When news that a US remake of Swedish horror hit ‘Let The Right One In’ was going ahead, many were anxious to see what Hollywood would do with the nuanced and genre-bending original. Most probably weren’t expecting ‘Cloverfield’ helmer Matt Reeves to take on the challenge, but his remake is respectful of the original while also ploughing new turf, and amping up the horror for a US audience. FAN THE FIRE met with the film’s director Matt Reeves and young star Kodi Smit-McPhee in advance of the film’s release…
Q: Matt, with Kodi and Chloe, you’ve got two of the most exciting young actors working today. Did you want them specifically or did you choose them because of the chemistry between them?
MR: I just wanted to find two young actors who could handle the emotional complexity of the story, because it’s an adult story. I went looking for Kodi’s character first and I saw a lot of people and was really concerned, because if that relationship doesn’t work then you have nothing. And then Kodi came in and he was so authentic that I was immediately relieved. And then when I found Chloe, Kodi was already back shooting another movie in Australia so he wasn’t available to read with her. The truth is that he was great, and she was great, and so I liked them both on their own; but I also felt like they would be really good together as well, I guess I could just see them together. I mean they are just both incredibly talented and they created that chemistry together. The movie wouldn’t work at all without them; they’re the reason the movie works. And so that was definitely the most important thing – to find them – and once I had found them, and once we got working together they were just great.
Q: Kodi, you are so young but it is a movie for adults. Have you watched this film, and the original, after making this movie? And do you think it’s a film for your age group? Isn’t it ironic that you probably wont be allowed to watch it in the US?
KSM: I’ve seen ‘Let Me In’ about 6 times now, but I’ve seen the original once. I saw it right after we finished filming because I was so eager to see it and we weren’t allowed to see it while we were filming. My dad didn’t want me to see it and neither did Matt so I was just waiting and waiting to see it. I thought it was awesome and I totally understand why people are protective of it because it is such a great film so when someone remakes it you want them to do a great job.
Q: And how did you handle it? It is pretty amazing for us to watch young children doing a film for adults, but how was it for you?
MR: You mean in terms of knowing that they would be handling the material? Well that was why it was so important to find these guys. You have to relate to the film on a very emotionally complex level, and that all falls on their shoulders. They’re both just so authentic and are really talented young performers, so that was really it. The story reminded me of my childhood, so it appealed to me as an adult in my remembrance of childhood. And Kodi and Chloe had to convey something emotionally complex in terms of their relationship, in terms of the love story. I mean you actually feel for their love story and yet they are two 12-year-old kids, I think that is quite amazing. And it is also down to Lindqvist’s story as well. When I wrote to him I explained that it wasn’t just because it is a great genre story and a great vampire story, but because it reminded me of my childhood. And he said that meant more than anything to him because it is the story of his childhood, without vampires of course. So I think that makes the film challenging and interesting in a way. The thing that I really like about it is that it’s an adult story told through the eyes of children. I think that’s one of the beautiful things about the story, and what is so unique about it.
Q: How did you decide which scenes to tweak, which scene to drop, etc? Some things seem to make more sense in your version.
