Interview: UNSANE Co-Star Joshua Leonard Discusses Steven Soderbergh’s New Movie and Reflects on THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

Sometimes love can be blind, and other times it can be downright deadly. In Steven Soderbergh's new movie Unsane, Joshua Leonard plays a man who could potentially be stalking a young woman trapped in a mental institution. A claustrophobic character-centric thriller that's eerily plausible, Unsane is out now in theaters, and Daily Dead had the great pleasure of speaking with Leonard about working with Soderbergh, acting in front of an iPhone 7 Plus (which was used to shoot the entire movie), and the similarities and differences between acting in Unsane and The Blair Witch Project nearly 20 years ago.

Thanks for taking the time to talk, and congratulations on the release of Unsane. I can't believe that it's already time for the film to be released.

Joshua Leonard: Yeah, we only made the film in June. It's one of the faster turnarounds. That said, Steven edits while he shoots. The night of the wrap party, we were at a local bowling alley in upstate New York where we had been shooting. Steven just sat on his laptop editing through the entire wrap party. And then, as we were all about to head home for the evening, he came over to Claire and I and said, "If you want to see a cut of the whole movie, you can come back to my hotel room, and we'll watch it." The two of us actually watched the first cut of the movie the evening we wrapped the film. Subsequently, I went back to Los Angeles three days later and got a text message from him saying, "Picture locked!" He's a bastard of the first order in terms of the way he makes the rest of us normal humans feel about our accomplishments.

And as a director yourself, that must have been amazing to see such a quick turnaround.

Joshua Leonard: When we started the film, I was just coming out of seven months of post-production on my last film, so there is no comparison. He puts us all to shame.

Wow. How did this role come across your table? I know the whole movie was done in secret initially.

Joshua Leonard: I knew Carmen Cuba, who is Steven's long-time casting director, just from auditioning for her in the past. I was actually on a job in Puerto Rico at the time and feeling really guilty, because I had a six-month-old daughter at home and had left her with my wife to go work and had promised that I would come back and toe the line shortly. I got a call from Carmen saying, "I've got this really interesting thriller project. It's being shot on an iPhone, and it's being made entirely in secret, and it's a very small movie."

I said, "You know, Carmen, normally I would do anything that you're involved in, but I just had a kid and now is not necessarily the time to traipse across the country and do an indie film. I'd feel bad doing that right now." And she said, "Well, it's really interesting people involved. You might want to at least consider it." I said, "I can't do a job for no money right now." She said, "Steven Soderbergh's directing it." I said, "When do I get on a plane?" [Laughs]

Steven's somebody who's been such an inspiration in my own career, and obviously in the careers of many, and somebody who I've always wanted to work with. It was a very exciting call to get.

And then I read the script, and I really liked the script, but at the same time, I had never played a character like David before. In my first conversation with Steven, I said, "Look, I don't want to scare you off, because I want this job. But I also would like to know why you think I'm the right guy for this job."

He said that I had an earnestness to me that he really wanted in David. He didn't want the part to telegraph evil. He didn't want anybody twirling a mustache or anybody who on the surface seems too overtly nefarious, and he had liked some of my comedy stuff, and that was good enough for me.

When you were playing this role, did you look to any favorite performances that you have from other psychological thrillers?

Joshua Leonard: I drew on lot of different places for inspiration for the role. First of all, I did my due diligence re-watching all the great stalker films: Misery and The King of Comedy and Play Misty for Me. I didn't realize until I started doing my research that it seems to be a full subgenre of film, the stalker-thriller.

I did that first, and then I did a little work with a coach. We did a lot of thinking and work on the concept of adolescent love, and how all-encompassing that can be, and how obsessive it can be—how you can't see anything past that infatuation when you're a teenager, and then just translating that and going, "What does it look like if somebody never emotionally matures from that place, if they never have the socialization or emotional maturity to get past a teenage obsession? What does that look like once you put on 20 years and some intellectual intelligence?"

I thought of Lenny in Of Mice and Men, this lumbering presence. David's a passionate guy, I don't think he's an evil guy, but he also doesn't know how his behavior really affects other people, and how destructive it can be.

In David's mind, he is very convinced that he and Sawyer are destined to be together, and that they are soulmates, and that his job throughout the course of the film is to give her the gift of their love and try to get her in a place and a context where she's going to be able to see what he already so clearly sees.

