George Ratliff Interview, Director of Joshua

MoviesOnline sat down recently with George Ratliff to discuss his new film, "Joshua,” a gripping suspense thriller about the perfect New York couple, Brad and Abby Cairn (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga), whose lives unravel into total chaos after the arrival of their new baby. They begin to suspect their eccentric 9 year-old son, Joshua (Jacob Kogan), may be responsible for the escalating chain of domestic terror.

Ratliff, a Texas native, began his career in journalism. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin film program, Ratliff moved to Costa Rica to write for a Central American news magazine and become a correspondent for a Texas newspaper. Since returning to the states, he has written and directed features, shorts, and television programs.

Not surprisingly, "Joshua” emerged from the mind of a director who has long been fascinated by the psychological machinations of fear. While the film marks Ratliff’s feature debut, he earlier came to the fore with the acclaimed documentary "Hell House,” which explored the creation of a sinister and graphic haunted house, intended to scare sinners, by a Pentecostal Texas high school.

On the heels of that film, Ratliff wanted to explore the idea of terror and human vulnerability from a more everyday, naturalist point-of-view. The story of "Joshua” emerged when he and his writing partner, the novelist and short story writer David Gilbert, hit upon the scariest, most anxiety-filled, everyday activity they could think of: parenting. "Kids can be scary and the scariest kids are the ones who are smarter than you,” observes Ratliff.

It was Gilbert, in turn, who came up with the character of Joshua, who joins the brief but powerful list of complex child villains in thrillers that range from "The Bad Seed” to "The Exorcist,” "The Omen,” and "The Shining.” The idea of Joshua was so frightening that Ratliff himself was almost scared away. "I was just starting to have kids myself and at first, I really wasn’t sure I wanted to do a movie about an evil child,” Ratliff admits. Yet, as he and Gilbert further developed the story, it became more and more irresistible to take the story to unexpected places.

Here’s more of what George Ratliff had to tell us about his new movie:

Q: What has living in Costa Rica taught you about yourself?

GEORGE RATLIFF: [laughs] Well you know one thing that living in Costa Rica taught me is that America is not that bad. Costa Rica is beautiful. I really love visiting there but it’s a tough place to live. I was only there for 6 months. I had an internship with a very tiny, tiny rag of a news magazine. It was a good experience but it wasn’t that long.

Q: What made you want to make the move from documentaries to features?

GEORGE RATLIFF: I always wanted to do narrative features and in fact I secretly studied acting in New York so I would feel comfortable working with actors. I posed as an actor for a couple years -- not some straight conservatory but on and off I’d take classes. I found that documentaries, at least verite documentaries, are very good background for doing a narrative feature because in a verite documentary you go into a scene. It’s not dissimilar to a scene in a movie. It has a beginning, middle and end. You have to get in visually, you have to get out. There’s characters in it that have to have an arc that you have to chart. You have to have cutaways. The only difference in a documentary is you have to figure it out at that moment and have to edit in your head as you’re doing it. So in some sense, doing a narrative was a real luxury because I could storyboard it and I could rehearse the actors and I could know exactly visually what I was doing and make that very much a part of the storytelling – you know visually as much as what the performers were saying.

Q: Does this film draw on your personal experience a little bit?

GEORGE RATLIFF: No, we made it all up. I’m a parent and I’ve found that having children is one of the scariest things you could possibly do. [laughs] My kids are very sweet. They’re good kids.

Q: Was this the original ending of the movie?

GEORGE RATLIFF: This is the original ending of the movie. Well, it’s close to the original ending of the movie. There was some slight variation and there was a different song. The song was kind of an interesting story because we had a different song in the script by the Magnetic Fields that I called "Evil Twin” and it made everyone think that Ned and Josh were in the cahoots together. So we wanted to find someone to write a new final song and Dave Matthews who is ATO Records which is ATO Pictures said he wanted to do the song. That was great and we needed it but he went off on tour. He’s a very busy guy. So we waited for the song and we waited for the song and pre-production was coming to a close and we didn’t have a song, and I started making the movie thinking in the back of my head, "Where’s the song?” We ended up scheduling the scene where he plays the piano to the very end waiting for the song and two days before we were going to shoot, Dave Matthews landed in Pittsburg, went to a sound studio, and recorded the song and uploaded it. So I heard it and thank god I liked it and the next day we taught Jacob how to play it and to sing it and we shot it the next day.

Q: What do you think happens in the end because the film ends with a lot of questions?

