Paul Feig on ‘The Housemaid,’ Sydney Sweeney, These WTF Twists

“I mean, is there anything more beautiful than this?”

Paul Feig is admiring the duo of martinis that probably the most discreet and well mannered server in uptown New York has put down earlier than us. Tucked right into a sales space in a darkish nook of Bemelmans, the bar within the Carlyle Hotel, the 63-year-old filmmaker holds up his tiny cocktail glass — a sort colloquially named the “Nick & Nora,” after the hard-drinking, light-quipping couple of the Thin Man films — then clinks it towards its twin earlier than taking a sip. He’s chosen this assembly place as a result of it occurs to hold Artingstalls, his private model of London dry gin, and the way higher to conduct an interview on a Tuesday afternoon than with a cross-promotional drink? “I make good movies,” Feig says. “I make great martinis.”

His love of a wonderfully constructed martini is one in every of three issues Feig is perhaps finest recognized for among the many profile-reading public. The second is his devotion to dressing up, ideally in Savile Row fits with matching tie-and-pocket-square combos (he’s been a critical clotheshorse since his early teenagers). The third includes introducing Melissa McCarthy to mainstream audiences and getting Maya Rudolph to shit in the street. Between directing Bridesmaids, the 2011 blockbuster that broke cultural glass ceilings and stays one of many funniest films of the twenty first century, directing quite a few episodes of The Office (26 in all), and creating the proper mix of heartfelt and cringe in Freaks and Geeks, Feig has helped revolutionize big- and small-screen comedy a number of instances over. He had a quick profession as a stand-up earlier than taking part in the comedian reduction in TV collection like The Jackie Thomas Show and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, then pivoting full-time to creating movies like The Heat (2013), Spy (2015), and an unexpectedly controversial reboot of Ghostbusters (2016). The gentleman is aware of humorous.

The punchline: Feig’s newest movie, The Housemaid, is something however a comedy. If you’re conversant in Freida McFadden’s 2022 novel, a couple of younger lady named Millie Calloway who takes a place as a live-in servant for a rich Long Island household, you possibly can attest that “hilarious” isn’t precisely the way you’d label this psychological thriller. And as each readers of the e-book and audiences who’ve seen Feig’s whipsmart adaptation, which opened on December nineteenth and stars Sydney Sweeney as Millie and Amanda Seyfried as her employer Nina Winchester, neither the story’s main WTF plot twists nor the bloody climax match the definition of “humorous.” “Sidesplitting,” perhaps — however extra within the literal moderately than the figurative sense.

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“I love thrillers,” Feig admits. “I like the high stakes of them. That’s kind of all I watch — I don’t watch much comedy at all. And if you look at what someone like Zach Cregger is doing with a movie like Weapons — a lot of us in comedy are going this way because we’re getting a double response from an audience. You know, when you get a laugh, you get a laugh. But when you get a jump or a scream or something, then you usually get a nervous-release type of laugh too. The two are very connected.”

Feig had dabbled in le cinéma du airport learn earlier than with A Simple Favor, his 2018 tackle Darcy Bell’s novel a couple of momfluencer trying to find her lacking buddy within the upper-crust suburbs of Connecticut. It was in style sufficient for the director to reunite with stars Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively for a sequel, Another Simple Favor, that got here out earlier this 12 months — the uncommon time that Feig says he’s been coaxed in to creating a follow-up, since “even when people want them, or think they want them, I tend not to want to do them. The sense of discovery is usually gone. That one was an exception.” It was whereas engaged on the second Simple Favor film that Lively prompt he maintain a watch out for actor Brandon Sklenar, who she was working with on her challenge It Ends With Us; Feig ended up casting Sklenar as Andrew, Nina’s saintly husband, in The Housemaid. (Asked recently on a podcast about his ideas on the continued lawsuit cleaning soap opera round Lively’s film, he admitted that he has not been following this torrid saga however stays solidly “Team Blake.”)

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You may nonetheless label A Simple Favor as extra of a black comedy than an outright thriller, nonetheless. So when his producing companion introduced him the script for The Housemaid, an enormous a part of the enchantment for Feig was attending to make one thing that hewed nearer to the suspenseful, scary, but additionally enjoyable Hitchcock movies he loves. Even higher was the truth that he’d get to work with Sweeney. The star was already connected to play Millie, and had come on as an govt producer. Feig was a fan. “I knew her from The White Lotus and all that,” he says. “But it was when I saw Reality” — the 2023 drama about whistleblower Reality Winner — “that I realized, ‘Oh, this actor is amazing!’ The fact that she was able to play a character who hides so much, and then this other side of her comes out…. I just thought, yeah, she’s perfect for this.”

After Feig and Sweeney talked, she basically greenlighted him as a director (“I don’t want to say Sydney fought for me, but she definitely pushed it through,” he admits). The director remembered having a gathering with Seyfried a decade or so in the past, and each of them vowing over espresso to do one thing collectively sometime. When her identify got here up as a doable alternative for Nina, he started catching up on what she’d completed within the intervening years, “just to be safe. I didn’t want to cast her simply because we hit it off. And then I saw The Dropout [where Seyfried plays Theranos CEO and convicted scammer Elizabeth Holmes], and thought, ‘She has 10 different personalities in that movie. Ok, this is a home run.’”

