Asian A.V. Club newsletter #12
Director Bishal Dutta talks to us about his directorial debut 'It Lives Inside' and how growing up as an Indian American teen inspired his award winning horror film.
When Bishal Dutta's debut feature premiered at SXSW and won the coveted Midnighters Audience Award, which specializes in scary and controversial after-dark features, it garnered significant attention. However, Dutta is no newcomer; he has been preparing for this moment throughout his life.
As an aspiring filmmaker since high school, Dutta has directed numerous shorts that have done the rounds at international film festivals (including Cannes). It was through the festival success of his horror short Inferno that Dutta met with producers Raymond Mansfield and Sean McKittrick, of Get Out fame, and found the perfect partners to green light his idea which aimed to showcase a demon from Hindu mythology and still celebrate his Indian heritage.
We got to chat with Dutta recently on the eve of his debut feature release and was immediately surprised by the filmmaker.
Asian A.V. Club: When we first heard about It Lives Inside world premiering at SXSW back in March, you were on our radar for people we wanted to talk to!
Bishal Dutta: Well, first, I want to say I'm such a huge fan of what you guys are doing, so really the pleasure is all mine.
Asian A.V. Club: I can’t believe you even know who we are! (a hint flabbergasted) Let’s turn the focus on you instead. We love a good origins story here at Asian A.V. Club, so can you tell us a little about you? Â
Bishal Dutta: I was born in India and growing up in our small town, my grandfather was the first and only person who had a VCR. When I was three, he showed me Jaws and basically movies have been a lifelong obsession ever since. A year later, we moved to North America, and lived in different places like Canada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In high school, I was making short films with my friends, trying to learn my way around the camera, building Steadicams and what not. I just knew that I wanted to move to LA to make movies. Â
Coming to LA really gave me this this incredible canvas to work on. I started meeting people like my DP [Matthew Lynn - director of photography] and my composer [Wesley Hughes] that I'm still working with to this day. But what really helped me take a big step forward was I made a short film called Inferno, and it was a horror short film. My goal with that movie was to strip down the whole narrative as much as humanly possible and make something that felt purely experiential.
I had just seen the movie Dunkirk when I started doing this one. And I loved the idea of this very immersive cinema that horror, as a genre, lends itself to so much. So that short film really opened a lot of doors for me, and it got me a meeting with the producers of Get Out, BlacKkKlansman & Us [QC Entertainment]. During that meeting, I told them this idea about a teenage Indian American girl who is going through a friend breakup and essentially unleashes a demon. And that was all there really was to it. A couple of months later, they said, ‘did you do anything with this?’ And I said, ‘what do you know, I just finished the first good draft of this thing.’ And it was really off to the races from there. So, it's a very quick kind of narrative journey for me. (laughs)
Asian A.V. Club: Did a story like this sit with you for a while and how did you know that this kind of cultural breakup would be the perfect playground for horror?
Bishal Dutta: [Director] Steven Soderbergh talks about Trojan horse cinema in one of his USC commencement speeches and that's always stuck with me. It’s the idea that you bring the audience in with something, you make sure they're satisfied, but then you're left with all this real estate to do something else. And I thought, if I'm going to tell the story that's personal to me, that's reflective of some very real things that my family, friends and even I went through, then it makes sense to put it within a genre that is also accessible and very effective when it's done well.
I think it's exactly that balance that I was excited about. I think everybody's afraid of eyes in the dark, but I felt the more interesting conflict was a person living in two worlds. People have asked is this movie an Indian Movie or an American Movie? And I say it's an Indian American Movie, just like I'm both. That right there was the genesis of what made the film interesting to me.
Asian A.V. Club: Something that is quite painful to watch is Sam has this need to assimilate into her American surroundings and for her parents to see her growing cultural erasure on a daily basis.
Bishal Dutta: When I was writing it, I think I was trying to be as reflective as possible at these specific insecurities that I had in the past. For example, when Sam runs out of her house after breakfast, she smells herself so that she doesn't smell like Indian food. I wanted to be very clear and not ever make it so that the parents were antagonists. I felt like everybody in this movie was trying their best. As I was writing, I just felt like the best way to communicate what Sam is going through is put the audience right there with her and use it visually convey this discomfort that she feels.
Asian A.V. Club: What was it like to show this film to your parents?
Bishal Dutta: My parents know that the movie isn't based on them. But I think there's a universality to the experience that a lot of us feel as immigrants with immigrant parents. I think showing it to them, it was so gratifying to watch Sam really reconnect with her mom especially. It feels like something that happens to a lot of us as we grow older, and as we become more empathetic towards our parents. In a way, it was really healing to put that on the screen. And to share that this is what's happening to a lot of families like ours.
Sam [Megan Suri] is someone that is on one side of the spectrum. And I would say her mother [Neeru Bajwa] is on another side of that spectrum. The film intellectually is about the two of them meeting in the middle and synthesizing both of their points of views into one. That felt relevant and vital. Then I put it in the context of horror where people could get a lot out of it and still be scared out of their mind. (laughs)
Asian A.V. Club: What really moved me is when mother and daughter fight the demon by looking towards cultural traditions. It really does celebrate the superpower of heritage.
Bishal Dutta: That makes me so happy to hear it. It was definitely a decision and I think that core has this incredible ability to be a metaphor. Of course, incredible films like The Babadook, Hereditary and It Follows all tap into a version of this metaphor. What was important to me was when I'm looking at a horror film, it's important that it is still a compelling film without the supernatural elements. If we take the demon out of this movie, I think there's a reasonable case to be made that it's still a compelling drama.
And at the same time, not letting the metaphor become the sole mode of storytelling that there isn’t a need for physical stakes and real danger. So, it's a balance I'm trying to find within the horror genre in this movie. This demon [Pishach] is true in our mythology and it feeds on negativity and isolation. So, it felt intuitive that the only way to defeat this thing was through togetherness and the wholeness within oneself. And then all of it is pooled in a Shanti prayer that they use against it, not so much as a religious prayer, but as a plea for peace across the earth. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to make a real monster movie (laughs), but the story beats came out of the mythology and felt so organic.
Asian A.V. Club: Speaking of the monster, I love how you don’t reveal the Pishach until pretty late into the film. Can you talk about that decision?
Bishal Dutta: It makes me so happy. Like every other horror filmmaker in the universe, I was inspired by Jaws and Alien with this whole approach. But this boogey man in particular, the Pishach, in our culture is really meant to be the embodiment of fear and isolation and anxiety. And I thought, whatever the audience conjures up in their mind is always going to be scarier. But it was important to me that we suggest it has a physical presence. If you look at the scene with the eyes coming out of the closet, we left just enough detail in the face so that it didn't feel like they're just two eyes. Later in the film we had to go through so many different shower curtains, so that it was just enough to suggest the physical presence of the creature.
I think the audience does enjoy this kind of back and forth. I had to be creative in delivering very intense sequences without showing the monster, but still conveying its scale and its ferocity. That’s when you get incredible sound design and shoot from camera angles to deliver that insane intense experience for an audience while still retaining that big reveal until later in the movie.
Asian A.V. Club: And what a reveal at the end! Thanks for letting us get nerdy with you Bishal, what a fun debut film you made for us!
Bishal Dutta: No, thank you!