The Nelms Brothers Talk ‘Red Right Hand’

Well, welcome back to the Board goes to Hollywood. My name is Sunny I am culture editor at the Bulwark. And I’m very pleased to be rejoined today by the Nell’s brothers, who have a new movie out, red, right hand. It is on VOD now. We’re gonna we’re gonna talk about that here in a second, but, you you you folks may remember them as, the writers and directors, fat man, the, new Christmas classic, nouveau Christmas classic, everyone every Christmas, people people, you know, send me tweets.

They’re like, I love this movie. I’m glad you, you turned me onto it. So thanks for being back on the show, guys.

Honor to be here.

And we really appreciate your support on Fatman, man. That was awesome.

We, we got a new one here to talk about today. Red right hand, and what’s what what jumped out at me just looking the production notes on this one, was that this is, I think, the first feature film that you guys did not write. Is that is that correct?

We we did one before Waffle Street. We also collaborated with Autumn Mcalpin to write that one. But this is the first one that didn’t say that we haven’t written at all.

Yes. Yeah. So what was what go ahead. What was it about the script that jumped that you’re like, we can we gotta make this. This is this is what we’re doing next.

It is probably it’s the only script we’ve read so far. That we were so excited about the characters and the backdrop. And then, of course, you you the way that it was structured was so wonderful. Right? You in with this family, you get hooked into them, you’re hooked into the main character, and then he does this little switcheroo, where you see the come, and then he joins in with them.

And you’re wondering, well, where the hell is this going? Now I’m on now I’m doing jobs with this guy and these people. And then you start to see that it’s the queen pin trying to reel him back in. And then, of course, the sort of second half of the film, you know, you get toiler, you ramp you know, I don’t wanna go too deep into

it. Right?

I don’t wanna say, well,

too bad. But you start really ramping up the sort of action and tension and thriller elements of the film. Yeah.

But it’s it’s honestly, it’s Jonathan’s dialogue as characters. They le absolutely leaped off the page. It was a absolute page turner.

Because we wouldn’t have we wouldn’t have cared about those thriller attention action moments later if we weren’t so weren’t so sucked in by those characters earlier.

Yeah. I I’m glad you mentioned that. I wanna read a passage from Ed Zwick’s new autobiography, which is out now. And he there’s a great line in here, where he is talking to Sydney Pollock, the the director actor, Sydney Pollock, about something in a script. And Sydney Pollock’s like, this script’s not working.

This is not working. And Edspick’s like, no. No. It worked. It’s good.

The plot is good. And then he he turns to Zwick and he says, listen kid. Plod is the rotting meat. The burglar throws to the dog so he can climb over the fence and get the jewels, which are characters, which I think is just a great, this great visceral image. So what about it was what what were the jewels of these characters when you were when you were looking them.

What what what what jumped out at you is like these are, people that everyone needs to know.

For for Cash, I think it’s his past. He’s got such a rough past, and you get the idea that he’s got a lot a PTSD from that past and having him being pulled back into where he has to confront that and go deal with it and go do it again. But this time for his family, was really drew me in, like, really sucked me in. The the the other, Fenny, of, of Savannah. I thought that he was really sympathetic.

You’ve seen those characters before, I don’t think you’ve seen those characters in that environment with those kind of stakes, at least I hadn’t. And then the daughter, you know, the sort of the she’s the naivete. She’s also the entrepreneur, and she comes into by the end of it, having to, in our experience, push yourself to a place that I wasn’t expecting in that script.

And then, obviously, big we were we were like, wow, if we got the right powerful actor for this, this could be a performance of a lifetime. Well, what

Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Yeah. Well, and and so that look, it’s a twofold situation there because it’s kind of a center logistic thing happened because we had sat down with Orlando after small town crime and really hit it off with them. And we were kind of looking for something to do with them. And so when Jonathan’s script landed on the desk, like, oh, wow. We could get Orlando.

And we’ve never seen Orlando do anything like this. And that really excited us.

And we were like, I hope to god he likes this because if he does, it would be incredible just to see him doing some of these scenes. Like, we were just really about having him do that character. And then with Andy, she was on our list of, like, okay, it would be amazing if if

because she was an outside the box pick, but I’m and I honestly was like, man, the chances of her doing that are so remote. This doesn’t

seem like what she wants to do.

