

Stephen King’s ‘The Long Walk’ Already Looks Gorgeous
It stars Alien: Romulus breakout David Jonsson, Mark Hamill, and Judy Greer.
Image via Zanda Rice 

COLLIDER: What is it like when Stephen King says positive things about your movie?

JT MOLLNER: It’s absolutely insane. The first book I ever read was Carrie in second grade, I swear to god. I made it through the book, but I think it took about six months. There was a lot I didn’t understand, but I felt something deeply when I read it. I got sent to the principal’s office because I had this book, and my mother defended me. She was like, “I don’t let him watch rated R movies, but he’s reading.” So ever since then, I’ve been a constant reader, and Stephen King has become a seminal centerpiece for everything cultural. So, the fact that he watched the movie was already a huge thing for all of us. Then, when he said he liked it, I just thought, “I don’t have to make any movies anymore.” It was really important to me. It was a really good moment.

Did you not just write an adaption of a Stephen King film that is being filmed right now?

MOLLNER: I did. Francis Lawrence is directing. The Long Walk for Lionsgate. It’s a rated R adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, and I wrote it, Roy Lee’s producing it, and it’s a dream job. I’ve seen some footage, and it’s absolutely gorgeous.

I am so excited for that. What is it like for you guys to talk about a film where you can only say so much?

GIOVANNI RIBISI: It’s challenging.

Z BERG: I personally really like working with restraints. This feels good to me. I say too much in general, so I like to have some rules. [Laughs]

How did you figure out that you wanted to do this with nonlinear storytelling?

MOLLNER: I didn’t want to make it a nonlinear film, although there are some great ones. It’s just that the idea came to me in that order. There was a point where the studio, without my knowledge, took it away and recut the movie in order, and said, “Do you like this?” It wasn’t a mean thing, it was just like, “Do you like this? This might be less confusing.” I watched it, and it was very conventional and dull, I think. So the idea came in that order, and it had to be in that order. It’s the only way that the story works.

‘Strange Darling’ Was Greenlit in an Unprecedented Time Frame
DP Giovanni Ribisi says, “I was essentially begging him to let me be a part of it.”

What was it like for each of you reading this script for the first time, and your immediate reaction? This is a really juicy role, and I’m just curious what it was like on the page for you as you’re reading this thing.

WILLA FITZGERALD: My agent actually was friends with JT for a while before we ever got to meet, and she called me when she got the script and was like, “You have to read this script immediately. It’s so good.” So I did. I read it the same day and I called her back as soon as I finished it, and I was like, “You’re right. I’ve got to get this job.” I think the experience of reading it for the first time wasn’t dissimilar to your experience of watching the movie. It was a very intense read. I remember also feeling very anxious about the prospect of playing this part because it’s a big undertaking. But I also had that innate sense that I absolutely had to do it.

RIBISI: I met JT seven years before, and we’d been exchanging material over that time period. Then he sent me this and within 15 minutes, I was essentially begging him to let me be a part of it. We started talking, and he was familiar with some of the things that I’d shot. He’d come over to my shop and all that, and the conversation evolved. We just started figuring it out. I think that once the cat got out of the bag and other studios had read the screenplay, I think within three months it was financed. The experience was like nothing I had ever read before.

BERG: It was a similar experience for me in terms of just how wild of a reading experience it was. We met on a hike. We met so very randomly in one of the very few situations in my life where you see the paths diverge. I said yes to something I would never say yes to. We met very randomly, and we kept in touch for a couple of years, and two years after we met he sent me the script. We’d had a brief conversation about single-artist soundtracks and music and film, and he sent me the script. I read it, and I was like, “What the fuck?” [Laughs] In the best possible way. The movie that you see is so thoroughly written down, and it’s such an incredibly realized script. For me, as a consummate queen of darkness and also an incurable modernist, it appealed to me on, like, a cellular level. If you’re into that kinda thing.

Image via Magenta Light Studios

I love learning about the behind-the-scenes and the making of shows and movies. Is there anything you think would surprise people to learn about the making of Strange Darling ?

