Nine years after his first film _Martha Marcy May Marlene_, Canadian filmmaker Sean Durkin has graced the world yet again with his second feature length film.
_The Nest_ stars Carrie Coon and Jude Law as Allison and Rory, a married couple who relocates their family from upstate New York to England. After being released earlier this year, the thriller/drama is available on demand today, November 17th.
Hear what the director, screenwriter and producer has to say about his film _The Nest_ below!
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**I wanted to start off my talking about this family. When I watched it it felt like I was watching a real family, it felt almost more real than some of the families on reality shows. How did you tap into each character and construct them when you were writing this?**
I spent a lot of time just thinking about family \[laughs\]. Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about family dynamics and gender roles and the family orders and characteristics that people take on being siblings. I think it's always fascinated me. I think, even as a kid both of my parents come from families with loads of siblings, and watching those things play out in those nuances. I always studied them and just looked to explore. In the writing process, once I decide what the family structure is, then I just kind of hone in on the details and just try to make everybody feel truthful to their age, to the year they were born, to their upbringing and really think through who they are and just grounded in details that I know, whether they’re personal details or things that I see in people around me are, you know, remember from childhood or whatever it is. And I think the best way to do that is to ground through specificity, to take something that's so specific to something that I know is true. And I think in doing so it makes it feel quite universal, because it's so specific that people either connect to it and say, “Oh, I remember doing that,” or “I've seen that,” or “someone in my family does that” or just sort of sensing it's truthful because it's based on something.
Jude Law as “Rory” and Carrie Coon as “Allison” in Sean Durkin’s THE NEST. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.
**In this film, from what I noticed, there wasn't a ton of crazy editing. There were a lot of long shots where it didn't cut much and it almost felt as if we were a fly on the wall watching this family. What was the inspiration behind that style choice?**
I think I'm just drawn to a more minimalist approach. I don't often see a need for a lot of shots and angles. And I think it comes from a place of performance. You just get better performances when there's less technical stuff getting in the way. I really trust my actors. I hire the people I think would be the best and then I give them the room to do what they do and I kind of work with them and whatever their process is. So we don't do much rehearsal, we do no rehearsal before except for sort of talking and background work. And then on the day, we rehearse in the morning, before we shoot. And I really just like to find the scene that way, and then shoot it in the best way that captures that scene and sort of see where the emotion is, see where the emphasis of the scene is and make my decisions. Although, I have everything planned beforehand, I go in on the morning and kind of forget about it and let the scene tell me what to shoot. I think in doing so, it enables the actors to really play it out and live it and live the scene and find it as opposed to sort of forcing them to do it over and over again with their close up and their medium shot and their wide shot and all that stuff. So I just like to take sort of as much of the technical burden out of it as possible.
**What would a typical day on set look like for this movie then?**
Usually my set sites are very, very calm, quite relaxed, often very fun \[laughs\]. I just built a really great family around me, people who I trust, and they're great collaborators. And so there's a real understanding going in and real chemistry all the way across the board. And so it's quite straightforward. I mean, we come in first thing with the actors and do rehearsal and find it, but let the actors work, find the scene, find the space. I never tell them where to sit, or what to do with the room. We've decided where we're shooting it and what the space is, and then we'll just rehearse it until we basically get a sense of it. I don't like to rehearse it till it's ready to go, because then we go away and let the team light and doing any dressing and then come back and shoot and pretty much do a scene, I mean, for the most part, I'd say we do a scene in the morning, and then a scene after lunch. Maybe two or three scenes. But we really just tried to focus on one setup on one time per half day.