MR: It was a strange process; it was very instinctual. When I saw the film, about a year before it came out in the US, I thought it was beautiful. When they asked me about remaking it I said I didn’t know that it should be remade because I thought it was just wonderful. But I so related to that story of the kids, and then I read the novel and I saw this opportunity to take it and, I realised Lindqvist grew up in the 80s at the same time as I was growing up in the US so I thought maybe there was a way to transfer this story into a context of what I remembered from growing up. So there is a portion of it that is about personalisation, there is portion that is taking some things from the novel that weren’t actually in the Swedish film, there is a portion that is very reliant on the novel in terms of how it was adapted as well – because Lindqvist did his own adaptation and a lot of these scenes that are the same between both films are actually taken verbatim from the book – and then there were some very clever things that he had done in the screenplay, I guess while working with Alfredson, and I wanted to take them. So it’s this weird thing where we were kind of personalising, Americanising, taking from the book, taking from the movie, and it was all very instinctual knowing one thing, which is that I related to the story as a coming-of-age story and I wanted to take that story and filter it as much as possible – in terms of how I shot it, the scenes I kept, etc – through his point of view. So, almost in a classical Hitchcockian style, make you intimately relate to his character and see the world through his eyes and use even the subplots to illuminate this story with Chloe. So in the novel there is a scene, lets say, with the neighbour Virginia, where she and Lacke have this whole life and back story that if we were doing a 10 hour mini-series would be a great thing to do (and someday somebody will do that and it will be like one of those Stephen King mini-series) but for this I wanted to do it from his point of view and illuminate coming-of-age. I took the story and instead of seeing the back story I turned her into someone that he sees, I turned him into a voyeur so that he could look out into the world of adults and get his first glimpses of sexuality and see people across the way who are fighting probably in the way that his parents fought, and use all of it to illuminate coming-of-age. So that was sort of the litmus test; and even the policeman – which was a character that was taken from the book that is not in the Swedish film – is kind of the moral eyes: he begins the story, looking at the face of evil, wondering what could be causing this. And the movie is the slow revelation of what is causing it and it’s not what you expect. But really on another level he continues to heighten the aspect of the coming-of-age love story, because he is ‘fate’, and he is getting closer to them, so our star-crossed lovers (our Romeo and Juliet, which is another element taken from the book) are threatened by him. So everything was taken with that one thing in mind.
Q: The film is a love story, and if you have the love story playing alongside the harder, horror elements of the story, how difficult was it to work those together? Did you try to keep them separate or did you try and make something that kind of dovetailed?
MR: To me it kind of dovetails because that’s what the story is about. I mean if the story is about how he experiences all of this stuff then all of it is interlinked. You know it is interesting, a lot of people thought the tone of this film is more horror-based than the original, but really the brilliant thing about Lindqvist’s conception in the novel is that he was finding the metaphor of taking a horror story to describe the horror of growing up. And all that dread that Kodi’s character feels every day when he goes to school – he knows he is going to get bullied, but when is it going to come? The movie is very much about waiting, waiting for that next shoe to drop. The horror for me is not so much the ‘jump’ moments (the few of which are there I hope are exciting and entertaining) but it’s about waiting for the horrible thing that is going to happen, because that is what his character does and that is the way it is in the book. So that was very important to me – that the thing occupies the emotional state of the character – so that drove the horror and the love story. The love story and the horror all come out of the same thing – his isolation and loneliness and the pain of growing up. So they weren’t really separate, we approached everything as if it were the way he would experience it.
Q: The ‘father’ character seems much more fulfilled in this film than the original, was that a conscious decision?
MR: The thing that I thought about Lindqvist’s book is that he was telling this horror story about these people who do these horrible things (I mean Jenkin’s character in the novel is very dark) but he never loses empathy for the characters, there is always humanity, and I wanted to introduce somebody who, on the face of it, seems to be a serial killer (and for all intents and purposes he is a serial killer) but then as you peel away the layers you start to see his humanity. Nothing is what you expect, the power dynamic shifts from when you think he is the ‘father’ to when you start realising that the way she is relating to him indicates a different relationship that you didn’t quite expect. So you peel the layers away, and casting Richard was a big part of that. It was a matter of finding somebody that I knew would give soul to a character who could really put you off, and you would start to feel for him. And then that was the reason that I did the whole sequence in the car, it was sort of inspired by Hitchcock’s ‘Dial M for Murder’, because in that film you know what the murder is supposed to be and you are waiting for them to kill Grace Kelly but then step by step none of the things that are supposed to happen happen, and the interesting thing about what Hitchcock does is that by using that he actually gets you to identify with the killer, and you start feeling bad for him and then suddenly by the end she stabs him with the scissors and it has become this little mini-tragedy about the killer. So I wanted to do the same thing, I wanted to set up Richard Jenkins so that initially we know how he kills. I did a lot of research on serial killers; that whole thing of hiding in the back of cars I actually found about this guy who was hiding outside of Wal-Marts, and somebody went into a Wal-Mart and said “is that your car out there? Because somebody has just gotten in the back”. When they called the police and caught the guy it turned out that he had killed a number of people and was a serial killer, and this was his method. So I wanted to show this guy’s method and then after you have seen these layers peeled away and you start to actually feel for him, then when you think you are going to see one more killing, just like the first, only somebody else gets in the car and suddenly there are two of them. So nothing is going the way it is supposed to go and by the end of it hopefully you feel a bit of the tragedy of his character. And then the last step being that when Chloe sees him at the hospital and he is completely ravaged, she talks to him and relates to him with a tenderness that at the end speaks to the tenderness that they must have had when they were young. So that was the journey they wanted to do and a huge part of that was about Chloe and Richard together, and specifically about Richard having such soulfulness as an actor.
