Over the weekend, first-time feature filmmaker Eytan Rockaway celebrated the premiere of his supernaturally-infused psychological thriller, The Confines, at the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival. Co-starring Louisa Krause (who recently appeared in the SXSW selection Ava’s Possessions) and Jason Patric (The Lost Boys, Narc), the film follows a young woman who takes on an overnight security job in an attempt at some normalcy in her life; unfortunately, the building she’s overseeing has a sinister past and soon she’s struggling to figure out what’s real and what’s just a figment of her fractured imagination.

During the Fest, Daily Dead had the chance to sit down and speak with Rockaway about what inspired the film, working with both Krause and Patric on The Confines, and his experiences helming a feature for the first time ever.

I really enjoyed how the story of The Confines all plays out by the end—it was very unexpected, but I enjoyed that. How did the idea for this film come about?

Eytan Rockaway: Well, the story and the characters all changed a lot from the first time I had this idea to what you see in the film version now. The general idea that I had was that I wanted to make a movie that had a sense of realism to it, that felt like the classic movies I enjoy watching—either psychological thrillers or horror movies that were more than just gore and crazy gags. Hitchcock once said, “The terror isn’t in the bang but in the anticipation of it,” so that’s what influenced me.

And to me, the story of the movie is about self-acceptance. I don’t know what I can say really because of where we take the story in that final act, but it does start out as one thing and then it turns out to be something completely different. And what I’m trying to say with this movie—which is something I hope viewers understand—is that we all have imperfections and if we don’t learn to deal with them, we live in a constant nightmare within ourselves. That’s scarier than anything I can portray onscreen.

That building in the film is magnificent—I’m a sucker for old buildings because they have a sense of history to them and the one you guys used in The Confines really added so much to the film. Where did you find it?

Eytan Rockaway: That was actually a few buildings that we found and we just edited the film in such a way that I was hoping you wouldn’t be able to tell. Basically, I had a vision for a building that never existed, and so I had to decide whether or not I wanted to just use the best building I could find or try and cheat it, so that’s what we did.

We were looking for opulent locations in New York City and oddly enough, the most opulent locations ended up being courthouses, especially older courthouses, and all the underground stuff we shot was in an old Civil War bunker. That ended up being hell on Earth because everybody had to wear masks all the time with kids and their parents running around—it was just chaos. That aspect alone of the shoot was the biggest learning experience for me.

Both Louisa and Jason are superb in the film. How was it working with them on their characters?

Eytan Rockaway: Being a first-time director working with this kind of talent was incredible. Louisa is a fantastic actress, but Jason really taught me a lot throughout the process of making this movie. Not only did we work back and forth on all the dialogue, but he was always open to adding little aspects to his character that are seen as well. He was very respectful while we were working together and sometimes when you are working with someone at Jason’s level, they have that kind of experience under their belt and may not necessarily want a first-timer telling them what to do. But that wasn’t the case at all with Jason. Often, we’d do my take of a scene and then we’d let him do a take where he would improvise or give it his own spin and most of the time those moments were better.

And he’s an actor where "less is more" really applies because he can say so much without ever opening his mouth. There’s a quiet intensity there that doesn’t need to rely on words to sell the emotion—it’s all right there, in Jason, and you can feel that when he’s onscreen.

Oftentimes, first-time filmmakers will try to do a film that’s smaller and a bit more intimate, just because it can be much more manageable the first time at bat. But for The Confines, you didn’t do that at all—you went big—and I’m curious if you were conscientious of that as you set out to make this movie.

Eytan Rockaway: Oh yeah, I wanted to go all out. I had a lot of experience coming into The Confines outside of features; I went to NYU Film School and I’ve been directing music videos for years and I used to create hundreds of hours of content for a TV channel. So I had a lot of experience when it came to production, but when it came to telling a story for 90 minutes or two hours, it's a completely different beast.

But when you get a chance to make a movie, I always feel like it’s go big or go home. You have to find a way to make a mark as a storyteller the best way you can and the stories I like to tell are a little bigger. Wherever this story was going to take me, that’s where I went, and I couldn’t let anything really limit that.

  • Heather Wixson
    About the Author - Heather Wixson

    Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.