The Big Picture - Cory Finley Breaks From the Stage with ‘Thoroughbreds’ | The Big Picture (Ep. 54)

Episode Date: March 9, 2018

Ringer Editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey chats with first time director Cory Finley about his film ‘Thoroughbreds’ and his transition from playwright to filmmaker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I just had a personal goal as a, you know, one of a million young male writers who really struggled to write female characters in my first several plays, to write a story that had two strong female leads who were not anyone's love interest, who were not, you-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most fascinating filmmakers in the world. How does a young playwright make the transition from stage to screen? For Corey Finley, it looks effortless. His first movie, Thoroughbreds, is controlled, tense, and shockingly assured. It's about two teenage girls plotting the murder of one of their stepfathers, and it has dashes of The Shining and Heathers. It's a perfectly timed movie, as bracing and

dark as it is morbidly funny. I talked to Corey about making his first film and the challenge of writing female characters. Here's Corey Finley, writer-director of Thoroughbreds, here with me. Corey, thanks for coming in. Thank you for having me. Corey, you're a playwright. I am. And you're also a director and a writer. And those two things are similar and not quite the same.

And I think a lot of people will be wondering how a person who's writing plays in New York ends up making a Hollywood film for Focus Features. Can you walk us through this process? Still wondering myself sometimes. It's been an amazing process. I, right out of college, moved to New York and started writing plays. It's what I've been doing pretty consistently for the last five, six years. And one of those plays was the time called Thoroughbreds, singular, now Thoroughbreds, plural. And it was a play that I fully intended to do as a play. It was mostly about two young women on one set, mostly on one couch, just having conversations. But there was always something about it that felt cinematic, that felt very filmic.

There was something kind of genre about it, sort of a psychological thriller aspect. And the longer that I worked on drafts of it, the more I started just seeing it in film language in my head and seeing close-ups and tracking shots and just film imagery rather than seeing sort of the proscenium stage that I normally see when I visualize a play. Was that the first time that you had had that feeling about something you'd written? It was, yeah. And I hadn't even thought about this fact until it started changing, but I think I would always just kind of visualize a set, whether it was a black box or sort of whatever stage format, but I'd see a set and I'd see actors on a set and I'd see usually sort of a limited amount of furniture and I'd see a play set up.

And for whatever reason, for this one, I just started seeing it like a movie. I think it just kind of wanted to be a movie. There's obviously a little bit of history with playwrights who become filmmakers. David Mamet and Martin McDonough has been lauded this year. Very recently. Was this something that you always wanted to do too? Were you always hoping to be a filmmaker? It was, yeah.

And in kind of an abstract way, I always really loved movies growing up. In the theater work that I was doing, I was very drawn to, obviously, to the words and sort of to the role of the playwright in it all. And in the films that I would love, I was sort of drawn to the words and sort of to the role of the playwright in it all. And in the films that I would love, I would really, I was sort of drawn to the more superficially directory parts of it, for lack of a better word.

I really liked movies that had kind of a distinct visual style. I tend to like kind of genre movies. What were your go-tos? What was like, what was your personal canon? I think I probably had kind of the standard slate of teenage boy movie posters on the wall sort of filmmakers, which I say very affectionately and lovingly. But I was a huge Tarantino fan. I was a big, I don't know if he falls in the same category, but was and am a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan, the Coen brothers. Speak in my language, Corey.

Yes. That's still so much of the stuff that I really love. And I also, I always liked kind of film noir and neo-noir and noir influence stuff, which I think became an influence in Thoroughbred and played into the way that I started seeing it. Give me a little more practical insight into that, though, because I think a lot of people hear young guy, playwright, great ideas, great work. But making that jump is obviously the single hardest part for most people trying to get into the business. Like what happens?

