JT Mollner Pulls Back the Curtain on ‘Strange Darling’: I Was Never “Trying to Fool the Audience”
[This story contains major spoilers for Strange Darling.]
There was a period of time when Strange Darling filmmaker JT Mollner didn’t want to give a detailed interview like this one. He intended for his thoughts on his six-chaptered, nonlinear thriller to correspond with a tight-lipped marketing campaign that sets a deviant predator in motion as he hunts his prey. And while the now-critically acclaimed film’s various marketing materials boil the premise down to Kyle Gallner’s “The Demon” and his tenacious pursuit of Willa Fitzgerald’s “The Lady,” Mollner eventually agreed with Magenta Light Studios’ marketing team about the necessity of tipping their hand ever so slightly. Thus, potential viewers were given an indication that Strange Darling wasn’t going to be another formulaic offering involving a final girl.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
'Strange Darling' Star Willa Fitzgerald Breaks Down the Shocking End of Her Acclaimed Thriller
How Giovanni Ribisi Ended Up Photographing 'Strange Darling,' One of 2024's Best-Reviewed Films
'Smile' Review: Sosie Bacon Stars in a Genuinely Frightening Horror Debut
Venturing into spoiler territory, the film’s marketing and first few chapters may establish Fitzgerald’s character as the target of a serial killer, but she was actually the one targeting Gallner’s character in the midst of their combative one-night stand. Known as the notorious “Electric Lady” serial killer, she didn’t realize that she was toying with an off-duty cop, so she finally met her match after a prolific two-year killing spree across multiple states.
When the film premiered at 2023’s Fantastic Fest, Mollner admits that numerous interested parties were stumped as to how to sell the movie to audiences, given its inherent sleight of hand.
“At the beginning, a lot of people were like, ‘We love this movie, but we don’t know how to approach this,’” Mollner tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So we found a company [via Magenta Light Studios] who formulated an approach and created some really great marketing materials. So it was possible to market the movie.”
Mollner’s second feature may have ever-changing character dynamics because of its nonlinear structure, but he always encouraged his actors to play their parts authentically. So he didn’t tell Gallner to feign the role of a serial killer at times, nor did he urge Fitzgerald to pose as the victim in situations where the viewer thinks she’s one.
“Narratively, the movie fools the audience, but I was never intentionally trying to fool the audience. So I never told either actor to act like a final girl in distress or a serial killer on the run,” Mollner says. “I never said [to Gallner], ‘Act like Leatherface here.’ On a subtextual level or a subconscious level, I felt like the people watching the movie would feel like I was trying to manipulate them in a dishonest way. We’re still manipulating them, but it’s only because the story is out of sequence.”
The Electric Lady subverts the final girl trope by being a serial killer who outlives all the other characters until a good Samaritan stops her truck to offer this seemingly war-torn woman a helping hand. Just moments prior, the Electric Lady explained to her final victim that she primarily kills people who briefly appear as the devil to her. So, when she steps inside the good Samaritan’s truck, she quickly sees the devil in her own reflection, resulting in tears of relief. That’s when she draws her gun, but before she can pull the trigger in one direction or another, Sherri Foster Blake’s good Samaritan, who’s credited as The Driver, puts an end to the Electric Lady’s reign of terror with a weapon of her own.
The lingering question is whether the Electric Lady was going to stay true to her tendency of killing devils, meaning herself in this case, or if she was going to murder The Driver. Fitzgerald all but confirmed this writer’s interpretation that the Lady was determined to commit suicide, but Mollner prefers to keep the ending as ambiguous as possible.
“I love The Hollywood Reporter, but I’ve made a deal with myself to never answer that question to anybody. I know how I feel about it, and there’s so many different versions of what people are getting out of that scene,” Mollner says. “So I love the complexity of that scene, and I like that that’s the conclusion you came to because it certainly could be the case.”
Mollner is a family man at heart, as his father, Duke Mollner, performs Strange Darling’s most hilarious line during The Lady’s escape from the motel room she occupied with The Demon. His mother, Ginnie Pallone Mollner, is also an accomplished singer whose voice is featured on Z Berg’s remarkably stirring soundtrack. And the Las Vegas native will soon be returning to his hometown to help run his family’s seasonal haunted house business, Freakling Bros. Horror Shows, which the USA Today once referred to as the country’s “scariest haunt.”
