When a young nun at a cloistered abbey in Romania takes her own life, a priest with a haunted past and a novitiate on the threshold of her final vows are sent by the Vatican to investigate.
Together they uncover the order’s unholy secret. Risking not only their lives but their faith and their very souls, they confront a malevolent force in the form of the same demonic nun that first terrorized audiences in “The Conjuring 2,” as the abbey becomes a horrific battleground between the living and the damned. “The Nun” stars Oscar-nominated Demian Bichir (“A Better Life”) as Father Burke, Taissa Farmiga (TV’s “American Horror Story”) as Sister Irene, and Jonas Bloquet (“Elle”) as local villager French.
We caught up with director Corin Hardy to talk all things The Nun. Check out our interview after the jump.
I read that The Nun is based on the film The Name of The Rose, can you tell us what aspects of the film that it’s based on? And if it’s also based on any other horror films?
Corin Hardy: It wasn’t based on The Name of The Rose, it was, there was some influences and inspirations that James and Gary, when they were writing the story The Name of The Rose, I mean, I haven’t seen that for a long time but I remember it was Sean Connery and Christian Slater film and it’s about, you know, Sean Connery’s a priest and he gets hired to go and investigate like a murder in an Abbey, so I think this was a cooler idea, I think, to riff off that, to take it in a supernatural direction. I made, like a kind of mood book when I got the movie and just put down as many inspirations and movies and art that I kind of drew from when I read the script to give a sense of the lighting and cinematography. I would do this on my movies and kind of show the production design as DOP, so it contained that element of Black Narcissus and Copula’s Dracula barred from movies. The lighting kind of like bold compositions in those films and, Nightmare on Elm Street. It was sort of iconic imagery that we’ve seen and then applying that to sort of period gothic horror movie. So, and obviously The Exorcist, you can’t sort of ignore, and The Exorcist 3 particularly is a film that doesn’t really get talked about enough but is also a pretty brilliant and one of the greatest scares of all time. I tried definitely pay it a little homage to it in my film. Yeah, it was classic gothic horror and I grew up watching ham horror movies as a kid, monster movies and Salem’s Lot, realizing that I suddenly had this opportunity to make a classic old-school gothic horror movie in 2018. Suddenly became really exciting because it was, I wanted something kind of timeless, contemporary in a sense, but also it didn’t feel like it was being done much now. Not making a spoof or anything like that, I was doing it with a lot of love. Yeah, it sort of dawned on me, when I was shooting it and Damien and Tyeese and Jonas, they first started shooting, we were up in Transylvania at the foot of the castle surrounded by crosses, blowing smoke through it and I suddenly was looking through the lens and I was like Whoa we’re making a gothic horror movie aren’t we?
Why are nuns so scary?
Corin Hardy: My mother’s aunt was a nun in England and she was lovely and very jolly, but I was sort of freaked out more just by, I suppose there’s obviously a practice, and there’s a holiness, and a mystery about what they do and what goes on in the convent and, I mean, for me, seeing The Conjuring 2 and that character seemed to sort of steal the show in a way. It just felt really iconic straight away. I love black on white and contrast, and shapes, and angles and I think just the nun habit was almost like a shark fin to me that was, I saw her as a shark and the convent as an ocean and she can sort of lurk in the shadows, she can drift in the corridors, she can hide. You don’t know if that’s a good nun or a bad nun until you like sort of turn around and see her. But then, also of course, the concept of anything that is meant to be trustworthy and good and holy is turned upside down and it’s anything but that is a great sort of basis for a horror villain because it’s a deceiver and it’s a demon that can trick your mind and is inhabiting something that is so good.
Did you guys have any consultants from the Vatican or did you talk to someone had really done exorcisms or something or?
Corin Hardy: I was scared that I was going to make something happen, I didn’t tell you that I was like, training all my life. No, I mean, we, again Gary and James had written the script. We had a real Roman Catholic priest come and bless the set, they do that on the Conjuring movies. It sounded funny, it sounded like a gimmick and yet, when they came, he brought all of his chaplain kit, and he had his holy water and it actually felt quite comforting to know that he was performing this quite long, twenty-minute ritual on the grounds of the castle. I was sort of taking photos and he flung a big load of holy water in my face, some hit me in the eye, and I felt particularly safe. I said to him, “so are we… what has this done? Are we safe now?” And he spoke only in Romanian and he looked at me, really dead serious, and said something to me. The translator said he said you’re safe if you believe. I sort of went “Oh okay.”
Have you ever been inspired by Latin America in terms of horrors or monsters?