Feig additionally started poring by means of McFadden’s e-book, which he hadn’t learn earlier than getting Rebecca Sonnenshine’s script, and marking bits from the bestseller that is perhaps price including in or increasing upon. “Adaptations are tough,” he notes, “as a result of in the event you take numerous liberties with the novel or take out their favourite components out, individuals get mad. And in the event you simply do a rote adaptation, individuals don’t provide you with credit score for that, both. ‘Don’t simply movie the e-book! But additionally, make it similar to the e-book!’ There have been a few of what I’d name water-cooler moments that have been disregarded to make issues run just a little faster, and which I assumed is perhaps good to discover a solution to embody.

“You know, I’m not usually a fan of fan service,” Feig provides, then laughs. He’s referring to the brouhaha that accompanied his all-female Ghostbusters reboot, an idea that didn’t precisely go over effectively with sure sections of the net group. “Everybody was extremely casual about everything over everything about that film,” he jokes. “Everybody loved it. Nobody was accused of ruining people’s childhoods. The President of the United States did not come after us.”

So what have been the water-cooler moments that Feig added again in? He pauses, smiles, then takes a sip of his martini. “Well, we may be getting into spoiler territory now, David….”

Right. To those that haven’t seen The Housemaid but: Let’s say that the presence of Millie within the posh family causes some stress between her and Nina, particularly with regard to Nina’s hunky, kindly husband. Nina additionally appears susceptible to violent temper swings and inexplicably accusing her new rent of all types of sabotage. Because Millie has a felony document, she will be able to’t go away her new job. Also, what’s up with Millie’s room within the attic, which includes a window that received’t open, a door that locks from the surface, and a critical Jane Eyre-meets-Gaslight vibe?

In different phrases, these are recognizable characters in a really acquainted melodramatic scenario — all the higher to take viewers by means of a collection of narrative swerves and stunning left turns whereas fucking with their head. “For the first hour, the film is kind of a potboiler love triangle, and Millie is like the audience, trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on here,” Feig notes. “Sydney is really, really good at doing that wide-eyed, I’m-kinda-helpless thing, and you know that eventually, a tiger is going to come out of her. I always love to set up stereotypes upfront: She’s the innocent girl who’s down on her luck, this is the kooky rich lady, this is the handsome, perfect husband. It’s exactly the kind of thing you can keep pushing, pushing, pushing right up to a breaking point. When I first read it, I thought I could add….”

Feig stops, trying to find the fitting, non-spoilery phrase. “I think ‘comedy’ is too strong a word, because look, there’s some really dark shit in here. But I thought, we can have some fun with this. Some really dark fun.” He mentions a second within the second act, wherein a personality seems to get their comeuppance. “I always laugh at that point because the audience cheers, and I just think, ‘Oh you’re going to be so sorry you did that in about 20 minutes.’”

And consider us after we say that The Housemaid is strictly the type of beautiful gothic trash — assume The Real Housewives of Bronte Hills — that was made to be seen with an viewers. “People say that nobody wants to go the theater anymore,” Feig says. “No, they simply don’t wish to spend cash on going to the theater to be shoveled the identical previous mediocre… I don’t wish to say ‘shit.’ [Pause] Ok, effectively, the identical previous mediocre ‘shit.’ When I see films like Sinners and Weapons do unbelievable field workplace and fill theaters, it provides me hope. It’s what Jordan Peele does so effectively. You hear about Get Out, I gotta be there opening weekend. You hear about Nope, I gotta be there opening weekend. I don’t know what it’s about, however one thing about it appears like one thing I haven’t seen earlier than, so I have to have that have. I saved telling audiences at our word-of-mouth screenings, ‘This isn’t church. You can have enjoyable.’ Because that’s the expertise moviegoers are nonetheless chasing!

“You have to give them something undeniable,” Feig continues. “That’s what I tried to do with The Housemaid, if I’m being honest. I wanted to make it undeniable. Like my favorite movies, the ones I saw in a theater and keep going back to, are undeniable. Like these martinis were undeniable.”

He research the empty glasses in entrance of us, with two lonely twists of lemon sitting on the backside. “Making a movie is like making a martini. You have your genre — I’m really spitballing here, but go with me — that’s your base alcohol. Your vermouth has to just be a little thing that opens it up. Don’t simply wave the bottle over the top. That’s just a glass of gin. It doesn’t count. There has to be vermouth in there, to open it up and give it some freedom, so it’s not just the genre. The glass is the marketing.”

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And the director? “The director is the twist. You don’t want to be the inflexible director who’s the olive and overtakes the flavor. Then all you taste is the olive. If your gin is good enough, you don’t need it. Don’t be the olive. Be the twist of lemon that just gives it that extra little bit of taste.”

Feig appears misplaced in pleasantly tipsy thought for a break up second. “And for god’s sake, don’t shake the shit out of it.”