[Editor’s note: This interview contains spoilers for “The Housemaid.”]
One of the most delightful surprises of the holiday movie season last year was director Paul Feig‘s “The Housemaid,” a thrill ride based on the novel by Freida McFadden about a housekeeper (Sydney Sweeney) who gets more than she bargained for when she takes a live-in job with a dysfunctional wealthy couple (Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar). Feig has long expressed admiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s work, and in screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine’s adaptation of McFadden’s bestseller, he discovered the perfect vehicle to, as Hitchcock was fond of saying, “play the audience like a piano.”
“When I first read the script and then the book, I thought, this is so much fun to really make an audience root for everything they should not be rooting for in the first hour and get them really passionate about it,” Feig told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “And then have the fun of their anger in the second half for being so hoodwinked, and the satisfaction that comes with the retribution.” The fact that “The Housemaid” essentially reboots halfway through, revealing to the audience that the husband we thought was a nice guy is actually the antagonist, is instrumental in its box office success, as many viewers are returning again and again to the movie to experience how it plays differently once one is aware of the twists.
“Obviously every filmmaker hopes to make things that you’ll want to watch a few times, but knowing this has that twist, it’s really fun to know that we’re seeding things in the first half that, if you watch this a second time, you’ll interpret in a completely different way,” Feig said, adding that the script’s potential for manipulating the audience was a large part of its appeal. “It’s funny, when I was in film school at USC back in the 1980s, all the serious film students were very against manipulating the audience. They were down on Spielberg because he was ‘manipulative.’ And I was like, ‘Guys, that’s what movies are. All we do is manipulate people!”
Indeed, one of the many pleasures of “The Housemaid” is the way Feig and his department heads slyly direct the audience’s eye to miss the clues that are often hiding in plain sight; from the use of color and the selection of props and artwork to the subtle performance choices by Sklenar and Seyfried — whose work has to be convincing in two entirely different contexts — every decision in “The Housemaid” is geared toward deceiving the audience without cheating, so that when they discover they’ve been manipulated they feel giddy and not offended. Figuring out how and when to parcel out the information was a painstaking process.
“I am very slavish to test screenings,” Feig said, noting that he tends to screen his films for audiences as early in the process as possible so he can gauge what’s landing and what isn’t. “I have 10 weeks [to put together] a director’s cut where no one can mess with me. I’ll do my first recruited screening at about five weeks, just to say, okay, I think this is working, it’s all together now, but I don’t want to fall in love with anything.” Feig not only records audio of the crowd reactions but also video via night vision goggles. “I find night vision to be incredibly helpful because you can see if people are watching passively versus when they start sitting forward and looking around at each other.”
The pacing of “The Housemaid” was particularly tricky, because it required a certain amount of patience from both the audience and the filmmakers in the first half — if the groundwork wasn’t carefully laid, the shocks and suspense of the second half wouldn’t work. “I always say I want to shoot my movie out of a cannon,” Feig said. “But you can’t shoot this movie out of a cannon. We tried [with an opening flash-forward to the crime scene], but we found with an audience that it took the fun out of them discovering this world.” Feig looked to “Once Upon a Time in the West” and its meticulously calibrated structure.
‘The Housemaid’Courtesy of Lionsgate
“That movie’s brilliant in its slow doling out of information,” Feig said. “It’s the best way to do a movie where you’re trying to pull people along.” If Leone was an inspiration in terms of pace, Hitchcock remained the big influence in terms of tone. “What I love about Hitchcock is he always lets you have fun. I’ve watched so many thrillers in my life that take themselves so seriously that I don’t feel there’s room for fun. I’m very religious about the thriller genre, but how can I bring [laughs] into that genre and get the double response out of the audience? We’re treating the story seriously, but there’s something wonderfully absurd about this dangerous situation.”
In spite of Feig’s reverence for Hitchcock, he says he doesn’t follow the master of suspense’s model of rigid planning. “ I leave myself very open,” Feig said. “When I started my career, I obviously loved Hitchcock, and he storyboarded every shot, didn’t shoot any more frames than he needed so he could control the edit. I tried to do that, but you get to the set, and people have ideas, and you’re slapping their ideas down because it takes you off your plan. And I realized early on that I was cutting off all the creativity from my cast.”
Feig changed his approach when he worked on the TV show “Arrested Development” and was forced to fly by the seat of his pants. “They would get you the scripts so late,” he said. “Sometimes you’d just show up in the morning and get the scenes. But it was the greatest thing because it got me out of my head to work with the actors.” Feig typically comes in with an idea of how to shoot the scene, but leaves himself open to new possibilities suggested by the performances. “I’ve got all these versions of the line or scene, so that when I get to the editing room, I can figure out, ‘Were they right or was I right?’ I want that input from the cast.”
Input from his collaborators also led Feig to one of the best needle drops in “The Housemaid,” for Amanda Seyfried’s dance of liberation to Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You Been Gone.” Initially, Feig used Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” as an homage to “Risky Business,” but when he screened the film, the cue didn’t work. “I realized, okay, I’m an old guy,” Feig said. “No one in the young audience gives a shit about that.” Feig polled the women who worked on the movie to ask what they would put on to celebrate breaking up with somebody or getting out of a toxic relationship, and the Kelly Clarkson song won in a landslide.
Relying not only on test audiences but his cast and crew is central to Feig’s filmmaking philosophy. “I’m very democratic when it comes to this stuff, because I’m making commercial movies,” he said. “I have things I’ll fight for, but at the end of the day, if the audience doesn’t respond to it, or if women don’t respond to it — because I make very female-centric movies — I’m not going to be the guy saying, ‘You’re wrong.’ I want to be in service to them so they have the best experience they can.”
“The Housemaid” is currently in theaters. To hear the entire conversation with Paul Feig and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