Q: What do you think about Vampires today? Why are they so big in the media and why are audiences so into it?
KSM: I suppose mainly because of ‘Twilight’. I think that a lot of people started to like them and then it got onto TV because you can do whatever story you want with vampires. You can make them sort of epic like ‘Twilight’ but you can also make them adolescent stories like this, and true love or something. I think because it is already a powerful and recognisable story itself, you can mould it into whatever you want.
MR: I think the thing about vampire stories is, as Kodi was saying, you can mould them. I think with all great genre stories you have the surface level which is about what that genre is – it’s a giant monster movie, it’s a vampire movie – but what the secret is, under the surface, is the thing that makes it really interesting. Obviously the thing that was appealing about this one is that on the surface it is a vampire film but underneath it was a story about coming-of-age.
Q: At certain points it felt as though you were deliberately avoiding doing the same thing as the original. How overbearing was that for you throughout the process and how did it influence you?
MR: Well it wasn’t really the process that we used. I mean Kodi and Chloe and the rest of the cast hadn’t seen the movie, and my director of photography and my other key crew members had not seen the movie, and I stopped watching the movie after I realised I was going to do it because I realised it was important for me to try and find our own version. And I think that what was important for me in the beginning was weighing what I wanted in the story, and once that was worked out in the script our making of the movie was our own process. And that was important because I think if we had got into the copying of anything then it wouldn’t have any soul. I wasn’t going to go to Kodi and say “see what Kare did in this scene…” so I didn’t want to do any of that because I didn’t think we would make anything that would be worthwhile. So our process wasn’t to avoid and it wasn’t to embrace, it was to find our own way with the same story with a different perspective hopefully. I mean some people have claimed it is a shot-for-shot remake, but that absolutely is not the case, its cool that people respond to it differently.
Q: Kodi, the brief moments of happiness that your character achieves with Abby are quite beautiful, how easy was it for you as an actor to find those moments of joy in the horrible bleak life that your character has?
KSM: It was pretty easy because for me, being Owen in that moment, he kind of knows that he is just waiting to be happy. He goes through this crap of being bullied at school everyday, and then he comes home to his mum passed out, and his parents are divorced. It’s really not a happy life that he has, so when Abby’s there it is something to look forward to on the way home, and he likes to have fun with her.
Q: When you started the process what did you feel was in it for you? Was it all about wanting to retell the story, or was it about finding a wider audience for the story?
MR: Well it is interesting because when I first embarked on it the Swedish film hadn’t come out yet, so I didn’t know anything about the other fans I just knew that I was a fan and that I was also a fan of the novel. The reason the producers and the distribution company wanted to make it was that they thought it could go to a wider audience, the reason I wanted to make it was because I connected personally to the coming-of-age story and I wrote to Lindqvist and said that maybe there was a way that we could take this story and put it in this new context and personalise it but still be very faithful. Because when he wrote back and explained that this was his childhood, I felt a certain amount of responsibility and I wanted to be faithful. When I watched the movie and read the book, the thing that got me was the central relationship, and I didn’t want to randomly change things that I had fallen in love with and was so moved by. I just wanted to find a way to personalise the film as well. So I would say the producers wanted to bring it to a wider audience and I just found, ironically, that through this remake I could do something very personal to me, and that was an opportunity that I really wanted to take.