GEORGE RATLIFF: I have a softer spot in my heart for Joshua than most people, but I think that he has an idealized vision of what Ned probably is really like and I think Ned will cross the line and he’ll probably get him. [laughs]

Q: You’ve been hanging around with David Chase a lot lately. Is that why you used a Sopranos style ending.

GEORGE RATLIFF: [laughs] Well I have to say I find movies much more interesting if you walk away needing to talk about it than having it all wrapped up. What’s the point of making an independent movie if you have to wrap it all up?

Q: What was it like working with Jacob?

GEORGE RATLIFF: It wasn’t that dissimilar to working with an adult because he’s such a mature, smart kid. But you know he’s still 10 so there was a little manipulation going on. [laughs]

Q: We always hear directors that do independent films say that it’s 90 per cent casting. Did you start out thinking of casting Sam Rockwell and Vera Fermiga and the rest of these people?

GEORGE RATLIFF: Well funnily enough we really wrote this with Sam in mind. It’s not the typical thing like a hedge fund manager who’s a parent thinking his son’s a problem. [laughs] I’m a big fan of Sam and I wanted this to have a very realistic feel to it and I feel like Sam can’t do anything he doesn’t absolutely believe. I just found it to be a really interesting role for him and I thought because it’s a different role than people offered Sam that he’d be interested in it and luckily enough he was. He really liked the script and he really liked me but he was still on the fence until I brought up that I really loved Vera Fermiga for the wife and he goes, "You get Vera and I’m in.” He really was a big fan of Vera and I had the same experience with Vera. She really liked the script, she liked me, and I told her "We’re talking to Sam” and she goes, "If you get Sam, then I’m in.” [laughs] They both sort of jumped at the same time. Yeah, it was a big manipulation.

Q: How do you manipulate a 10-year-old?

GEORGE RATLIFF: I say we manipulate but it didn’t always work. For example, there’s a scene where Brad finds Joshua under the table and he’s crying. Jacob was very worried about being able to cry. Doing this cold, emotionless thing, he could find that pretty readily, but emotionally going to the place where he was under the table, he was very worried about it. [laughs] We tried. We scheduled that on one of the last days of shooting and a couple hours before we all signed this card, kind of like a year book. [sad voice] "We’re gonna miss you, Jacob. Maybe we’ll see you again.” Everyone made this yearbook moment for him and presented him with this thing, thinking he would be very depressed. He was like, [upbeat, cheery voice] "Thanks!” [laughs] I never, ever got cross with him at all on the set, but I got cross with him earlier that day, but it didn’t work. He sort of found his way on his own. The slight manipulation is that I didn’t always tell him what exactly I wanted to find something fresh. Usually we would try to get the performance out of Jacob a lot of time with who he was performing against. Like his singles were very much influenced by Vera. What Vera was doing wasn’t necessarily exactly what the character was saying to get a slightly different reaction sometimes.

Q: Jacob mentioned that he was genuinely petrified of Vera in the scene where she’s really yelling and screaming at him. I was wondering if she was terrorizing the adults as well by being so into character?

GEORGE RATLIFF: [laughs] What Vera was doing was very, very heavy. She really put it out there. That was a really brave performance and it’s funny because I had a different way of communicating with all the actors. Sam and I, it was very exciting for me because we’d basically talk before every take and would try different things and it was really exciting. And Jacob was a little bit more of a quiet manipulation. But Vera I kind of left alone because she was channeling something so specific and difficult that it wasn’t easy always for her to be in that place and I found that talking about that sort of hurt it more than it helped it. I would leave her alone unless she was really doing something I just couldn’t use. There was sort of an instinct that everyone on set knew that we needed to give Vera her space with her manufacturing this performance.

Q: Can you talk about the casting process and how you discovered Jacob?

GEORGE RATLIFF: You know I really cheated on that. Before we even had financing for the movie, I knew a guy who created a show on MTV 2 called Wonder Showzen. I don’t know if you know this show. It’s like Sesame Street but it’s late at night and it’s very twisted. A friend of mine created it. I knew that they had worked with all the kid actors in the five boroughs of New York. I had him read the script and send me a short list and Jacob was at the top of the list. He said, "This kid is just an amazing talent. You have to see him.” I had his name before we even started the casting process. We ended up auditioning a lot of kids but Jacob was kind of my ace in the hole. He came in and he was clearly the right kid. I also knew that any parent that would let their child on Wonder Showzen would let them do "Joshua.” [laughs]

Q: Does Joshua actually do anything wrong?

