Rebecca and Tyler are about to meet their grandparents for the very first time. Their mother may have severed ties long ago with folks, stubbornly refusing to see them or even talk to them, Tyler and Becca have insisted on having a week-long visit to their remote farm in snow-covered Philadelphia. Becca, an aspiring teenage filmmaker, decides to film their trip to cut a documentary later; an act which she hopes will further her film career, and perhaps even persuade her mom to give her grandparents another chance. They may have gone to grandma’s house with good intentions, what they find when they get there resembles more of a nightmare than a family reunion. Their grandmother and grandfather have been acting peculiar ever since they arrived, and although at first they initially write off the odd behavior as old age, as their worrisome antics continue, the children start to grow suspicious that there may more to the story of their estranged grandparents, and perhaps a good reason why their mother have driven a barrier between the two camps for all these years.
“Limitations create opportunities” preaches writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, the man behind such popular projects as The Sixth Sense, Signs, After Earth, and the recent hit FOX TV show, Wayward Pines. The man who is usually known for big projects that cost upwards of $100,000 has turned the tables on himself and shocked everyone by getting back to basics, and limiting himself to a found footage thriller with a budget of only $5,000,000. By giving himself such rigid restraints, Shyamalan was forced not only to tackle his screenplay in a different manner, but also to limit himself to a single, confined, reasonably-priced set.
Luckily, he found a happy marriage in a little farmhouse in the outskirts of Pennsylvania. Shyamalan himself resides in the Keystone State, and once he learned of a farm nearby that was going under foreclosure from a bank, he convinced the owners to let him rent the place for six months before they put on the fire sale, to which they happily agreed. “You know I storyboard every shot of my thrillers in general. In this one, I had to put it in the screenplay” explains Shyamalan, “So we had this incredible situation where I had the actual house where I was shooting through pre-production, so I would go with the actors and we would rehearse in the rooms, on the stairs, in the kitchen….there was a lot of times, it was really creepy actually, I would go to the house by myself and just sit there, and just think of the shots, and it was just different because I could really, really plan it out and think it through”.
Aside from allowing him to truly stretch his creative muscles, Shyamalan’s lowest studio budget to date also made finding a home at Blumhouse that much easier. “When you get into expensive movie-making territory, it’s almost impossible not to think about the financial result, but when you make low budget movies, you can put that out of your head and create” producer Jason Blum excitedly states, “One of the reasons I really love low budget filmmaking is you can have more fun, and be more playful, and be freer creatively”.
Although it was Blum who started the conversation about pairing up to do a smaller film for Shyamalan’s next project, surprisingly, Shyamalan opted to retreat away from any outside influence, and complete his entire feature on his own time, not choosing to bring Blum into until it was time to show him a rough cut. By absolving himself of any meddling forces, and restricting himself to a stowaway agrarian piece of land with nothing but handheld cameras and a desire to make a scary movie that reflected his own kooky, part horror, part comedy personality, Shyamalan managed to tap into a pure sense of isolation and uncertainty that hasn’t been present in his films for many years. When asked about the ill-recieved past couple of films that feel so vastly different from his newest feature, Shyamalan insisted that he does not look back and try to improve upon old projects, because to try too hard to create something entirely different would only strangle his creativity. “The second you try to conform, you try to do something else, you aspire to be something other than you are, your light diminishes” stresses Shyamalan. “I can walk away and say, ‘The Visit is one hundred percent me’. That’s such a wonderful feeling, and whatever comes from it, comes from it, because how could the result be wrong, right?”
In order to accomplish the believability of a found footage film, Night sought to find actors who were talented enough to balance the genre-blending of the horror-comedy-drama mash-up, while still being unrecognizable enough to be taken seriously as subjects of a recovered tape. In order to do this, Shyamalan looked to the theater. “I love stage actors” boasts the determined director, going on to explain how with his style of filmmaking, he tends to use less coverage, and more long takes. “Because I do long takes, there’s a trust that happens on the set” tells Shyamalan of how he’d rather explore the characters’ emotions in a scene, rather than trying several different angles of the same shot just to have more material for the editing room. “I am committing to him, as his point of view in this thing, with all of us, rather than coverage”. Shyamalan isn’t looking for an actor who can stand on the X and recite lines, he’s looking for someone who can handle reciting extensive, drawn-out dialogue and commit to a character’s emotional state during the times when the camera refuses to cut away, revealing their vulnerable side. To Shyamalan, a theater actor who recites entire plays nightly without the comfort of taking breaks between scenes is simply more fitting for this style of filmmaking than one who’s more catered to filming a few moments of dialogue before stopping and starting again. For these reasons, when Shyamalan set out to find his grandparents, he eyed two theater vets for the roles — Tony award winner Deanna Dunagan, and character actor Peter McRobbie.
The children in the film, also meant to come across as realistic and believable everyday kids, came as a result of a worldwide search, finally ending in Australia. “If you’re trying to find someone that you guys haven’t really seen that much, where are the biggest pools of untapped talent who can do an American accent?” Apparently, the pools are in Port Jackson.
Despite the fact that the kids are supposed to be the sole directors (or as Becca puts it, Tyler is credited as the B-camera operator) of this little documentary, in the real behind the scenes story of the making of the film, all of the beautiful captured moments of a perfectly timed sunset, or an expertly framed moment of action was caught by cinematographer Maryse Alberti, a woman known for bringing grit and raw emotion to Oscar-nominated 2008 film The Wrestler. With the help of another camera operator, Alberti brought the same unbiased view to the farm’s rugged surroundings, while also managing to emote the romantic idea of an amateur filmmaker on the rise, who cares deeply about the look of the film, as well as its subjects.
Alberti may have filmed the majority of handheld moments throughout the film, but when it came time to shoot the hide-and-seek chase scene under the house, it became clear that the only person small enough to run around in such a tiny space effecitenly was young Ed Oxenbould, who plays Becca’s little brother, Tyler. “We had one day which was a problem, which was the underground where the grandma crawls, the camera operator was too big. He’s a grown man, so he couldn’t keep up and go crawl under there”, recalls Shyamalan. “I look over, and Ed is there, and I’m like, ‘Ed, why don’t you just hold the camera?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah!’ And he just ran underneath, and he did all of the camera work under the house. He was so proud that day”.
There may have been many joyous moments of laughter and playing on set, but the source material for the film still remains morbid and dark, shaping up the film to be a true black comedy. “The subject of the piece is fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying”. Shyamalan darkly interprets the distrust of the elderly with man’s primal, innate rejection of the reaper. To him, it’s a subject that when pressed, can create some of the most tension-filled moments in cinema. By toying with the one fear that all humans share, Shyamlan manages to coax discomfort out of the depths of his viewers inner-most subconscious, bring it to light, and poke fun at it. “We’re scared of getting old, and playing on that is a powerful conceit”.
The Visit hits theaters on September 11th.