Below, during a recent spoiler conversation with THR, Mollner also discusses how Giovanni Ribisi ended up as Strange Darling’s DP and producer. Then he details Stephen King’s dual endorsement of both his new film and his upcoming screenplay adaptation of The Long Walk for Francis Lawrence.
So you shot Strange Darling entirely on 35 mm, and it was done so by Giovanni Ribisi, which has prompted many double takes. What’s your own history with celluloid and how did that lead to Giovanni as your DP and producer?
Ever since I started directing short films a long time ago and went into my first very low-budget feature [Outlaws and Angels], I wanted to shoot film. But when I was coming up as a filmmaker, almost everybody who was doing low budget stuff and short films and scraping by to create content was shooting digitally, just like most people now. So it was really important for me to shoot film because the movies I grew up with as a kid looked a certain way and had a certain amount of texture and depth and feeling. I wanted to be on sets where I could hear cameras roll and smell celluloid, but when I finally got into filmmaking, that wasn’t really happening anymore. So it became a huge priority of mine to do that, and I had to beg, borrow and steal to make sure I could raise enough money to shoot film on my short films and first feature. Instead of making 30 short films in five years, I only made five, because it was always just a big priority.
I then became close with Steve Bellamy, the president of Kodak at the time. We met at Sundance when my first film premiered there, and [Outlaws and Angels] was only one of two movies that were shot on film back in 2016. So we stayed close, and I spoke on panels for Kodak, and I talked to filmmakers who were also making small films about how they could make it work on their budget. It just became a real passion of mine since they were the last company around that was selling what I considered to be my paint.
And so, one year, Steve Bellamy took me to the ASC [American Society of Cinematographers] awards, because Kodak always has a table and they’ll usually have a filmmaker, an actor, and some people from Kodak there. And, that year, Giovanni Ribisi and I were two of the guests. I’ve always been a huge fan of his as an actor, and so we started talking right away. I actually started plotting how to get him in my next movie as an actor, but what I realized was that he was very, very passionate about cinematography. He told me he’d been shooting music videos and commercials for probably 10 years at the time, but he hadn’t done a feature film yet. So he invited me over to his studio, Stellascope, to look at his camera equipment, and we bonded over a similar passion and love for celluloid. He just adored the medium.
We then became film buddies. We started texting each other at night, saying, “I’m watching Kwaidan on the Criterion Channel,” or, “I just watched Dead Ringers again for the first time in many years.” We went back and forth on movies, and we had this film-dork friendship. I then sent a few scripts to him, because he said he was very interested in producing and shooting something, and [Strange Darling, then known as One Night With You] ended up just being the one. We’d been looking to work together for a number of years, and this is the project that spoke to him.
At first, we thought we’d have to go out and raise a million bucks to shoot this tiny movie ourselves, but it turned out that we had a lot of other supporters. My agent sent it to producers Roy Lee and Steve Schneider, who took it to Miramax and a number of other places. We got some very quick offers to make it for a low budget, but it was at least a legitimate budget that didn’t have to come from us running around town, trying to get private equity or something. So I still really wanted to work with Giovanni, even though he didn’t have to get the movie set up for me. And when Miramax signed on, I just said, “Hey, listen, I’ve seen what this guy can do. I think he’s the right DP for this movie. We’ve been talking about the plan for how we want this movie to look for months.” We then went and did it.
Are you permitted to say what the official budget was?
I’m not even aware. It’s because Miramax essentially bought the script from me, and then they hired me to direct it. It wasn’t like my last movie where I was very involved in the budget process, as one of the main producers. But this was my first studio movie, and I know the budget is somewhere over $3 million and somewhere below $10 million. I wasn’t exactly thinking about the budget as I was writing it, but I knew that it was contained enough and limited enough as far as the amount of cast and everything. And once I finished the script, I was like, “Wow, if I needed to, I could shoot this thing for a few hundred thousand dollars.” It would be a much different movie, but it was still made for what felt like a low budget and was considered a low budget. We had major limitations. Our shooting schedule wasn’t long.
When we went and got the movie greenlit by Miramax, they said, “We want to make some theatrical, but lower-budget, elevated thriller genre movies.” And, for me, it was a huge step up, budget-wise, because my first film had to work with a very, very minimal budget. So this, at least for me, felt like a real movie. I did have access to more things than I had on the first one, and then Giovanni brought in a lot of his camera gear and equipment that he kept at his own rental house, Stellascope. So he added to the value of the movie, and if the official budget that Miramax had for this movie was $4 million, Giovanni’s contributions, as far as camera equipment, made it feel like it was a million dollars higher than that. But no, I don’t know the exact budget number, unfortunately. They haven’t shared that stuff with me.
