Interviews
[Interview] ‘The Devil Inside’ Filmmakers Speak On Low Budget Horror & Bold Finales!
It was hard to stay on top of things with the holidays looming over the release of The Devil Inside (review). Thankfully, Evan Dickson was lucky enough to land a last-second interview with director Brent Bell, co-writer Matthew Peterman and producer Morris Paulson to speak about the found footage exorcism flick.
The below chat, which is excerpts from the conversation (the best of, if you will), tackles everything from the film’s budget to the conclusion that has more than a handful of critics and fans up in arms.
And as always, make sure to write your own review to tell all of Bloody what YOU thought! BD: You guys made this movie for about a million dollars correct?
Morris Paulson: A little bit less than that.
BD: Matt, did you approach Brent with the idea?
Matthew Peterman: I’ve been working with Brent on films for about a decade. We’ve been a team for that long and Morris is our partner now on this film and for the future. And we were working on ideas about five or six years ago when we read an article that said the Vatican had started a [school] for exorcism. This process started way back then. We wrote a traditional hollywood script and got frustrated with that process.
Brent Bell: Then Morris, who has been our friend for over a decade suggested we film this independently, more documentary style. And make the movie in Europe, just the three of us without anybody else bothering us. And I’m really glad we did it that way, I love it.
BD: The film has a lot of creepy imagery and a visceral nature to the exorcisms. Was it a conscious decision to show more than the average found-footage film?
Brent Bell: I think the difference between this movie and most found footage films is that it’s not just like the guy from Cloverfield running around with a camera. With our film we tried to create an actual documentary. And that guy is there to make a film. He’s there to get the shot, and she’s there to let him get the shot. They’re there to make a film and document what they’re seeing. It’s not as much about trying to answer why the camera is there because the camera’s there for a very good reason. Like any good documentary filmmaker, like Michael Moore, they’ll do anything they can to get the shot. That’s a little different from what you normally see in a found footage film.
BD: With Suzan Crowley playing Maria Rossi, that’s a pretty intense role. How did you cast her?
Brent Bell: We saw quite a few people but she was literally the first person. Her picture was great. And then at the first reading it was like “wow!” No one came close to her. It’s hard to find someone in her age range that can be that fearless and completely out of her mind. And she just stood out from everybody. It was a clear, immediate, choice.
Matthew Peterman: When you’re casting a film like this all you’re worried about is talent. Their level of talent and how good they are. There’s no other agenda. You’re not worried about how famous they are or what kind of cache they bring. You just try to find the best actors possible and that’s what we did with this.
BD: It made 2 million dollars in previews last night, double your initial investment. How does that feel?
Brent Bell: We’re excited about the initial success but what we really want to focus on how excited the audience gets. And that’s what we’re hoping to see in the next couple of weeks.
Matthew Peterman: You always hope for the best, we all do whenever we embark on a creative project and rarely do you get the chance for it to actually happen. It’s really great that people get to see the movie. No matter what they think, it’s great to just put it out there.
BD: For the possession you use a unique makeup effect. How did you settle upon the general look of that?
Brent Bell: Pretty much everything in the movie we tried to do real. In camera. And kind of subtle and believably. You do kind of want to subtly indicate the person is possessed but if we did it with their heads spinning around or their eyes glowing or something crazy, that really takes you into the realm of unbelievability and we wanted to be as authentic as possible.
*SPOILER WARNING**
BD: I’m reading a lot of reaction today about the card with the url at the end. When was the decision made to make it kind of a more “interactive” experience?
Brent Bell: That was something that happened towards the end with Paramount. It was interesting, it was kind of a provocative thing. When you’re doing an independent horror film that [people] aren’t just trying to get their money back real quick and make a really cool film you can take chances like that. I don’t think we ever expected that Paramount would release a film with something quite as bold as the way the movie ends. And their idea was this website, and we thought it was kind of cool to continue the story on this website, nobody’s ever done it before. Good or bad, it’s kind of unique.
Matthew Peterman: One the one hand, a lot of the internet is like “oh that’s cool!” And on the other hand, and what I think you’re referring to, is people are saying it’s kind of bullsh*t. You know what I mean? You make a bold choice and you stick with it. I know for us, we all flirted with different ending for the film and we settled for this kind of abrupt ending that we all really believed in. Because with this film, we’re trying to make it feel like real life and very realistic and life doesn’t always follow a perfect three act structure like film does. They’re very fabricated. The stories always have a very Hollywood ending. And we’re doing the antithesis of that. I know some people love it and some people f*cking hate it but it gets people talking. We’re just trying to make it realistic. Not every situation ends perfectly or the way you want it to end.
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
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