Do you get a phone call from someone that says, you're a genius, I want to make this? Definitely that. Definitely the genius. Well, how granular should I get here? Because it's a long, winding, granular road. Try to give us like a full picture without going too far down the road, I guess. You know, just try to help people understand like how something like this can turn over and change your life basically. For sure.

Yeah, it was. So it was first like just a writing sample. I think that's how a lot of screenwriters certainly sort of get their start in Hollywood is they have their like calling card script. And the joke is that you do the water bottle tour. You go to all the studios and production companies and you sit on the couch and you're not important enough for them to meet with you the moment you walk in. So you get the water bottle tour. You go to all the studios and production companies, and you sit on the couch, and you're not important enough for them to meet with you the moment you walk in, so you get the water bottle and you wait.

And I kind of did that, but on that initial water bottle tour, I was lucky enough to connect with a couple producers that were more sort of independent, smaller film focused, and that, you know, for whatever reason, just really connected with that material. And one of them, a producer named Alex Sachs was actually at ICM, the company where I'm repped, the agency where I'm repped. And she was one of the first people to take an interest in it and connected me with some other producers. And then we sort of had a, just a play,

not even a screenplay at that point that we were excited to make to try to make as a movie and we started sending out to cast and then once we had sort of initial cast attached our leads we had a little bit of momentum and then and then the rest sort of fell into place quickly and sometimes very slowly okay so being a playwright is is a somewhat similar to being a screenwriter, but it's also radically different. How much did your original play or the writing sample you were sharing with people change from before you started shooting?

I think the heart of it changed very little. A lot of the sort of key moments, sort of the key like dialogue moments in the movie, the real turning point scenes were almost lifted directly from the play. But I was very aware that I didn't want to make a movie that felt like just a filmed play. I didn't want to make a static feeling movie. You talked about being a real film fan and fan of filmmakers who are directory in a way. And your movie has a lot of style and definitely does not feel like a first film. How did you determine not just how you wanted it to look, but how, what people to bring on board to help you achieve what you wanted to do? And did

you, since you'd never done it before, did you know where to go and what to ask for? I think I was definitely helped by the fact that I didn't know how much I didn't know. I think that can be a real asset. And the fact that because of one of our actors' filming schedules, we had a very compressed adaptation and pre-production period, I think that was also a big asset. So there were a lot of decisions that I just had to make as quickly as possible because we only had one very brief shot to make the movie before our actors became unavailable. So it was a very instinctive process in that way,

both in the writing and in deciding, in picking collaborators. I just mostly just went to film collaborators whose work I really admired. And same, I was just a fan of both of the lead actresses. I'd seen their movies recently and down the line with all of our sort of key department heads. It was just people whose work inspired me. And because I had not kind of come out of the film world myself, it was just I was able to kind of go to people as a fan and see if they wanted to make a movie. You're from the Midwest. You lived in New York.

So why this story about two girls living in Connecticut? Where did the story come from for you? The story took a very strange and winding path to being what it became. And the screenplay was written in a real rush for logistical reasons, but the play was like sort of a two and a half year on and off putting it away taking it back out sort of process um and it started as kind of almost like a connecticut family drama uh and was much more about the the parents of the what became the lead characters i always start with an image uh when, and the image with this one was a violently euthanized horse.

I don't think that's spoiling too much, I hope. No, it might vaguely explain one aspect of the title. It might shed some light on the title. But I had this image. I think it was an image that sort of freaked me out in a useful way. There was something about, like, even just, like, the euthanizing of my own pets growing up always had a real effect on me. And there's something about sort of, like, the idea of mercy killing that is very primal and sort of seems to belong to an earlier time and place but still exists with our pets and our domestic animals. And there was something that felt ripe about that. And it really took a long

time to sort of find the characters to assemble around that image. And it's funny because you start with the image and then hopefully it becomes all about the characters and the characters become the core of the story and the guiding principle but yeah there was something about this sort of Connecticut horsey world that felt like a right place to set a present day thriller. And what about the two

characters that are at the center of the story? Are they flashes of people that you know, that you've encountered in your time? Where are you drawing from to build them? Because they're both very specific and very precise, and they feel real in that dreamlike way that you talked about Lyle creating. There's a lot of people that I know in them, but there's a lot of me in them. There's an uncomfortable amount of me in them.

