PopHorror Let's Get Scared
I love movies about grief because it just confirms for me that everyone deals with it differently, and it’s never easy. Grief is so suffocating. It pulls you under like wet clothes and heavy boots and leaves you struggling for breath. The Surrender, written and directed by Julia Max, and starring Colby Minifie (The Boys) and Kate Burton (Grey’s Anatomy), is a film about how one family takes extremely drastic measure to deal with their grief, and the dire consequences they must pay.
When the family patriarch dies, a grieving mother and daughter risk their lives to perform a brutal resurrection ritual and bring him back from the dead.
To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Julia, Colby, and Kate via Zoom about making the film together, the mother and daughter dynamic, horror movies, and more!
PopHorror: I loved The Surrender so I’m super excited to talk with you guys about it today. My first question is for you, Julia. The Surrender feels like it was a personal film for you to make. What sparked the idea for it and how did the project come about?
Julia Max: This was loosely inspired by what my mother and I went through when my stepfather passed away, so it was very personal.
PopHorror: I hope not the ritual!
Julia Max: Thankfully, no! That’s where we go purely into fantasy. But my mom did hire a death doula, and I didn’t know what that was at the time, and I was really nervous about it. Of course, my mind went to the worst-case scenario and that’s what this movie is. It was lovely in real life. Thank God nothing like the movie.
PopHorror: That’s good! Colby and Kate, what intrigued you about the script and made you want to be a part of the project?
Colby Minifie: I read it and just felt really connected to it because the first half of the movie is a really well-built relationship between a mother and daughter losing the male patriarch of the family. I was hooked. I was like, this is really well written. It feels like a two-hander drama, and I was sold. Then when it gets into the second half of the movie, I was like, Oh shit! Okay! Now we’re doing this! I love things that get heightened like that because I just love diving into stuff like that. I think it’s so fun and when you just fully commit to that kind of thing, it’s like a whole different kind of catharsis to perform it. It just feels really exciting and fun. And also, when I had a meeting with Julia, I was floored by how prepared she was. I really liked the artistic approach that she pitched to me and you can see it in the movie, locking off the camera in the first half of the movie and just letting Kate and I play as if it were a piece of theater. That, to me, is a dream scenario. To have trust in us and to give us that freedom, I was like, I’m in, I’m sold. And then Julia was like, “It’s Kate Burton playing your mother,” and I was like, Ah! Couldn’t be happier. I got so excited. So, yeah, I loved making this movie. Truly loved it.
Kate Burton: It was a dream to make, Tiffany. For me too, when I chatted with Julie and I said, “Who is playing Megan?” And she said, “Colby Minifie,” and I looked at Colby’s photograph and I’d seen her before. I just went, “Oh, yeah, I can spend a month with this one, no problem!” Basically, from the minute we met each other, there was an instant adoration. Mutual Adoration Society. We rehearsed for many days. We worked on script. Julia very graciously shifted some things. So by the time we started shooting, and this is very rare, we were juicy with it. We were already in it and it just felt very seamless. Very much like breathing, which is the way you ideally want to feel about anything that you work on. We all come from the theater originally, and I truly believe that theater actors are the ones that just have a different level of chops. It’s funny because this felt the closest to a theatrical experience in terms of the intensity of the collaboration every single day. And also it was a joyful set to work on even though we were telling this dark, dark story that we couldn’t wait to get to work everyday, which is honestly, not always the case. An incredible experience. And to be honest, I took the film because I was living in LA at the time and it was just right near my house, and I was like, oh this works out very nicely! It also just worked out perfectly. It sort of felt like it was meant to be. When we made this film, like we make lots of other things in our lives, you think, oh I had such a fantastic experience, oh this is so exciting to work in this beautiful collaboration, maybe this will be the extent of our experience with it. Maybe this will be it. We will have had this wonderful experience and that will be it, and then to have the news come to us that oh my goodness, people are resonating with this film. Like oh my goodness, it’s going to SXSW. Oh my goodness, we’re all going to SXSW! I felt like Cinderella at the ball. I just felt like, oh my God. I had some experience with something like this before but not a lot and so this is very thrilling because this was a labor of love. Julia’s incredible vision for this film is what spurred us through everything and to have it be so well received is just… Oh my God. It’s what you dream of when you’re doing this work. Even if it hadn’t been, we had an amazing experience doing it, but it certainly is lovely that people are so enjoying it.
PopHorror: I’m glad that you both brought up the relationship between Megan and Barbara and that you guys rehearsed to prepare for it, because I absolutely loved the chemistry between mother and daughter. The interactions, the back-and-forth banter, the wit. There are several times that I laughed watching it and was like, Wow! That was a zinger! I love hearing that you forged a friendship before starting because it’s very evident in the final product. Just one last question for all of you. What is your favorite scary movie?
Julia Max: Oh, that’s such a hard one! Oh man, I feel like you need to pick a category, like what kind are you talking about? Are you talking about comedies? Are you talking about the classics? Are you talking about new ones? Oh my God. Oh my gosh, you guys. So much pressure. Colby, do you know what yours is?
Colby Minifie: It depends on what you mean by scary.
PopHorror: I like to use the word scary, but really the one that you watch more than others, the one that is your favorite and that you always go back to.
Kate Burton: Okay, I can speak. I know exactly the answer. Psycho.
Julia Max: Oh, Psycho is great.
Kate Burton: Psycho. It just never ceases to amaze me.
Julia Max: Yeah, it’s fantastic. I know this is such a cliche, but I can’t help it. The Shining. I watch it almost every year. I love it so much. It’s so good.
Colby Minifie: I was going to say Iron Will.
Kate Burton: Wooowww
Colby Minifie: It’s about this guy racing the Iditarod. It’s terrifying! It’s like crazy frostbite… Anyway, I haven’t seen it since I was 10, but it was really scary at the time.
Thank you so much to Julia, Kate, and Colby for taking the time to chat with us. The Surrender premieres on Shudder today!
