‘The Front Room’ Directors Max Eggers And Sam Eggers Talk Creating Their Uncanny New Horror Film
Twin brothers Max and Sam Eggers grew up with filmmaking in their veins. Whether growing up at their mother’s theater camp or spending time with their Shakespearean professor father, they were surrounded by theater, art, and the magic of performance. So it only makes sense that the two have finally united to direct their first film together: The Front Room, a chilling psychological thriller about the horrors of aging.
In the film,
Everything goes to hell for newly-pregnant Belinda (Brandy) after her mother-in-law (Kathryn Hunter) moves in. As the diabolical guest tries to get her claws on the child, Belinda must draw the line somewhere…
We spoke with the Eggers brothers about filming in a real haunted house, the physicality of Kathryn Hunter, and finding their Cinderella.
Dread Central: So this is your first time directing a film together. What was that process like for the two of you to come together? You obviously have your own experiences in filmmaking, so what was it like collaborating?
Max Eggers: It was weirdly natural. Our mother had a children’s theater company in New Hampshire for 20 years, and that’s where we grew up essentially. I mean, our father was a Shakespeare professor, so there was literally no choice.
DC: You were doomed. You were doomed to be theater kids. [Laughs]
ME: Yes, yes. But if that’s doomed, thank God. But I would say we’ve been working together in that space forever since we were five years old. The hardest stuff was logistics when we had to deal with COVID. It’s funny, actually, Sam got COVID on set and the hardest part was when we got separated, honestly,
Sam Eggers: It’s not like a secret language or anything, but we think the same way. Plus we planned, we storyboarded the whole film before we shot anything. And so I think we oftentimes have the same ideas and I dunno how anybody does it on their own. Truthfully, after going through it, I have somebody who, when things go wrong, I can be like, “Okay, what the hell do we do now?” But it was also just really just a joy. As Max said, we directed some shows when we were younger, I used to be an editor, Max obviously wrote The Lighthouse with our brother, and so evolving into this felt natural
Dread Central: The tone of this movie is so wild and I was obsessed with it. Why this tone for this specific film? I’d love to hear more about your process there with the dark humor.
SE: I think the source of it is we took care of our grandfather as he declined, which was the inspiration for how we adapted the short story. That was a terrifying, sad, hilarious journey to go on, especially because, as he declined, he never had dementia or anything. But he acted out in certain ways and he was this patriarch of our family. We would have, not the same but similar instances of discovering things behind doors that he would do in his bed. Things that were just such surreal, sometimes hilarious experiences. Then so when we were adapting [the story], especially when we were shooting it, we were trying to find filmic parallels.
What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? was a big inspiration. That has a similar hilariously bizarre, scary tone. And when you watch that film, you’re like, “What is going on? What’s happening?” I dunno if I should be laughing or crying or covering my eyes. So I think we are very interested in that kind of thing
ME: From the beginning, we were very inspired by surrealist painters. Dorothy Tanning was one of them. And sort of the idea of opening a door and you don’t what is in front of you. The surreal is not always frightening. It can be frightening, but it’s also most of the time hilarious and kind of stupid.
DC: It’s so uncanny where you’re like, is this normal or not? Am I supposed to laugh? And you play with that uncannyness super well in The Front Room.
SE: But again, it goes back to the truth of what it was like to take care of somebody who declined. There’s no support in this country, I should say. You feel rudderless and it’s crazy.
DC: Yeah. Kathryn Hunter as Solange, what an absolutely inspired choice. I’m obsessed with her. I love her physicality. I love her as an actor. So I wanted to hear about how you came to her as your antagonist because she hasn’t really had a lot of roles like this, so it was just so cool to get to watch her play and be kind of psychotic and chaotic.
ME: Well, I mean a hundred percent. And it’s crazy that it’s taken this long for her. I’ll say Joel Cohen’s Macbeth was the thing [that got our attention]. One of our executives we were working with, Zach Vargas Sullivan, was like, “You should check out Kathryn Hunter and Macbeth.” We’d heard of her seeing The Tempest, the Julie Taymor taped version, and Harry Potter, of course. But when we saw her and heard her [in Macbeth], I mean, we were like, my God, this is it.
And then she was willing to read the script, liked it, wanted to meet us. I mean, it was immediately clear from when we saw that performance. But then when we met her there was no other choice. And whatever else we had entertained would’ve been a terrible idea. It wouldn’t have been this, this special thing that she created. She loves to explore stuff that people don’t want to talk about. I think the two canes and being able to do that was really exciting for her. And she’s a very physical actor.
