Interviews
[Interview] Gore Verbinski, Dane DeHaan and Mia Goth On Their Quest For ‘A Cure For Wellness’
In the latest from filmmaker Gore Verbinski, director of The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean, comes a tale of a man who is not well. Lockhart, a wealthy young stockbroker on Wall Street, has been conditioned to believe that he is happy because he has money. However, when his company calls on him to visit a secluded Alpine medical spa, retrieve CEO Pembroke, and bring him back to New York to take care of business matters, Lockhart finds that he, too, might be in need of some medical assistance. It’s not long before Lockhart becomes a patient himself, hoping to be cured, but as he’ll soon find out, no one here ever gets better, and no one ever leaves.
I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with stars Dane DeHaan, Mia Goth, and director Gore Verbinski to discuss their new film A Cure For Wellness on behalf of Bloody Disgusting. In the interview, we discuss the mystery of the sanitarium, the relentless ambition that makes us all sick, and the psychological experiment that will be performed on all audience members who choose to see this movie in theaters.
“I think deep down he knows he’s not well” says Dane DeHaan of his character Lockhart. “I think he’s a person that thinks he’s in control of his life, but there’s this underlying part of him that he knows he’s not. I think he’s a person that thinks he’s on top of things, and really like winning at life, but really, he has the sickness.”
In the movie, restless busy body Lockhart travels thousands of miles to acquire his business partner, and return him back to the normal part of the world, a.k.a. Wall Street. Despite his intention to quickly grab Pembroke and head out on the fastest flight home, once he’s standing on the wellness center grounds, and under the watchful eye of Director Volmer, Lockhart discovers a sickness growing within him, and reluctantly accepts treatment in order to rid the harmful toxins of the fast paced money grabbing world out of his system, in the hopes that he will one day be well again.
But what is the sickness? Everyone here is searching for the cure, but what exactly is it that they are trying to heal? According to director Gore Verbinski, the sickness is blind ambition.
“It’s sort of diagnosing modern man, if you will, and I think to the people who are particularly vulnerable are the people who have done whatever it takes to sort of succeed or to get ahead” explains Verbinski of his characters’ willingness to accept treatment. “So this place is sort of preying upon oligarchs, and head of industry, and in this case, Lockhart, who is going to do anything to succeed, but I mean, that’s not really wellness, is it? Money and success, particularly in the case of Lockhart, who, he doesn’t make pottery or shoes or guitars, he makes money, he makes money off of people who make something, so the idea was to try to hand pick the people who come to this place because Director Volmer is sort of offering absolution in a way. He’s saying ‘You’re not responsible because you’re not well’ and that sort of note from Doctor I think in the initial phase, that’s what keeps them there, that’s the sort of narcotic if you will”.
Dane DeHaan says his character Lockhart is the perfect patient for this institute, because chasing money all of his life has left him with little humanity to speak of.
“For Lockhart in the movie, why he’s such a great protagonist for the story is because he’s blindly in pursuit of money and power, and he’s willing to step on other people to get to the top. He’s consumed by that quest and he’s like a slave to his company and his corporation and that’s all he cares about, and he thinks that makes him a well man, but that is the sickness, and that’s why when he’s diagnosed, he gives into the treatment”.
While at the hospital, Lockhart befriends a shy girl named Hannah, who says that she’s been in the system since she was born. Lockhart is instantly drawn to Hannah, both for her sweet nature, and for her closeness in age, but he’ll soon find that his new friend has just as many secrets as the sanitarium that houses them.
“I felt that I was able to find a lot of parallels between my life and her life, and this leap from having to go from girlhood to womanhood was one of them” says Mia Goth of her sheltered character Hannah. “It’s quite a journey for her, and at times it’s thrilling, at times it’s terrifying, at times it’s exciting and sometimes painful, and that’s something that I really connected with, and I think that’s quite a universal thing for women all over the world”.
Together, Hannah and Lockhart search for answers to the many questions that they hold about the seemingly tranquil sanitarium. What is the cure? How does one achieve wellness? What’s Director Volmer’s end goal? What’s the real story behind the history of this hillside hospital? Only time will tell, but one scenario that moviegoers may not have thought to consider is that as we are watching Lockhart and Hannah being toyed with, we, too, are being experimented on. At least, that’s what director Verbinski says about going to the movies.
“I think it’s one of those genres where you can kind of bend to a dream logic, I mean I think when Dane’s character Lockhart makes his way to this place, he’s entering the place of dreams and nightmares and so I think that you know that type of narrative, you can prey upon the audience’s motivation to discover, and you can use enigma to tell that story” says director Verbinski in a manner that’s just as mysterious as his nursing staff in the film. “You’re watching Dane’s character reluctantly become a patient of this place, but really, you’re the patient, aren’t you? You’re in a darkened room and we’re using sound and image to kind of conduct a psychological experiment on the audience”.
Verbinski goes on to say that we, as an audience, are just as unwell as the character of Lockhart. We need the cure just as much as the patients of this dreamy asylum.
“I think there’s a reason why we’re gonna buy these pharmaceutical prescriptions even though the side effects are ridiculous, I mean whether you’re doing that, or whether you’re eating a kale wrap, or whatever, we must, at our core sense that something is not right with us or we wouldn’t be susceptible to that”.
A Cure For Wellness hits theaters everywhere on February 17th, 2017.
