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With Greta opening this weekend in theaters, I sat down with director Neil Jordan a few days ago to talk about his suspense thriller. If you haven’t seen the trailer, Greta takes the stalker genre and flips it on its head, as it focuses on an unhealthy relationship between two women (Isabelle Huppert and Chloë Grace Moretz) who start off as friends before everything begins to unravel. In the film, Moretz’s character returns a lost purse to a lonely and disturbed woman (Huppert) and things go off the rails pretty quickly. Greta also stars Maika Monroe, Colm Feore, and Stephen Rea.

During the interview, Neil Jordan talked about designing the color palette with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, what it was like filming the Isabelle Huppert dance scene, how the film flips the script trope by having the woman as the stalker, how the film changed in the editing room, deleted scenes, looking at Roman Polanski’s Repulsion for inspiration, and more.

Check out what he had to say in the player above and a list of what we talked about below, followed by the official synopsis.

Neil Jordan:

• How the film is a flip on the typical Hollywood trope by having the woman as the stalker.
• How did he decide on the Isabelle Huppert dance scene?
• How did the film change in the editing room and did he make any changes due to early screenings?

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  Deleted scenes talk.
• What was it like returning to filmmaking after making TV the past few years.
• What was it like working with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey?
• How they looked at Roman Polanski’s Repulsion for inspiration.

Here’s the Greta official synopsis:

A sweet, naïve young woman trying to make it on her own in New York City, Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz) doesn’t think twice about returning the handbag she finds on the subway to its rightful owner. That owner is Greta (Isabelle Huppert), an eccentric French piano teacher with a love for classical music and an aching loneliness. Having recently lost her mother, Frances quickly grows closer to widowed Greta. The two become fast friends — but Greta’s maternal charms begin to dissolve and grow increasingly disturbing as Frances discovers that nothing in Greta’s life is what it seems in this suspense thriller from Academy Award  winning director Neil Jordan.