MOLLNER: Well, Roy Lee, if any of you get to meet him ever, you’ll be lucky because that guy is a magician. He just gets stuff made. Roy Lee and Steven Schneider read the script, and Giovanni and I had been talking about getting this movie made — it has very few characters, it’s contained like the early Polanski films — and we thought we could make it for very little money, and so Giovanni and I were just going to scrape up the money and go make it somehow. Then my agent read it, and he’s like, “I think we can get something done with this. Can I send it to Roy Lee?” I was like, “Sure.” He sent it, and a few weeks later, the movie was financed. It was crazy.

BERG: Not normal.

MOLLNER: Oh no, it was insane.

BERG: When he told me, I just kept saying, “This is the movie The Player; This is not real. This doesn’t make any sense.”

MOLLNER: It was crazy, but Roy really believed in the script, and he took it to Miramax with Steve Schneider, and they got it made. In the pitch meeting, Bill Block at Miramax said, “We’re making it. Just stop. Stop talking.” So we made it, and it became much more difficult than the getting-it-made process. The making of it was very challenging. But it became one of the great learning experiences of my life, and I got to work with my friends. It was really cool.

BERG: The most important thing from behind the scenes that I just found out the other day is about “Squatchy.” I feel like that’s a story that needs to be told.

MOLLNER: There’s a bar in Portland, Oregon, called The Low Brow. We would scout all day long, and then we would drink into the night, me and my producer partner. Giovanni went and slept in the room, usually. We had to have somebody who kept their shit together — we didn’t really drink all night. [Laughs] But we went in the woods one day, my producing partner, Chris Ivan Cevic, and I, and we’re in the woods all day long one day with Giovanni and Michael Zampino and all those guys, and then that night we went to a bar. We’re sitting at the bar, and this guy’s like, “What were you doing today?” We were like, “We were scouting in the woods.” And he goes, “Whoa.” I go, “What do you mean ‘whoa?’” He goes, “It’s Squatchy out there.” I didn’t know what he meant. I said, “Is it like squishy, like the ground is wet, like there was rain?” He goes, “No, it’s Squatchy.” And Chris says, “Like Sasquatch?” And he goes, “Don’t say it out loud.” So that’s why Barbara Hershey says that. [Laughs] And I told him at that bar in 2022, “I’m putting this in the fucking movie.” So, we put it in the movie.

But the strangest thing about it all was that we went to a restaurant the next day, and I was telling the story to our server hoping to get some mutual laughter. I thought we could joke about it. I was like, “This bartender said ‘Squatchy,’ like Sasquatch,” and she’s like, “Don’t say that.” She’s like, “It is Squatchy out there.” So, I think it’s a thing.

BERG: I think it’s fucking Squatchy out there.

MOLLNER: It’s fucking Squatchy. [Laughs] It was great, and I’m so grateful to The Low Brow for giving us that thing to put in the movie. [To Fitzgerald] You seemed very angry during the Squatchy scene, like, “Squatchy? What’s ‘Squatchy’ mean?” When you’re talking to Barbara and Ed [Begley Jr.]. You seemed very annoyed.

Image via Magenta Light Studios

FITZGERALD: I don’t think I was. [Laughs]

BERG: She’s a non-believer.

FITZGERALD: That’s a hard story to top. Kyle and I lived together for, like, two weeks while we were shooting this movie, which is pretty unconventional. In a cabin in the woods.

MOLLNER: And they’re both still with their significant others, which is super cool.

BERG: Everyone’s still alive.

FITZGERALD: No, it was kind of nice, actually, having a roommate. I haven’t had a roommate in a long time. That’s my fun story.

MOLLNER: The budget was low.

Giovanni Ribisi Is Delighted to Make You Squirm With His Feature Debut as DP
“We were reaching for something that wasn’t what you constantly see.”
Image via Magenta Light Studios

Giovanni, you’ve shot some shorts and music videos, and you’ve done some other stuff, but this is your first feature behind the camera as director of photography. I say this with all sincerity, you need to keep shooting movies. You did a great job with this. Can you guys talk about how you decided on the look and the colors? I love your use of colors and the way you frame things.