M. Night Shyamalan urges up-and-coming filmmakers to consider how to market and frame their movies while writing and shooting, because a film’s marketing team initiates the storytelling experience. Well, it seems like Strange Darling may have used a similar strategy. Did you actually know how you’d eventually market this movie at the script level?
No, I respect and admire M. Night Shyamalan in a major way. He’s a profound influence on so many of us, and I can’t wait to see his new film [Trap], but I actually disagree. If I had been thinking about how to market this movie while I was writing it, I may not have written it. It’s so difficult as an artist to discipline yourself to sit down and write and complete a screenplay. I’m compelled to do it and I have to do it, but it never stops being a grind. The only way I’m able to get through that process is to have it be something that totally inspires me, artistically, or somebody hires me to adapt a novel. It then becomes fun because it’s a high level of work. But when writing something original, it’s got to really get me excited. I’ve got to love the idea, and it’s got to gestate in my brain and in my heart for a good period of time before I finally have to write it.
So it’s somebody else’s job to market the movie, and if I started thinking about that as I was writing, I think it would derail a lot of fairly good ideas that might be complicated by marketing ideas. When the film premiered [at 2023’s Fantastic Fest], we had a flood of really good reviews and good responses from audiences, which was amazing. We then had a bunch of companies that were interested in buying it and distributing it. Miramax doesn’t distribute movies; they just finance movies. So there were a lot of discussions with potential distributors and people who ended up making offers, but at the beginning, a lot of people were like, “We love this movie, but we don’t know how to approach this.” So we found a company [via Magenta Light Studios] who formulated an approach and created some really great marketing materials. I love the trailer and poster art, so it was possible to market the movie. But if I thought about it too much in the beginning, I might’ve been too scared to write it.
Well, let’s dive into spoiler territory. The first half of the film is framed as if Kyle Gallner’s “The Demon” character is a serial killer, but it’s actually Willa Fitzgerald’s “The Lady,” which is short for her serial killer name of Electric Lady. Did the marketing team basically decide to mirror what the first half of the movie was doing anyway?
Well, the conundrum was that I wanted to present all the trailers, posters, interviews and everything that had anything to do with the movie as a very simple “predator versus final girl.” That’s it. So the marketing team had to find a way to present it that way, but also hint at the fact that there’s more character complexity and more emotional complexity and just something different about the story. They were afraid, and for good reason, that if they just marketed it like the first chapter of the movie, then we’d only get people who want a very traditional cookie-cutter cat-and-mouse film. We’d miss out on all the people who want something different and something new.
If you were going to publish this earlier than the movie comes out, I’d normally say, “I had this image of the archetypal final girl, and I wanted to present her with more context, backstory and complexity than we’ve ever seen before.” But that basically means turning the final girl inside out, because the person you think is the prey at the beginning of the movie isn’t. It switches. So it was just really complex, and I aligned with the goal of marketing, which was to target people who want something more traditional and those who want something in addition to that.
Did you play any mind games with the actors to achieve the desired guessing-game effect? For example, during the opening car chase, did you direct Kyle to play the part like he’s really the serial killer? Did you get that psychological with each chapter? Or did you let the context and structure do that work instead?
That’s a great question, and nobody has really asked me that, even outside of interviews. Narratively, the movie fools the audience, but I was never intentionally trying to fool the audience. So I never told either actor to act like a final girl in distress or a serial killer on the run. Willa and Kyle were just tremendous, and we talked about how this movie is essentially a love story. It’s about the different representations of a relationship’s phases and a relationship eventually going bad.
Love hurts …
Exactly! The intimate moments in the hotel room and the intimate moment in the final act when they’re talking to each other, we talked about how I wanted them to be feeling earnest emotions. She’s not luring him somewhere, he’s not trying to fool her. They really feel something for each other, and I wanted them to play that straight. Now it’s sometimes hard to sense that they really feel anything for each other because of the way everything goes, but when he is chasing her through the woods in that opening scene, I probably could have made him more villainous and more disgusting and more terrifying. He’s scary because he has a gun and he’s chasing her very aggressively in a truck, but the idea and the direction associated with those scenes was that those characters knew what had happened in the hotel room already. We’d already shot those scenes at that point, but the actors already knew from reading the script. So the reason he was so ferocious in all those moments was because of what had happened in the earlier scenes and how upset and hurt and angered he was by what had already happened.