Corin Hardy: I mean, yeah, absolutely, but I’m very much, I’ve grown up in England. I haven’t, this is my first time in Mexico City, I came on holiday and to learn and that was a little bit different. When I was creating my film The Hallow, it was trying to tell like a fairy folklore story based on real beliefs in fairy mythology. There were versions of that I was looking at telling around the world, so I researched a lot of folklore in Mexico and Ireland and those certain area’s that are rich for it. I’ve never had the opportunity yet to tell one, and I suppose Guillermo (Del Toro) is like a big inspiration and I’ve learned a lot through his films, through Devils Backbone, Pans Labyrinth, and Cronos, and the way he speaks about mythology and monsters and stuff is just very passionate. I feel the same.
Will we see the nun in Conjuring 3?
Corin Hardy: Dude, I can’t tell you anything. I’d be ejected from the universe, but yeah, if people like this movie then there are definitely more stories to tell. In Conjuring, you can go anywhere with that and I love the idea of Father Burke or Sister Irene on some further adventures; without spoiling, of course, whether they survive or not.
Were you given any parameters now that this is part of The Conjuring or where you have to stay in this or was there any advice?
Corin Hardy: It was more like a given, really, The parameters as I understood them because I am a fan of those movies and I wasn’t going to sort of like try and take it somewhere completely different. But I also, I mean James and Gary both said from the start we want this to be, and that’s what is great actually to hear, but we were really pleased with The Conjuring movies and the Annabelle movies and we don’t want to keep repeating anything. We want to take it somewhere different which is what made me sign onto the job, it was almost like a fresh, new Conjuring movie. So we talked and we would collaborate and Gary was there also, we’d sometimes were like are you sure that this adds up to this and then we wanted to get into that and little things like continuity things that we wanted to make sure we got right. Connect with the movies and also within the film the rules within it, and so it was collaborative.
As a lifelong horror fan, what scares you? Did you incorporate any of that into how terrifying Vallack is in this one?
Corin Hardy: I can’t really say that can I? Real life scares me and to me, I find it really fun to escape into a horror movie, that’s what it’s all about, that’s what I get a kick out of and enjoy and that’s what I was obsessed with as a kid is going to the cinema and shutting out the world, but the real world is far more terrifying than The Nun. I shouldn’t say that The Nun’s obviously (scary).
What for you the most challenging scene in the film?
Corin Hardy: The water’s a challenge, everyone was like you sure you want to do the water wasn’t in the script, there was a different ending in the script and it was effectively a gateway to hell. But I sort of like a gut feeling that when you have things like gateways to hell, you have to go through some kind of transformation or something, kind of like a portal. It can’t just be literally a gate. And I always had an infinity with water, you know if you go in the ocean and you look on the surface, it’s one thing. Once you’re underneath, it’s completely different and everything changes so, I kind of said I wanted to build this idea of this kind of like catacombs, all the evil is just like welling up down there. It enables a gateway to sort of happen without being able to see it too clearly.
So that was a challenge. We had wires and we had Tyeesa getting dragged through the water in full makeup, getting dragged through the water and Damien in there and all sorts, that was a challenge. I was just thinking of the perpetual adoration as well, just sort of like trying to pull off dynamic camera moves under a sort of tight schedule. We were with Maxine Alexandra, he’s I think the best genre DP in the world anyway. He advised in Maniac and he’s got a lot of experience but he’s also got that Italian cinematic high quality. We said let’s try and make a kind of classic movie and we’ll use a lot of tracks and dollies and long takes, and try to keep the scares happening in the frame when you can rather than sort of lots of cuts. So that challenge is trying to do that when you’re under a really tight schedule.
What was the last thing that made you jump?
Corin Hardy: Well, we were doing an interview about an hour ago and it was the last one, just in there, and the guy said something like, he asked, well my answer was to do The Exorcist and I said the word “the exorcist” and it went (explosion sound), it was that big thunderclap a couple of hours ago and we were sort of like “Whoa! We shouldn’t be talking about this!” and it started raining straight after. I’ve got two daughters and sometimes they make me jump in the middle of the night. They’re suddenly standing there in your room. And in a movie… I don’t know, I watched Heredity, there are some good things in there that made me jump.
Is there space for improvisation for a horror film or it’s really already scripted?