RIBISI: We had a four or five-month prep period during COVID, so it really was just about knuckling down with JT and going over the movie and making it on paper with a shot list before we actually went and made the movie in Oregon. It was really detailed. I think we went through it, got to the end, and then went back to the beginning, and went through it again and again and again until we could see the movie. A lot of those choices, color and saturation, came from the idea — and I don’t even know why this resonated with us — of making a fairy tale. So you have these two characters, and maybe it was more or less to offset the content of whatever was there and whatever they were going through, but it was also to just try and go in a direction that wasn’t intuitive and then figure out how it might work.

There were so many things that I looked at, that I see other cinematographers or compatriots who watch it and sort of squirm, that makes me so happy because it’s not what you see, you know? Even if it’s wrong, I just felt like we were reaching for something that wasn’t what you see constantly in the homogeny of the visual image these days with streaming and all that. They’re buying it by the yard, so to speak. We just wanted to do something that rattled the cage.

MOLLNER: Yeah, we called it blood on the flowerbed. That was our mission statement. We were watching a lot of films that weaponized color at the time, like Cries and Whispers, Dead Ringers, and Blue Velvet. Movies that have such dark undertones, but are so beautiful.

RIBISI: Mario Bava.

MOLLNER: Yeah. The darkness is just bubbling up through the whole movie and is dichotomous with the visuals, like The Red Shoes and movies like that. Then other movies that were black and white, like The Servant and Mademoiselle and all these films. But color-wise, we were just looking at a lot of those movies that just popped and were candy-coated. It was definitely the mood we were in when we were developing the look.

Image via Magenta Light Studios

RIBISI: I’m gonna go on a diatribe right now — watch out. With social networking and Instagram and all that, you can get caught up in a certain sort of tone, that if you step out of that lane, you’re censured for it in a way that is public. It becomes this ultra-conservative mode in the zeitgeist. I feel like this is just absolute praise for this man sitting here because he was so brave to take something that was so well-written and then just try to fuck it up. [Laughs] But we worked on it and worked on it and worked on it until we felt confident with something that might be original.

You guys shot on 35, and I say thank you. You’re shooting in Oregon, and I don’t know where the film labs are, so how are you actually getting the film out in terms of getting it developed? Also, with 35, I don’t know how it worked in terms of looking at dailies and making sure that the film came out.

RIBISI: The traditional thing is if you’re shooting in a city or a location that doesn’t have a lab nearby, you do what’s called a film break. So, you send the film out at lunch, and then you send the film out again at the end of the day. There are two flights that the day’s film is traveling on. Again, it kind of goes back to this thing of convenience. The challenge, and I know JT feels like this, is the idea that there’s a certain sort of desperation in that. It’s hard. Yeah, you need more lights; it’s not like you walk into a room and flick on the overheads, and you’re shooting and modeling the actors. It requires more focus and more effort, and I think you can see that in the fabric of films that are shooting celluloid.

The contrast to that is, it’s really not that much more expensive. Definitively, a film will try to find a way to be more expensive. This is just a proverbial. So, no matter what you’re shooting, film is the least expensive thing in the movie. But it’s definitely a different discipline, especially to what these young kids are used to. [Laughs]

MOLLNER: It’s true. It’s not expensive. That first movie we shot for right around $500,000 before the above-the-line stuff, and we shot in film, and it’s not more expensive. The line item adds money, but then you save money in post.

RIBISI: A friend of mine is shooting Super 35 right now, a feature film on a budget of $100,000.

I love hearing that people are shooting film. It’s fantastic.

‘Strange Darling’s Soundtrack Is the Film’s “Life Blood”
Image via Magenta Light Studios

Z, you’ve done a lot of music. If someone’s never heard anything you’ve done before, what’s the first thing you’d like them listening to and why?