So it is a temper explosion, but he was never supposed to play a villain or a predator with no purpose. I never said, “Act like Leatherface here.” On a subtextual level or a subconscious level, I felt like the people watching the movie would feel like I was trying to manipulate them in a dishonest way. We’re still manipulating them, but it’s only because the story is out of sequence. And what I wanted the movie to be about was expectations and subversion of those expectations when it comes to stereotypes and archetypes. Somebody might be acting this way in this scene, but let’s see what happened to them the night before to get them to this place.
So we always talked about being honest with the characters’ emotions and who they are. It makes a second viewing more interesting than it could have been. If we were just feeding into those archetypes and those characters weren’t acting honestly, you’d go back to the opening act and be like, “Well, that’s a little far-fetched.” But if you go back and watch the opening act now, you’ll see moments where he seems a little bit vulnerable and a little scared. You’ll also see moments where she looks a little bit tough, and there are indicators of what’s to come, like when she stops and smokes that cigarette in the forest. It’s weird to finally be talking about this stuff now.
Electric Lady survives all of these obstacles, and along the way, she tells Steven Michael Quezada’s cop character that she kills anyone who appears as the devil to her. A good Samaritan (Sherri Foster Blake) then rescues Electric Lady at the end, and when she gets inside the woman’s truck, she immediately sees the devil in her own side-mirror reflection. She then pulls her gun out, but the good Samaritan reacts instinctively and shoots the Lady with her own gun. Was Electric Lady actually going to shoot herself and not the good Samaritan?
What do you think?
When she saw the devil in herself, I think she realized that she had to honor her pattern or code of killing devils by killing herself. She then cries because she knows she’s about to free herself of this burden. But the good Samaritan obviously didn’t know what was going on inside her head, so she jumped the gun.
I love The Hollywood Reporter, and I was so excited to do this, but I’ve made a deal with myself to never answer that question to anybody. I know how I feel about it, and there’s so many different versions of what people are getting out of that scene. It’s really exciting that people are sometimes seeing it in such a different way than I imagined and sometimes in the same way. So I love the complexity of that scene, and I like that that’s the conclusion you came to because it certainly could be the case. But I don’t want to talk about how I feel about it. It’ll ruin things for the rest of you reading this. [Writer’s Note: Willa Fitzgerald also wanted to avoid being too definitive, but she seemingly agreed with the above reading.]
Electric Lady proceeds to die in a oner that concludes the movie. Is that a dying look of satisfaction on her face? Is part of her impressed by the good Samaritan?
I think that’s a fascinating interpretation, and if you saw that in her, then there’s probably a little of that there.
His fate was likely tied to wanting to subvert the final girl trope, but did The Demon/R.C. (Gallner) not make it out alive as comeuppance for stepping out on his wife?
I don’t really write in those terms, and I don’t think about things in those terms. If it gives somebody satisfaction because that’s where they’re coming from and they’re projecting that onto it, then great. But the intention with everything that happens in this movie is always narrative surprise, especially with this specific exercise. I’ve written other films that maybe have more of a specific social message or something I’m trying to subversively push. But this movie was an exercise in surprise and subverting expectations, stereotypes and archetypes. What do those things mean? So I tried to figure out the most believable outcome to every scene that could also surprise.
Part of it is also just an emotional attachment to certain characters. Personally, I have compassion personally for the Lady. There’s a lot in this film about moral ambiguity and how some people might not be a serial killer, but they have other issues. (Laughs.) One person might not have those other issues, but they’re a fucking serial killer. And even if somebody is a killer, maybe this killer isn’t a sociopath. Maybe she’s really like Travis Bickell in Taxi Driver. Even though they’re totally off the rails, there’s really a true motivation and justification for the killing within their own psyche. They don’t lack emotion and lack feeling; they just really believe this is the only way. So I personally feel a lot of compassion for the Lady character. There are times when I feel compassion for the Demon too, but after going through all of that, I didn’t feel like the right way for her to go was by his hand.
You have this opening crawl that sets up the film as if it’s a true crime story. Did you take a page out of the Fargo playbook where it’s not actually based on a true crime?
