INTERVIEW: Max and Sam Eggers on Directing The Front Room, Casting Kathryn Hunter, and Musicals

The debut film of directors Max and Sam Eggers, The Front Room, hit theaters this weekend, starring Brandy as Belinda and Kathryn Hunter as Solange, a mother/daughter-in-law duo at odds as Solange's health declines.

Centering the film on their own experience of caring for their grandfather in his old age, The Front Room takes inspiration from Susan Hill's short story of the same name and invites the Eggers brothers to unpack their experience through their twist on the tale which toes the finite line between horror and comedy.

Joining us to discuss the process of bringing the film from page to screen are Max and Sam Eggers, who told us about moving behind the camera for the first time, finding their Solange in Kathryn Hunter, and... musicals?

Billie Melissa: I read that you both have an acting background. How did it feel stepping behind the camera for the first time? What were your concerns? What were you excited about?

Max Eggers: It’s funny, and this is stealing from Stephen Sondheim, who's sort of an idol of ours as far as writing is concerned for any medium. He's always gonna be somebody that we look to. He talks a lot about being an actor as a writer, and I was never a better actor as an actor than I was an actor as a writer. What I mean by that is, I understood objectives and wants and obstacles and could use them in a way as a writer and as a director far better than I ever could as an actor.

The biggest critique I always got as an actor was “You're playing the end of the scene”, and that is great when you're writing. It's because you know where you're going, and when you're a director, you know what you want. We've been doing this – acting, and performing, and being in shows – since we were five years old. It’s been part of us forever, and I think it's always scary when you try any new thing. But, having been in the chaos of theater since we're five years old, and of course, then moving into cinema, being actors ourselves, when things went wrong, we kind of were like “It's OK. We know we got this. I’ve seen weirder.”

I would hope that the actors felt supported in the sense we could just let them do their thing and not worry about it, because we knew what that felt like and knew exactly what we wanted for them.

BM: So much is said in someone's debut film. I know The Front Room is inspired by Susan Hill’s short story, but it's also very personal to you both. What was it about this story that made you want to direct?

Sam Eggers: First of all, it's Susan Hill, who's an amazing writer, but it’s also about a family taking care of someone who's declining. We had done that recently, before reading it, with our grandfather. It was a very surreal experience for us. So, making it personal and moving it from England to America and flipping certain themes to make it more personal for us, I think that gave us a different lens to tell the story, having gone through something that was quite surreal.

Our grandfather was the patriarch of the family and then he suddenly started to become this little baby boy, and every day it got worse, and every day something weird would happen. I think we had a unique take on this part of life, and thought that we could from our personal experience authentically tell that story.

ME: I also would hope that Susan feels this way, but also, by letting The Front Room story be what it is, and adapting it and making it personal, then both things can coexist at the same time and be in concert. I think it's important when you adapt anything to make it personal, because you cannot replicate what attracted you to the material. You can only make it of yourself.

BM: Who were you in conversation with when adapting the material? Did you speak with Susan?

ME: We got the story from our producers, Lucan Toh, Babak Anvari, and Bryan Sonderman. I think, at that time, they had optioned the material in some way, so were looking for a way to adapt it. Then, of course, once you get the material, you pitch your idea that goes through certain hoops to be cleared. Then you're off to the races.

What's great about someone like Susan, I think she could recognize, hopefully, that in this piece, we're enlarging those themes and aspects that were so iconic in what she wrote. She wrote this amazing character of Solange, which was mythic. She was not just a wicked stepmother fairy tale, she was a mythic being. So, we were able to – along with the personal stuff – enlarge those aspects and make her, hopefully, as iconic a character as she deserves to be.

BM: I really want to talk about Solange, as Kathryn Hunter is so amazing in everything she does. What did you find yourselves learning from her?

SE: She is an artist in the true sense of the word. When we first met Kathryn, her and her husband were performing–

ME: –At the Almeida.

SE: At the Almeida, in London. In [Eugène] Ionesco’s “The Chairs”. Meeting her, first, was amazing, but, from there it was watching her embrace a story and live it. For me, that’s incredibly inspiring. Her utter commitment to the work, as well, is something that you can always appreciate and be inspired by because she's an artist's artist.

ME: As people from the theater, she's somebody who understands story. It's an incredibly inspiring process to watch her work.

BM: Was she on your mind when you were writing?

ME: I would say yes,

SE: We had some dream ideas.

ME: But, I would say yes. Kathryn was. It's one of those things where Solange is a very unique character, and she does many things that many people are uncomfortable with, and we couldn't find somebody who was willing to go there. So Kathryn was there. We just had to discover that. We'd seen her in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Julie Taymor version, of course, in Harry Potter as well. But then, when we saw her in Macbeth, it was like, “Here she is.” It was inevitable that it was Kathryn.

SE: There’s the physicality to the role that I think would be very hard for anybody else to achieve that she pulls off. She's a real chameleon in that way. So, for us, that was a big portion of finding our Solange, was somebody who bought into the gross and uncomfortable stuff, but also could physically be on two canes for the whole film.

BM: I'd love to hear about finding Andrew Burnap and Brandy, too. When I spoke to Andrew, I asked him the same question I asked you about Kathryn, and he said his lesson from you was about how to take risks in a short amount of time. So, my question is twofold: Tell me about finding the cast, and also the risks you were open to them taking.

ME: Similar to Solange, a lot of people were afraid of the material. With Brandy, there's a lot that is asked of her in terms of the character of Belinda. That was as equally challenging as it was to find someone who would be willing to play Solange, was to find someone willing to do that stuff. So, Brandy, she understood the material, connected with it, and wanted to embrace it. Roll with the punches, as it were. We lucked out, because we needed a Cinderella. That's what we were looking for.

With [Norman], people wanted to change that character. They did not want to play someone stuck in the middle. I remember we had an interview with somebody who wanted to make him this burly strong guy, and [Norman] is not that.

Andrew, immediately when we met him, understood the assignment. This is what he said to us, “I know how to be active in passivity, but I also know that this is a chance to support two women and I wanna do that.” So he was game for everything that we put at him. We saw Andrew play Joseph Smith in a series about Mormonism, and his work in silence was beautiful. Norman is a man of few words, so we needed somebody who could again be active in passivity.

BM: I want to ask you one last question, about the landscape of horror at the moment and how it's really giving way for new voices to come onto the scene to tell their stories. Do you think you want to play in the playground of horror for a little longer? Or will you switch it up for your next project?

SE: I went to musical theater school before all this, and I think horror and musicals are a beautiful landscape where you can do anything. Sometimes those two things cross. I think what's great about horror, especially these days, is there's just so many stories that can still be told, and such unique ways of telling those stories.

Speaking musicals, we'd love to do a musical, too, at some point. But, I think the horror space, we grew up in it. We know it. So, I think we want to stick with it.

ME: There's so many things you can get away with in horror that you cannot in any other genre and so many topics you can tackle. It would be wonderful to continue to explore that genre.

BM: Horror musical, please.

ME: Look, you know, Tim Burton did Sweeney Todd already.

Related: INTERVIEW: Andrew Burnap on The Front Room, the Horror Genre, and New Snow White