Viewers will face the music when Richard Shepard’s thriller The Perfection arrives on Netflix Friday, May 24th.
While I strongly recommend seeing this one as blind as possible, we have an exclusive clip for those who are jonesing for new footage.
The shocking and unpredictable film follows a cello prodigy’s pursuit for perfection that takes a sinister turn.
In this clip, Get Out’s Allison Williams attempts to console Dear White People‘s Logan Browning, who is freaking out after throwing up maggot-infested bile!
“For years I had had this idea for a thriller on a bus. Being sick and trapped in a foreign country, but it really wasn’t a full movie,” Shepard tells Bloody Disgusting about the genesis of The Perfection, which ties directly into the exclusive clip above. “It was [just] a sequence.”
He approached Eric Charmello and Nicole Snyder, who wrote the pilot of “Ringer” for Shepard, to help him break the story and “do something out of the box and different.”
“We actually broke an entirely different story around the bus sequence,” he added, explaining that they eventually went back to the drawing board. “But it wasn’t exciting us. It wasn’t character driven. It wasn’t twisted enough. So we started again and came up with the whole musical element.”
As for the riveting bus sequence, which is easily the pinnacle of The Perfection, the cast and crew experienced an exhaustive (but also fun) shoot that would eventually pay dividends.
“Shooting the bus sequence was an enormous amount of fun,” Shepard explains. “It was just a crew of five hidden on the bus— under chairs, behind prop luggage. On a real road. No green screen. The cast doing their own makeup. No other crew. Just pure filmmaking.
“We shot hugely long takes – basically six or seven pages a take,” he added. “[We were] really getting the actors into the moment. It was four days on the bus, with a lot of screaming and flaming out by Logan and Allison, and a lot of laughs in between takes. Everyone knew how difficult it was for Allison and Logan, and for the crew, so everyone was in it to win it.”
“It was tough to edit because Logan is yelling and freaking out so much. Just looking at takes was exhausting. We’d have to work for a few hours and take a big break. But I knew if we could get the sequence to work it would be an amazing bit of movie-making. My editor David Dean and I worked meticulously to cram every bit of tension out of the sequence. Having great reaction shots of the passengers helped in editing. The driver was amazing. All the story-boarding and coverage and hard work we did figuring out how to shoot it on an actual bus paid off.”
You can watch the sequence that started everything above and then add The Perfection to your Netflix list early by clicking here.
Trace raved in his review about this under-the-radar festival favorite, writing that it “delivers twisted, shocking and hilarious perfection.“
