Synopsis
Interview
Cinema Scholars’ own Glen Dower sat down with director Matt Vesely and star Lily Sullivan to discuss their new film, Monolith. They talk about shooting on a short schedule and small budget, building tension through restraint, and how it feels for Lily to be heralded as an up-and-coming ‘scream queen’ after her success in the smash hit Evil Dead Rise, among other topics.
(Edited for content and clarity)
Lily Sullivan:
Glen Dower:
Lily Sullivan:
Good!
Matt Vesely:
Glen Dower:
Lily Sullivan:
Over to Matt!
Matt Vesely:
And hopefully, it goes well. To give it a quick summary, it’s about a journalist who’s kind of disgraced and retreats to her family home to work on a kind of click-baiting podcast. She’s trying to resurrect her career, and she receives an email about a strange alien artifact that’s appeared around the globe. As she delves into this story, she starts to kind of lose herself inside of it and discover that maybe the story is turning on her. That’s the pitch!
Glen Dower:
There it is. Lily, when you received the script, were you surprised or was it part of the pitch to you, that you were solely onscreen 99% of the time, one way or another, just you?
Lily Sullivan:
Glen Dower:
Matt Vesely:
But I think you’re right about the restraint, it was an exercise in restraint in many ways, and there’s something very terrifying about that. But all those references you list of, yeah, those kind of creeping shots, there’s these kind of unmotivated camera moves that we do where the camera just pulls away from Lily or just moves. It’s got a mind of its own, and all those things were about creating a feeling of her being observed or watched or the sense that there’s another presence kind of manipulating you as a viewer. That was interesting.
It’s a story about a podcaster kind of manipulating a story for her ends, and we like the idea that the audience is being manipulated as well and we recognize, as filmmakers, that we are maybe playing a trick on you as well. Layering it through in those ways is interesting. I mean, all those influences are there.
The Shining is one of my favorite movies. Arrival. We talked about another Denis Villeneuve film called Enemy, which is a very small kind of claustrophobic film, which I love. So that was all there. And there’s a Michael Hanneke film called Cache that I love, which is again, about restraint. Hanneke presents horrifying things in a very kind of plain way. He just sort of sets the camera and then just lets things happen and there’s something very terrifying about the banality of horror.
Glen Dower:
Lily Sullivan:
This was probably the least I’ve done in a sense of just this state and place that she’s in, how little we kind of explore these intimate relationships. It’s just this level of isolation, the way she chooses to connect than the way she chooses to kind of cut herself off. I found myself sitting more in her energetic space, this place of desperation and need for her professional life to be salvaged. It was just more than ever before. I think, as well, being alone and not having to relate so hard with actors and talking about background.
I found myself more in this state of ‘ick’ and feeling a lack of self-worth and narcissistic tendencies. It’s bizarre, like the whole experience of shooting it in fifteen days and shooting it in chronological order. And because Lucy’s writing and Matt’s direction was just so specific, she was doing this before, and this relationship to that has made her, there was so much activity and doing and going, and it was just always just coming from wherever that was coming from. Just trying to find that specificity as opposed to carrying the baggage. Also in denial in regards to family.
Glen Dower:
Matt Vesely:
Yes, it was more about an independent film. It has got a lot of value from hitting up the festival circuit. So we did festivals for about a year, so I think it says we’re a 2022 film on IMDB. We only screened once in ‘22, right at the end it was at the Adelaide Film Festival, which is our local festival that helped finance the film. So we had a local premier there. And then our international premiere was South by Southwest last year in March in Austin. And then you just do a year of doing the festival circuit.
So I got to go to South Korea and I went to Spain, and there’s so much value for us to get to meet people and connect with other filmmakers. It’s just a really rewarding part of an indie film finding its audience. So it seems like a long time or it’s had trouble, but it’s just actually just part of the journey of a film like this and working out when you want to release it. So this was always the plan. We weren’t stymied by Covid or anything like that. We came out in Australia in October, which was exciting coming out at home. And then to come to America, I’ll be over there next week. It’s super exciting and it’s just such a big genre audience there, the biggest one in the world. So it’s cool to tap into that for sure.
Glen Dower:
And finally, Lily, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a certain modern horror classic that we at Cinema Scholars Towers all love and adore. Can you just tell us how it feels now, to be the new Scream Queen on the block, as the chainsaw-wielding heroine of Evil Dead Rise?
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