Q: You mentioned speaking to Lindqvist, has he seen the film and what did he think of it?
MR: He has seen it, and he published this wonderful statement explaining that he loved the movie. When the film came out in the US a few weeks ago I was in New York and read a great review in the New York Times, and that was really thrilling. But then I checked my email because I knew Lindqvist was seeing it that week and I was horrified. Along the way there were lots of little conferences, and I did a little thing at SXSW where I talked about the film right after we shot it, and he wrote to me to say “someone showed me your panel at SXSW and I continue to have faith”. I thought “Gosh, what if he has faith and then I let him down?” But he loved the movie and so when I got that email it meant more to me than anything else. I mean I love the fact that we got a great review in the New York Times but this was more important to me because it was his story. He felt that the Swedish film was a great Swedish film and that this was a great American horror film and he was very moved by it. He said it made him cry as much as the Swedish film but in different places, and he felt that the emphasis was in different places. But he was very taken with it and he told me that he watched it with his wife and then drank a bottle of champagne in the empty parking lot and he said it was very fitting. And I was very moved by that.
Q: I am interested in the direction that you gave to Kodi and Chloe. A lot of the adult actors are distanced and unfocused, and in terms of character Owen is obviously very introverted, so what sort of direction did you give to him?
MR: Well, I wanted Kodi and Chloe to be themselves in terms of how they related to the characters. I mean for so much of the film, and especially the first 20 minutes, he has almost no dialogue. And one scene that was great for me is when you first see him after he has had the spit-ball thrown at him and you cut to him and he is watching the bully as he is torturing this girl, and it is a testament to the power Kodi has as an actor, we just have the close up on his face, and he is staring with utter hatred. I just think that is so remarkable, that you can put a camera on somebody and so see their emotions come to the surface and it is one of the things that Kodi is just amazing at, he is a wonderful actor.
‘Let Me In’ is released nationwide on 5th November.
Q: Matt, with Kodi and Chloe, you’ve got two of the most exciting young actors working today. Did you want them specifically or did you choose them because of the chemistry between them?
MR: I just wanted to find two young actors who could handle the emotional complexity of the story, because it’s an adult story. I went looking for Kodi’s character first and I saw a lot of people and was really concerned, because if that relationship doesn’t work then you have nothing. And then Kodi came in and he was so authentic that I was immediately relieved. And then when I found Chloe, Kodi was already back shooting another movie in Australia so he wasn’t available to read with her. The truth is that he was great, and she was great, and so I liked them both on their own; but I also felt like they would be really good together as well, I guess I could just see them together. I mean they are just both incredibly talented and they created that chemistry together. The movie wouldn’t work at all without them; they’re the reason the movie works. And so that was definitely the most important thing – to find them – and once I had found them, and once we got working together they were just great.
Q: Kodi, you are so young but it is a movie for adults. Have you watched this film, and the original, after making this movie? And do you think it’s a film for your age group? Isn’t it ironic that you probably wont be allowed to watch it in the US?
KSM: I’ve seen ‘Let Me In’ about 6 times now, but I’ve seen the original once. I saw it right after we finished filming because I was so eager to see it and we weren’t allowed to see it while we were filming. My dad didn’t want me to see it and neither did Matt so I was just waiting and waiting to see it. I thought it was awesome and I totally understand why people are protective of it because it is such a great film so when someone remakes it you want them to do a great job.
Q: And how did you handle it? It is pretty amazing for us to watch young children doing a film for adults, but how was it for you?
