Opening in theaters and arriving on VOD this Friday is Steven Shainberg’s sci-fi thriller, Rupture, which stars Noomi Rapace as a single mom abducted by a sinister organization that experiments on her while she desperately tries to escape their clutches. Daily Dead recently spoke to Shainberg in anticipation of Rupture’s release, and he discussed what inspired the project, how the aesthetics he established helped serve the story, and his experiences collaborating with Noomi.

You really put Noomi through her paces in this movie, and she’s really great. I'd love to hear about where this idea came from, because the story has some very unexpected twists that I really didn't see coming.

Steven Shainberg: This movie, for me, is rooted in a Japanese film by [Hiroshi] Teshigahara called Woman in the Dunes, which is a very beautiful, incredible movie about a guy who is held captive by a woman who lives in the sand dunes. And it's about his attempts to escape, and eventually how he changes in that circumstance. That film always stayed in my mind and kept me thinking about captivity films as ways of instantaneously plunging somebody into a very intense situation and, in some cases, intense relationships.

So, that basic form always really was an interest to me. I'm not a very obsessed fan of horror, but I became much more conscious [of it] over the last few years, considering the metaphoric possibilities within that genre. If you look at a movie like It Follows, it's a pure metaphor film about death coming for everybody, where it’s very methodically pursuing you. That idea that it's a function of a directly metaphoric experience, that got me more and more interested in it.

I love the aesthetics to Rupture. It's one thing to spend most of your time in a movie in a grungy warehouse, because we've seen that horror movie before. But the way that you played with the colors and played with the light—it's a disconcerting atmosphere for viewers to play around in. Can you talk about establishing that look?

Steven Shainberg: There are a couple things I wanted to achieve that you're dead-on right about, which is that this movie was made in a rundown factory, and, as a location, that is what it is. To some extent, that's sort of what you're used to seeing. But if you build this entire facility, which is what we did, then you have a blank slate and you can really start to ask some interesting questions about how the environment informs the story.

The key thing that evolved for me, the DP [director of photography] Karim Hussain, and the production designer Jeremy Reed was the realization that the people of that facility have very sensitive eyes, where they wear contact lenses to protect their eyes. We realized they would choose colors and light that facility in a very unusual way that made their eyes feel relaxed. That meant that we should use yellows and purples and reds, and lighting fixtures that were placed with strange gels in unusual positions that normal people don't necessarily use.

And once do that, now you're into a world that you can make up yourself. You're freed from the literal reality of an existing factory, and you're freed from the literal reality of, "Where do the light fixtures usually go in a hallway?" So, that made it possible, that understanding, that aesthetic, that very simple aesthetic building block made it possible for us to do all the rest of it. It has a coherence.

I became a big fan of Noomi’s after Prometheus, particularly the med bay scene where she's stuck in the pod. Can you discuss what it was that you saw in her for this particular role?

Steven Shainberg: I don't really think that there's anybody else who could have played the part. There's an intelligence, a sense of determination, and a raw physicality that she brings to the performance. That's what you need, or otherwise this movie was not going to have the feeling that I wanted it to have. So, there was no other possibility there. And we had a great supporting cast, too. Peter Stormare, Kerry Bishé, and certainly Lesley Manville, too, are all just fantastic actors.

  • 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.