How Kate Siegel overcame self-doubt on directorial debut, a Mike Flanagan-penned UFO story

EW visits the set of "V/H/S/Beyond," where the actress and longtime Flanagan muse now steps behind the camera. See a first look.

On a sweltering summer day in the valley, Kate Siegel sits on the dusty floor of a soundstage next to a box fan and a bucket labeled "Fresh Guts," massaging her star's head.

She's shooting a scene inside a strange, cave-like spaceship for her directorial debut in V/H/S/Beyond, the latest installment of the long-running found-footage horror anthology series. Her leading lady, Alanah Pearce, mostly known for her work in the gaming world, is sticking out of the ship's wall from the waist up, the rest of her body dangling outside in the cold void of space. She's been suspended in this position for a while, and Siegel is doing everything she can to make her comfortable as her team sets up the shot.

"I've never had any director ever sit next to me on the dirty floor on their knees and basically give me a massage just to try to make me feel slightly better about the uncomfortable position that I was in," Pearce tells Entertainment Weekly nearly two months later. "It was the sweetest thing in the world. She brought a lot of mom energy to me." 

Siegel walks back to her monitor, crosses her arms, and assesses the scene. "Right now, she feels like something that is stuck to the wall as opposed to something that was placed in the wall," she says. Her crew sees what she means and gets to work. Pleased that she's been understood, Siegel jokes in mock amazement, "Her ideas are brilliant but easy to understand!" The set designers smile as they mix more papier-maché and begin burying Pearce deeper into her extraterrestrial enclosure.

"What we're doing here is all of the work, the art, and the collaboration that we've all been doing during prep and trying to bring that all together to give the audience something they haven't seen before," Siegel tells EW over her lunch break. Her spaceship might be made mostly of papier-maché and black paint, but she and her team are employing unique filmmaking techniques to transform it into something otherworldly.

"We're shooting in infrared so our light doesn't behave like light. We are creating an entire puppet built on top of an actress so that her body won't behave like a body. And we've put our camera on something called a trinity head, which makes our camera not behave like a camera," she explains. "And we have to make all of those things sing in tune."

Related: A horror maven's muse: Kate Siegel looks back on a decade of scares with Midnight Mass creator Mike Flanagan

Known for her collaborations with her creative partner and husband, renowned director Mike Flanagan (Hush, Midnight Mass, and The Haunting of Hill House, to name a few), the veteran Scream Queen makes an impressive directorial debut in V/H/S/Beyond, the seventh film in the anthology series that helped launch the careers of icons like Ti West, Adam Wingard, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, and Tyler Gillett. Her ambitious segment, Stowaway, follows Halle Halley ("like the comet," Siegel says), a young mother, physicist, and UFO truther who finds a flying saucer in the desert and, like "every good final girl," makes the fateful decision to go inside.

"The thing about V/H/S that I love is…the word I would use to describe it is scrappy," she says. "You have people who have a ton of passion and who don't necessarily have the Marvel budget, but what I'm experiencing is that everyone is interested in creative problem-solving. So I felt very lucky to step into a well-oiled machine for my first job. And V/H/S has always been known for supporting new and upcoming filmmakers and giving them space to do their dreams."

Related: Kate Siegel breaks down her mysterious Haunting of Bly Manor role

A writer at heart, Siegel has plenty of dreams, but she never intended to be a director. "When people would ask me, have you ever thought about directing — and I don't mean actual producers, I mean my mom asking — I'd be like, 'Wow, that seems like a lot of work, and my days are great. I get a nap at 2:00 p.m., I play with my kids, I learn some lines.' And I was like, 'I'm a sleepy girl with a busy life. No, thank you.'"

When she was approached to direct a segment in the upcoming sci-fi edition of V/H/S, a franchise she "loves," her first reaction was to turn it down. "I know, because I work closely with my husband, how much it takes," she says. (Their most recent collaboration, so far nine in total, was the film The Life of Chuck.) "I know the effort. I know what is required. So I was talking it over with my manager, and I was like, 'I don't think I can do that.' And from behind me, I hear Mike run into the room, and he goes, 'Yes, you can, absolutely. Yes, do it. You can't say no to this.' And I was like, 'Can I call right back?'"

Flanagan advised that directing a segment in the anthology series was "exactly the right first step," noting, "You'll be supported, but you can be creative. This is where you want to start." Plus, Siegel admits, "I always said if I wanted to direct, you got to do short film first. You can't take on a whole meal if you can't cook eggs." So she called the V/H/S producers back and took a meeting.