Like, we’re probably just wasting our time with a submission dir.

But her agent passed it to her unbeknownst to us, because it was going around to start talking about casting. And she pasted her and said, Hey, I think you might dig this. And then Andy came to us and said, guys, I know you’ve never seen me do a role like this, but I have this in me. Just asked my kids. And she was like, I I want I want to dive deep into this.

So we had the first Zoom with her. And, man, she brought a little bit of that big cat wither. She was wearing dark leather pants. She had the edge with her. It was a very pleasant conversation, but you could see that that she was gonna tear this roll part.

Yeah.

And I think for us, like, you know, a script on the page, it’s the alchemy of the characters in the translation. Really get us excited.

And so, obviously, you’ve got the two leads there, but then it’s like, you know, us casting like Scott Hayes and Garrett Dillahunt and Brian Garrity and Jeremy rashford, James Lafferty, and then finding Chapelopes, finding Chapel. That was another one that was, you know, we didn’t have anybody in mind for that role. So it was like, okay, let’s open it up, and we just started taking calls and meetings with actors. And, you know, she was there were there were a handful of very prominent actors that age group that we’d seen do wonderful things that wanted the role. And Chapel just she beat him out, man.

She was just that good.

Well, that’s that has to be, a tough role to to cast, but also, I mean, you know, as the directors, you you have to be a little bit worried that she’s up there against, you know, a guy who has been in the Lord of the Rings movies and the pirates of the Caribbean series, Andy Mcdowell, you know, one of the one of the, great actresses of of her time. And then this is basic this is her first movie. Yeah?

Yeah.

Yeah. It wasn’t first movie. Yeah. I think something else came out where she had a a smaller part in it before us, but this was the first one she shot. And I and absolutely.

Right? I mean, look, man, it’s a leap of faith. And you do you do all you can through this audition process. And and at the ultimate, Okay. Well, hopefully, when we get she and Orlando and Andy and Scott and everybody in the same room, if this translates

and she can hold her own. I will say there was one moment when we were doing a Zoom call with

her. Yeah.

That, I think it was our second Zoom call. It was like the callback zoom call in which we said we said,

Okay. It sounds a little more about it.

We want you to push your emotions a little bit more in this moment, and it was one of the more intense moments in the script in the in the movie. And she was like, okay, okay, okay. And her said something to her. And she goes, no, dad. No.

No, it’s gonna be real. And she, like, closed her eyes. And we’re like, oh, shit. She closes her like, goes to a different place, envisions where she’s at, opens her eyes, comes back on and was like, killed it. We were just like, okay.

There’s something here.

And if she had the confidence to ask, you know, to ask for that time in front of us, to take the moment, to find the character, and then can deliver the character. In that circumstance, but, like, she’s gonna be fine when she gets in in the room with everybody else.

And, and, and you hope, right? Cause there’s, there’s two things that could happen when an actor gets in there with, with another that’s a lot more experienced. They can either rise even further or they can start to fall apart and she rose. She rose the occasion every time.

That, I mean, that’s that’s great. So let’s let’s talk about the the leads here because you, you know, you’ve got, again, you’ve got Orlando Bloom, and he’s been in a couple of movies in very interesting roles for him. Again, kind of of his, comfort zone recently. He was in, the outpost, the Rod Louie film. I don’t know if you guys saw that, but he’s he he’s he’s great in that.

And then he has kind of a supporting role in Brand Theresa, which was unexpected. Like, again, it’s just different than what he what he is usually doing And here, you’ve got him playing. Basically, it’s it’s like a character out of a Walter Hill movie Yeah. From the from the seventies. Right?

Like this kinda southern backwoods guy, tough. I again, I just in my notes, I just have like Southern Orlando Bloom exclamation point. It was So when you were when you were sitting down to work with him, what were you what were you emphasizing? What were you trying to get him to do with the character?

