From director Lenny Abrahamson (Room, Frank) and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon, and adapted from the book of the same name by Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger tells the story of what happens when Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) is called by the Ayres family to Hundreds Hall, where his mother once worked, to attend to a patient. The house and grounds of the vast estate has suffered and is now dilapidated from neglect, which adds to the creep factor, as he begins to wonder if mother (Charlotte Rampling), son (Will Poulter) and daughter (Ruth Wilson) are being haunted by something more supernatural in nature.

During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson talked about what made him want to tell the story of The Little Stranger, as his follow up to Room, the biggest challenges with intertwining the genres and themes, how he’d like audiences to draw their own conclusions with the ambiguity of the story, designing and working in the perfect old manor, cutting the film down from three and a half hours, and working with such a talented cast. He also talked about his desire to tell the story of the very complicated life of champion boxer Emile Griffith, and why the story is of such interest to him.

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Collider:  Good to talk to you again! The last time we spoke was in 2015 for Room, so it’s been a little bit. You actually told me, back then, that this was the next thing you were hoping to make, so it’s very cool to see that it actually got made, which is a huge accomplishment, in itself.

LENNY ABRAHAMSON:  Yeah, I know. Actually, I can tell you, at the end of this interview, what I hope to do next, and let’s see if it comes true again.

One would think that, after an awards season like the one that you had with Room, you would have had a few opportunities come your way. What was it that made you want to tell the story of The Little Stranger, in particular?

ABRAHAMSON:  Some people would say, “Okay, you had success with a literary adaptation, so did you just decide that’s your thing and want to do another one?” When I read The Little Stranger, eight or nine years ago, just before it came out because somebody slipped us a copy of it, it was the first time I’d ever read a book and thought, “I would like to adapt that.” So, it had been sitting there, in the back of my mind, for ages. When I read it, I’d made two well-reviewed, but very small films in Ireland, and it was very, very hard for myself and Ed Guiney, the producer I work with so closely, to be trusted with a big period film. Later on, while I was working on Frank with Film4, they were also developing this project with producers Gail Egan and Andrea Calderwood, with Potboiler in London. We all ended up talking, including Lucinda Coxon, who’s the magnificent screenwriter that adapted this, and realizing we all had a very similar vision for the film and a feeling about it, so we decided that it would be good to work together. That’s how it started. Then, Room was bubbling away and it happened really quickly, by film standards, so I made and released Room. Everybody was kind enough to wait for me while that was happening, before we did this. While other films and projects came in, and lots of offers came in, and other things that I’d been developing suddenly became possible, with the success of Room, I just had this in my head as the next film. I just didn’t want to let it go. Things have their time and had I not made this film next, I would have been taken up with all of the other things that I’m developing, and I may not have had a chance to make it. I felt like I really had to do it now.

Were there ever people, at any point, that were trying to persuade you to do something more high-profile because of the success of Room?

ABRAHAMSON:  People did, in a lovely way. I’ve got very good people that I work with, and they were saying, “Are you sure? This is an unusual choice. It’s quite a hard film to sell, in the sense that it’s a hard film to describe. Why not jump, while the chances are there, and do something bigger?” But people also know me well enough to know that I’ve never been strategic in my choices. If you look at Frank, what a bizarre choice to make. All I can do is just go on instinct. It just felt like the right thing to do, so I went for it.

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Image via Focus Features

This is a story that has different genres, tones, and themes that are all entwined together. What were the biggest challenges in getting all of that to feel how you wanted it to?

ABRAHAMSON:  When you look at the novel for The Little Stranger, it’s a chunky novel. It’s quite big. It’s possible for the author – and in this case, that’s Sarah Waters – very brilliantly to drift into these different waters, explore them, and look at these different thematic and tonal spaces, and then gradually pull them together. With a film, those are tighter corners to turn. The biggest challenge was to find the tone of the film, which would allow us to flirt with the gothic ghost story tropes, but not fall fully into that, and also allow us to also have it be a character study and a study of the period. When there are such strong genre gravitational fields, it’s hard not to just go headlong towards that planet. That was the biggest challenge. The other challenge, which is always there when you move from a novel to a film, is just thinking about how to capture the perspective that a first person novel has. This is Faraday’s account – and a somewhat unreliable account – of his experiences with the Ayres family, so we had to find a way of still having Faraday be at the center of it, but deal with the fact that we’re never going to be able to hide inside his voice. In the novel, he can hint at things or question things or hear things second-hand, and we can then ask ourselves, “Did this really happen, or was somebody telling him an untruth?” Once you start showing things, they tend to feel it’s a different experience, looking at something on a screen. Finding just what to hide and what to reveal, and how to tease and foreshadow without overdoing it. Those were big challenges.

I really loved how unsettling and unnerving the film is. It just bothers you for hours, after you see it, which I like much more so than if all of that is in your face. Because this storytelling is quite ambiguous, as far as blurring that line between reality and supernatural, what do you hope audiences take from it? Do you want them to draw their own conclusions?