MR: You mean in terms of knowing that they would be handling the material? Well that was why it was so important to find these guys. You have to relate to the film on a very emotionally complex level, and that all falls on their shoulders. They’re both just so authentic and are really talented young performers, so that was really it. The story reminded me of my childhood, so it appealed to me as an adult in my remembrance of childhood. And Kodi and Chloe had to convey something emotionally complex in terms of their relationship, in terms of the love story. I mean you actually feel for their love story and yet they are two 12-year-old kids, I think that is quite amazing. And it is also down to Lindqvist’s story as well. When I wrote to him I explained that it wasn’t just because it is a great genre story and a great vampire story, but because it reminded me of my childhood. And he said that meant more than anything to him because it is the story of his childhood, without vampires of course. So I think that makes the film challenging and interesting in a way. The thing that I really like about it is that it’s an adult story told through the eyes of children. I think that’s one of the beautiful things about the story, and what is so unique about it.
Q: How did you decide which scenes to tweak, which scene to drop, etc? Some things seem to make more sense in your version.
MR: It was a strange process; it was very instinctual. When I saw the film, about a year before it came out in the US, I thought it was beautiful. When they asked me about remaking it I said I didn’t know that it should be remade because I thought it was just wonderful. But I so related to that story of the kids, and then I read the novel and I saw this opportunity to take it and, I realised Lindqvist grew up in the 80s at the same time as I was growing up in the US so I thought maybe there was a way to transfer this story into a context of what I remembered from growing up. So there is a portion of it that is about personalisation, there is portion that is taking some things from the novel that weren’t actually in the Swedish film, there is a portion that is very reliant on the novel in terms of how it was adapted as well – because Lindqvist did his own adaptation and a lot of these scenes that are the same between both films are actually taken verbatim from the book – and then there were some very clever things that he had done in the screenplay, I guess while working with Alfredson, and I wanted to take them. So it’s this weird thing where we were kind of personalising, Americanising, taking from the book, taking from the movie, and it was all very instinctual knowing one thing, which is that I related to the story as a coming-of-age story and I wanted to take that story and filter it as much as possible – in terms of how I shot it, the scenes I kept, etc – through his point of view. So, almost in a classical Hitchcockian style, make you intimately relate to his character and see the world through his eyes and use even the subplots to illuminate this story with Chloe. So in the novel there is a scene, lets say, with the neighbour Virginia, where she and Lacke have this whole life and back story that if we were doing a 10 hour mini-series would be a great thing to do (and someday somebody will do that and it will be like one of those Stephen King mini-series) but for this I wanted to do it from his point of view and illuminate coming-of-age. I took the story and instead of seeing the back story I turned her into someone that he sees, I turned him into a voyeur so that he could look out into the world of adults and get his first glimpses of sexuality and see people across the way who are fighting probably in the way that his parents fought, and use all of it to illuminate coming-of-age. So that was sort of the litmus test; and even the policeman – which was a character that was taken from the book that is not in the Swedish film – is kind of the moral eyes: he begins the story, looking at the face of evil, wondering what could be causing this. And the movie is the slow revelation of what is causing it and it’s not what you expect. But really on another level he continues to heighten the aspect of the coming-of-age love story, because he is ‘fate’, and he is getting closer to them, so our star-crossed lovers (our Romeo and Juliet, which is another element taken from the book) are threatened by him. So everything was taken with that one thing in mind.
Q: The film is a love story, and if you have the love story playing alongside the harder, horror elements of the story, how difficult was it to work those together? Did you try to keep them separate or did you try and make something that kind of dovetailed?
MR: To me it kind of dovetails because that’s what the story is about. I mean if the story is about how he experiences all of this stuff then all of it is interlinked. You know it is interesting, a lot of people thought the tone of this film is more horror-based than the original, but really the brilliant thing about Lindqvist’s conception in the novel is that he was finding the metaphor of taking a horror story to describe the horror of growing up. And all that dread that Kodi’s character feels every day when he goes to school – he knows he is going to get bullied, but when is it going to come? The movie is very much about waiting, waiting for that next shoe to drop. The horror for me is not so much the ‘jump’ moments (the few of which are there I hope are exciting and entertaining) but it’s about waiting for the horrible thing that is going to happen, because that is what his character does and that is the way it is in the book. So that was very important to me – that the thing occupies the emotional state of the character – so that drove the horror and the love story. The love story and the horror all come out of the same thing – his isolation and loneliness and the pain of growing up. So they weren’t really separate, we approached everything as if it were the way he would experience it.