I think a big I think a big part of the transformation for him was the dialect, of course, you know, and he worked for, like, three months getting that dialect down, and we thought he had just nailed it. I mean, he was recording locals

he was trying varying degrees of the of the accent, throughout these these sort of like various takes he would send us. Yeah, a wonderful dialect coach. And then, you know, when we got the physicality of the character, he obviously had a bunch of ideas on what the hair or the face hear the the physical stature of this guy because he needed to be capable on his job, and he’s obviously, like, in manual labor. And then the it the real magic started happening when he was collaborating with the makeup team and the costume because when he found those boots that sort of gave cash, this sort of, like, clunky, like, stride. And then the the tattoo placement where he and Skye Hayes really dug in together, and they’d pick the

tattoos that they would match and, like, really built their characters out through the ink, on their bodies. You you asked you asked what what was it about him that we liked. Right? What was it about him that drew us that drew us to him for that character? When we sat down with him, we had, like, a couple hours, and we sat down.

And there was when you’re sitting down with him and you’re thinking about the characters that you’ve seen him play, there were assets of him that we could see that were awesome and interesting that we’d never seen on screen before. And when we got that script, we instantly just said, Holy shit. Like, I think we could sort of reinvent him in this, in a way. You know what I mean? And I he saw it as well.

He was just like, oh, yeah. I’ve never done anything like this. This is a fucking bad ass movie. Is what he told us right? That that he’s like, this this is gonna be a lot of fun.

So he was totally down for this transformation, which he he sunk his teeth into, and we were hoping for that, you know?

And, the other the other the other character note I had in my in my notebook is I’m, as I’m watching the movie is evil Andy Mcdowell, which again, like, unusual, not not precisely what, you know, folks who, loved her in Groundhog Day and everything else would expect Alright. So you you’ve got her on the zoom. She’s wearing the leather pants. It still has to be it has to be, again, this is a leap of faith, casting her in in this movie.

I mean, all all I could all we could say is like, you you get a vibe, you sit down with a person, you look in their eyes, you see what they’re throwing at you.

They’re swearing. They can do it.

If there’s an appetite there, and it’s a hundred percent genuine, and you can feel that, and you can kinda see it and roll. It worked. It just it just works. You Jeff, you’re just like, and you just gotta trust your gut, and that’s really what Ian and I do. If it’s if we both turn to each other after the meeting and go, that’s our person.

It it it can’t question it twice. You can’t over analyze it because then you’ll start talking yourself out of it.

And she she wasn’t big cat on the call, but we got a version of what what big cat could have been. It was obviously a lot more subdued and it was just a person, but she was giving us flares. She was giving us moments. It was by July. Then we were, of course.

And we were just like, okay. We we see this. I could see this now. She was giving us these little edgy moments when she was talking to us. Totally pleasant.

A blast.

Yeah.

We were all laughing the whole time and having a great time and talking about the characters and stuff, but she would give us these little flares and you’re just like, oh, shit.

Yeah. I remember we had similar situation with, like, Walton. Yes. That’s, like, we were sitting at a coffee shop and, like, Walton, like, stands up and becomes the skinny man. And we’re like, oh, man.

Like, this is our dude. Like, it’s when that moment happens, right? You’ll see a bunch of actors, but when that moment happens, you have to to listen to it. It’s like, it’s there. That’s this is the perfect storm.

Go.

Well, it’s it’s funny you just mentioned. Alright. So you see Walton Goggins in a in a coffee shop. The these inter these, auditions were over zoom, have things changed forever in terms of casting and all that, when you’re when you’re sitting down to make a movie like this, because I I feel like the Zoom interview audition process is just fundamentally so much different from how things used to be and being able to see that physicality. Like, how does that how does that work now differently than it did in the in the before time and the long, long ago?

But I do think, you’re absolutely right. A Zoom meeting is harder to train late and get the essence in an in person conversation. But, you know, look, we’ve been doing them a while now, and, we’re all getting better at it. And, you know, I’d love would love to see it go back the other way. Absolutely.

And I think, you know, hopefully, it feels like it’s kinda going that way. But there is something just you know, it’s really convenient to do it over Zoom. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

When you’re in Kentucky, you know, you know, you can’t fly out to play to meet an actor, you know?

That’s that’s what I was gonna say too. There’s a there’s a convenience to it. There’s a, a speed to it. It’s like, you know, we’re in Kentucky prepping or, you know, she’s in North Carolina, you know, or we’re in LA. It’s just it’s hard to it’s the great thing about it is now you can span that gap with, you know, expediency and and some kind of some kind of quality.

