LAFF 2015 Interview: Director Adam Schindler and Producer Brian Netto Discuss SHUT IN

Friday night at the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival, Adam Schindler’s thriller Shut In enjoyed its world premiere. Written by T.J. Cimfel and David White, the film stars Beth Riesgraf as Anna, an agoraphobic woman who loses her brother- and her only connection to reality- to cancer. As she struggles to cope, three men (Martin Starr, Jack Kesy and Joshua Mikel) break into her home, not realizing that its last remaining resident isn’t going to give up the sanctity of her home (and the only world she knows) without a fight.

Daily Dead had the chance to speak with Schindler and his producing partner Brian Netto about their experiences  working on Shut In, finding their perfect Anna, shooting in Shreveport and more.

Thanks for speaking with me today, guys. I really enjoyed how Shut In shifted dynamics throughout, making you wonder just who you should be rooting for which was a nice touch to the story.

Adam Schindler: Thanks! That shifting dynamic is what we both really responded to when we read the script. It starts off feeling like more of a drama and a thriller but then halfway through, everything shifts and these characters then find themselves in a horror movie and I thought that was interesting because you get lulled into the story at first and then it all starts to unravel as we learn things about these people.

This story also plays around with the concepts of predators and their prey, with that role going back and forth between Anna and the guys who are trying to rob her. One thing we had to always keep in mind was the role of Anna because you needed to still feel good about her throughout this ordeal even though she’s not always doing the right thing.

Brian Netto: It was tricky too because the writers wrote such interesting antagonists too so you end up getting to know them and empathizing with them in some ways even though they are very much the villains. A lot of times you get characters like these and they’re so flat but the way they were written here gave them some dimension so they end up just as interesting as the hero of the story.

Something else I’d like to commend you on- but I won’t delve too deep because I don’t want to give anything away- was how one of your villains takes a moment to mourn when one of them dies. So many times in horror movies, those deaths get glossed over and I think it’s a moment that humanizes them. It was a nice touch.

Adam Schindler: That was a huge conversation for us so I appreciate you noticing that moment because it was important to us. This story is fun but it has an emotional impact on all these characters; it’s not one-sided at all.

Brian Netto: Yeah, a lot of Shut In is about who you side with in the end and we definitely played with those concepts throughout the film so that viewers would feel conflicted about Anna- she’s definitely a victim but that’s not all that she is either.

Let’s talk about the character of Anna and Beth who gives an amazing performance in the film. She’s so broken but so strong at the same time and it was really fascinating to watch how she evolves throughout the film.

Adam Schindler: This was definitely a meaty and challenging character. Anna’s so splintered, to the point where ‘s childlike in certain circumstances and then in others, she functions like an adult. And Beth was literally the first person who read for us when we were casting- she completely blew us away and I think we all knew that she was our Anna but we still went through with the rest of auditions anyway. But in the end, we always kept going back to Beth.

And she’s such a tireless worker too- she always went above and beyond and did as many of her own stunts that we’d let her do too. We didn’t have a ton of prep time on this but she came in probably more prepared than most of us- Beth completely knocked it out of the park. We did take the time to talk through Anna’s different emotions and responses to different situations but Beth was the one who navigated that character and did it so beautifully too.

One of my favorite moments in Shut In is when she’s talking to Dan in the kitchen and she just sort of drifts away and then he snaps her back into the conversation. It’s such a subtle thing that Beth does there but it perfectly sums up her character- she’s just so lost in the real world.

Shut In also has some rather incredible production design- can you discuss the process of finding and dressing that house because the attention to detail is really stellar.

Brian Netto: We shot this down in Shreveport and we looked at several houses there until we could find something that also had a sense of character to it. The one we ended up choosing had an interesting history to it and the owner had recently passed too so when we got inside, we discovered it had been sitting largely untouched for about a year. When it came time to dress the house, we actually had to clean it up in order to not only make it safe for us to shoot in but also to take out a lot of the existing clutter so it didn’t look like too much.

Adam Schindler: And the basement was actually a seamlessly-built separate set  and our DP Eric Leach did an amazing job of shooting everything in a way that you could never tell that there was any disconnect.

How has this entire experience been for you, from working on Shut In and now getting ready to celebrate its world premiere at the LA Film Fest?

Adam Schindler: The first project that we did, Delivery, was this passion project that we spent a good amount of time on so when we began working on this, it all came about rather quickly which was a different experience for us. In fact, it was about a year ago that we were down in Shreveport shooting so everything has definitely been a whirlwind for both of us over the last 12 months.