Related: Mike Flanagan calls his Exorcist 'the scariest movie I've ever made'

"I heard through a friend that Kate wanted to direct," Josh Goldbloom, a longtime producer on the series, says. "I know she's an actress first and foremost, and she was a writer with Mike on Hush, but everybody starts somewhere. I immediately got excited and went back to the team, and they were as equally excited. We sat down with Kate, had a conversation, and she just blew me away. Her treatment was, far and away, one of the craziest I've ever read. It was so thorough and complete and chaotic, and, on paper, it reads like a $100 million short film."

"I've always wanted to do Kate in space," Siegel says. "I've always loved the concept of space, and I love Interstellar, and I love Alien because what's great about a spaceship is that it's just an abandoned house — but in space, of course." So she used Goldbloom and the V/H/S team as a sounding board for a number of ideas from her writers' Rolodex. "What I loved about meeting with Josh was that I had some crazy ideas — I had a musical, I don't even remember what else — but he was like, 'Cool, cool, cool. Go get a pitch and come back.'"

Siegel trusted her closest collaborator to help craft a script she felt confident about executing. "Of course, I turned to Mike, and I was like, 'If I'm directing something, I need you to write it. He gave me parameters because he wants to protect me, he loves me, he wants me to do well. And so he helped me structure a script that was a really great blueprint for how to shoot your first movie. And I have that privilege that other people don't have: I live with Mike Flanagan."

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"When we brought on Kate, it was about Kate," Goldbloom says. "I wanted to see what Kate could do. There was never like, 'Hey, Mike Flanagan needs to be involved,' or, 'Hey, can Mike Flanagan write this segment?' She had come to me a couple weeks later and was basically like, 'Do you think it would be cool if Mike Flanagan wrote this?' And who would ever say no to that?"

Siegel's creative partnership with her husband forms the bedrock of their relationship. "We met as a collaboration. We met on Oculus before we got married. We did Hush, and at the end of Hush, we were like, 'Oh yeah, we're going to get married.' And so the two things are completely intertwined," she explains. "It's our love language. And it doesn't mean we don't fight. We had a couple of knockdown drag-out ones on this one, but I've said this to him and I think it's important that he is my, and I am his, north star.... Our collaboration needs to be gloves off so that we can push each other past our comfort zone."

Still, Siegel knows not everyone will understand their dynamic. Over the years, she learned to tune it out. "I understand that there is an undercurrent of 'I only get work because I get hired by my husband.' I'm aware of that rhetoric," she admits. "The truth is, if it wasn't that, it would be something else. 'She only gets work because of this.' People love to take you down if you're working. They want to have a reason that it's not them. So I had to release that balloon into the world because I would say it to myself. On Midnight Mass, I would be in my trailer thinking, 'I'm going to mess this up because the only reason I'm here is my husband.' And it's like, that's fine. Every actress I know has that basic imposter syndrome. I think of myself as relentlessly lucky to work with my friends on material."

It's a sentiment she and her husband continue to pay forward with their ever-growing, self-described Flanafam — a ragtag mix of actors and collaborators they enjoy working with. With V/H/S/Beyond, Pearce has become the newest member. "I've been friends with Kate for a number of years now," she shares. "We do regular movie nights at the Flanagan's house that they call the Flanaplex. I can't speak on behalf of Kate here, but when you're making indie movies, a lot of indie projects in general, you generally want to work with people you know. It's more fun; it's low budget, nobody's in it for money, so it's a lot easier to wrangle people to get together to make something creative and cool. And from my perspective, Kate is a creative powerhouse."

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"This has been an unrelenting, joyful experience for me," Siegel says of her directorial debut. "And, of course, it's also getting kicked in the tits every day. I don't think you can say kicked in the tits. It's also a series of challenges. But what I keep saying is I can't believe it's this much fun as an actor. I thought I was the rainbow, but it turns out I was only one color, and I finally had that Wizard of Oz moment where the world turned into color."

She adds, "I could have lived my whole life happy being an actor and not knowing that the thing was over one degree to the left. And I will never ever forget that. V/H/S were the first people to call and say, 'I think Kate could do this'. And I hope I get to do more of it, but I don't want to get too cheesy because directors aren't cheesy. They're cool."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.