Right? Some kind of being able to see them do their thing and meet them in person as a person via video, rather than at least a phone call, you

know? Yeah. And, hey, and it expands the talent pool for sure. I mean, that’s Yes. You know.

Yeah.

Yeah. It wouldn’t even been possible if it if it had to be in person.

Yeah. I don’t know we would have because Chapel was a few states away, you know. So I don’t it’s not like she was gonna be able to drive up and and audition for us either. So if we would I don’t know if we would have found her either. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned, or we talked a little bit about some of the, you know, the, predecessors here, some of the influences. So when when you are sitting down and you’re explaining to somebody, this is this is what this movie is like. This is what, the vibe we’re going for?

How would you, how would you do that? What are what are some of your influences here? What are some of the the films you would recommend people? If people like x they’ll like this.

You wanna talk about some of those those things we’ve watched that we were that we were that we were because these it’s it’s interesting because it’s always things we’re looking for in a film too, right, is that it’s not exactly quantifiable. You know what I mean? Because that

You’re like, oh, it’s this part’s kinda like that. That part’s kinda like that. Exactly. And we’ll go and we’ll watch, like, a place beyond the Pines for this one. We watch Wind River, a few others, you know, like, a ton of others.

We have, like, fifteen or twenty film. We were

watching Scorsese’s bringing out the I mean, for a different reason, obviously, but no one’s driving around in an ambulance. But we were we were watching a lot of different films for a lot of different looks. We watched we watched probably about a dozen films for handheld aesthetic, because we wanted to use handheld on the family. And we’ve And we

wanna get it

Yeah. Yeah. And there’s, you know, there’s, there’s great handheld. And it was almost at that point. We’d never we haven’t we hadn’t really used handheld in that way before.

It’s like a actual visual theme. So when we were heading into it, we were like, let’s watch, let’s watch as many handheld films as we can. Let’s watch the ones because we we didn’t really like handheld sitting there saying, Hey, we wanna use handheld on this to try to fight and do it well. We’d actually finally seen a couple of films.

That was is like we started to see movies where we liked it and we’re like, oh, wow. We should really, like, I think this aesthetic for this particular movie would be really great.

Because handheld does a does a good job of draw a good hand has a good job of drawing you in. Ban held bad handheld has a has a good does a good job of making you sick.

Take you out.

And making you feel like it doesn’t feel cinematic, you know. But good good handheld is cinematic, and it’s done really well. And you’re like, oh my god. Okay. I’m not only am I not only does it feel like a movie I’m being sucked in as if I’m there, you know?

Yeah.

It can be of add a little bit more voyeuristic, intimacy to it.

Well, that’s a so what was it about? What was it those scenes with the family that made you wanna wanna experiment with handheld as a as a visual idea.

I mean, we just wanted it to be more intimate, more woristic. We wanted you to feel like you were sitting in the room with them. We did we didn’t want you to be distressed acted by fancy camera moves. You know, these are sort of the some of the things that really led to this these decisions.

And when when we did get to the and sequences or some of the some of the bigger sequences where we did wanna do a few camera moves. I think it was fine because we were trying to sort of, use a cinematic language to show, you know, not just like scope and tension and reveal. And, you know, we’re trying to use those more cinematic conventions for for tension and and surprise. And like I said, reveals, you know, like, we we were just really trying to be conscious of we were moving our camera and why.

And then we really we really wanted to use a a a pretty big juxtaposition by going with some big sweeping, drumstick stuff as well. So you would have this, like, hi. Over the head, you could see the canopies of the trees and, like, really open it up and then, bam, dig down into that more intimate photography on the ground.

It was really fun to use during the action sequences because we’re big fans of having the geography of the action, you know, at your at your right on the tip of your mind. Oh, I know. He’s over here. Because I for us, in those action sequences, it adds a lot attention to know where everybody’s at where all your players are at and how they’re moving and where that person is and juxtaposition to that person. It just makes it a lot more fun to back the sequence, and there’s a lot of tension built of like, oh my god.

He’s right over there. And your mind’s just going a mile a minute, you know, keeping up with it because you can, which is fun.

The the drone stuff is interesting because I really do feel like we are, you know, we we have a new tool here. The first kind of new real new tool to do things visually, in in a long time. I mean, it reminds me I don’t know, the introduction of, steady cam or whatever. There there’s, like, there’s, like, a new thing that we can use to, tell a story visually. So when you are there with, when you’re there with the drones, you’re trying to figure out, you know, okay, this is what we’re gonna do with this.