Steven filmed this on an iPhone, so as an actor coming into a project like this, was there anything different about how you had to perform in front of the camera? It must have been a different process than what you're used to on a typical film set.

Joshua Leonard: First off, the prospect of it was so exciting to me, because one of the reasons that I hold Steven in such high esteem is the fact he's never stopped experimenting with the medium and never stopped experimenting within the context of his own career, whether it's genre or working with non-actors or filming techniques. This felt like an invitation to be involved in a master filmmaker's new experiment. I was down with that from the beginning.

And then when we actually got on set, the biggest difference that I hadn't anticipated before we started filming was that you got this piece of technology in the iPhone that is so omni-present in all of our lives all the time. It's something that most of us have in our pockets most of the time. As a new dad, the iPhone is always coming out to take pictures of my daughter, of our family. It's something that you're very used to. It's a piece of technology that just by nature of how integrated it is into our lives, we've established a certain comfort with.

When you actually get on set and start filming with the iPhone, it removes a sense of elevation from the project in the sense that it no longer feels like you're making film with capital "F." The phone almost disappears in the room, and it really becomes this fertile playground for you and your scene partners to own the room and drop some of the self-consciousness that comes along with having a big camera and a big lens shoved in your face all the time.

The other aspect of it is you don't need much lighting, and you don't need much crew, so you also move so fast. I don't know that I've ever moved as fast as we did making this picture in the sense that you can put the camera anywhere. You can move it in 30 seconds to your new setup. All the downtime that you normally experience as an actor on a film set where you'll film one side of the scene, and then you'll sit around waiting for two hours while they set up and light the other side of the scene, and you're just trying to remember the emotional state that you were in when you first filmed it, all of that gets removed from the process, and it feels much more like a fast-moving train that you all jump on. You feel like you get to be in the moment more and riff more on what just happened.

Yeah, it sounds like you were back in film school making a movie with a guerrilla style.

Joshua Leonard: The funny juxtaposition on this film is that it did feel like a film school project, except with Steven Soderbergh shooting you with Joseph P. Reidy, who's been Martin Scorsese's AD [assistant director] for 30 years. It was a film school with some of the greatest film industry people ever.

Yeah, that's a nice contrast, and this isn't the first time you've been involved with experimental filmmaking, if we look back nearly 20 years ago at The Blair Witch Project. Looking back at that experience and going out in the woods with Eduardo [Sánchez] and Daniel [Myrick], was that similar at all to making Unsane?

Joshua Leonard: I've always had fond memories of Blair Witch, and that was really my entrée into what has now become a 20-year career. I've always been so grateful that we inadvertently blew down the back door and got through and got to do this with our lives.

There are some real similarities and some big differences between Blair Witch and Unsane, because of the technology and the technique of making the film, you remove all the space between impulse and execution. You're really getting something that, whether it works or falls on its face, it does have the sense of surety and immediacy to it. That's a real big similarity.

One of the differences, just technologically speaking, is when we made Blair Witch, where digital technology was 20 years ago versus where it is now, part of the conceit of that film was that these three student filmmakers bought a video camera and went out into the woods and made this film of themselves. That's going to look terrible, but that terrible-looking aesthetic exists because these are the people making the film.

Whereas it's still a bit of a novelty that we made this film on an iPhone, because to my knowledge, the only film before us that got a theatrical release that was shot on an iPhone was Sean Baker's Tangerine. I think once people get into the theater and start watching it, the aesthetics of the film stand on their own two feet. I don't think that the fact that it was shot on a iPhone would necessarily be a conceit to the experience of watching the film unless you knew that it was shot on an iPhone.

In addition to Unsane, you have some really interesting projects coming up. You have another directing project around the corner, and you're also playing a role in Larry Fessenden's Frankestein-inspired movie, Depraved. Is there anything you can tell us about either of those projects?

Joshua Leonard: Yeah, I've got my film Behold My Heart coming out this summer theatrically with Marisa Tomei, Timothy Olyphant, and Mireille Enos from The Killing and this wonderful new young man, Charlie Plummer, who I think is going to blow the world away with Andrew Haigh's film Lean on Pete, so I'm very excited about that.

And then there's Larry's film, which I just finished shooting, which interestingly enough has some thematic similarities to Unsane in the sense that we Trojan-horsed our way through a genre picture into a critique of the pharmaceutical industry, which we're doing bit with the mental health industry in Unsane. Larry's movie, which we just finished filming, is going to be fantastic and a blast. It's a new, interesting, and highly relevant take on an old story.