Look, I was hellbent on directing something. I gotta direct something, it’s going to be independent, it’s going to be small, in one location like a house. So the question for me became “how do you make a house feel as cinematic as possible?” Then I remembered something that happened about 11 years ago. My husband did get bit by a bat. It was crazy. That doesn’t happen. Except when it does. He got a rabies shot and he was OK. I don’t know how you process trauma in your marriage but comedic bits is usually our go-to move. We just started cracking vampire jokes.
At a certain point he was just very lightly like “but if I became a vampire, you would let me back in the house, right?” I paused and he didn’t like that pause. We had a very spirited debate about what it would mean to have something happen that’s nobody’s fault but at the same time was something we never agreed to. It sets both of you on a wildly different path from what you were on. As I started thinking about what could happen in this house, this thing in the back of my brain rolled to the front. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought about writing this night in their lives, figuring out what that would look like, and figuring out what would happen next.
Some vampire properties that are mentioned in passing in this pilot are Twilight, Interview with the Vampire, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What are some of your vampire inspirations?
Those are touchstones. I also love Only Lovers Left Alive. It’s Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston playing glam rock Bowie vampires. I interpret it as a genre metaphor about climate catastrophe because they can’t drink contemporary human blood because of microplastics. They keep having to go to blood banks to find blood from before a certain date. I just love that one. I love the original Let the Right One In. I rewatched it recently. I think I always love a vampire story where there’s genre as metaphor front and center. That one is very much about coming of age and being an isolated kid who finds another isolated kid – the things that are deeply positive about that, the things that are deeply challenging about that. There’s a lot you can do in terms of genre as metaphor.
I’m glad you mentioned Let the Right One In because I feel that that aspect of vampirism – the needing to be let in – is the one that people forget about most frequently. Thankfully every decade or so, a major vampire story comes around to remind people of it. Are you grateful that Are We Still Married? is premiering on the heels of Sinners, which makes that a major plot point?
It’s so interesting. Yeah, I am. I just love art being in conversation with each other. I love this giant metaphorical party where we all have our wine glasses and are meeting and talking with each other. They’re so wildly different. With Sinners; it’s Coogler, it’s From Dusk Till Dawn, it’s institutional racism. He’s tackling very, very different things on a very different budget. We do have the same supernatural trope at our core but I would argue over on my side we’re doing ‘70s Cassavettes, Gena Rowlands’ dramas, Marriage Story, tonally a little bit more like Nora Ephron or Linklater’s “Before” trilogy. They couldn’t be more different and we’re starting at the opposite end of the spectrum but the fact that we have the same origin point, I just find it thrilling.