How does that work? I I’m fascinated by this, and I don’t have language for it because no like, nobody’s really written about, you know, the the the Bulwark that I guys like Michael Bay, or, the, the Russo brothers, whatever, are doing with drones as a way of both, like, creative intimacy, like using using it fluidly to get intimacy, but also using it to get the scope and the scale of everything. So when you’re sitting down I’m sorry. This is a very long question. When you’re sitting down with the drones and trying to figure out how to use them, how to make it work within the language of the film, what are you considering?

What are you trying to do

with it? So for us, it is it gives that, elevated perspective, right, where you can get a a huge sweeping vision of where you’re at in the top topography of it, and then it could also tie it together many elements into once, the opposite of the archdrip. I just think for us, it’s that hard juxtap to position. Right? And it also creates this great energy, like, in the intro of the film with some of the motorcycle stuff.

Right? You get these sweeping things. You’re kinda bird’s eye view through the top of the trees. I it’s just I don’t I for us look, what Michael Bay and and some of the Russo’s and some of these folks that really take drones and, like, throw them through a house and do all that stuff, like, amazing, right? Amazing technical accomplishments.

But for us in this movie, we didn’t want the the that sort of flashy photography to distract from the story.

Yeah. I thought I thought

a lot of the drone alerts that

we did was fun to use because it it in a in a bigger film with a lot setup, you can get those shots with cranes and jibs. And we got this good track. Whereas helicopters right, it tried to back work. But when we’re when we’re having to move as fast as we can with as little budget as we had, and, you know, we had a we had a significant amount of money if if you’re an independent filmmaker, we had a good for for this, it’s, you know, you have to if you’re gonna make an action film in this size. But, it allowed us to do a lot quicker ups, obviously, because there’s not track, there’s not a gym, there’s not a, and a lot less crew to run those drones and get those angles and those perspectives that we usually wouldn’t have been able to get.

Yep.

And it just comes our storyboard process when we’re like, oh, wow. What do we wanna see here? Right? So we were like, oh, wow. Let’s go elevated high.

We wanna see the, you know, cash zipping towards the farm. We’ve got the canopy of trees, the motorcycles zipping through them, and then we wanna see where he’s going in the horizon.

And a lot of times, you know, this is our first time using as much drone workers have. And thankfully, we we got to use it because honestly, if we were the film we are, the size we are, we wouldn’t have had such dynamic because of the time and money it takes to get their setups.

It also opened it up. Right? I mean, if you shot the whole movie from the ground, you’d feel smothered. You’d feel like you couldn’t get the open the land.

How am I gonna see these four or five players all in the same shot? And we do have these nice moments where you can kinda see the landscape for and before we pop into the story we’re running with. But yeah, it it was it was it was great to have for this movie, in particular, because of how much land we were all this was playing on at the end of the movie.

There is there is challenges, though, in that, you’ve gotta pick your days. Right? And and that was a challenge for us, and we did end up overcoming it by finding a crew member that was a licensed drone operator so we could have the drone eventually, essentially any day we wanted at any time. That’s that’s challenging you’re sitting there looking at your script. And it’s like, okay.

Well, what two days do you want the drone? It’s like, well, that’s not gonna work. Like, two days on all, you know, thirty one day, thirty one and be shoot.

Now most people end up with, like, one or two wide sweeping shots in odd moments or one or two moments that work in another odd moment because that scene just happened all in that day.

Yeah. They’re, like, jamming in these drone shots because, well, these are the two days we have it. So we’re shooting it and seeing you better get that fucking phone shot? One twenty seven reason. We gotta put it in there.

Right? And so, like, we’re, like, not gonna work. Like, we gotta figure out a way to have this thing in our disposal every day.

That was one of the things that came up right in the pre production immediately as as he’s boring it out. We’re like, Hey, we’ve got all these shots, and they’re like, okay. Well, we only have it in the budget for this many days of drone shots. Which days do you want? It’s like, well, shit.

Yeah. Like I should say, that’s not gonna work because we need it intermittently out through all these days. So we came up with a work a workaround. Yeah.

