PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Caring for someone with PTSD can be challenging and life-altering, but in Daniel Stamm’s (The Last Exorcism) new film, Lockbox – written by Justin Yoffe and developed from Soren Narnia’s podcast, Knifepoint Horror – Ellen (Carla Gugino – read our interview with her HERE) does it with care and compassion, taking in her cousin Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci- Evil Dead 2013) in his time of need. Add in a slightly unhinged neighbor, Vanna, played by a quirky Katharine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps), and some very strange occurrences, Ellen has her hands full.
A woman puts everything on the line to defend her enigmatic cousin from a dangerous otherworldly entity determined to track him down.
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with stars Katharine and Lou, and director Daniel, about how they became involved with the project, collaborating together, Vonna’s fantastic hair, and more!
PopHorror: I loved Lockbox so I’m super excited to talk to you guys about it today. Daniel, what was the specific element in Soren Narnia’s original story that made you say, “I have to direct this film!”?
Daniel Stamm: That I had no idea where the story was going at any moment in the story. Every 10 pages I thought, I’ve got this figured out, it seemed to be this but now it’s that, let’s see what we’re going to do for the next 80 pages. And then there’s a completely different turn – new characters, new settings, new everything – and it just keeps you guessing the entire time. That’s something that I think is being said a lot but that is actually very, very rare. Of 100 scripts that I get, one script does that, that is special. This one was the one.
PopHorror: It definitely keeps you guessing. I sat through the whole thing thinking, what does Lockbox mean? Katharine and Lou, when you first read the script, what was the exact scene or image that gave you chills and made you realize that this had to be your next project?
Katharine Isabelle: I think for me, I was sold when I read the audition sides for Vonna. I didn’t get the script; I just got Vonna. I said, “I don’t care what the rest of the movie is about or what genre this is or what kind of movie this is, I love her and whatever happens around her, I don’t care.” I was attached to her immediately and I think just the same thing that Daniel felt, reading through the script, I couldn’t predict what was going to happen or who was going to do what at any point. I’m usually annoyingly good at that to the point that it ruins watching things for me, and I couldn’t pin it down at any point and at the end I was just like, woah.
Lou Taylor Pucci: In order not to give away spoilers, I won’t say the one that I think because I can’t. It would just spoil the movie completely. What I will say is that his visual is this emaciated military-type character and that seemed challenging to me but at the same time, I knew subconsciously or I guess consciously, I don’t know, that I was going to have to torture myself in order to lose all this weight and become this interesting, dark looking character. I would be torturing myself the entire experience, which sometimes is what you need to make a horror film, to be in that sort of sad, abused, neglected, depressed space that you have to be in for that long. I just starved myself as well.
PopHorror: Anything for your craft!
Lou Taylor Pucci: Yeah!
PopHorror: Daniel, with three distinct performances happening at once, how did you balance guiding Katharine, Lou, and Carla individually, while keeping the collective tension of the scene intact?
Daniel Stamm: Katie I didn’t direct at all. She came in fully formed as Vonna.
Lou Taylor Pucci: Oh, but you directed me a bunch, right?
Katharine Isabelle: You did a lot!
Daniel Stamm: We were just dealing with different acting talent, like Katie’s a really good actor and Lou is like the nicest guy and he’s trying. That’s worth a lot! A good director can work with that. No, it’s a good question because basically, they’re all actors where they bring everything and I don’t have to create anything on set. With Katie, completely formed performance, can’t take any credit for anything. I wish I could work with her one day. This wasn’t the project where I got to work with her because she was already perfection coming on set.
Katharine Isabelle: We’ll do it one time, Daniel.
Daniel Stamm: One day we’ll do it. With Lou and Carla, what was obviously very different from Vonna is that they had backstory. They were family, they knew each other as children, so I thought the best that I can do is to create that intimacy because that’s something you can’t pretend on screen day one, two people that have never seen each other, suddenly they have to act some kind of backstory. So what we did is that we carved out one day before the shoot even started and we spent the day together and I let them spend half the day together, not even in character but as people to really talk about stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily tell everybody. I had these index cards and they had different questions to discuss like tell the other person about one moment you were really scared, what are you proud of in your life, what are you ashamed of in your life, tell the other person one secret that less than five people in the world know, blah blah blah. And if they are open to that, the most magical thing can happen because you can create an intimacy and a protectiveness of each other that even I as the director shouldn’t be putting myself into, that should just be between them. Then throughout the movie, that becomes a source and a rich well that you can always go back into because it was scene specific, it’s basically a toolbox that opens up for the entire thing. So, very different indeed but it really worked out.
PopHorror: I love that. Katharine and Lou, your characters have very different energies on screen. Winthrop is very haunted and quiet compared to Vonna’s hyperness. How did you two collaborate to build that unsettling vibe without overpowering each other?
Lou Taylor Pucci: I think we just had to do it on our own. It was written there and the writing was good, so we knew that we were opposites. I was the quiet, haunted, abused, neglected person and she was the charming, manic-
Katharine Isabelle: Manic.
Lou Taylor Pucci: Scary, dangerous seeming. But both of us seemed dangerous in different ways, which is pretty cool. I think it was all written there from the beginning. What we didn’t do is what Daniel just described me and Carla to do. We didn’t want to know much about each other.
Katharine Isabelle: We did the opposite. We just avoided each other.
Lou Taylor Pucci: Honestly, we did avoid each other pretty much, because to have those appearances of us happen on screen was so much more important than us meeting each other offscreen. These are two people who’ve never met each other and now the fact that they’re meeting is creating the whole movie, so we want that to be filmed.
Katharine Isabelle: Most of our experience together was in these characters in these uncomfortable scenes where we’re both like antagonizing and judging and sussing each other out to see who’s going to freak out. What’s happening here, what’s the dynamic? I think that’s a really intriguing part of the movie is you have these two people who have been traumatized, who have been through the worst that human nature can inflict on someone and they express that in very different ways. They can tell that they’re sort of on the same level of messed up but they cannot see eye-to-eye and there’s going to be a fight there at some point.
Lou Taylor Pucci: Yeah, we recognize that we’re both scared of each other in a way but also attracted to each other and think each other are dangerous.
PopHorror: I just have to ask, who chose Vonna’s hair?
Daniel Stamm: So, how that happened is that I listened to the podcast that the movie is based on, Knifepoint Horror – Lockbox, and the Vonna character was in there. It was the most striking thing. But I have a very bad memory and sometimes I use that as a tool and in this case, I listened to that podcast once and then never again, so when months later we were doing the movie, a lot of stuff was as I remembered it in my head. This is the hair that I remembered from the podcast which later turned out was not the hair in the podcast at all, but I just loved the look so much. I had dreadlocks when it was still okay, it was a different time, and I loved those dreadlocks until you finally could pluck them off your head. They had been rotting from the inside. That’s how we went with Vonna. Once we committed to it, we committed to it. Our producer was the entire film, “Is it too much?” And we were like, “Yes, it’s too much! We love it!”
Katharine Isabelle: There was definitely a process of figuring out how much we could pile on top of her head and how big, and Kearie (producer Peak) was always like, “Can we just make it slightly smaller? None of this is going to fit into any frame.”
Thank you so much to Daniel, Katharine, and Lou for taking the time to chat with us! Lockbox is in theaters today!
