Elizabeth Olsen admits she loves romantic comedies. "I like ones that are supposed to be terrible. I will see all of them." Fortunately, the younger sister of the famed child actors-turned-fashion moguls Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen also loves horror movies, because her latest movie, the psychological thriller Silent House is just that. "I like being scared, and I laugh my ass off, screaming and laughing as an audience member."
Olsen does a lot of screaming in the movie, trying to escape the mysterious people who have invaded her family's lake house. But to add to the drama, Olsen is one of just four actors in the movie; the other three – her father, uncle and a childhood friend – appear sporadically. Not to mention, the story is told in real time – 88 minutes – and is shot the same way, in very long takes, many longer that 20 minutes each, that make the final product seem like it's one continuous shot. Olsen, who grew up acting in plays where there are no chances to start over, says she was used to the approach and trusted her training.
"You can't break character when you're on stage and you're a child," Olsen says, followed by a laugh realizing her young training sounds a bit dramatic. "[Actors] take everything so seriously," she adds, with a bit of an eye roll. But Olsen is quick to admit she faced some unexpected challenges on the movie set. "We ended up doing one chunk a day, and so, if you had an idea of which part in the arc this chunk is, [on] the first take you're trying to figure out how to make that work. And then maybe the tenth take, you've kind of figured it out. But then by the 26th take, it's almost totally different than the other one because you're so tired at the end of the day…but it's hard to continue to remind yourself of your barometer of the different things you set for yourself when you're doing something that long, so many times, for 12 hours."
"There were so many people who had to know what they were doing," says writer and co-director Laura Lau, "from the dimmer board operator to the props people to the [assistant directors], not to mention, of course, the [director of photography] and the actors. So it was really all about rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing."
Inspired by true events from the 1940s, Lau says she took those incidents and them as a seed for the theatrical telling of the story. "There were some murders that took place – we don't want to give away what happens in the film," Lau cautions, adding that it spawned a lot of questions. "What could've happened, and why this would happen?"
Lau and her husband, co-director Chris Kentis – the filmmakers behind 2003′s Open Water - give their own take of the answers to those questions. In our interviews, Kentis and Lau reveal how they constructed tension and why they cast Olsen, who describes her approach to portraying fear, what scares her, and how – after Silent House and her previous movie, Martha Marcy May Marlene - she let the characters go when the cameras stopped rolling.
Silent House is currently in theaters. It run 85 minutes and is rated R for disturbing violent content and terror.
