PopHorror Let's Get Scared
One of the best films I’ve enjoyed this year is Nicholas Tomnay’s What You Wish For. I don’t want to give too much away because it’s best to go into this one blind, but it’s pretty fantastic. Starring Nick Stahl (Carnivàle) and Tamsin Topolski (Penny Dreadful TV series), What You Wish For is a jaw-dropping thriller that will shock you with a multitude of bad decisions and pique your interest with beautiful culinary delights. But be careful what you wish for as nothing is at it seems.
I was lucky enough to chat with writer and director Nicholas (The Perfect Host – 2010) about his journey making the film, filming on location, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I loved What You Wish For. I’m super excited to talk to you about it.
Nicholas Tomnay: Oh, that’s awesome, thank you! I’m very pleased.
PopHorror: What inspired What You Wish For and how did the project come about?
Nicholas Tomnay: I had the idea for a little while, the idea of someone who is unhappy with their life, and they have the opportunity to become somebody else, and then they regret that. I thought that was actually quite a solid concept for a film. I felt like it could work. And then it was just a process. I actually had a few false starts. It started off as this sort of rise to power story about this young girl in Palm Desert in California in the 80s and then it became this story about crossing from New York to London and it was set in the 50s. I was just going everywhere with it, and none of them quite worked. Then I had this horrible high school reunion with some friends of mine from Australia in Las Vegas and I couldn’t leave.
PopHorror: That sounds awful.
Nicholas Tomnay: It was brutal. It was just an interesting experience, and I think maybe just the idea of old friendships and stuff kind of sparked the way it is now.
PopHorror: I have never gone to one of my high school class reunions and I doubt that I ever will.
Nicholas Tomnay: It was actually just two friends that I was quite close with 15 years ago in Sydney who were in America, and I hadn’t seen them in ages. We just don’t have anything in common anymore. It was just a weird experience. Sometimes the past is best left in the past.
PopHorror: A fairly large horror website posted a spoiler for the movie in the title of their review and all over their socials. How important is it to you for the audience to go in as blind as possible?
Nicholas Tomnay: It’s very important and I hope that we’re talking about the same spoiler because I was speaking to our publicist about that, and they got onto it pretty quick, and they changed the word.
PopHorror: It’s still on Instagram so I don’t know if they actually changed it. I don’t know if we’re talking about the same one and I don’t want to give them up.
Nicholas Tomnay: Oh, for sure, sure. My feeling is this film… It’s for the benefit of the viewer. It’s better to walk into this film knowing a little bit about it like the tone of the film but not knowing about the story because I think that’s where the pleasure is. The film is told subjectively. We are hitched to Ryan (Nick Stahl), the protagonist in this film, and we experience the story as he does and I feel like that’s why the film is entertaining, that’s why it is, because we get those revelations with him. As an audience member, if you know more than him, it’s not going to be as enjoyable.
PopHorror: I went into it completely blind. I didn’t even watch the trailer. I got the email; I saw Nick Stahl and that it involved a chef. I went to culinary school, so I appreciate all of the culinary horror. Give it all to me. I’m really glad that I went in blind because it was nothing what I expected. I had no idea what was going to happen and then all of a sudden, I’m like, “Wow!” Kept my attention through the whole thing because I had no idea what was coming.
Nicholas Tomnay: Yeah, I enjoyed it as an audience member too. I love going into and experiencing something, and being surprised and that feeling of not knowing where things are going to go. And certainly in this kind of genre. It makes it just so much better. As a film viewer, I enjoy that experience too.
PopHorror: You filmed this on location in Columbia and in 23 days, which is not a lot of time. What was that like?