Q: The ‘father’ character seems much more fulfilled in this film than the original, was that a conscious decision?
MR: The thing that I thought about Lindqvist’s book is that he was telling this horror story about these people who do these horrible things (I mean Jenkin’s character in the novel is very dark) but he never loses empathy for the characters, there is always humanity, and I wanted to introduce somebody who, on the face of it, seems to be a serial killer (and for all intents and purposes he is a serial killer) but then as you peel away the layers you start to see his humanity. Nothing is what you expect, the power dynamic shifts from when you think he is the ‘father’ to when you start realising that the way she is relating to him indicates a different relationship that you didn’t quite expect. So you peel the layers away, and casting Richard was a big part of that. It was a matter of finding somebody that I knew would give soul to a character who could really put you off, and you would start to feel for him. And then that was the reason that I did the whole sequence in the car, it was sort of inspired by Hitchcock’s ‘Dial M for Murder’, because in that film you know what the murder is supposed to be and you are waiting for them to kill Grace Kelly but then step by step none of the things that are supposed to happen happen, and the interesting thing about what Hitchcock does is that by using that he actually gets you to identify with the killer, and you start feeling bad for him and then suddenly by the end she stabs him with the scissors and it has become this little mini-tragedy about the killer. So I wanted to do the same thing, I wanted to set up Richard Jenkins so that initially we know how he kills. I did a lot of research on serial killers; that whole thing of hiding in the back of cars I actually found about this guy who was hiding outside of Wal-Marts, and somebody went into a Wal-Mart and said “is that your car out there? Because somebody has just gotten in the back”. When they called the police and caught the guy it turned out that he had killed a number of people and was a serial killer, and this was his method. So I wanted to show this guy’s method and then after you have seen these layers peeled away and you start to actually feel for him, then when you think you are going to see one more killing, just like the first, only somebody else gets in the car and suddenly there are two of them. So nothing is going the way it is supposed to go and by the end of it hopefully you feel a bit of the tragedy of his character. And then the last step being that when Chloe sees him at the hospital and he is completely ravaged, she talks to him and relates to him with a tenderness that at the end speaks to the tenderness that they must have had when they were young. So that was the journey they wanted to do and a huge part of that was about Chloe and Richard together, and specifically about Richard having such soulfulness as an actor.
Q: What do you think about Vampires today? Why are they so big in the media and why are audiences so into it?
KSM: I suppose mainly because of ‘Twilight’. I think that a lot of people started to like them and then it got onto TV because you can do whatever story you want with vampires. You can make them sort of epic like ‘Twilight’ but you can also make them adolescent stories like this, and true love or something. I think because it is already a powerful and recognisable story itself, you can mould it into whatever you want.
MR: I think the thing about vampire stories is, as Kodi was saying, you can mould them. I think with all great genre stories you have the surface level which is about what that genre is – it’s a giant monster movie, it’s a vampire movie – but what the secret is, under the surface, is the thing that makes it really interesting. Obviously the thing that was appealing about this one is that on the surface it is a vampire film but underneath it was a story about coming-of-age.
Q: At certain points it felt as though you were deliberately avoiding doing the same thing as the original. How overbearing was that for you throughout the process and how did it influence you?