Evil Dead Rise final girl Lily Sullivan finds herself coated in blood once more in SOULM8TE, but this time as the killer.
In Blumhouse’s new horror movie, arriving on Digital on August 1, Sullivan stars as Sara, an Artificially Intelligent android whose sole purpose is to serve as the perfect partner for her owner, David (David Rysdahl). But impossible beauty standards and programming safety measures that have been tampered with set this love bot to destroy mode when her relationship with David becomes threatened.
Director Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother), who rewrote an original draft from Rafael Jordan (Salvage Marines), based on a story by James Wan, Ingrid Bisu and Jordan, drew inspiration from ’90s erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction.
They became a guide of sorts to Sara’s villainous turn, Kate Dolan explained to Bloody Disgusting. “All those old movies, when I was re-watching them to prep, I was writing the script, I was like, ‘Damn, these women are really just being driven into these scenarios by these men, these hapless men who are just treating them so badly. These men should really be getting their just desserts.’ But I think that was something we had as a guide for Sara: what really makes her into that femme fatale or that evil woman is just the impossible task of being a perfect woman and trying to balance being the Madonna and the whore and all these different kinds of aspects of being a woman and not being able to compute that. That’s what drives her crazy.
“That was always what really drew me to the story: of how to reframe that femme fatale or that villainous woman of the erotic thriller and do something new with it and something different.”
Lily Sullivan agrees: “She felt like a contemporary evolution of those characters. It’s like processing it all and then putting it through in an output. But it was so fun to try to find the old Hollywood archetypes of women in the 1990s, where it is built around fantasy, projection, desire. Then you’re just, even as the actor, then going through makeup, going through costume, where it’s all of these things that are kind of messed up about the blonde wig, the covering your whole body in paint so you can’t see any of your imperfections, or getting your teeth whitened and a push-up bra, and you’re just like, ‘Whoa. Why am I so angry? Why do I not feel enough? And why am I actually, literally, the male gaze right now?’ I was like, ‘Booked.'”
It turns out, though, that it was the impossible ideal of perfection that Sara represents that terrified Sullivan. She credits Dolan for helping her take on the intimidating role, one she was extremely hesitant to tackle at first.
Sullivan explains, “To do it, I’m like, someone’s going to meet your freak. We’re both choosing to do this. But at first I met Kate, and I felt like I told her all the reasons why I couldn’t do it or shouldn’t do it or why I was worried instead of being like, ‘Yeah, I’d love the role.’ I just weirdly had this verbal diarrhea of freaking out that I was like, ‘I don’t think I can.’ But then usually when you are that scared, it’s usually an indication to walk towards it. But really for me, it was Kate.“
Once she was on board, though, Sullivan grabbed the role by the throat. “Then also just again, to walk into the inky, gross, shadowy stuff of being a woman where I’m like, ‘How about I go over-hypersexualize the hell out of myself?’ But I’m going to make it uncanny valley. I want you to feel as silicone as much as you can. So I’m going to bring my Jim Carrey version of it, The Mask work, the Jacques Lecoq method of finding it through physicality. So there was so much nourishment in the challenge of it. Even reading the words when I was reading Kate’s writing, I’m going into Palisade mode. I was like, ‘I’ve got to go figure out what that language even means.’ And, ‘It better be as jarring as I possibly can.’ We love David, but we judge him for being able to project a whole life onto this wonky woman who’s forced to be there.”
Dolan reveals she did a lot of research into AI, and our home uses of it like Amazon’s Alexa, which informed Sara’s soothing voice and mannerisms. It also informed Sara’s parent company and new owner, David. “I was reading a lot about why that’s appealing, but also bias within the tech industry and how it’s predominantly male-led,” Dolan says. “So, you’re getting a lot of men of a certain background and life experience all thinking that this is the right thing to do.”
The director uses the ’90s thriller framework as an abstract metaphor for how we’re currently engaging with AI now, and “how people engage with them and what you get from that back.” That didn’t just inspire Sara’s look and design, but her methods of murder.
“The kills were very much like, I won’t spoil anything, but it was always ways that the men would be taken down a peg, then emasculated, or just put in a chokehold; literally, it was the kind of concept behind a lot of them,” Dolan explains. “And then it was just like: what would be most fun? What would be really fun to do? What would be fun to film and fun to watch as an audience? I mean, they were great fun, and all our male cast were very eager and excited to have these death scenes. That was the most exciting day on set when they were getting ready to be completely eviscerated.”
If it’s not already apparent, it feels strange to consider Sara a villain when she has no actual agency, though there’s no question she’s the terror of SOULM8TE. And Sullivan had a blast taking on the baddie role. Especially when it came to eviscerating the pursuit of perfection and anyone who dares to get in Sara’s way.
Sullivan teases a favorite kill of hers as she recalls the joy of playing a horror movie psycho, “Even loving the stiletto in the mouth referenced from The Last Seduction, just sets the heart. Even just having the plastic apron as I’m sawing the man’s body like a cello, little wink at American Psycho. It was so fun making a film about AI that’s super tech-based. Obviously our whole lives are bombarded by it, and it’s quite nauseating. If you’re going to make a film about AI, this serving is fun, it’s twisted, but it’s also freaky. And the freak show circus is already here, unfortunately.”
Lily Sullivan and Kate Dolan behind the scenes
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