When I saw Oculus at the Toronto International Film Festival, I got to interview director Mike Flanagan and star Katee Sackhoff. Then it played SXSW and Bibbs got video interviews with Karen Gillan, producer Jason Blum and Mike Flanagan again. Now the film is finally in theaters so I bring you my own interview with Flanagan. I’d actually forgotten my opening joke so I made myself laugh again. Oculus is about two siblings (Gillan and Brenton Thwaites) who confront a cursed mirror that she suspects drove their father murderously insane. Mild spoilers, but the lightbulb bit has already debuted at CraveOnline, so here goes.
CraveOnline: I think you should do a musical and call it Rockulus.
Mike Flanagan: Okay, no problem. I think that’s a great idea.
That could either go to Broadway as an adaptation of the movie, or the movie sequel could be Rockulus.
Yeah, we’ve also though – – no, I can’t say that. Inevitably when somebody does a porno version of it, that’s going to be an obvious title.
Aren’t you glad I was thinking musical?
I’m glad you went with the R.
What does Oculus mean?
The title is Latin for actually mirror, eye and portal.
Is Oculus really in some ways about movies, how we can’t really trust what we see?
Sure, absolutely. The theme of not being able to trust your eyes, it was really neat going into this and having an unreliable narrator, going with the idea that our protagonist might not be sane. I think that’s a great device for movies. The idea that we kind of accept movies on their face value and take for granted that we’re seeing something objective is also something really fun to play with.
How did you get Karen Gillan’s pony tail to swing back and forth like that?
She did that herself. I don’t know how she did it. The funny thing is that it’s scripted. I think the line in the script was, “Her pony tail swings back and forth like a pendulum as she walks down the hallway.” Karen just did that. I don’t know what her secret is to pull that off. That’s Karen Gillan.
The flashbacks were very seamless. How did you come up with a way to get between past and present without breaking the narrative at any point to say “now we’re flashing back?”
We had talked a lot about organic transitions that we could do in camera instead of doing something that was going to be an effect, a dissolve, something like that. We talked a lot about John Sayles’ Lone Star and how it bounces back and forth between past and present in a very organic way, by just panning off of one actor onto another who shouldn’t really be there. That is one of my favorite films and I thought it was such a neat, simple way to move back and forward in time that we wanted to take that to start and try to find another level of that.
The biggest reaction in the movie might be the fingernails. Do you have an issue with fingernail horror?
I do. I have a huge issue with fingernail horror. The funny thing is that that scene, I hadn’t actually expected that we’d be seeing the fingernail come of. That was actually [producer] Trevor [Macy]’s idea. It was written so that we’d be on his face and see his arm moving and we’d hear it and see his reaction. I get so squeamish and nauseous looking at fingernail injuries that I actually couldn’t watch that scene be shot.
The sound is a big part of it.
That was horrible. I got super nauseous and really flinchy while we were shooting. I think maybe once or twice early on I’ve watched that whole sequence but usually I look away. I can’t handle it.
You might be the only director I’ve ever heard of to not watch a take he had shot.
I was circling the monitor and you can hear it actually in the raw footage. When we got it in to edit, you could hear me reacting to it the entire time. We had to cut all that out. I think someone rolled behind the scenes footage of me.
Did you have to toy with at what point in the movie you could have Karen’s big speech to establish all the rules? It’s a mouthful, but you made it a compelling mouthful.
Karen did a lot of that. We had taken that almost verbatim from the shot. It clearly had to be in the first act, which is often where you’re not wanting to do anything that’s going to be dicey from a pacing point of view. Karen spent most of her time between when she was cast and when she arrived to set preparing that scene and infusing it with as much energy as she could, which I think is all there. That was a scene that was a minor concern to everyone involved with the project, including me, going in because if we didn’t pull that off, if she didn’t pull that off just right, it was going to be 14-15 minutes of boredom.
It’s not that long, is it? 15 minutes?
It’s I think 13 and a half minutes.
I did not feel 13 and a half minutes.
That’s the idea and it’s neat because you look at it, two things are happening at once. One is Karen is just killing it and the other is that we edit to a different angle on it every sentence. We’re never on the same shot for more than a sentence.
What is your next movie going to be?
Somnia, which I’m incredibly excited about. It’s going to be with a lot of the same people that made Oculus possible. It’s with Trevor Macy at Intrepid, Dale Johnson and MICA is financing with Demarest Pictures who are new to us. And Katee Sackhoff is starring so it’s kind of a reunion.
Is it also a horror movie?
It is. It’s a horror film that has an emotional punch to it that I think a lot of people won’t expect. My writing partner likes to talk about how hilarious it was that while we were finishing writing it the two of us were just sitting in the room crying, laptops together. It’s got a really intense emotional core to it.
What does Katee get to do in Somnia? Is her character the reason you were crying?
Yeah, there are three principal characters in the movie. There’s Katee’s character, her husband and a little boy who’s being taken in. At a certain point, all three of them made us cry.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