Corin Hardy: There definitely is. It depends, I think, on there’s a lot of technical mechanisms that you have sort of instrument to kind of get a scare to work or build the tension, but then you want the actors to feel alive and so I think when you’re working with the actors you kind of build up a trust that you can stick to the script and then you can also go okay cool, either during the leadoff you find out, how Damien will say “I don’t know if I’d say it like this”, so I think it’s just the instinct of the director to decide whether that’s what you want to go with or definitely try and give them freedom around. But there are just somethings you just got to end up here, you’ve got to stand like one inch from that and if you don’t, it’s not going to work or you got to angle your head a certain way. So I think you build up a trust and they trust you to know that you aren’t like placing them everywhere and they feel like objects.
In the #MeToo movement going on, would you consider The Nun a women empowerment movie?
Corin Hardy: I’d love to say that. It did occur to me that even, assuming that you agree that she is a woman, or he is a woman. I mean, yeah, what a great thing in 2018 to have this really iconic terrifying female villain and I think, iconic female heroine, battling out good and evil, black and white. I quite like heavy contrasts and I quite like a horror movie that can address things like that in quite a sort of black and white way as well sometimes.
And on those heavy contrasts and synergies, there’s a scene where there’s a snake jumping out of the mouth and popping into an eye but then there’s a very classic cinematic scene where there’s a shadow going around the chapel like meeting to the mirror. It kind of makes me think about old cinematic horror elements with like more humor like CGI effects, is that a tension that you’re trying to work with in this movie?
Corin Hardy: I mean, I think the big challenge in a good horror movie is, I actually think that it’s much much harder to make a really good horror movie than any other kind of movie because ultimately you have to suspend people’s belief for a long time of an hour and a half or two hours. To do that, you’ve got to keep, they’ve got to trust the movie and so it’s constantly a sort of stress when you’re making a film is like you can’t let something let it down and if you suddenly fall out of the movie, the tension dissipates. So, for me, I try and do things as real as possible whenever you can with the actors, with the sets, with the practical effects. I grew up with the seventies and eighties horror movies that only had practical and optical effects. Still, love the way they look.
I’m also not naïve enough to know that you can create incredible visual effects but there’s a sort of, for me, there’s a limitation with practical effects where you have to stop before it gets beyond it. And there’s a limitlessness with CGI that you can never stop but you have to know your limits to bring it in. I always want to keep things grounded and as humans, we as humans only find things really moving or scary when you really can see the light in the eyes of the person or the fear of the experience they’re going through. I try and, I use CGI, absolutely, and I use visual effects but trying to mix em up so you don’t really get accustomed to the exact ingredients that are happening.
In looking at that, I know James and Peter worked on this film as producers and they were on The Conjuring, did they give you credit for full autonomy over this or did they give you insight?
Corin Hardy: Um, it was certainly collaborative, but they were supportive of it and let me go for it. James was like we wanted to take this in a different direction do your thing, it was quite organic and collaborative and if there was any discussion we would have them, it was a very comfortable process. Again, because I think James comes from a true place of loving horror, gets really excited about it, you just know certain people, anyone around this table, if you like a certain band and you like the same band and (snapping fingers) you’re on the same level straight away and or a type of music or a type of film, so with Gary and James and I, even though I never met Gary or James until I did this was sort of straight away talking about cool stuff that we like in movies and I was like “well you know what I loved about Nightmare On Elm Street 3, there was this practical way the floorboards did this”, and it was like “yeah yeah, maybe be could be like Satan’s Lot“, you sort of just having a dialog about stuff you love.
How is it to have Bonnie as your villain? Did you just let her go nuts?
Corin Hardy: Didn’t need to let her go nuts. No, she’s great. Bonnie’s lovely, it was sort of straight away I guess once I got the movie. We were thinking about casting and who’s going to play Father Burke and I was like hang on a minute, we have got the demon, we have the actress who played her in Conjuring 2 right? And suddenly we had a panic; what if she’s not available, doesn’t want to do it, or they don’t want to, I don’t know. Because she just immediately kind of captured this iconic kind of character, like you’ve got Michael Myers, you’ve got Freddie Kruger, you’ve got Christopher Lee’s Dracula, and then I think you’ve got the demon nun. Then we got Bonnie and she’s an eccentric character, and she loves scaring people.
Unlike Demián and Taissa, who aren’t massive horror fan but are great actors. Bonnie just was just like desperate, to do it, she loves being that nun and you couldn’t keep her away. She’d be standing at the side of the set and we’re like “get away!”, and we end up putting her in the water. She’s like a real trooper. We put Bonnie on wires in the water, getting pulled underwater on multiple takes and contact lenses, and we were like “please can you do it again?” She’d say “yeah, hang on a minute,” (makes noise) teeth falling out but she’s also got this very kind of classical Hollywood sort of film star fifties face if you see her without makeup, she’s really got a very stylish look.