An apple pie doesn’t exactly look like a dessert in “Mine,” with Madeline (Eve Lindley) having to interrupt a routine of stretching out on a yoga mat to take it out of the oven. The crust may be perfectly golden as she sets it out to cool down in an empty house, but beyond the ominously large carving knife just off to the side at the ready to cut off a slice, the symbol of Americana doesn’t sit exactly right in the ultramodern home that Madeline lives in, with the camera in Jaclyn Moore’s terrifying short lurking about as if an intruder is on the loose, though it just could be that the threat is already inside the house.
It is a most auspicious directorial debut for Moore, a showrunner on such deliciously prickly potboilers of late such as “Nine Perfect Strangers” and “Based on a True Story,” packing a lifetime of dread into 13 tense minutes where in fact Madeline is visited by a violent intruder (Mark Duplass) who can find a different use for the knife than intended, but nothing is necessarily what it initially appears. “Mine” cuts deeper as a smart, subversive spin on a longtime horror trope as it becomes clear that Madeline and her attacker have a history, and while the former seems particularly vulnerable as a trans woman, having a sense of the worst thing that could possibly happen offers the freedom of no longer living in the fear of uncertainty and what may be perceived as weakness can suddenly emerge as strength. Not only is the presence of the usually genial Duplass especially unsettling, pulling on major “Creep” vibes here, but so too is Moore’s shrewd suggestion that as dangerous an encounter Madeline has with the intruder, it could be the aftermath that is even more perilous territory, working out why it is that it happened and the unexpected emotions that cropped up only when it wasn’t some hypothetical exercise but actually unfolding in real time.
Fitting for a film built around an incident that’s bound to have lasting reverberations, “Mine” is bound to linger in the mind for far longer than its brief run time and has already started to stand out on the festival circuit with its recent premiere at Moore’s hometown Cleveland Film Festival en route to the San Luis Obispo Film Fest this week. Moore kindly took the time to talk about her desire to get behind the camera for a film after accruing so much experience on sets of episodic series, telling a story in a way only she could and summoning suspense in reconsidering what is safe and what isn’t.
How did this come about?
It’s a very personal story and one of those films [where] I think the character even says at one point, “I feel like I don’t have any skin on.” That is the level of vulnerability I sometimes feel sharing this movie because it is such a personal look at how people — and certainly how I have struggled — dealt with traumatic things that have happened in the past. There’s actually two ways it came about — the first is as an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time based on my own life, but then like so many things in this business, ideas are great, but they’re not really anything until opportunity comes. But I wrote a feature that Mark Duplass was interested in and basically he said, you need to make a short that shows off some of what you can do as a director. I’ve show run a bunch, but I hadn’t directed and this idea that I’d been kicking around,had a lot in common, if not story-wise, thematically with the feature, so one plus one equals two. Mark was kind enough to agree to be in it and Jenee LaMarque, who is one of the executive producers on the film, was kind enough to encourage and support it and help make it happen. Everything came together from there.
We’re huge fans of Jenee since her debut feature “The Pretty One.”
I love Jenee and this movie would not happen without her. It’s Jenee’s house that we were in and Jenee and [her husband] Julian [Wass] was involved, doing the music, so I owe her so much. I couldn’t love her more.
It’s a short, so I can’t imagine there was a huge budget, but the house is unreal in terms of how perfectly it suits the story. Was there much production design involved?
It was a combination. The house is so beautiful and Jenee has such great taste, so there was some amount of inherited production design. But then Kelly [Wilcox] did great work as a production designer. She’s such a Swiss Army knife and she’s not a producer of this movie, but I think she’ll probably be a producer of everything I do from now on because she’s one of those people that does a little of everything. She did our hair and makeup. She shows up and just makes things happen. She did that here, taking what was already beautiful [with the house] and really accentuating it. Things like the gallery wall was not there, that we cut back to a couple times during the assault scene. We assembled that out of art that Jenee had, wanting to create something that captured an OCD feeling, having that wall be both beautiful, but then also ominous representing the organized mind part of the main character.
Was this interesting to structure? You generally work in episodic series and this has some interesting peaks that doesn’t exactly correspond with a traditional three-act structure.