Nicholas Tomnay: It was exciting, and it was difficult and stressful. There were strengths and weaknesses, like anything. And we had an excellent production services company. They were really supportive, and I liked those guys a lot. But it was tricky. I’m terrible with languages. It’s just something I’ve never been very good at and so my Spanish actually got worse at the end. People were like, “How can your Spanish be worse than it was when you turned up?” I’m like, “Because my brain is dealing with all this, and I don’t want to think about that.” So that part of it was tricky. I think people often say that production of a film sometimes mirrors the plot of the film and I feel like on some level I had a bit of Ryan energy going on, being in a situation that I had bitten off more than I could chew and I had to make it work. Working with the actors was really fun.
PopHorror: And it undid any of the Spanish that you ever learned.
Nicholas Tomnay: Oh yeah.
PopHorror: The film focuses a lot on food and cooking techniques. How did you and your cast and crew prepare for shooting?
Nicholas Tomnay: Well, I had done some research when I was writing the script and I was trying to figure out what it could be. When we were in Columbia and we were prepping the film, we contacted a food stylist and we were like, “Okay, this is the script,” and not to give anything away, she was like, “Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything like this before.”
PopHorror: I hope not!
Nicholas Tomnay: Yeah! So that was an interesting process. Basically, she took, more or less, what I’d written in the script and made versions of it. It’s what looked best, and my feeling was, the food had to look great but more than that, the characters had to interact with it like it was great as well. The taste is really everything.
PopHorror: What is it that draws you to horror?
Nicholas Tomnay: I’m actually not really a horror fan, to be honest with you.
PopHorror: Really!
Nicholas Tomnay: I don’t think this movie is a horror film. I think this is a thriller.
PopHorror: It is, you’re right.
Nicholas Tomnay: I like some horror films and I like them a lot, but generally speaking, I have a problem with my suspension of disbelief in supernatural things. I’m unable to get past that threshold so when stuff like that happens, I’m like, “Well that’s just a grip with the door.” So it’s not really my jam. But when it’s done well, it’s incredible and it’s pure cinema. So from that level, I absolutely think it’s in a way, some of the most pure cinema you can do because it’s operating completely and it’s holding you with suspense and fear and that’s really hard to do. But yeah, I’m more interested in thrillers.
PopHorror: I think it’s hard to get into and to really believe it when you’re a filmmaker and you know how they’re making it happen, or you have an idea of how they’re making it happen.
Nicholas Tomnay: The movie that I remember seeing – and I’m showing my age here – I went to the cinema in 1999 to see The Blair Witch Project, and the concept of that being all found footage, because that obviously hadn’t happened before in terms of found footage. I mean, it had but not in such a mainstream, major way, and the idea that the frame you were looking at was only part of the picture and that anything could be happening outside of the frame. It’s just that the filmmakers had only captured this – that concept – it completely dissolved the threshold for me and I was absolutely able to buy into it. I remember that experience being incredible. And obviously the classics as well. Maybe it’s that aspect of it, the way it’s presented has to have a level of authenticity, otherwise it’s hard to buy into.
PopHorror: We’re probably around the same age because I also saw that in the theater.
Nicholas Tomnay: It’s an amazing movie. It’s really well done, and the ending is incredible. It’s so ambiguous but brilliant in the tone that it struck in the end. It just pitched itself up higher and higher until you got to that point and it’s sort of an irrational ending and it was so unknowable, and that was the thing that was so horrific about it. I really, really like that movie a lot.
PopHorror: It’s been out for 24 years, so it’s been out a long time, and people still talk about how much it scares them. They can still watch it and be scared about it, and that’s how you know it’s an effective horror film.
Nicholas Tomnay: It’s the naturalism in it. Actualism and then the way it’s a found footage. It’s “discovered” and it’s archival. All that is so clever and brilliant. I think that’s why it probably still works is it doesn’t date. It’s not going to date.
PopHorror: I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?
Nicholas Tomnay: Well, Blair Witch definitely is in there. I’m really boring. I like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. I actually like the book Rosemary’s Baby more than the film. The book is unbelievable.
Thank you so much to Nicholas for taking the time to speak with us. What You Wish For is currently playing festivals.