We bought we we found a person on that crew that could be manning it at all times, and we bought it. And we said it’s there. Every time we need it. So it’s like, put the drone up, shoot that shot. Boom, now we’re back to coverage.

Well, that’s wild. So I, I, just one more dumb question because I, again, I don’t I don’t know I don’t know how this works. So when you’re when you’re you’re sitting down, you’re you’re setting up shots, that are that are taking place on the ground, it are you doing the drone shots simultaneously, or are are all the drone shots, you know, kind of planned out specifically? Like, this is we gotta do we’re we just have the drone running right now.

Yep. Both. It’s it’s a the drone is a pain in the neck. Right? Because if you look at a film set, that is not, conducive to a wide sweeping drone shot when you’ve got the entire crew running around in your shot.

So we would have to definitely be like, okay. Hey. Before we set up this shot, we’re gonna get these shots. And then everyone can come in. We can shoot this.

Then we gotta fly everything out. We’ll shoot that next drone shot. You know, it it’s a pain in the neck to use, but, again, well, under us, it’s absolutely worth it.

There were some moments though that we were able to keep a, a couple of cameras going on the ground at some of those moments where we had where where we did have the drone doing a shot that we could kind of hide things in certain spots. But the bigger ones, yeah, you gotta clear it all out.

Yeah. The, the the drone also give you again, it’s that kind of a sense of sweep and scope, but also very specific place. I mean, this is a movie that feels like it takes place in hollars of Kentucky. Right? This is, like, this is a, a a a movie that feels like it takes place in a place which is, you know, which is nice.

When you when you’re planning that out, how do you, how do you create that set of community identity within the community, as you’re as you’re thinking about the, the, the visual language of it.

Ross, it was a painstaking amount of location scouting. And we’re pretty relentless when we’re doing our location scouting. We spend weeks and weeks and weeks. Usually before even the rest of the team comes down. We get out there early, and we try to spend at least three weeks.

And we’re doing it all the way throughout pre production, but we try to spend three weeks really just getting to know the landscape, how far can we reach, how far can we drive, and then every nook and cranny of everywhere. We probably visited every holler within an hour of Kentucky four or five times within that three weeks. Just well, let’s go over there and see if that was there. You know what I mean? Cause you you don’t always have everything in your mind.

Yeah, we would we drove the hell out of that place.

And I Will Saletan lot look, you have your location scouts and they’re out finding stuff and sending stuff to you, but Anne and I like to do it personally. Right? Like, we don’t We, we wanna get out there. We wanna meet the people personally. We wanna drive through the haulers.

We wanna experience that ourselves because you you’re you’re gleaning all these different things. Right? You’re seeing, like, you’re getting over this this bluff, and then you see this amazing vista. And you’re like, okay, bookmark, they were dropping tens. We’re like, get the drone out here.

We gotta shoot this that. You know, it’s things like that. Like, a lot of that opening drone work that opens the movie, we discovered on those location scouts. We were out there around and we’d see these beautiful vistas. I’m like, oh, amazing.

Like, we have to come back with the drone and get this. So it that’s such a critical part of our understanding of the environment and the locations and the people that are of that area.

No one, it’s great to send the scouts out, and they did a great job on this movie, but you you it there’s no replacement for actual person who’s trying to direct the film or people who are trying to direct the film, saying, this is what I need. This is what I’m looking for, because, I mean, you have two or three out driving around looking for stuff, but they’re driving past things that we will we would probably wanna use or look at.

Even like a a truck parked in someone’s yard. Right. That too. Right. We’re Oh, and stop.

And we’re gonna put a a leaf on that truck window and see if the list use it for the movie. Like, we’re just looking for anything we could find in the area that really fuels our fire.

So we hate to just kind of leave it up to other people, you know, especially on location scouting because it’s so important. You find so much stuff, you know, when you’re out there.

Yeah. What the, the the the house that big cat lives in is this kind of big, mansion y space was that a private residence? How’d you guys, get that? I I love I love stories. A lot of the times you get these stories where we had to borrow somebody’s house and we kinda messed it up and they, you know, but how was How what was that what was getting that space like?

Not easy. We just start off with that. It was that was a really a needle and a stack of needles, to find because it had very specific requirements for the way everything blocked out, especially at the end, right? Like, cash had to sneak around through the forest. And, like, final that we didn’t cheat anything.