BERG: Oh, heavens. Well, obviously, this. The album also comes out on Friday. But if you want to familiarize yourself with me before Friday, my first and last solo record is called Get Z to a Nunnery.

MOLLNER: It’s so fucking good. It’s the greatest. It’s the reason I wanted her to do this soundtrack.

BERG: That gives you a pretty good window into the chaos within.

Talk a little bit about what it was like working on this and coming up with this. What was this thing like for you?

BERG: Extraordinarily surreal. For me, it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever worked on because I have never had a creative partner who liked everything that I did. [Laughs] The general theme with me is people don’t like it. But I wrote all of this music based on the script. I didn’t see anything. I wrote most of it while they were shooting; I didn’t see any of it. It was just the conversations we had. We had a preliminary conversation about if the music existed somewhere between Julie Cruz and Leonard Cohen. I was like, “Babe, I got you. That’s where I live.”

But strangely, I think the first time I saw this movie shot, it was like, “Yeah, I know. That’s exactly how I saw it in my head.” So writing the music, we would have a conversation about what scene they were shooting, and some of it was that he wanted to put a different song into the movie, like a Sibylle Baier song, and I was like, “What if I just tried to write my own?” We would have that conversation in the morning, and my musical partner who produced the record, Joe Keefe from a band called Family of the Year, he and I lived in this house that was all wired as a studio. My boyfriend called it The House on Paper Street because, like Fight Club, it should be condemned. It’s 110 years old, surrounded by a Target parking lot, a freeway off-ramp, empty, lots — chaos. You can shoot guns and play drums until four o’clock in the morning, but also, you might die there.

RIBISI: You shot guns and played drums ‘til four o’clock?

BERG: Maybe. But we had the whole house wired as a studio, so we would have a conversation in the morning, I would write a song during the day, we would record it at night until four o’clock in the morning, and we would send you something in the morning. And every time, JT was like, “Yeah, I love it.”

RIBISI: He would walk his phone up to my ear and be like, “Oh my god, we’re so lucky.”

MOLLNER: The bar was so high because I loved her music already, and I was like, “There’s no way somebody can just spontaneously write shit that’s that good.” I wanted it to be really haunting and memorable, and I was like, “I don’t know if it’s gonna be possible.” I told you at one point, I was like, “Maybe we can just license music that I already love of yours,” because I don’t know if you can just tell somebody to… Like, if you told me to write something special as a script, I couldn’t just do it. I’d have to come up with it. And so the fact that she started sending me music and I would say, like, “Maybe put a Sibylle Baier song here or something,” and she’d send me a song, and I kept telling Giovanni, I was like, “This is so good. This is my favorite Z Berg song, and I already love all her music.” And then she’d send me another one. I was like, “This is my new favorite Z Berg song!” It was crazy. The first song you sent me, I think, was where she’s running.

BERG: “Day In, Day Out.”

MOLLNER: I was like, “What the fuck?” People were like, “It’s like it should be a James Bond movie.”

BERG: That’s my specialty. Spy chords, baby!

MOLLNER: It was so good. It was so much better than the temp placement I had in there, and it ended up just being, I mean, the music, specifically her songs are like the life’s blood of the movie.

Willa, you did such a great job in this. How nervous were you the night before the first day of filming when you saw that schedule in front of you and everything you were going to be doing, the running, blood on your ear, everything. What was that like for you?

FITZGERALD: I actually don’t think I was that nervous the first day. The first day, we eased into it. We started shooting with all the stuff at the hippie house. We shot that sequence in chronological order, and the first day of shooting was a lot of me finding the house and running up to the house. I was like, “This is actually a great way to start.” It’s a great way of exploring the physicality of this costume for the first time. It was kind of a dream first day. You don’t always get that lucky with your first day where you, like, don’t say anything basically. I didn’t really have to speak on the first day.

