How Carmen Ejogo Helped Build a Personal Apocalypse in It Comes at Night – Den of Geek US

For an ensemble piece about family and the pains it can endure, Carmen Ejogos Sarah is more than just the mother of an endangered den in It Comes at Night; shes the key that makes these people blood relatives. So she has the most to lose whenever any of it spills.

When the film begins, an unseen apocalypse has been muddled through for an unknown amount of time, but its certainly taken its toll on Ejogo and everyone left that matters in her life. Secluded and surviving in her presumable childhood home, a house deep in the woods, the picture opens on Sarah saying goodbye to her father Bud (David Pendleton), a man suffering from a mysterious plague that has caused blisters to crop up on his face and body. His grandson Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and son-in-law Paul (Joel Edgerton) reluctantly take the former patriarch out into the woods and euthanize him in his grave.

For Sarah, it is all downhill from there as an enigmatic family with young parents (Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough) ends up staying with them. She isnt sure if she can trust them or anyone else who isnt kin these days. But with already one loss in the family, she isnt eager to see another member vanish.

When Den of Geek sat down with Ejogo earlier this week, the foreboding nihilism of this film hung heavy around the conversation. After all, director Trey Edward Shults cited the medieval painting The Triumph of Death as one key inspiration, and the loss of a parent as the other. Ejogo is aware of the interpersonal horror in this epic worldand how unique of an opportunity it was for her and her co-stars to build that world simply through their acting choices.

In our conversation with the Selma actress, we veer from discussing how she, Edgerton, and Harrison had the freedom to conjure this reality and emotion, as well as what it means to her and our seemingly darkening world. But there is light too since we also discuss whether we might see Ejogo again in a Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them sequel!

So youve been in horror movies before, but none quite like this. Could you talk about what you mightve expected the script to be and how you reacted upon reading it?

So I got the script, thought it was really interesting, but didnt have a sense of who the director was given he had only made one film. So I went to that film, which is called Krisha. It was immediately obvious to me that this was somebody who had a very clear sense of self as a director and a filmmaker, and whatever he did next would be potentially really powerful. So I guess it was a combination of script and seeing his material that made me sign on, and then it just got better and better. I was like, Who else is probably going to be cast? Hearing about how he was going to approach lighting in the movie and the very unorthodox attempt at bringing on a sound supervisor who was going to be pretty radical in some ways.

So there were so many reasons to be excited. Because the things that are the most hard to come by in this business are original ideas that are then executed the way they are intended, which is what I think was the promise of this from the start.

How much of yourself do you look for in the subject? Because despite being such an apocalyptic setting, the film is dealing with very primordial concerns about mortality and losses within ones family.

Good question. I think often as an actor you read material and you dont even realize fully why youre responding until maybe afterwards, maybe never. That was probably the case for me. I know it was the case for Kelvin. I didnt know until today that he had gone through in some form or another Hurricane Katrina.

So he lost a home. He was only 12-years-old at the time, but thats the kind of memory that I imagine stays with you the rest of your life. So its bound to inform the kind of professional choices you make too. So I dont doubt that there are experiences I had, if I thought about it, that would keep me interested and pull me back to this sort of genre world, and this sort of darker, nihilistic kind of space we inhabit.

Did you call on anything specifically to find Sarah?

I think the one thing I drew about regularly was the relationship with my own son whos 15-years-old, who is at a very close age. I would argue that Kelvin plays it like a 15-year-old a lot of the time, in terms of his innocence, curiosity, his sexual desires for Rileys character, and so on and so forth. Its all just emerging. Its all just beginning to blossom in him.

Trey is apparently heavily influenced by Pieter Breughel paintings, specifically about medieval plagues. Obviously, theres a painting in your characters house in the movie. Did you study the paintings of Brueghel and did you get to talk to Trey about why your characters would keep this painting?

We definitely talked about why we keep the painting for sure. One of the things that became a fixation for all of us was timeline. Even if we didnt know what the backstory was entirely, we did need to have a feel for if this disease is something thats been around for six months or two years. How long does it take to die from it? How long has Bud have it before he gets the blisters? You know, these things kind of things did need to be answered in order to move forward in a way that was consistent.