That's made me very uncomfortable. Yes, I'm back in the way as you speak. I think in a way, like, writing this story that was about these teenage girls gave it a little sort of a useful little bit of distance so that it didn't feel. I almost didn't realize it until I had already done it. But I was able to sort of explore some of my own kind of fears about myself through them, I think. And one of the characters, Amanda, is very, as Olivia Cooke's character in the movie, is a very sort of an emotionless figure who has recently come to embrace her own emotionlessness and not be ashamed of it.

And I think I feel, and probably everyone feels like on some days, I can be unpleasantly surprised at my own lack of empathy about things, my own lack of concern about things. I think I don't think I'm actually an unempathetic person, but I think I spend a lot of time worrying that I am. And that character is a way of sort of dealing with that. And then Lily, Anya Taylor-Joy's character is sort of the opposite and is a character who feels things very deeply and who can't control those emotions

and whose emotions about small things take on outsize importance in her life. And I can feel like I have both of those sides within me and this story was a way of sort of working through that and of coming to embrace that, hopefully. Staging a play is obviously quite different from staging a film, too.

What was it like to be watching those very personal feelings that you put on paper get played out and drawn out over long periods of time on shooting days like that? Were you able to have some distance from what you'd written or do you feel like really closely etched on top of it? I think so. I think I did have distance from it. I think one of the great, it's been cool to kind of direct for the first time on this movie. I'd really only written, hadn't even directed plays.

And I think there is something sort of so solitary and personal about the writing process and so sort of inherently emotional about the writing process. And the directing process is a cool, is interestingly different from that because you have to be, there's so much leadership in it. You have to be setting the tone for other people. You have to be, you're so much leadership in it. You have to be setting the tone for other people. You have to be, you're sort of a logistical expert among other things when you're on set. And so I think I was always looking for emotional truth from the actors, trying to sort of help them find it and reach it. But it was a more sort of tactical process on set, I guess.

And it was more aware that we were sort of building something together rather than, you know, just feeling our way through something. Did you feel prepared for that? By day three, I did. I think. What was the feeling on day one? Well, you know, I came in cocky at the very beginning. Again, I think just not knowing how much I didn't know.

I just convinced myself that I knew how to do it. And then I think it was like, yeah, right after we started rolling on our first take, sort of the reality of it set in and that I was doing this for the first time with very little preparation. And the first, it was funny because the first day was a lot of very technical work. But once we got into the more emotional sort of heart of the story, it started becoming a little bit easier. And the fear went away quickly, but it's a real thing, and it's a thing I've learned to embrace. You'll be ready on the next one. I'll be ready on the next one, yeah. Did you have reference points that you shared with the cast and crew beforehand? Did you say, watch this film, read this play, this is the tone I'm trying to set?

A little bit. I talked certainly with department heads, with Lyle, the DP, with Alex Boverd, our costume designer. I would – we would talk about – I think you often have to kind of communicate with images, communicate in images and in images from other movies and photographs that we liked and things like that. I talked a little bit with the actors about sort of a tone, sort of like the way dialogue, sort of the rhythm of dialogue in older kind of 40s film noir type movies. But I also didn't want the actors to be sort of thinking too much about style. I wanted them to be, you know, kind of living these moments in real time. So we certainly talked a lot on sort of the technical side about other films and about The Shining and the way that Kubrick kind of makes that space feel huge,

even though it's very claustrophobic and about film noir. But with the actors, it was mostly just talking about the characters and backstory. It's interesting that, you know, Anya Taylor-Joy is in the movie. She's becoming kind of like a Jamie Lee Curtis of psychological thriller figure now. Did you have a sense of that when you guys were working together that she was, you know, in a low-key way becoming an avatar for a very specific kind of movie, you know, that when you see her it communicates like there will be some tension coming. Yes, yeah.