What I was very, very afraid of was the fact that we were shooting the ice box scene at the beginning-ish of the second week. It’s the emotional heart of the movie, and I knew that that was approaching rapidly. It was something that, when I read the script for the first time, I was like, “Oh, well, that is what the relationship is, and that is who the character is, and if we don’t get it right, then the movie doesn’t work.” So, I definitely remember being quite nervous the day of. I was luckily able to sleep. And then we just got it. It was one of those beautiful moments that was kind of crazy because it was a very long scene, and we kept on running out of film in the middle of it. It turned out that we didn’t have any mags long enough to shoot the whole scene at once, and that was probably because we said we didn’t want to rehearse the scene, so we didn’t know how long the scene was actually gonna be. So, it was our fault.

Image via Magenta Light Studios

MOLLNER: We totally rehearsed that scene.

FITZGERALD: But we didn’t rehearse it with the amount of time. We read through it. And so we were basically shooting the first part of the scene, then we would have the mag run out, and then we’d roll back to the beginning of the scene, we’d start again…

MOLLNER: Still shoot film. Please.

FITZGERALD: [Laughs] We’d go back to the beginning of the scene, and then we’d pick up with the scene halfway through, and then we would continue to the rest of the ice box scene. That was crazy, but we got to the end of the day, and I think that we all were like, “Whoa, we did it.” It was a very special moment because I feel like, as an actor in that moment, it gave me this huge amount of freedom where, in some ways, I knew that I had done the job. I knew where it was going and everything else kind of became so much more open and so much more free because there was this fundamental touchstone.

MOLLNER: You nailed it. As you can tell, I don’t like to cut away. We almost never cut during that scene because of that performance. We could have gone to the reverse shot, but we just don’t, and it’s because of how great she was.

FITZGERALD: Kyle was so fucking good. I remember shooting that scene, and that scene was possible because of Kyle. If Kyle hadn’t been there, if I was doing it to a piece of tape, it wouldn’t have happened. You know what I mean? That was the beauty of that scene.

MOLLNER: Isn’t Kyle Gallner great in this movie?

Image via Magenta Light Studios

What shot or sequence during filming was the real pain in the ass?

MOLLNER: Which wasn’t?

RIBISI: There were some logistical issues. I have to say, every day really was a challenge very particular to this project.

MOLLNER: It was just external challenges.

RIBISI: It was also something where I was so excited to go to work every day. I think part of that was because at the end of each day, and really because of JT and the cast, it was just the attitude of just focusing and getting back up on your feet and going and finishing the day and figuring out solutions and the overcoming of barriers towards not-unknown goals. For me, it was technical logistical stuff, whatever everything is technical and logistical.

MOLLNER: There’s a single take following Kyle through the house. It’s a steadicam shot, and we always knew. I mean, it was written that way. We talked about doing it months before we even shot the movie. It was gonna be a single take all the way through the house, and he’s shooting. It was really fun to set that up because we had the effects guy setting up gunshots in the boxes, everything had to be coordinated perfectly, and that’s what I live for. It’s so much fun. Giovanni is getting his steadicam guy to execute it. He had to pre-light the house and pre-rig everything the night before. It was a big thing. The big challenge of that day — although I knew it would work, and it did; we left it in the way it was — was we weren’t gonna shoot stitching coverage. We weren’t gonna have any safety net when we shot that. But when we were doing it, I knew the plan was gonna be like we were gonna spend half a day rehearsing the shot because we’re shooting film, and then half a day getting three or four takes, and that’s it. And then that takes care of five pages or something. We start rehearsing, and they’re like, “Why don’t you have a shut-off yet?” The studio is calling from LA.

Image via Magenta Light Studios

RIBISI: No, they were there. They were actually there, and I was being timed to set up. We had to empty the trunk.

MOLLNER: They’re like, “We need something shot here.”

RIBISI: It was seven rooms to light in an hour and a half.