So in that exploration in putting questions back and forth to Trey, it became clear he had imagined that this had been the house Bud stayed in as the family moved out and grew up, or moved to after he split with his wife or his wife died. But then there are other things he had no intention of letting us know or understand fully. He wanted to keep us in the dark. I think to fester a certain amount of paranoia among ourselves. There are things Riley knew about me that I didnt know about her and all kinds of shady stuff he was encouraging. [Laughs]

Were you, Joel, and Kelvin able to come up with your own backstory for what family life was like before all hell broke loose?

I dont know if we were ever completely on the same page to be honest. I know we all did it as part of our process. I had several dinners with Trey to talk about what I thought might make sense in terms of profession. Is this a rich family or a poor family? You know, where do we land on that stuff? So we definitely got into that. But as I said, some of the things would really live within ourselves. So if it makes sense to us, given the kind of family performance we were hoping for.

Who do you think Sarah was before the plague then?

So I think Sarah was a bit of a daddys girl, but tomboyish and resourceful, and may have learned to use guns by observing her dad, who I think its kind of clear, not really, but hes probably come home from the military or Vietnam and established the house. That maybe there is something a little PTSD about him, which may be why he is so secluded in this forest in this house. And thats also why I have an aptitude for putting together the water system or doing ABC. I can use guns it seems. Its not a big thing for me to get readythere are parts of the movie where Im using guns. So that was certainly something we explored.

But you know, I could know nothing about my character, and there still would have been enough with the paranoia.

Out of curiosity, did you speak with Chris or Riley about their own backstories, or were you as actors kept apart to build that suspicion of each other?

Yeah, I knew and I know nothing about Chris and Rileys characters. Other than what you see on the screen? Nothing else. I remember there was some kind of strange pitting us against each other by Trey, between myself and Riley, so thered be a degree of jealousy festering as well. For me, the mother of my son who clearly has thing for this other girl, and I was also jealous of their marriage, because mine is very stale and a little frigid. So these are things that arent on the page.

Theres nothing in the stage direction or dialogue that suggests thats what were playing, but there are layers and colors that lend themselves to this sort of movie, that make it very much a character-driven piece.

This movie can at times be bleakly nihilist. It goes back to Breughel and The Triumph of Death. What do you think the appeal is in such grimness from our art or even entertainment?

I think theres something a little nihilistic in every one of us. That theres this awful dance with mortality that we have to play every single day of our lives, which means theres a fascination with death and death in all the forms it can take. Whether its self-inflicted, whether its apocalyptic events, whether its pandemics, whatever it might look like. To have a grasp of it in a safe arena like a cinema screen is a kind of experience that most of us are willing to go through, because we will understand that it may only be around the corner in real-life.

On a somewhat lighter topic, I just recently rewatched Fantastic Beasts again. Have you heard whispers yet about Seraphina Picquery returning for another wizarding adventure?

Write all requests to @jk_rowling on Twitter and hopefully shell get the message that Seraphina cannot be done without for number two! [Laughs]

When I last saw it, it was actually the day before the U.S. election in November. JK Rowlings vision of nationalist forces on the rise again seems more timely than ever.

You know, Ive made a few filmsthis is very interesting, because I came up earlier with the theory about Trey, who wrote [It Comes at Night] three years ago about something completely different. It wasnt an attempt at being political or socially relevant. It was a personal film about his father dying of cancer. And yet, somehow, his feelers were out enough to tap into the zeitgeist. Ive had that experience, when I think about it, three times. So maybe its as much to do with me as it is to do with Trey in how I found myself in repeated pieces of material that really resonate in the here and now.

Certainly, which you just mentioned Selma and also this. I dont think Trey had any intention when he wrote this to tap into whats happening right now. But if youre following the newsreal newsyou saw this coming. Its not that it happened yesterday and suddenly a movie happened to coincide [with it]. It feels like its in-tune or attuned. This has been cyclical for as long as I can remember. It wouldnt surprise me around the time that Trey was writing the piece three years ago that he was just getting a feel in the air for something that was coming. Interesting that as an audience, we get to watch it right smack back in the middle of that time that he may have been sensitive to three years ago.

It feels like art will be reacting quite a bit now.

Yeah, for sure.

Thank you for doing this.

Thank you, it was great to see you.

It Comes at Night is in theaters now.

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How Carmen Ejogo Helped Build a Personal Apocalypse in It Comes at Night - Den of Geek US