**You talked about this a little bit earlier, but you drew some inspiration for this from your own childhood and moving around. I read that you set it specifically in 1986. What did that year look like for you or what was going on in the world where 1986 was the year that this film was going to take place in?**
Nothing specific for me. In 1986, I was only four, going on five... I think. My math is bad \[chuckles\]. So I don't have any sort of concrete memories from that time. I moved from England to New York in the early 90s and they were very different places. It was more the sudden change of environment, in that mood, that had a big impact on me. In 2012, I went back to England to make a show called _Southcliffe_ and I noticed that New York and London were very similar at that point in time. So the two places that kind of merged in a way just come a lot closer culturally than they were when I was a kid. And so the starting point for the film was wanting to explore that. So once I did that, I knew I wanted it to be about the values of the time and about Rory's character in this American dream that he was chasing and sort of coming back home and returning. It ended up being 1986 because I was just researching the time and what was happening in London in 1986 was that there was a lot of deregulation and privatization. There was something called the Big Bang, which was when the London markets were deregulated and could trade global companies could come in and trade there. So I wanted to set it around that point in time because of that. So that Rory's character has this pitch like that he can come in and be the sort of bridge between America and England because he knew both places, which was something that was happening at the time. So that's how it got to 1986.
**You started working on this film in 2014 writing wise, do you have a favorite memory from the past six years of putting this film together? Whether that was on set or before you even started production?**
Hmm. I mean, so many. It's hard to pinpoint one. No, I love being on set. I love being in the moment, creating it and letting it live. I mean, I can't film it so it's a living process. And for me the height of that is just being on set and working with actors and capturing the image. I think the most special day that I can think of was there was one day where we shot everything with Jude and Carrie that they did in their bedroom in England, in the English house. We shot it all in one day, so it was very intimate, it was very small. It was basically just me and Matthew, sound, art, few people, and Jude and Carrie. It was like watching an entire relationship unfold in a day. So it in a way felt like working on a play a little bit. It was very, very special and just incredible performances and just very intimate energy. It was really, really memorable.
Jude Law as “Rory” and Carrie Coon as “Allison” in Sean Durkin’s THE NEST. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.
**I watched the trailer before I watched the film and a lot of the comments on the trailer on YouTube were, “Where can I watch this?” And it's coming out on demand soon, so what are you most proud of in that film that you want people to see?**
I set out to make a very, very real family drama. That is I want it to capture the complications and the nuance of family dynamic, and about a family that's fighting to stay together. Pitching that can be very challenging. I mean, it sounds sort of straightforward, but there's not a lot of great films about families that are truthful. And I wanted to make something that looks into the difficult corners of family dynamics and expose them and talk about them. And I think we were able to do that in a really real and in a real unique way. So I feel I feel very proud of that.
**To someone who hasn't seen the trailer yet, or hasn't heard much about the film, but is looking to watch it, how would you describe the essence of it?**
Yeah, I would, I would say... man, I'm so bad at boiling things down. I would say it's a look at a very specific family in a very specific moment in time that examines what happens to this family when they move between England and the US in the mid 80s. And it examines the dynamics that we set up within a family and questions what happens once the secrets lying beneath the surface are exposed.
**Not only did you direct and write this film, you also co-produced it. How rewarding is it to see this film that you have so much involvement in, that you created, get called things like, “one of the best films of the year” by Vanity Fair?**
Yeah, it's very rewarding. I mean, I'm a big believer in focusing on the work and only the work and because all you can do is make something and put it out into the world and and beyond that you can't control the response you can't control if people like it, what they think about it, what they say about it. So I just believe in working really hard to make something truthful, honest, original, and of course when people respond to that positively and you put your heart and soul into making it, of course it's absolutely rewarding.
**I want to ask you about your next project that you're working on, which is a film also about a family, but I'm sure it has a very different dynamic. It's about the Von Erich family. What was the inspiration behind putting that together?**
As a kid, I was really into wrestling. And I was living in England, WWF was televised, but I was really into NWA wrestling, which was more regional wrestling. It was harder to see and so I used to have to really search it out, so I find bookstores that sell VHS tapes and magazine stores that had magazines. I had this sort of fascination with this time in this world. I remember going and getting a magazine once and opening it and seeing that one of these brothers had died. It had been a few of them that had died at that point, so it really haunted me. I remember just opening the pages and seeing it. As I was writing _The Nest,_ I don't know why, but I thought about them and I just thought okay, maybe there's something there. And so I started to look into it and started to go back and dig into more of the family history. That moment has always stayed with me from childhood, so I just wanted to explore like, what happened to this family? It's a family that's described as being cursed. What does that mean? How is the family cursed? And so yeah, I just continued to look into it and start to build the project around it.
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