The structure was baked into the idea. I really like the idea of playing an audience like a musical instrument sometimes and it’s something I learned a lot from Justin Simien doing “Dear White People,” the creator and showrunner of that show [adapted from his film of the same name]. The idea of being able to use audience’s expectations against them, like having an episode be particularly comedy forward and then suddenly pulling the rug out with the most dramatic moments of the show. In this case, it was the opposite. I really wanted to make a movie that was about safety, what safety looks like and the search for feeling safe that can be so difficult to know what’s okay and what’s not. So I wanted to make a movie about something that felt dangerous, but then was revealed to maybe be less dangerous than we thought and then something that felt very safe that was then revealed to maybe be not quite as safe as we thought because I think that’s often the experience of relationships. When you’re in a bad relationship, you don’t know it till you know it and when you’re hypervigilant because you’ve had bad relationships, sometimes you are worried about something being dangerous when it’s not. So I wanted to try to get into that mental headspace with this character.
What was it like bringing Eve Lindley into this?
Eve’s one of my best friends and I’ve loved her in everything she’s done — “National Anthem” and “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” just everything she does, she’s brilliant — so I’ve wanted to work with her for a while. I wrote this for her because I wanted to see her show the range that I know she has. And I liked the idea of showing both her scream queen bonafides, but also how charming and funny and warm she is. A lot of the ways we thought about this movie was like, it’s going to start as a movie that feels like the opening of “Scream” or “Repulsion,” and then becomes “Before Sunrise,” and then maybe become something else. It takes a specific kind of actress and actor to be able to play all sides of that and to both Eve and Mark’s credit, they are such versatile actors that are able to be so dark and scary and dramatic and scared in Eve’s case, but then also be like the most charming, wonderful rom-com cuties. I wanted to do that because it’s a movie about sexual assault and the kind of shadow it casts over you. And a lot of times, we have these ideas of what that looks like. It’s a stranger, it’s a monster, but a lot of times they’re the most charming people, and these things seem like opposites, but they actually live side by side.
Once you get Eve and Mark in a room together and see their dynamic together, does anything change in your thinking about this?
The script is pretty set, although they certainly played with it and I encouraged that because you want to capture what’s real on the day. But I think the biggest thing was finding the contours of that scene [they’re together] and where are the moments that the temperature changes in the room. Maybe it was scripted one way, but it wasn’t until we were in that room that I [thought], “Okay, this is actually the moment where I feel a change” and that’s just the experience I’ve had, certainly on TV shows too, where you [realize] things are just different when you get great actors saying the words and you start to feel what’s true. They both did that in spades.
The other part of it is it’s different when you’re imagining it in your head versus when you see Sarah Whelden, our DP who is a genius, some of the images she and I were able to come up with together and that she was able to bring to life so beautifully. How we’re perceiving moments changes based on what the frame is and what it looks like and she is so good at creating those images. That was another variable on the day of finding things.
The sound is also a really effective part of this – the rubber band that’s indicative of the OCD becomes a strong motif, but also there are echoes that you hear throughout. What was it like building that out?
Playing with the sound after the fact was so fun. JoAnne Yarrow, our editor, was somebody I met doing this and I worship at her altar now. She did so much of the sound design, and it’s not always the case that you have an editor that’s so attuned to that part of the storytelling. Sitting with her in the edit, just playing with the sound over and over, it was really remarkable finding things that we didn’t quite get on the day. There’s a sequence on the stairs when Eve is alone in the house and we ran out of time for getting the version of it we wanted, and that was a sequence that plays really well in the movie [now] through creative editing and sound. That was just JoAnna and I working together in post.
From what I understand, the Cleveland Film Festival debut was actually a homecoming. What’s it been like to start sharing this with audiences?
It was great. It’s such fun to show the film in my hometown at the theater I grew up going to and fell in love with indie film. It’s where I saw “Wet Hot American Summer” when I was a kid and the first time I went to “Rocky Horror,” dressed in drag, which as a trans woman now [I think] “Oh, this is surreal.” So full circle moment. [laughs] And I think it’s very watchable, but it’s tough subject matter, so it’s been interesting to hear reactions from people. It can be divisive, but in a way that I think is illuminating about its subject matter and I’m very proud of. I really like that and I’m excited for more people to see it.
“Mine” will next be screening at the San Luis Obispo Film Festival at the Downtown Centre Cinemas on April 24th at 8 pm and April 25th at 7:15 pm.