Shock Q n A with Sinister 2 Director Ciaran Foy

Director Ciaran Foy talks about making the horror sequel Sinister 2

For a director, tackling the sequel to such a popular and original horror movie like Scott Derrickson’s Sinister might not be an enviable task, but for Irish filmmaker Ciaran Foy, who got attention for his 2012 thriller Citadel, taking on Sinister 2 offered quite a few other challenges, including working with kids and creating the film’s distinctive “kill films.” 

This time, the focus of the movie is James Ransone, the deputy from the original Sinister who is now tracking down the deaths attributed to the demon Bughuul to a remote house where a single mother (Shannyn Sossamon) is living with her twin sons and trying to deal with an abusive ex-husband while also being terrorized by the deceased tenants that used to live there. The deputy needs to figure out how to stop Bughuul before he takes more victims by playing the twin brothers against each other. 

Foy discussed some of the challenges of making the movie with ShockTillYouDrop.com when we got on the phone with the director last week.

ShockTillYouDrop: I feel bad because I haven’t seen “Citadel” and I’ve been told over and over to see it, but I didn’t get a chance before seeing “Sinister 2.”

Ciaran Foy: No problem, no problem. I think it was sadly taken off of Netflix. Our contract ran out, but I think it’s still on Amazon.

Shock: That’s good to know, so I’ll check it out after we talk. “Sinister” had obviously been a movie by Scott Derrickson that’d been pretty successful and they decided to make another one. Had either Jason (Blum, producer) or Scott seen “Citadel” and came to you or did you pitch to get the gig?

Foy: It kind of came as a bolt out of the blue because January 2014, I was flicking through Twitter through one day and I follow Scott Derrickson on Twitter and he tweeted that he’d seen this movie “Citadel” on Netflix and he was raving about it. I showed it to my wife and I was like, “That’s kinda cool.” I just replied and said, “Thanks.” So then he started following me and asked me a bunch of questions about “Citadel,” working with kids and what kind of schedule they have. He said, “Look, you’d be the perfect director for ‘Sinister 2.’ Would you like to read the script?” So yeah, I have Twitter and Netflix to thank for it, but certainly, I think he saw in “Citadel” what he was looking for, in terms of finding a director for this movie.

Foy: When “Citadel” won the Audience Award at South by Southwest, I got representation over here and was being sent a lot of scripts to consider, and most of them were awful and found-footage movies and all this kind of stuff. I just assumed that this is how this game works. It’s like, you wait until the perfect script arrives and then you just do that movie. (laughs) Not realizing that you’re hot for three-and-a-half minutes and by the time the next film festival comes along, the volume of scripts has dissipated. So I began 2013 sort of feeling like I was back to square one in many ways. So I wrote two movies that year, a science fiction and another horror, and I was trying to get them off the ground. When you’re trying to get indies off the ground, it’ll be a laborious process and it can sometimes take years. I mean “Citadel” almost took seven years to get that off the ground. So I was not looking forward to that process, but felt like, “Okay, this is what I need to do.” Then began 2014 with that tweet that came out of nowhere. So at the same time, every director has an ego, and half of my brain was flattered by that tweet, and then the other half of my brain was a little bit skeptical in that I was like, “Well, this is just going to be a quick cash in sequel and it’s just going to be another Ethan Hawke watching a bunch of movies.”

Shock: I guess you haven’t seen the first “Sinister” because I think Ethan Hawke died in the first movie.

Foy: Yeah, another version of him, like whoever the cheaper version was. So I sort of started to read it a little bit skeptically, you know? What really surprised me was how it expanded upon the mythology by showing you stuff that presumably happened in the background in the first movie with Ethan Hawke’s daughter and the heavy emphasis on the kids and the drama that was happening with these two boys, I thought was really novel. So it eluded to some of my favorite horror films. My favorite novel is “It,” and some of my favorite horror films are “The Devil’s Backbone” and “Let the Right One In.” I love combining the macabre with childhood because being on the cusp of adolescence can, in many ways, feel like a bit of a horror film when you’re in it. I think I was incredibly taken aback by how the script involves me and I was like, “Absolutely. This would be great to do,” so that summer I was packed up and moved to Los Angeles.

Shock: I assume Scott and Robert had already written something and had already been developing it. When you came on board, was there anything that you wanted to bring to the development process or was it pretty much ready to go?

Foy: Every director has his ideas and the guys are very open to implementing a few things. I remember sort of suggesting the idea of the boys watching a horror film and having that scene where in the end, we’ve got “Night of the Living Dead” on the screen. I just remember thinking, it’s just a little bit of fun for the audience, but the same dialogue took place upstairs in the bathroom. I was like, “Why don’t we split this scene and begin it downstairs with the boys watching a horror film?” But also, it sort of says to me, in the back of my head I remember thinking, “Well, Dylan, just as I would have been at 10 years old, he was probably initially a little freaked out with these ghost kids in the house, but sort of seems okay with them. He’s not scared to death of kids, but presumably, they’re not normal kids. I thought one of the things that would help me digest that a bit more is if they were fans of horror films, which I was at that age, and so we put little horror posters on the wall in Dylan’s room and sort of to make him and his brother a little bit more of a fan of that kind of aesthetic.

