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Personally, I would put M. Night up there with the Stanley Kubricks, the Steven Spielbergs, with just how they get these performances out of their casts.
Performances, but also just the way that they create tension, the way that they create a space, a mood that most directors can’t. And there’s a world-building that Night’s involved in that is very specific and unlike those other directors, but with that same sort of ability. He’s a genuinely genius filmmaker.
Absolutely, and he’s known for getting sort of these kind of off-kilter, very specific performances from his lead actors a lot. He has a very specific tone, like you said, and you have to go with it, and you play a large role in setting that tone. Was that something that you guys talked about beforehand, of threading that needle?
Yeah. We talked a lot about how we could make the choices credible enough so that you believe that this guy, who seemingly loves his daughter [laughs] and will do anything for her, [and is] also the serial killer. And not cheat the audience and be like, “Yeah, these two things exist.” And for me, a lot of that stuff is a front, and then the front bleeds into his reality. Which is something that happens often, I think, with people who have really intense, forward-facing fronts and their reality of themselves is kind of hidden. Often they become that front. And with him, he’s sort of melted into that front so far that he started to have something that’s like love for his daughter. But it’s probably not love the way that you and I understand it, it’s probably more just the way that she reflects onto him, his understanding of himself.
So it’s probably — I mean, it has to be, if he’s a psychopath — has to be necessarily narcissistic. But he’s discovered over the course of this piece … and it’s not just a character study. Of course, this is supposed to be a fun movie. But from my perspective as an actor, it is. And so I feel like this is the day in the life where Cooper discovers that he’s not completely a monster, and that’s an interesting role to take on.
How much research was involved in this? Were you looking to make this as realistic as possible?
Lots and lots of books, reading about people who are in jail right now for doing this exact same sort of thing.
Any specifics you can think of, off the top of your head?
I read a book early on that was about this guy going into the prison system in England, and there were a couple of serial killers there, lots of people who had committed crimes that were clearly psychopaths, and he went in and over the course of it started to advocate for one of them who thought he wasn’t a killer. And turns out, of course he was. He was just really, really charming and very convincing in his portrayal of innocence and his portrayal of just being a normal guy. And I was like, ‘That’s exactly what’s going on here,’ and hiding in plain sight and all that sort of stuff. It’s interesting. I found the whole research of it was dark, not something you want to do all the time, but something that worked really well for this character and I think hopefully made the character fun and buoyant and real.
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