PopHorror Let's Get Scared
You could say I was a bit surprised to find out that Julie Pacino, daughter of Al, wrote and directed a horror movie. I Live Here Now, starring Lucy Fry, Sheryl Lee, and Matt Rife (in a terrific dramatic role that is not funny, at all), is a surreal nightmare akin to a locked-room thriller. It’s a pink-hued journey of one woman’s descent into chaos and an is-this-real-or-isn’t-it mindfuck after checking into a motel to wait out the abortion pill she’s supposed to take.
A woman finds herself trapped in a remote hotel where the violent echoes of her past come alive, blurring the lines between her darkest nightmares and the waking world.
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Julie about creating the feature film from the short, being a filmmaker, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I really loved I Live Here Now and I’m really excited to talk to you about it. And the buzz about it… People are loving it!
Julie Pacino: Thank you so much for taking the time to watch it! I really appreciate that.
PopHorror: I read two things: that the film grew from a photo series that you did, but I also read that it started as a short. Neither article said anything about the other so I wasn’t a hundred percent on how it started. Can you tell us where your inspiration for the feature came and how did you start your film journey with it?
Julie Pacino: Yeah, it did start as a short film that I wrote during Covid, and it was June 2020. It was just about this girl who was trapped in an Airbnb, and it was called I Live Here Now and it was about being literally trapped in a place. Then the ideas just started blossoming. It started as let’s just get our friends together and shoot this little thing on a little Blackmagic camera and just like, please get the juices flowing because we were all going crazy. The ideas started blossoming and it started becoming apparent that it was going to be about a woman kind of trapped within herself and really more of an allegorical exploration, and that’s when the short started expanding into this feature. I’m a photographer as well as a filmmaker, and all my friends are actors and creative and amazing so we kind of play for a moment with some photography to just work on a visual language for it. But yeah, I do that with all my films. I like to take photos and sometimes I’ll rehearse scenes from a movie and I’ll have my camera with me and take photos for inspiration. That’s the best way, especially as an indie filmmaker when fundraising to be able to say okay, here’s a photo that captures the look and feel of what I’m going to go for with a movie, so if you like this photo, you’ll probably like the movie, do you want to be involved?
PopHorror: Lucy Fry as Rose goes through quite a journey dealing with trauma, abortion, violence, and unplanned pregnancy. How did you approach guiding Lucy through those intense scenes?
Julie Pacino: Lucy and I just built an amazing foundation of trust. That was the thing. We’d never worked together before or knew each other and it was really difficult casting Rose because in all of my meetings prior to meeting Lucy, I was really clear that I needed someone to help me shape this character and bring some of their vulnerability to it because I was putting so much of mine on the page that I was really looking for a partner to craft Rose and that Rose really needed to ground the story. It was challenging finding the right fit, but as soon as I met Lucy, there was just this inherent openness that we had with each other, so I think a lot of times it was me guiding her through these scenes by creating a safe space and just being in close proximity to her or sometimes far away if she needed the space, but developing that foundation before we shot was super important. We rehearsed and got to know each other for several months before we shot, and it went both ways because there were certain scenes that were really challenging for me to bring to life and scary for me that she was brave about and she pushed for. It was just a really beautiful collaboration that we had.
PopHorror: I love that! You mentioned casting and I love it when we see someone, like Matt Rife, who is known for comedy, do something that is normally not something that we would see them in like drama or horror. Kind of like… Something that’s big right now is Wanda Sykes just did her first dramatic role and it’s something completely outside of comedy. How did you know that Matt Rife was right for the role of Travis? This is something that is not funny in the slightest.
Julie Pacino: Yeah, and please spread the word on that because I know a lot of times people will see his name associated with the project and judge a book by its cover. I met Matt right as he was starting his ascension into super stardom so he wasn’t quite famous yet, but I knew that he would be right for it because of the way that he talked about his approach and how he really wanted to craft something with Travis. The questions that he was asking me about the character and the meaning behind it, because I think Travis is totally a douchebag but in a lot of ways, he’s also having his body controlled by this representative of the patriarchy and so I thought it was really interesting to explore, slightly, what that perspective is like. He was on board with that and he had ideas about that, and Matt brought a lot to the table. He showed up and he rehearsed and he was committed. He spoke about the script with passion and that’s how I ultimately knew he had the chops in him. He’s an amazing comedian. He’s so funny and naturally funny in person too, but he takes his craft as an actor really seriously as well, and I could see that just from the first conversation we had.
PopHorror: That’s so cool. I just love seeing someone that you would never expect in a horror film to be in a horror, or make horror, kind of like Jordan Peele, and then they blow your mind.
Julie Pacino: Same, same. And like Zach Cregger, too. He’s a comedian.
PopHorror: Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the film, no matter what?
Julie Pacino: Yeah, there were two things. One was the soup scene, which was a scene that I wrote in the very first draft that a lot of people had issues with and even Lucy Fry, she says it herself, she almost passed on the script because of that scene. She said, “I don’t know if I can do that.” And then the last scene with Rose on the table. That was a scene that wasn’t written like that in the script. It was pretty simple in the script, but her and I really worked on what we wanted to do with that and at times, she wanted to cut and I’m like no, we’ve got to have it. At times I wanted to cut it and she was like no, we’ve got to have it, so we both fought for that last scene and I think that’s maybe the one that we’re the proudest of.
PopHorror: I’m glad that you kept those in there. That soup scene was pretty gross, but I like gross.
Julie Pacino: Yeah, me too!
PopHorror: You mentioned your photography, which I was looking through your Instagram earlier and they’re amazing. You’re also a filmmaker. How did you know that you wanted to progress from photography to filmmaking?
Julie Pacino: I’ve always made short films. Photography was kind of a hobby for me for a while. My dad put a movie camera in my hands – remember the little DV tapes? – when I was 10 years old, I was making movies with my friends in my neighborhood and editing them on my gigantic Mac iMovie. I’ve always loved making moving pictures with sound and music and these things, and then photography was just kind of this thing that I did as a hobby on the side. Somewhere along the way, maybe in like 2016, I started getting approached to do photography professionally and then I started realizing that actually the mediums really complement each other in terms of how I go about my process where I like to write and then, like I said, take photos throughout the way. They kind of go hand in hand so it was never like a clean transition, it was just always like one thing can help the other. Even after we wrapped I Live Here Now, I went and did this photo shoot with a Leica, and it was creative and feminine and awesome, and I was able to apply some of the stuff that I learned while shooting I Live Here Now to my photography. They’re intertwined, but the first thing I ever did creatively was make a little short film when I was 10.
PopHorror: I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?
Julie Pacino: Inland Empire is so scary to me. It’s so scary, that film. Maybe Lost Highway. I go back and forth between those two. But yeah, depending on the day. And The Shining. I don’t know, it’s hard to pick one! I saw The Sixth Sense when I was like nine years old. My dad brought me to see The Sixth Sense in a movie theater, and I slept in my mom’s bed for two weeks after that. But yeah, my favorite horror movie is Inland Empire.
Thank you so much to Julie for taking the time to chat with us. Stay tuned for release information for I Live Here Now!