No, I actually read a story about a similar killer in the U.K. So there was definitely some reality at play when the character was conceptualized, and I’m going to try my best not to talk about that specific story in the next couple months. It would muddy the waters of the movie. But we’re definitely leaning into traditional horror tropes in the opening of the movie, and there’s a number of them there. Some of the influences are obvious, like Duel and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Jason Patric steps in to do the John Larroquette voiceover from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is one of the most iconic horror openings in the history of American cinema. So we really wanted to lean into that. We also wanted to give the audience a sense of immediacy and honesty, and remind them that there are true elements to this story, which hopefully makes it scarier and more visceral and more intriguing.
Where did Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hersey’s monstrous concoction known as “Sunday breakfast” originate?
Although the standard American diet can be horrifying and that meal could have been used for scares, it came naturally when I was writing. I wanted to present the most idyllic version of a long-term relationship — a sort of Eden. These two endearing — and in many ways, unorthodox — characters are dressed in the only white clothing you see in the entire film, surrounded by flowers and sunshine, enjoying their perfect vision of a Sunday morning, allowing themselves to completely indulge. The breakfast became a representation of that happiness, that indulgence, and the contentment they feel. It also just delivered exactly what I wanted to relay about these two characters. It explained their relationship perfectly to the audience without using almost any dialogue and in such a short amount of time. It also, narratively, offers some humor in a moment that’s very cathartic and effective. I love that scene, truly. It’s up there with my favorites in the film, and that has almost everything to do with the fact that Barbara and Ed are in it.
The funniest moment in the film is when the Lady yells, “He’s got a gun!” and the neighboring motel guest yells back, “Well, so do I!” That was your dad, Duke Mollner, right?
It was! That moment has been getting a really wonderful audience reaction with a lot of laughs. He was the star of two of my short films, and then he played the sheriff in my Western, Outlaws and Angels. He’s been in everything that I’ve ever done, so it’s always really fun to work with him. We really focus on two characters the entire movie, so I knew he was going to have to do something very small, but I wanted it to be memorable and impactful. So I love that moment, and I’m glad you noticed.
Z Berg’s music, including the aforementioned “Love Hurts,” is one of the film’s key ingredients. Was her version of “Love Hurts” actually played diegetically in the motel room on the day?
Other than “Love Hurts,” “Into the Night” is the only song other that Z Berg didn’t write or record for the album. It’s a song that I liked from her previous album, and I put it into the hotel scene when the Lady and the Demon are having their moment earlier on. In the original draft of the script that I sent to Z and to Giovanni and to everybody else, it actually says, “Woman running in slow motion with ‘Love Hurts’ covered by Z Berg.” So that was the dream, but I didn’t know if we’d get that song.
But Z’s other music is extremely singular, and that’s what I wanted. The only bit of direction I gave her for the rest of her songs that she wrote for the movie was: “Julee Cruise meets Leonard Cohen meets Z Berg.” I just wanted that sadness and that beauty all wrapped up into the music, and she delivered in spades.
With “Love Hurts,” we hoped we could get the rights to cover that, and when she did end up covering it, we knew she was going to stay true to the Emmylou Harris version. That’s why she brought in Keith Carradine to do it with her. But when we used it in the hotel room and the Lady sang along, we played the Emmylou Harris version on the day. We then went in and recorded the Z’s version later.
One of the original songs, “To Forget You,” was sung by my mom, Ginnie Pallone Mollner. She has the voice of an angel, and had a career performing in Hollywood and Las Vegas in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It’s always been my dream to have her on a major movie soundtrack, and Z and her dad Tony Berg produced the song and made that dream come true. It plays on the radio during a few of the scenes and is featured on the soundtrack album. So I had the great pleasure of getting to work with both my mother and father on the film.
Stephen King praised Strange Darling, and you recently adapted his novel, The Long Walk, for Francis Lawrence. Does that mean he endorsed your Long Walk script as well?
He did. He gave the thumbs-up on the Long Walk script, which was very exciting. I’m such a fan of Stephen King. I’m such a fan of Francis Lawrence. So that was one of those dream gigs, and it’s shooting right now. It was very exciting for me to be able to contribute in some way to that. And then, with Strange Darling, we really wanted Stephen King to watch it, and the fact that he was willing to say something about it, I didn’t even know how to process that. It was pretty cool, and I love him. I’ve never met him, but he did endorse both of these things that I’ve done, which is just so special.
***
Strange Darling is now playing in movie theaters.
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