Also, you get us watching a horror film watching them watching a horror film and then the kill films and some of the thematic questions to do with what are you watching? What are your kids watching? What affect does that have on them? So that was just one example. There were a couple of moments like that where I suggested things and the guys are like, “Yeah, that works.” You just lift up every stone and ask questions and it’s only going to get better. The best ideas live on and if the idea is bad or doesn’t work, it just doesn’t get used. So that was kind of the process the whole way through. Even on set, there were little kind of comedy moments that I found with James in the moment, and some of them stayed in the movie or just didn’t make the cut. It was kind of a process from that prep stage all the way through to the edit.

Shock: It must have been interesting to work with these kids. Are they actually twins or are they just brothers fairly close in age?

Foy: No, they’re twins. They’re actually part of a triplet, and they have a sister. But yeah, those two guys, I knew that this script was going to live or die based on their performances and how real these guys were. Initially, when we started looking, I said to Scott and Cargill that in the script they’re written as identical twins. I was saying, “We don’t have the time to take one kid actor and make two of them and put them in different costumes and shoot them from another angle.” We didn’t have the budget to do like a “Social Network” kind of thing where you take Armie Hammer and you make two of him. I was thinking it’s going to be incredibly difficult to find identical twins that are good actors because having just come off of “Citadel,” I know how hard it is to find just one good kid actor. We had a relatively small window of time, this being a low-budget movie, your opportunity and time for casting is quite condensed. So I suggested that we just make them brothers. So the guys were willing to do that, just make them brothers, but Scott had asked me to just keep an eye out for twins, because it’d be kind of cool. Then we found these boys. They play hockey.

One of the things I did on “Citadel,” which I wanted to bring to this was I had relative success finding good performance in places where you normally wouldn’t look because I felt that a lot of kids that had managers or had the sort of the theatrical parents or that they had a very mannered sort of way of performing that didn’t feel like kids. The thing is that you do take a regular 10 year old who isn’t used to acting, but then they come with all that sort of baggage that 10 year olds take with them such as they’re fidgeting a lot and they lack a focus and the discipline and all that kind of stuff. Well, sports tend to do that to kids, so we found most of the kids on “Citadel” out of a local martial arts school. On this movie, we found the guys and they play hockey. So you’ve got that confidence and focus and all those kind of things that I could say sports bring to them, but they also feel like regular 10 year olds. They have a rawness to them and a realness that makes them feel like kids. So if they have a will and a want to act and you can extract the performances, then it’s going to work.

Shock: How do you deal with kids when you’re dealing with such a tough subject matter, especially having these home movies that are so graphic and scary?

Foy: The thing is, on a horror set, it’s like, the whole thing is Halloween, you know? There’s a lot of laughing that takes place and you’re kind of having to tell the kids to calm down because they know Nick behind the Bughuul mask. They know him, and they’re kind of kidding around with him. He’s in full makeup, the blood is kind of a fascinating thing to have on set because it’s sticky and it smells sweet, so the artifice of everything is very apparent on set, and so in many ways it’s not until you’ve edited it, you’ve put the visual effects in, you’ve put the sound design on top of it… it’s not until the final finished product that it has that gruesome, graphic sort of visceral effect on the audience. That’s the version of the movie that they can’t see.

Shock: It must be fun making those kill films, trying to figure out how to make them look like old home movies, and they’re like mini-movies in some ways.

Foy: In many respects, this time, each of the kill films have their own sort of visual effects challenge, whether it was environmental, like we have snow in one of them and then we have alligators in another and rats in another. So we had some real rats on set and then CGI rats. Because you’ve got that level of work involved, then they need to be treated the same way as the main shoot. So you have everything that you’d normally have shooting the main body of the shoot, only we shot it on 16 millimeter.

Shock: You actually shot on 16 and that wasn’t an after effect kind of thing?

Foy: No, we shot on 16, but the cameras are so good today that the footage out of the cam looks pretty accessible. So we made it look worse, in post. But no, film gives it its own quality that you can’t really fake so we shot them on 16. But if you were to look at the set where we’re shooting those things, it would look just like the set where we’re shooting the main body of the shoot.

Shock: So do you have other things you’ve been writing? Do you think you might work with Blumhouse and do something else? What’s your plan after you’re done promoting this one?

Foy: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I’ve been so focused on this for the last year that I haven’t had time. I’ve only come up for air in the past two weeks, so I’ve got those two projects that I’m developing right now, science fiction and another horror. So yeah, I’m sort of looking forward to sort of jumping into that next and finding the right home for them.

Shock: Have you actually gone back and read them since, in the year or year and a half since you started working on this?

Foy: Yeah, I did at Christmastime and made some changes and some notes for what I need to do. But since moving here, met a lot of new people and colleagues and whatever. So I’m just looking forward to maybe sitting down with another writer and maybe co-writing the final draft for one of these, so we’ll see what happens.

Shock: Ciaran, it’s great talking to you and I promise that before I talk to you again, I will have seen “Citadel” okay?

Foy: Awesome, awesome, perfect.

Shock: I’ve really been hearing so many good things about it, it’s surprising I haven’t gotten a chance. I don’t know what happened.

Foy: Well, bring your expectations right down because otherwise you’ll probably go, “Eh.”

Sinister 2 opens on Friday, August 21 with previews on Thursday night. You can read our previous interview with Blumhouse head honcho Jason Blum right here.

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)