When we started working together, I'd only seen The Witch which is a movie that I really love and she'd she's so captivating in that movie. I don't think any of her movies that she's filmed since then had come out at the time and she came to our set having worked on three or four movies back to back. She's a very, very hard worker.

And I knew she was great and really talented. But a lot of those movies that have really sort of raised her profile since, we were just hearing, you know, her stories about working on set with them. It's been about a year since you debuted the movie at Sundance, right? So what happens, you know, we stories about working on set with them. It's been about a year since you debuted the movie at Sundance, right? So what happens, you know, we hear about this a lot, a movie debuts at Sundance, it gets, it's well received, it gets distribution, and then there's a waiting period. So as a creative person, what are you doing in this waiting period? What is this year like for you? I think there's a, it's a lot of, there's certainly some press and promotional stuff

for the movie, which is great. And then it's sort of beginning to look at other projects. And I have a very – I think we'll continue to have that very winding and unpredictable writing process. So I've been doing a bunch of writing and then I've been sort of doing a very – something which is very new to me, which is being attached to projects as a director and not a writer sometimes and taking meetings and just sort of cultivating the field of possibilities that will lead to the next movie and the next several movies. Have you been elevated off of the water bottle tour? I don't know.

Maybe the water bottles have become nicer. I have a great water bottle here today. Yeah, only smart water here at the Ringer. No, but very much still that, you know, that's the world, I suppose. I wanted to ask you about Anton Yelchin, his performance. This is the last performance I think he gave before he passed away. He's really wonderful in this movie. Maybe could you just reflect on working with him and

what that experience was like? Yeah, it was really amazing and wonderful. I mean, he's a, I do think it's a great, really, really great performance within the movie. And I think we were all, you know, felt very fortunate to have the chance to work with him. His role in the movie, I would hesitate to say like comic relief, but it's a movie with a very deadpan overall style. And he really gets to come in and bring energy and spontaneity to the movie. That was very much his sort of presence on set too. And he was simultaneously very serious about the work and about the craft of acting um but intensely playful when doing it um did a lot of improvisation and um came in after it had been several days of really just working with any and olivia and brought this sort of whole

new crazy dynamic uh to the set and um and just the sweetest guy too. And was at the end of our final sort of wrap party was like doing rounders in his car, taking crew members home, and was just such a sort of giving guy. So it was awesome to work with him, for sure. I've been thinking a lot about the story since I saw this movie months ago. I'm curious sort of what you're feeling the primary mission of the story was because it's taken on some added weight, I think, given the headlines the last six months or so. But when you first started writing it, what were you like hoping to convey about these two girls. I think again, like I sort of started with just a very abstract image and then moved into just trying to be sort of true to these characters and making them as complex and interesting as possible. And I think sort of like the social objective or the political objective

of the movie is always sort of the very last step. And I sort of trust that it will be honest and worthwhile and true if you do your work on those earlier parts of the movie and stay true to the characters and to the world. I think for me there was always – the whole process was sort of tied up in my own anxieties about wealth and about the influence of wealth and privilege on people and particularly on young people, there was always something that was interesting for me about lead characters that were definitely big beneficiaries of privilege, but were also sort of drowned by it and were at a moment in their own journey in life where they were kind of building their own moral codes. And so I hope that the movie says something that is hopefully hard to boil down,

but that is truthful about the effect of living in a capitalist world and living at the top of that particular food chain. I just had a personal goal as a, you know, one of a million young male writers who really struggled to write female characters in my first several plays to write a story that had two strong female leads who were not anyone's love interest, who were not, you know, the younger sister or the daughter, but who really had their own story and their own movie. Did you have like a council of people that you showed the script to before you started shooting? I'm always curious about how many people get to see what's going to start going into action. And

you talked about, you know, having some concerns about writing female characters in your earlier work. Will you show it to people and say like, help me understand if I'm doing this correctly? I will. And I think that's one of the very cool things about the way that the kind of playwriting theater world works is that you're able to develop a script with a bunch of actors and the actors can change. But there's sort of a whole process of doing readings and, you know, readings around a table and then readings with music stands in front of people to sort of hear early versions of a draft out loud.

