Jenna Ortega is no stranger to horror movies, having starred in recent genre entries X, Scream and Scream VI. But in each of those movies she plays one of the protagonists, who is often the one getting spooked by a horrifying villain. But she turned the tables in her latest movie, Miller's Girl, and on her director no less, Jade Halley Bartlett.
"She scared the s**t out of me. She definitely went to a place with Cairo that... it's even tricky to explain," Bartlett told What to Watch in an interview.
In the movie, Ortega plays high school student Cairo Sweet. Incredibly bright and a talented writer, she forms a close connection with her English teacher Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), who is excited by her talent. However, their relationship becomes increasingly complicated and dangerous in this psychological thriller that What to Watch called "riveting" in our official Miller's Girl review.
That's because this isn't your typical teacher-student problematic relationship. Bartlett explained that what excited her about this story as she wrote it was that she discovered she didn't have the perfect villain and perfect victim in her story in Cairo and Jonathan, but rather two villains that help give the movie a fresh, exciting feeling.
In our interview with Bartlett, we also discussed the long process of getting this movie to the big screen and what that means for her, as well as some of the influences that she had while writing and making the movie.
Read our full chat right here.
What to Watch: Your script first appeared on the Blacklist in 2016 (an annual list of the best-unproduced screenplays) and now all these years later it at last gets to the screen. What has the process been like? What have some of the challenges been?
Jade Halley Bartlett: "Well it was originally a play that I wrote in 2011, way before I ever turned it into a screenplay. I wrote it for an actress, a friend of mine. I was a bartender living in New York City, this is like post-recession. I couldn't get a job, I have no formal education, so I was like what am I going to do with my certificate of participation from an acting school? I was like 'I guess I'm going to write a play for my friend.' So I called her and I was like, 'if you could play any character, who would it be?' And she said Rhoda Penmark from The Bad Seed, who if you remember is a psychotic child killer.
"So I knew I wanted to write a villain and I did. In the first iterations of the play Cairo is a villain. And then MeToo happened in 2016, around the Blacklist time, and I was like, 'oh s**t, I've written two villains.' And that was really exciting and it pushed the screenplay into this whole new place because I realized my internalized misogyny, as I was learning through MeToo, I couldn't see what I had written right in front of me. So I got to develop John and that side of John through the iterations of the screenplay — he is that version in the Blacklist and moving forward.
"But it allowed me to have a script that I realized … the whole court is out of order. All of these characters, nobody is good or bad. I think both of these characters — having the perfect victim and the perfect villain, that's boring and it's not real. Obviously, this world is three feet off the ground, it's heightened and it's kind of magical, but the characters to me, through the development of this from a play to the screen, became so much richer because they are all the facets of real people."
WTW: Personally, it reminded me of Southern Gothic stories. But what were some of your inspirations while you were writing and directing the movie?
JBH: "So Southern Gothic, for sure. I consider myself a Southern Gothic writer and it's definitely what I wanted to have. Every good Southern Gothic has a ghost, and that's who Cairo is; John is also a little bit of a ghost. My influences are Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the 1993 Secret Garden, the one with Maggie Smith, Park Chan Woo's The Handmaiden, which is so, so beautiful.
"I wanted something really scary, but not scary in the way you anticipate it, you know? I think a Southern Gothic has to drip. It's like you take a bit of fruit that you think is sweet and then you realize that sweetness is rot, that's what I wanted."
WTW: Jenna Ortega has been on the rise in recent years with many acclaimed performances. What was it like for you to get to work with her on Miller's Girl?
JBH: "She's so special. She's very disarming. She's also kind of gothic. I grew up in Tennessee, she grew up in the desert, but we have a lot of the same gothic proclivities, I would say. So working with her felt like an extension of myself creatively that I could trust entirely. In fact, I would say that for every person in this cast. They all understood the characters so well that there wasn't a lot of explaining that I had to do. We developed those things together but they understood them so well that they could just run. Obviously the dialogue. There is a lot of dialogue in the script, they all came prepared, they all knew their lines so it did feel like a play in a way. They came in, they knew everything, so we could just explore, which was really extraordinary.
"Jenna, I mean she's a savant. You watch her heart break in real-time and then you watch her calcify, you watch the scales grow over her and it's a very subtle thing that I think is quite terrifying.
"I had only ever seen The Fallout when we met, so I didn't know. I mean she is incredible in The Fallout. The Fallout is so good, I resisted watching it for so long because I thought it was going to be so bleak, but it is so beautiful. But Jenna's so funny — in The Fallout she's so funny — so it really disarmed me how the depths she could reach into with this character but also the humanity she could bring a character that could easily be played very large or pretentious. It felt very natural with her because she gave her a heart."
WTW: Was there anything about Jenna's performance that surprised you?
JBH: "I mean she scared the s**t out of me. She definitely went to places with Cairo that… it's even tricky to explain. Cairo thinks she is such an adult, but she's not. She's an isolated young woman who is a ghost in her house. Her entire education about romance is from 18th and 19th-century literature and old movies, which are inherently problematic, right? But she thinks she is such a grownup. And there are some moments that Jenna has when she is looking at Jonathan or when she is talking to him when she is like I almost believe… she's like a vampire, like a 900-year-old vampire. There's something very ancient that she does that really scares the s**t out of me, excuse my language."
"There's also a moment in the scene, without spoiling anything for anybody, but the scene with Winnie when they are passing the bottle back and forth between them, where you watch her make a decision in that moment that really stunned me, because her physicality changes and then it's different for the rest of the film. Which is insane because obviously, we shot out of order. So Jenna's just, I don't know, extraordinarily intelligent. Almost everything she did surprised me, I have to be honest."
WTW: This is your first movie, but in this streaming era, what does it mean to you to have this movie to get its chance to play in theaters?
JBH: "It means everything. Making this movie was an anomaly of near perfection. Everything felt good, everybody loved each other, it was like a summer camp family. To have it be released theatrically, for audiences to get the opportunity to sit in a theater and experience the score, the aesthetic, the language; to get to experience that in a space where they're not going to be looking at their little screen with their other screen, they're going to see it the way I intended it to be seen. Sometimes people don't get that opportunity. I am so, so grateful that I do. I am so excited for people to see it that way.
"I think a lot of the initial reactions — you know there's controversy around the movie and I hope that in that situation they can immerse themselves and surprise themselves with what the story actually is versus what their biases of what the story is. Because it's a play on a trope, it's my version of breaking this trope.
"For it to exist in a theater, especially because I'm a first-time director… Listen, I don't mean to sound like Pollyana or like a yokel, I don't know, I don't know what I did to deserve this other than work very hard with people that I love. But this movie was made with so much love, so it's deeply, deeply meaningful that everybody involved it also gets to have an experience of it existing in a theater."
Watch Millers' Girl exclusively in US movie theaters right now.