MOLLNER: The work he did was absolutely stunning. I knew he was gonna execute it, and the actors had to do it right, everybody had to do it right, and those are the moments. It’s like when I was a kid watching Goodfellas and seeing that scene in the kitchen, it was like, “I want to do that someday.” So, I knew that was gonna work. When they saw the footage, they were like, “How are you going to put this in the movie? There’s no stitching coverage,” which is essentially shots that you have to get so you can cut if we need to cut. We didn’t want to get it, but we did it because they asked us to do it. But then Bill Block gave us final cut, and the big scene’s in there. I think it was just challenging because nobody really understood what we were trying to accomplish that day.

RIBISI: Also, to be fair, if you’re making movies — and people who are in film know this — you’re always being timed when you’re setting a shot because you have the schedule. People are like, “You said you were going to be done by this time.” So there is a certain thing, but I think there was definitely a lot more pressure that day.

MOLLNER: It was just insane. That was a strange day for me because there were other days where they’d be like, “Can you guys get a shot?” And I was like, “Of course, I understand you want us to get some footage.” But that day I knew what our plan was, and I knew that what we had to do is be meticulous and get it right and then roll film. The beauty is that now, after the film was finished, Bill Block and everybody at Miramax are like, “Oh, this is so cool. Now we get what you were doing that day.” But so few people are shooting film now on these budgets. There are a lot of people shooting film lately on bigger movies and stuff, but so few people are shooting film on these low, low budgets that I think a lot of producers and financiers aren’t used to it. They forget that we’re not just gonna shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot and then find the movie in the edit. We’re gonna meticulously plan and get the shot. So, to me, that was the day I remember as being the most stressful as far as us getting what we needed to get in the can.

It’ll be easier for you on the next one.

MOLLNER: Thanks. I hope so.

RIBISI: Because you mentioned your first day, and talking about that — for me, I remember the three or four days leading up to production of you guys in the makeup trailer. [To Fitzgerald] This is a comment on your transformation. Even as you sit here now, it’s just so extraordinary to me as an actor. I look at that, and I’m just like, “Wow.” I mean, really amazing. I know that you guys were going back and forth and that you were getting a haircut.

MOLLNER: She didn’t want to get a haircut at first.

RIBISI: And then you were getting another haircut. I think you had five haircuts.

MOLLNER: Then I get a text in the morning, “I got the haircut.” [Laughs]

RIBISI: I’ve been there where you’re looking in the mirror, and you’re like, “What the fuck just happened? This is what I’m gonna look like.”

FITZGERALD: It was a war of attrition. First, it was, “We’re going to bleach your whole head,” and I was like, “Okay.” And then it was like, “And then we’re gonna give you a haircut,” and I was like, “Okay.” So I got a haircut.

Image via Miramax

MOLLNER: She didn’t know me yet either. It was like you had no trust. [Laughs]

FITZGERALD: I didn’t. There was no trust yet. We hadn’t shot anything. It was like blind faith. So that was maybe my most challenging day. I really get stressed about my hair.

RIBISI: No, it was incredible because the other thing, a lot of people don’t know this, is that JT has another job. He has one of the most successful haunted houses in the world.

MOLLNER: The Freakling Bros., everybody, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

RIBISI: For the month of October, he’s going off and doing that, and a lot of it is writing and building characters and stories in this experience. He’s somebody who understands what a Halloween costume is and the iconic nature of that, and this was something that was amazing for me to see.

BERG: Yeah, that is one of the first things I said when we first watched it: “I can’t wait to be this bitch for Halloween,” because it’s what’s so amazing is watching that costume be composed within the story. It’s like Superman’s cape. You see all of these things fall into place and it’s so satisfying.

RIBISI: It is one of the interesting things about the story is that this uniform is being cultivated throughout these nonlinear chapters, and you understand. Obviously, she is the way she is but then the scrubs and all of that.

BERG: I realized it’s very fun for me. I’ve seen this movie now, like, 200 times, but I like this movie so much every time I see it. I love it every time I see it, and you’ll never get that first watch back where you don’t know what’s happening, but after that’s over, when you watch it, and you get to watch the construction, because to me that’s very much what this movie is about. It’s about storytelling. Even after 200 times, there’s still some new thing I notice every time. That’s like crack to me.