And we did a bunch of readings when it was still a play and when I sort of fully intended to do it as a play. And I got huge feedback then. You also can get a really interesting sort of feedback, I think, just listening to actors, listening to where actors' instincts take them on their first time reading through a script. But I definitely had not even sort of a small, closely trusted council, but a big group of collaborators that really helped with sort of the script as a play. And it's interesting sort of starting to write things purely for the screen, things that start as a screenplay now. I'm always trying to find ways to keep that process alive. I get the impression that when the film comes out, a lot of people are going to apply their specific visions of the world onto the characters and the story that you've created. There's a lot of evident sort of taking power ideas in the story that you're telling.

What's your level of comfort with people saying this is what this movie is about, even though that's not the intention that we talked about a few minutes ago? I think that's great. And I think I'm definitely a firm believer that I do not hold like an authoritative key to the meaning of a story. We'll see if, you know, I'm sure there will be some out there takes that make me furious. But no, for now, it's been very exciting to hear the different ways people take the movie, the different ways in which it's personal to them, the different sort of meanings that they take from it. And yeah, as someone who loves to have those debates

and talk about sort of the out there interpretations of movies that I love, I'm a big enthusiast of multiple readings of movies. How do you figure out what you're going to do next? Does it have to be a film? Could it be a play? Yeah, it doesn't have to be film. I definitely want to keep doing plays.

I think there are very sort of cool things you can do in the theater that are harder to do on film. But I had such a just fantastic experience with this movie that I'm very excited to keep working in film right now. I have a couple things brewing, none that I can speak publicly about, I guess. But I'm definitely interested in continuing to work on stories that have like a little bit of a genre element to them, but also hopefully function as dramas and sort of live in that interesting in-between area between multiple genres. What genres? Give us a little hint. I think there's so much you can do with broadly construed thriller genre. I think like suspense as an engine of storytelling is one of my favorite things to play with.

It's also been sort of pushed to the side a little bit, I feel like, in the last 10 years. It's not as much like a primary. It doesn't feel like the 90s when there would be a series of films that were driven by like the thriller category. It feels like it has lost a little bit of its luster. I think it's been, certainly with Get Out, it's been a very cool year for thrillers on that count alone. And I saw a cool Christopher Nolan interview where he was talking, I think, about suspense or tension being the visual language that he chose to tell Dunkirk.

And that couldn't be a more different movie from Get Out or from Thoroughbreds. But I think there's some cool thrillers out there for sure. Have you seen Raw? I have, yes. I think that's my top movie of the year so far. That is a suspenseful and a how soon will I vomit kind of way. Exactly. How long can I handle this sort of way?

That's a very good movie. Corey, congratulations on the movie. Thank you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you so much. Thanks again to Corey Finley, and thanks for listening to today's episode. For more on movies, head to TheRinger.com, where Cam Collins reviewed A Wrinkle in Time, a fascinating and complex new movie from Ava DuVernay. And check back next week when we'll have a new episode of TheRinger.com where Cam Collins reviewed A Wrinkle in Time, a fascinating and complex

new movie from Ava DuVernay. And check back next week when we'll have a new episode of The Big Picture. This is JJ Reddick, here to talk to you about the JJ Redick podcast, part of the ringer podcast network. Currently I play in the NBA for the Philadelphia 76ers, but you may know me from my previous teams, the LA Clippers, Milwaukee Bucks and the Orlando magic, or from my college days at Duke university being a professional basketball

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