, the exceptional 44-year-old British actor thus proves to be the embodiment of various types of toxic masculinity. Yet Kinnear is quick to point out that the film is, fundamentally, a highly subjective portrait of that larger sociopolitical subject. “The film centers around one woman’s experience, and it is one woman’s experience of all the trauma in her life and how that plays out in the way she interprets male behavior on this particular holiday.
thing—the answer is less good than the question. Honestly, I wanted to write a horror movie about a sense of horror. I knew I wanted to do that. I understood the sense of horror, and I thought, a horror movie is an interesting way to investigate that. Then with the title, I just thought it’s so perfect—the word ‘men,’ how compact it is, and how freighted it is. If you’re talking about something that people can project into, that word’s got a lot you can project into.
He continues, “In terms of the effect, I had no idea what it was going to look like; it’s obviously very difficult to picture how it’s going to look, because a lot of it is left to after the event, with CGI and stuff. But each character was birthed in a specific way and had a specific reaction, and they were trying to get something specific from Harper, and that was my choice; that was what I wanted to do with each one.
“You read the script and see what Alex is doing here, and why he’s using these particular positions of authority that they’ve been afforded. But I couldn’t think of them like that; I had to try to flesh out the characters as fully as possible,” he confesses. Consequently, “I tried to make sure, before the shoot, that I’d given each character the same amount of time of development in my head.
Technical trickery notwithstanding, Garland didn’t see the venture as very different from any other, since “I think probably 80% of my day, in a way, is logistics. It’s how do we arrange this thing to happen at this moment, and shoot this moment in such a way that the cameras are not off-putting to the actor, and capture the performance in as clean a way as possible.
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