Image via Magenta Light Studios

Who uses that much butter and syrup?

MOLLNER: I’m a vegan. I don’t eat that shit.

I was watching it, and I’m like, “That is a fuck-ton of butter.” Who is cooking with this? Am I doing it wrong? Am I supposed to use that much butter?

MOLLNER: It’s a standard American diet. Ed and Barbara are both vegans, so it was an interesting day for all of us. There are no real animals used in any of the cooking in this movie, or the hams. They’re not real, either.

I’m just messing with you. I love talking about the editing process because it’s where it all comes together. How did this possibly change in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect going in?

MOLLNER: Christopher Bell is my editor, and he’s much more than an editor. He’s a collaborative partner, like Giovanni and everybody on this stage with me has become, and he’s just a really special part of the process. If I sent him a pile of footage, he could make a movie out of it, and he could make a really good movie out of it if I shot enough footage. But he didn’t need to do that with this one. He improved it for sure, and tweaked it, but this movie is really, really, really close to how it was written. Sometimes you’re finding things, but this one was like a puzzle, and once I figured it out, it kind of had to be that way.

So, I think his initial assembly was based on what we shot, which we shot what we wanted in the edit. Like I said, we weren’t shooting, we weren’t over covering anything. That scene where she’s grabbing him and pulling him toward her and she’s cuffed, that was a locked-off, Michael Haneke-inspired shot, and it was just sitting there. That’s what we did. We didn’t shoot a bunch of coverage or inserts or anything, and so when Chris got the footage, he was like, “I know exactly how this needs to be.” He read the script, and I think the editor’s assembly that he did in October was very, very similar to the final cut, maybe a three-minute difference, that we had in May. It was just a lot of back and forth and test screenings and convincing and all that. But, for better or for worse, it’s pretty much what was on the page.

That Final ‘Strange Darling’ Shot Took “80 Gallons of Blood”
Well, maybe not 80…
Image via Magneta Light Studios

There’s a oner towards the end of the film. I’m not going to be specific about where that oner takes place, but it features Willa, you’re in the shot, and I’m just curious if you could talk a little bit about filming that oner.

MOLLNER: Thank you so much for your wording. I appreciate it. There’s lots of phones and stuff.

I love this shot. Just talk a little bit about filming it without ruining it.

FITZGERALD: That’s almost an impossible task. So here we go… What do you wanna know?

MOLLNER: 80 gallons of blood.

RIBISI: That was a special day. That was a special day for JT.

MOLLNER: That was the most challenging shot. I forgot about that.

RIBISI: There was some special effects makeup on a character that was more of an abstraction, depending on what your religious bent is, that walked out of the trailer. It looked like — I mean no offense to Comic-Con — something that somebody who did… It was not a professional makeup job. It was really unnerving. So JT went to go give the special effects makeup artist some notes, and she was really unhappy. So she screamed, and I think she threw something in his face and stormed off the set. So then we didn’t have a special effects makeup artist.

MOLLNER: I wasn’t being mean at all.

RIBISI: There was the guy who was the visual effects guy on the movie who said, “Well, I have some fake blood,” and we thought, “Great, well, you’re saving the day.”

MOLLNER: He had some blood with a cannon.

RIBISI: He makes things blow up.

MOLLNER: And the shot has no blood. There’s really no blood you see in that shot, but we thought there would be some bleeding in that shot.

Image via Magenta Light Studios

RIBISI: And so this is something you have one opportunity to do, the sun is setting, there’s only one, and so we set the camera up on the side on a hostess tray, and then the blood started going…

MOLLNER: And going and going.

FITZGERALD: And never stopped.

MOLLNER: So I asked Willa to have dinner with me that night, and she said, “I can’t. I’ve got to shower for eight hours.”

RIBISI: Anyway, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Curious what that bloody final shot is all about? Strange Darling is exclusively in theaters in the US now. Click the link below for showtimes:

Get Tickets