Box office hit and Vancouver-shot Longlegs leans in to Silence of the Lambs as source of inspiration
Director and writer Osgood Perkins says his tense, psychological thriller starring Nicolas Cage was inspired by Silence of the Lambs
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Three-plus decades ago, a teenaged Osgood Perkins saw a movie that blew him away.
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Box office hit and Vancouver-shot Longlegs leans in to Silence of the Lambs as source of inspiration Back to video
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That film was Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme’s 1991 psychological horror thriller starring Anthony Hopkins as imprisoned serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lector and Jodie Foster as FBI agent Clarice Starling.
All these years later, director/writer Perkins has drawn a line directly from Silence of the Lambs to his own just-released psychological horror thriller, Longlegs. Shot in the Vancouver area the film has been a surprise summer hit pulling in a stellar $22.6 million USD over its opening weekend. That big number for an indie film earned it the No. 2 spot on the box office list for the weekend of July 12 behind the animated juggernaut Despicable Me 4’s $210 million USD.
“It was derived from my appreciation of Silence of the Lambs, which was a movie I had seen at a particularly ripe time in my life,” said Perkins over the phone from Los Angeles. “I don’t think anybody my age who is interested in movies will ever forget Silence of the Lambs and the way it felt … and the way it sort of cornered the market on excellence in the genre.”
The film, which won all the marquee awards at the 1992 Academy Awards, came out at a time when cinema was still considered “an event,” something Perkins says further helped to imprint the story on him.
“I really sort of had my channels open to movies,” said Perkins, a New York native who has been living in Vancouver for the past two years. “This was a time in the early ’90s when stuff was presented to you. You didn’t know anything about it. You’d seen a trailer at best, and you were ready to be taken over by an experience.”
Like Silence of the Lambs, Longlegs, out Friday, focuses on a female FBI agent who is hunting a serial killer. The film stars Maika Monroe as an FBI agent and Nicolas Cage as the serial killer who signs his coded messages Longlegs.
“If you think of it as a hopscotch course, square No. 1 was all the things that Silence of the Lambs was to me,” said Perkins, who is the son of actor Anthony Perkins. “So, I started with that and let it evolve, devolve, expand and contract from that starting point.”
Set in 1993 — another nod to Silence of the Lambs — Longlegs is tense and violent. Cage, under a scraggly, shoulder-length wig and full-face prosthetics is almost unrecognizable. And when he speaks, you get the creeps. Again, another solid nod to Hopkins’ Lector.
“Nic came on to the project in a very traditional way. We got him the script through regular permissible channels,” said Perkins, whose directorial resumé includes The Blackcoat’s Daughter, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel.
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Perkins said Cage liked the script. And then the two began to talk.
“If you can imagine someone on a beach with a metal detector … A traditional image of someone out there with headphones and a metal detector on a beach scouring, and every once in awhile, something goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. And you stop, and you dig,” Perkins explained of the process with Cage.
“I don’t mean to be flip about it, but that’s the creative process for me. At least especially when you are collaborating with people. You sort of say, ‘I think it’s this. And he says, ‘Well, I agree but I think it might also be this.’ And then you sort of find your way to things that fit. It’s no more complex, really, than doing a crossword puzzle.
“Once you’ve decided on 12 across you have a pretty good guess what six down is.”
What Perkins and Cage have come up with is a truly terrifying and elusive character who kills without getting his hands bloody.
While Cage and Perkins talked extensively about Longlegs, Perkins said the character’s appearance came about like most decisions on his projects do: through discussions with the other creatives on the film.
“For me, the only process to go into movies is to go in loose. Ask everybody what they think,” said Perkins. “If I’m out there cracking a whip and telling people everything I know is right, I’m lost. I don’t know how to do that.
“You’ve hired a crew, an army of really intelligent, creative people who also want the picture to be great. No one is doing it because it’s their homework … Everyone wants the picture to be special. So empower the other departments — the costumes, the makeup, the hair, the camera — everybody. If everyone is working at full tilt, you have a much better chance of operating as opposed to if everybody is living in fear.”
Vancouver actor Lisa Chandler, who as the character Mother Camera is involved in a murderous and terrifying scene, confirms Perkins’ approach.
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“I’ve always loved working with directors who simply want to create,” said Chandler. “They’re not bound by studio or network rules; they just aim to be as creative as possible, tell their version of the story, and remain open to suggestions. Oz exemplified that,” Chandler told Postmedia News by email.
“As much as he knew exactly what he wanted to shoot, he was very receptive to suggestions on how to capture a particular physical shot. Or simply in terms of letting the camera roll a few extra seconds and allowing me to just ‘be’ in the scene and let me play. I appreciated that freedom immensely.”
In her bid to track and capture Longlegs, FBI agent Lee Harker (Monroe) must unlock coded messages. While those messages are paramount to her investigation, and make for a top-notch murder wall back at headquarters, Perkins doesn’t think what they reveal is important.
“The clues don’t f—ing matter. What it’s about is not about the clues,” said Perkins. “What it’s about is not about the coded language. What it’s about is not about finding the killer. It’s about much more than that.”
So, what is it about?
“It’s about the fact that parents can lie to their children. And I think that was always the elemental truth,” said Perkins. “When you are putting something together, and you’re doing what you want to, make sure there’s something true at the centre of it. For me, the truth at the centre of it is that parents make up stories when they feel it serves the experience of the child or protects the child. Children can be protected by stories and by fictions and by narratives that have been created by the family, in this case by the mother to protect their kid.
“For me, the pain of that was the centre of the movie.”
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