GEORGE RATLIFF: There’s no real hard evidence. That was important to me that you couldn’t really pin it. But I also think that it’s sort of our biological imperative to give the kid the benefit of the doubt or find reasons why it wasn’t him. I think at the point of the movie where there’s no more doubt that it is him, I feel like the audience feels so betrayed that they’re really angry at Joshua and I don’t want to give this away but it goes to the point where [after the scene between Brad and Joshua in the park] I feel like secretly the audience wants him to do that and they are just as guilty as Brad.

Q: Was Joshua actually abused or was this another manipulation?

GEORGE RATLIFF: We really left a lot of room for interpretation in a lot of parts of this movie. I had a version of what I felt was happening but I’m open to all interpretations. What I think happened is when the child psychologist comes in, that’s Brad’s check in the chess game of the moment, where Brad has the upper hand, and the way that Joshua gets out is drawing that child abuse drawing. I think that’s the spark in his mind of how he’s going to get rid of his dad and the bruises are self inflicted. That’s all the head crashing up there in the penthouse.

Q: Why does he want to get rid of these people?

GEORGE RATLIFF: A lot of it is open to interpretation, but specifically like talking to Jacob about what he’s doing as an actor in this role was that… David Mamet’s take on movies is that every movie is about finding order out of chaos, that every movie starts in disorder and it’s about the process of finding order and this movie is kind of different. It starts in some kind of harmony and ends in sort of chaos. For Joshua, he’s in this place of disorder. His parents are pretending to be someone they’re not. His Dad’s a social climber pretending to be this hedge fund manager when that’s not what he is. His mother’s pretending to be sane and a normal person but she’s not. What he’s doing is trying to create an order out of this chaos. And at the end, he gets to the goal where he thinks he should be which is with his uncle, the one guy he thinks really understands him.

Q: So when he’s watching that film of him being born and we think he’s angry at his mother, he’s basically seeing something else?

GEORGE RATLIFF: He’s seeing a way to get back. The more you watch him, the more manipulative you realize he is.

Q: You’ve drawn some comparisons to "The Omen,” but they seem really superficial. What do you think is the central theme of the film? Is it about a kid looking for love or is it about a family falling apart?

GEORGE RATLIFF: I’ll just say that for me what’s scary is the idea of a kid being bad for no good reason. You can look at this as a film about a family falling apart. It’s a film about post partum or it’s a film about a sociopath nature, but I tried to approach this as a … I really wanted this to be a scary movie and still be smart and still maintain a realism. The underlying thing that’s scariest to me is this idea that… Let me just say this. When I had my first kid, what kind of freaked me out was that the minute he was born I kind of knew his personality. There was so much of him that was already there. He kind of already had his character. I was under the impression that people were born a blank slate and their parents influenced them and the people around them influenced them, but I really don’t think that’s true. I think we can screw our kids up. He was so much who he was at the minute he was born and luckily he was a really good kid. But what scared me was what if a kid was born that was actually just a bad kid. That was the overall premise for the movie.

Q: Did you shoot any scenes where Joshua was actually doing evil things?

GEORGE RATLIFF: No, that was never on the table. I never wanted that.

Q: Just the little bit we saw with the video camera?

GEORGE RATLIFF:Yeah, and even with the video camera, you get a look at it and you see a budding Orson Welles as much as you could a budding Hannibal Lecter. [laughs] Night vision videos are just scary period.

Q: Is Ned (Dallas Roberts’s character) the older brother?

GEORGE RATLIFF: He’s the older brother. Kind of a parallel thing.

Q: And the mother-in-law in this film is Brad’s (Sam Rockwell’s character’s) mother?

GEORGE RATLIFF: That’s right. You know we did have some back story about Ned and Abby’s parents, especially her dad that we ended up cutting because I felt it was all in Vera’s performance and we didn’t need that background. There was some other psychosis going on in the family, but I didn’t feel like we needed it.

Q: What do you have coming up after this?

GEORGE RATLIFF: David Gilbert and I wrote an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s second novel, "End Zone.” It’s a big football satire. It’s kind of like Mash on a football field. It’s a very funny movie and it’s got a political bent to it. ATO Pictures is on board to produce it so we’re taking that out and trying to get that going. I’m very excited about that.

Q: Thanks very much.

GEORGE RATLIFF: Nice meeting you. I appreciate it.

"Joshua” opens in theaters on July 6^th