Like, that’s all there. Like, that how the heat light goes up the ravine, all that’s, like, right around that area. So but finding that place took a ton of work. It took we looked at a ton of houses. And another interesting anecdote about that is it’s a private residence.

We it was kind of overlooked because the of the house is is not very cinematic. We shot the back of the house for the front. So you go into the backyard that big splendid, like, mansion esque, you know, two story facade is there, but in the front, it looks like a very humble home.

And the coolest thing it was that, you know, that we were talking to the owner. And she’s like, well, it’s interesting you wanna use the back for the front because when this was built in the early nineteen hundreds, that actually was the front of the house. And, like

Would cars came into, you know, by the lens. We moved it. There was moved

to the front. It was switched. It was switched to the other side. And that was the other look we really wanted on the house, right? It had to be modern enough, and that house is super modern in ways.

But it has to have throwback too. It has to have a retro feel. It has to have history. It has to have the columns and the, like, it like, the fireplace, you know, and the big room and the wood and the leather. Like, it has to have this feel to it.

And, like, all the ornate work that’s that’s running the wrong the ceiling. Like, you just in all the bookcases they put in, there was there was such, care and craftsmanship putting in put into that house, and it shows on screen, and it feels like it was built in the nineteen hundreds, and then had some layers of of of new put on it. And that was exactly what we wanted. We wanted someone who’d been in that area for a long time, and her family was in that area. You know, you wanna feel the history.

And that’s how they’ve come to power, right? Is they’ve been there so long. They haven’t gone anywhere, and they’re not going anywhere. Yeah.

Yeah. No. That’s a that that is a very it’s a great location because it does give that vibe off. It is, like, this is I, you know, that gives off the vibe of, like, this is old south. Not old old south, but, like, been here been here a while.

So I I always like to close these interviews by if there’s anything I should have asked. If you think there’s anything, folks should know about the movie or what you guys are doing next, I whatever anything anything you think folks should know.

Look, I mean, I think you did a fantastic job. We did we

went to places we hadn’t gone. Yeah.

This is good. So that was

really fun. That was super fun. But anything that you missed. I don’t know, man. We’re just ex we’re we’re just excited that people seem to be reacting really positively to the movie because when we it.

There was just some you’ve seen a ton of thrillers like this. You watch the trailer, you’re like, Oh, yeah, I kinda know what that movie is. But to be honest, when we started reading it, we’re like, I don’t know what this movie is, and then it took so many kind of left, but earned turns that it was such a pleasure to read and the characters were so well to mind and put together that we had such a blast reading it. We were like, this has to be made. It’s it’s it’s it’s its own thing.

Like, when you were saying, what is it like? What is what what can I say that it’s kind of like? I like that question, because I I almost feel like you’re having a hard time defining it perfectly, and and that excites me because I think we wouldn’t have made it if if it was easily definable. We wouldn’t have made it if you would have been, like, Yeah. It’s exactly like this.

It’s exactly like next to Ken with Patrick swayzey. It’s just Orlando’s Patrick swayzey. And you’re like, oh, okay. I get it. Like, I don’t I’m not even excited to see that movie, let alone make it.

But this one, this one is two or three different movies woven together wonderfully and it has a a a fun tone to it. There’s some humor in the in some of those moments. Like, I really like the moment when he’s Browing out. He’s not broing out exactly, but there’s a kind of a bro out moment with him and the and, what’s Kenny’s character’s name? The where that where he’s kinda like, you mind if I get that cigarette?

You know, like, there’s kinda little moments between, you know, there’s there’s such tension between them, but it’s also kinda like, Hey, we’re on a stakeout. Hey, you know, let let’s fucking hang out a little bit and they’re no. We’re not fucking hanging out at it. So there was just so many fun little moments like that all the way throughout that I, I felt like made it its own animal.

Alright. Ian, Nesh, and then Ashham Nelm’s. Thanks again for being on the show. I really appreciate it. This is this is a pleasure.

It’s always great to have you have you guys Jonathan Last

so much, Sunny.

To pleasure for us, man. Thank you. Meesa Mountain.

Alright. Once again, my name is Sunny Bunch. I am culture editor at the Bulwark, and I will be back next week with another episode of the Bulwark goes to Hollywood. We’ll see you guys then.