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Interview: Writer-Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods Talk Thrills, Chills, and the Inspirations Behind Their Religious Horror Thriller, ‘Heretic’

November 6, 2024Ben MK




With lighthearted romantic comedies like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually under his belt, Hugh Grant has established a reputation as one of Hollywood's most likeable on-screen good guys. In the religiously themed horror thriller Heretic, however, the 64-year-old actor is showing moviegoers a much darker side of himself, playing the ruthless antagonist in writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' tale about a pair of Mormon missionaries named Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), who find themselves at the mercy of a man on a twisted mission. As the stone-cold and sociopathic Mr. Reed, Grant portrays a villain whose strong beliefs pose a life-and-death threat to the two young women who come knocking on his door one rainy afternoon. But just how far is Mr. Reed willing to go to try to convince his unsuspecting visitors of the truth of his personal tenets? And will Sister Barnes and Sister Paxton survive the demented challenges he's designed to test the strength of their resolve?

I caught up with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods to chat about Heretic and their filmmaking influences, as well as to find out more about the nuances and challenges of crafting a horror movie that relies heavily on claustrophobic set pieces and nail-biting scenes of dialogue between its small cast of characters.

Heretic isn't your typical tale of terror, but it's definitely one of the most compelling horror films of the year. Where did the idea for the story come from, and how has it evolved over time?

Beck: Bryan and I have known each other since we were 11 years old. And so much of the last three decades of knowing and working with each other is sharing this ongoing conversation about religion. Part of that is religion in our relationship, growing up in Iowa, but also expanding our circles into families that we married into that were of different beliefs. And then eventually having friends from so many different walks of life and belief structures. Concurrently, as you get older you lose more family, you lose more friends, there's this existential question of what happens when you die. And this film tackles a lot of that conversation. It may not necessarily have the answers, but at least the attempt is to provoke those questions that we all have as human beings.

Hugh Grant has spoken a bit about why he wanted to work on this movie and play a character that was against type for him, but why did you want him to play the role?

Woods: There's several reasons why Hugh seemed perfect for the role to us. One of the surface-level reasons is that Hugh has almost three-decades worth of good will built up with the audience. The audience has a relationship with him and they kind of trust him and love him. And to be able to use that charisma and trust and turn it on its head was very exciting to us. I think, more than that, in the last 10 years, Hugh has, for our money, really become the best character actor. Every time he shows up in a movie in the last 10 years, in these supporting roles, it's always a fascinating performance. And he always steals the movie, whether he's an Oompa Loompa in Wonka or doing character turns in Guy Ritchie films. His work with the Wachowskis in Cloud Atlas — we've been blown away. And so we felt like we needed an actor who is a 10 out of 10 — just totally in tune with their instrument, at the height of their abilities, and then also an actor who can disarm the audience.

Your other films, like A Quiet Place, were similarly dialogue-driven. But this movie is almost like a play, the way it's driven very much by the dialogue and set almost entirely inside Mr. Reed's house. What were some of the challenges of making this film feel as intense as it does, within those small confines?

Beck: It's a huge hurdle to try and write something that is full of dialogue, that is contained in one space, and yet try to make it engaging every single minute. I think that was the biggest fear that Bryan and I had in pre-production. And the conversations that we had with all of our collaborators — whether it was through the production design or cinematography — were always about how can the story expand itself. And that doesn't need to be in giant, sweeping ways. It can be the way that the camera moves evolve, and it's the way that the characters need to unveil themselves act to act and scene to scene. And so it was always trying to find ways to just nudge the anticipation of what could happen next through those different design elements.

Woods: But it's also what made the project so exciting to us — this feeling of if we could do a movie that’s in the horror genre that expresses horror, not through monsters or blood and guts, but through ideas and dialogue. We felt like we hadn't seen that before, necessarily, and we felt like it was a fun challenge. Just like A Quiet Place, for us, was a fun challenge to try to do basically a modern-day silent film with no dialogue, and then tell a story that way. And Hugh is an actor who recognizes a fun challenge when he sees one. So I think we were all just excited to attempt to do the thing that felt like a high-wire act.

Your other movies also featured a small cast, like this one. And here, we have Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East holding their own opposite Hugh Grant. What was it like working with them?

Beck: What we loved about Sophie and Chloe is they felt naturally inclined towards each character that they were cast as. They inherently shared attributes — Sophie with Sister Barnes and Chloe with Sister Paxton — in terms of their outlooks on life and the way they walked through the world. So there was an authenticity to their connection to those characters. Sophie is somebody that's so introspective, and wonderful to dig into the marrow of what she wants to convey through the character. And yet Chloe is this free spirit who's very, very open, and that connects to who Sister Paxton is, who takes people seemingly at face value and is very open and generous with her personality. So when we saw them together, there was this disconnect in the best way possible.

The story is inherently about Mormon missionaries, and Mormon missionaries are paired up with each other not knowing each other. So they're thrust into this situation where they have to find a way to work together. And that was kind of the chemistry that we naturally found between these two actors.

One of the best scenes in the film is Hugh's speech about iterations, and the way he compares the evolution of religion with certain board games and music. In terms of movies, speaking of iterations — what are some of the inspirations for your work, and for this film in particular?

Beck: Looking at recent pieces like Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs, a movie that takes its time in these three acts, but really digs into character-centric work; work that's both been on stage and on film, like Oleanna by David Mamet, which is a piece that sparked, at the time, a lot of discourse and controversy over its gender politics. And so, with this movie, ultimately our hope is that for an audience it's the beginning of a conversation. That there's no answers in that, and there's many different opinions that you could have on it, whether you love it or you hate it, but there's something in it that hopefully provokes you in a personal manner.

Woods: And using the way you framed the question — this idea of iterations — to trace the lineage back even further, you could go back to a film like Inherit the Wind, directed by Stanley Kramer, which is kind of this conversation about religion and science and the interaction of those things. That was an inspiration. And going back even further than that, something like Plato's The Phaedrus, which is a piece that was always important to Scott, which is this ancient piece of writing that's basically a dialogue between two people, Socrates and Phaedrus. In that case, it's about love and discourse, but it does it in a dialogue form and it makes it very digestible and interesting. So that is the interation of this movie — it's using those influences building into this piece.

Is there a scene in the movie that was the most memorable, or is a personal favorite of yours?

Beck: The iterations scene, I think. But that was, in part, because, like I was saying, there's things that scared us about making this movie. Just because there were certain things that felt like a high-wire act, where you needed the storytelling to be clear, you needed the performances to be hopefully as bombastic as we had dreamed. And then we saw Hugh perform that iterations scene, and he went beyond what I think we even imagined.

We shot this movie, to a certain degree, like mini stage plays, meaning there'd be seven to ten pages of scene, and so you would sit back for, 10 to 15 minutes as these scenes unfurled. And to be able to see somebody like Hugh, with Sophie and Chloe, in that scene interact and find something that felt brand new to us, even though we had been living with the script for so long — super exciting. So I think, yeah, that middle scene of the film is really the one that continues to be fun to watch with an audience and see how an audience reacts to that.

Last but not least, you've done sci-fi horror and you've done religious-themed horror. Is there a particular sub-genre of horror that you want to tackle next, as directors?

Woods: One of the movies that made us really want to get into making movies was seeing The Sixth Sense when we were in middle school on opening night. It's such a beautifully constructed film with great performances, and beautifully designed; and the sophistication of the script and the twist ending — it really inspired us to make movies. So maybe one day we'll try supernatural horror.
Heretic is in theaters November 8th.




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