MR: Well it wasn’t really the process that we used. I mean Kodi and Chloe and the rest of the cast hadn’t seen the movie, and my director of photography and my other key crew members had not seen the movie, and I stopped watching the movie after I realised I was going to do it because I realised it was important for me to try and find our own version. And I think that what was important for me in the beginning was weighing what I wanted in the story, and once that was worked out in the script our making of the movie was our own process. And that was important because I think if we had got into the copying of anything then it wouldn’t have any soul. I wasn’t going to go to Kodi and say “see what Kare did in this scene…” so I didn’t want to do any of that because I didn’t think we would make anything that would be worthwhile. So our process wasn’t to avoid and it wasn’t to embrace, it was to find our own way with the same story with a different perspective hopefully. I mean some people have claimed it is a shot-for-shot remake, but that absolutely is not the case, its cool that people respond to it differently.
Q: Kodi, the brief moments of happiness that your character achieves with Abby are quite beautiful, how easy was it for you as an actor to find those moments of joy in the horrible bleak life that your character has?
KSM: It was pretty easy because for me, being Owen in that moment, he kind of knows that he is just waiting to be happy. He goes through this crap of being bullied at school everyday, and then he comes home to his mum passed out, and his parents are divorced. It’s really not a happy life that he has, so when Abby’s there it is something to look forward to on the way home, and he likes to have fun with her.
Q: When you started the process what did you feel was in it for you? Was it all about wanting to retell the story, or was it about finding a wider audience for the story?
MR: Well it is interesting because when I first embarked on it the Swedish film hadn’t come out yet, so I didn’t know anything about the other fans I just knew that I was a fan and that I was also a fan of the novel. The reason the producers and the distribution company wanted to make it was that they thought it could go to a wider audience, the reason I wanted to make it was because I connected personally to the coming-of-age story and I wrote to Lindqvist and said that maybe there was a way that we could take this story and put it in this new context and personalise it but still be very faithful. Because when he wrote back and explained that this was his childhood, I felt a certain amount of responsibility and I wanted to be faithful. When I watched the movie and read the book, the thing that got me was the central relationship, and I didn’t want to randomly change things that I had fallen in love with and was so moved by. I just wanted to find a way to personalise the film as well. So I would say the producers wanted to bring it to a wider audience and I just found, ironically, that through this remake I could do something very personal to me, and that was an opportunity that I really wanted to take.
Q: You mentioned speaking to Lindqvist, has he seen the film and what did he think of it?
MR: He has seen it, and he published this wonderful statement explaining that he loved the movie. When the film came out in the US a few weeks ago I was in New York and read a great review in the New York Times, and that was really thrilling. But then I checked my email because I knew Lindqvist was seeing it that week and I was horrified. Along the way there were lots of little conferences, and I did a little thing at SXSW where I talked about the film right after we shot it, and he wrote to me to say “someone showed me your panel at SXSW and I continue to have faith”. I thought “Gosh, what if he has faith and then I let him down?” But he loved the movie and so when I got that email it meant more to me than anything else. I mean I love the fact that we got a great review in the New York Times but this was more important to me because it was his story. He felt that the Swedish film was a great Swedish film and that this was a great American horror film and he was very moved by it. He said it made him cry as much as the Swedish film but in different places, and he felt that the emphasis was in different places. But he was very taken with it and he told me that he watched it with his wife and then drank a bottle of champagne in the empty parking lot and he said it was very fitting. And I was very moved by that.
Q: I am interested in the direction that you gave to Kodi and Chloe. A lot of the adult actors are distanced and unfocused, and in terms of character Owen is obviously very introverted, so what sort of direction did you give to him?
MR: Well, I wanted Kodi and Chloe to be themselves in terms of how they related to the characters. I mean for so much of the film, and especially the first 20 minutes, he has almost no dialogue. And one scene that was great for me is when you first see him after he has had the spit-ball thrown at him and you cut to him and he is watching the bully as he is torturing this girl, and it is a testament to the power Kodi has as an actor, we just have the close up on his face, and he is staring with utter hatred. I just think that is so remarkable, that you can put a camera on somebody and so see their emotions come to the surface and it is one of the things that Kodi is just amazing at, he is a wonderful actor.
‘Let Me In’ is released nationwide on 5th November.
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