ABRAHAMSON:  I’d like them to draw their own conclusion. I know what my conclusion is, and I think I know what the film is hinting at. All the hints are there, as to the interpretation that I feel most close to, but I think, like anything worth watching, it still has to be rich enough to support multiple interpretations. If you have to nail it down, then it’s always going to be a bit crude, so I have to embrace the fact that people will have different interpretations. There are a couple of very rich interpretations, which the film is nodding towards, and the connection of what’s happening in the house to the emotional lives of the characters, particularly Faraday, is where the richest experience of the film is to be found.

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Image via Focus Features

It seems like nothing good ever comes from people living in isolation in an old, crumbling manor.

ABRAHAMSON:  Yes, that’s not to be recommended.

How imposing was it to walk into and work in an estate like that?

ABRAHAMSON:  It’s a massive house, and it’s really quite amazing. It took me ages to find my way around the house, and we didn’t even use all of it. It took me weeks before I knew the house properly. It’s 90% made up of one house, on the outskirts of London, but that house is surrounded by a built up area, so if you were to walk out the door of the house and look around, it would not feel remotely like it does in the film. The big wide vistas were shot in an entirely different place, in the north of England. It was constructed somewhat piecemeal. The inside of the house was beautifully designed by Simon Elliott. It became real for us. It did become claustrophobic because of the material. It did become imposing. I would not have liked to sleep in that house. I’m not superstitious, at all, but something about it definitely got under my skin. The house is actually over 300 years old. It’s a really, really old house.

How long was your first cut of this, compared to what we see now? Are there a lot of deleted scenes?

ABRAHAMSON:  The film always starts really long, but it’ll end up just around under two hours. The first cut of everything that I do is really long, and the first cut of this film was maybe three and a half hours. Now, it’s about an hour and 50 minutes, so we lost a lot, but it’s all still there, in a way. Sometimes the scenes are just shorter versions of what was there. We certainly lost whole scenes, some of which were absolutely great, but nothing is more important than how a film flow. Just because a scene is great, it does not mean it should be there. There are extraordinary pieces of acting that aren’t in the film. There are amazing moments of drama, which aren’t in the film. That’s because the overall journey is more important than any of the bits, along the way. So, it was a long first cut, but it came down pretty fast.

When you have an insanely talented cast like this one, especially with actors like Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson and Charlotte Rampling, does it make your job easier, in the sense that you just have to sit back and let them do their thing?

ABRAHAMSON:  You always have to direct, and really good actors want you to, but having said that, it’s just an absolute privilege and a pleasure because they’re these extraordinary instruments and they give you more than you ask. They find color and richness and complexity in the scenes. It’s such a privilege to watch a really good actor work. It’s like watching a great musician. It’s a very rare skill, and they all have it in spades. They’re also all really lovely. For such a dark film, it was actually a really happy shoot. The thing is, it’s still the same job. Really, really good actors have very strong views on things, so what does come with working with very experienced and established actors is that you have to earn their respect. You don’t just get to go in and tell people what to do, in the way that you might think is your job, as a younger director, or you can do with younger and less established actors. It’s up to you, as a director, to raise what you do to their level. It’s both joyful and challenging, and that’s the way it should be.

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Image via Focus Features

What are you thinking about working on next, or hoping to make next?

ABRAHAMSON:  So, my hope is to make a film about a man, called Emile Griffith, who’s a real person. He’s no longer alive. He died in 2013. He left the American Virgin Islands, as a young black kid, and he came to New York in the late ‘50s and started working in the fashion district. He actually wanted to design ladies’ hats. He was gay and very much an absolute lover of the underground gay scene around Times Square, but he was also an incredibly talented boxer and ended up as the world champion of his weight, in the early ‘60s. He lived a double life, with a tremendous amount of tragedy, but also some extraordinarily wonderful things in it, as well. It's his story that I’m planning to tell. The working title is A Man’s World, but it may change. It’s an extraordinary story, so my hope is to get that into shape with the writer I’m working with, called Jon Raymond, and to make that next year. That’s the aim.

It seems like that would also be a great opportunity to work with a really talented actor.

ABRAHAMSON:  Yeah, but the interesting thing is that Emile was so young, in the height of his career, that his story may well have a new actor, which is always a really exciting thing to do, to find somebody who’s right. But then, there are some extraordinary character parts  around it. It’s such an interesting period in American history. It’s a period of great prejudice, but also change. His career spanned that whole shift through Stonewall into the new America, which sadly seems to be under threat.

How did you come across that story?

ABRAHAMSON:  I saw a documentary that had been made about him. Somebody that I work with had spotted it and said, “You should look at this person. He’s extraordinary.” I watched it, and then I started reading more about him. I read this book by Don McRae, called A Man’s World, and then another book by a friend of his, Ron Ross (called Nine Ten and Out!), and the more I read about Emile, the more I realized that he’s an incredibly enigmatic character. If there’s anything that links the films that I’ve made together, I’d say it’s characters who are impenetrable, in some way. Frank is obviously one. Faraday is another. And this is another one of those characters. He was very friendly, very gregarious, and very outgoing, but ultimately massively guarded and hard to understand, as a human being, and that’s what the challenge of the film is.

The Little Stranger is now playing in limited release.