SE: That’s maybe the thing that she is, and she finds truth not just in the language, but in the body.
DC: And I love that in a film like this where you’re being very honest about old age, even though she’s not great, you’re still honest about what it means to take care of somebody. And I think a lot of films don’t want to talk about that and how hard it is to take care of. But this puts it in such a ridiculous light that I think it’s maybe easier, I’m not sure. But yeah,
ME: Our goal has never been to offend. It’s a very difficult subject and people are either open to it or they’re hostile to it. Therefore that sort of ridiculous tone, again, might strike people negatively. And if that is the case, we just want to say that’s of course not our intention. This is a very specific woman and a very specific situation. I’m going to say all day, aging and people who are older are wonderful people. [Laughs] This [film] is no comment on the process of aging except on how we deal with it as a culture.
DC: It’s my worst nightmare. I have an estranged parent and this movie is my literal nightmare. I appreciate that though, being able to see it and to live it out. But you did capture probably one of my deepest fears.
SE: I think also think Susan Hill [who wrote the original novel], I mean obviously, the film is very different in many ways. Also very similar, but it’s such a powerfully relatable and frightening thing to have this estranged parent slammed back into your life. And you can’t do anything except take them in because you feel guilty. Of course, Belinda and Norman have their own selfish reasons for bringing her in. But then like Max said, for us, I think it was important to sort of explore that in a somewhat frightening but mostly ridiculous way. What is the process of someone coming in like that and then declining? It is important for us to begin to talk about these things.
DC: Yeah. You also do a really good job of skirting the horror genre. The trailer sets an expectation, but I think The Front Room is something much different.
ME: That was something that was a bit intentional. Again, it’s that thing of the lead-up to going into a certain door. I think it was a big risk tonally, but we were blessed to have the collaborators we had, not just on camera, but certainly, but also behind the camera. We were in this abandoned, haunted house that had no working toilets or anything.
DC: Wait, that was a real abandoned house? And it was haunted for real? At least you think.
ME: Well, our costume designer, Elizabeth Warn, saged the place because she said that the woman there was not happy. So just long story short, we were looking for a house. We needed something that could fit us, our whole crew, and everything. At the last minute, Justin Stowell, our great locations manager, found this house that was abandoned and was like, “I don’t know if it’ll work. We might not be able to film there.”
It was a big house that hadn’t been open for two years, smelled like mold and it was leaking and all this stuff. You walk into the living room and it’s got 70 shag carpet. Then you go into the front room and it looked like Ingmar Bergman’s The Shining. There was a blood-red carpet, and on the walls were these black and white dancing people.
DC: That’s incredible!
ME: Literally, we were trying so hard to keep it all because it was so strange. But just in terms of all the things we needed, we had to unfortunately get rid of [that room]. The woman who lived there ended up not being able to get up the stairs, so she lived out her life in the front room and died there.
DC: Shut up. That happened for real in that house??
SE: For real. And so we were like, “Okay, it has to be this place” and somehow we were able to do it. We were very lucky, but it was so weird. Very surreal.
DC: Wait, that’s so weird. Oh, that’s so cool and spooky. I got goosebumps a little bit.
ME: One thing that’s sad about it is they demolished the house as soon as we left.
DC: No! Well, you know what? It’s captured forever in memory on camera.
SE: Ava [Berkofsky], our cinematographer, they said that they’d heard things. There was a corner of the house that we weren’t allowed in. It was just completely dangerous. But they said that they heard stuff in there where no one was. It was spooky.
DC: I love that. That’s so good and cool. So what was it like for y’all to get to work with Brandy?
SE: It was a dream. It was a dream. She’s our Cinderella. And so again, we sent her the script and she had a lot of personal connections to it. And I think she wanted to explore darker things at this point in her life. She was so collaborative, so honest, so willing. She was in every single scene.
I think of course as anybody would be, even if they’re a seasoned person who’s done this before, she was nervous. But she was really, really committed. And I think we got really lucky. It’s truly rare when it comes to one person. But to have all of our actors be committed like Brandy, I mean, it was just a dream.
ME: It’s one of those things where you search for somebody like Solange, the wicked stepmother, and then here comes Kathryn Hunter. If we have a wicked stepmother, we need a Cinderella. We need somebody that we all can connect with immediately, that we all root for. And when Brandy was willing to read the script, and again, talk to us, it was like, “Oh my God, this is it. This is her.”
The Front Room comes to theaters on September 6, 2024, from A24.
Categorized:Interviews
