Premiering at this month’s SXSW film festival is Stacey Gregg’s film Here Before. Andrea Riseborough, Jonjo O’Neill, Martin McCann, and Eileen O’Higgins lead the cast of the British psychological thriller which will have its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 17, 2021.
When a new family moves in next door, their young daughter, Megan, quickly captivates Laura, stirring up painful memories of her own daughter who died several years previously. Before long, Laura’s memories turn to obsession as Megan’s unsettling behaviour begins to convince her of something supernatural. As Laura’s determination to get to the bottom of it becomes all consuming, her family begins to fracture and the line between the extraordinary and the real becomes ever more obscured in this haunting story about a mother’s love.
We caught up with Stacey Gregg to talk about the film ahead of its premiere at the festival.
Starting at the beginning, how did the idea for Here Before manifest?
Here Before probably has its roots in my own childhood when I was pretty obsessed with all things supernatural. I had the opening of the film in my head for years and then finally sat down and wrote it. It was in the process of writing that I came to understand what I was really trying to explore, and the initial idea developed from there. Then once we cast Andrea I knew we would be able to deliver a central character with the complexity the script demanded. The final part of the puzzle was the creative collaboration, to realise the tone of the film and its visual language, very much embedded in the Northern Irish landscape.
Here Before takes the viewer on an incredible journey, leaving a lot of aspects to their own interpretations. Was an element of ambiguity always what you intended, and if so, what challenges did this create when writing?
Absolutely. And it was always a tightrope on the page and in the edit. It’s central to the philosophy of the film that there are multiple interpretations of reality that co-exist, and who are we to tell grieving people otherwise? What we wanted to avoid was people feeling there was one big reveal or explanation that undermined the journey they’d been on; so the points of disclosure and how we seed how and when each viewer puts those things together is where you need to hold your nerve and not be afraid of there not being one monolithic reading of the film. The script was written to play on that – in a way that literally boiled down to looks and the odd word having a huge impact on where an audience throws their anchor, and this reflects Laura’s disorientation.
Andrea Riseborough leads with a fantastic performance as Laura. When did you know that she was the right person, and what did she bring to the part?
Andrea was on my mind as soon as we came to casting. It was an absolute gift when she came onboard and I knew we’d get a fantastic performance. Andrea is an artist. She is emotionally intelligent and searching, she makes nuanced offers with every take. She is such an invested and compassionate collaborator, she intuitively understood the strength and fragility of Laura.
Around a third of your cast are made up of young actors. The film is the first feature for both Niamh and Lewis, how did you find them?
Well that was another wonderful adventure with Carla Stronge casting. We cast the net wide and saw so many great kids, but both Niamh and Lewis brought something so natural and untrained, yet technical and smart. They were troopers too, it was cold during the shoot! I love working with actors, and these guys were no exception.
In addition to the top notch cast, one of the standout elements for me was the location. There’s something about those two interconnected houses that appear as if they are stuffed onto the end of the street, which feels peculiar. Did you have a setting like that in your head when writing, or was it something you stumbled upon during pre-production?
Again absolutely. Very little is not intentional. The proximity and porousness of those two households, the interweaving rhythms of suburbia, the strangeness of that was all dependent on having the right visual. When Chloë Thomson our DP came onboard, the first thing she did was push to find that depth, and our locations manager nailed it. It’s also exactly on the edgelands in a way that speaks to the film’s themes of liminality and the uncanny.
You shot Here Before in December 2019, in your native homeland of Northern Ireland. What made Northern Ireland so integral to the story for you?
It was always a story hewn from both the landscape and the people here. Growing up I felt surrounded by strong women and hard love and survival. I’ve always wanted to see more of these women onscreen. There’s also the proximity of life and death here in terms of how we culturally process grief and death. The wake for example. There’s a space around spirituality that feels very pragmatic and not all New Age. And the landscape is strange in its own way, as are the idiosyncrasies of the accent, the micropolitics. I’ve loved being able to share that.
Thematically, the story tackles the really tricky topics of death and grief. This is mainly told through the character of Laura, but rather than being the stereotypical broken husk of a person, she’s actually quite buoyant. Why do you think that it’s important to show a different version of the grieving process than we’re used to?
Because that reflects the reality I’ve seen. I think growing up in Northern Ireland you learn to hold a lot of cognitive dissonance in your head; big contradictions co-exist and integrating this is a process with many lights and shades along the way. I also think too often we see a very thin representation of women when it comes to grief. Grief is so intertwined with love. People love and carry on all the time; Laura has a family, a son to be there for. It was important to me to see someone strong, someone fighting. And to subvert some of these tropes we are conditioned to accept about hysterical or crazy or broken women. There is also no obvious good guy or bad guy, just lots of people trying to keep going. And love is so central to all of this.
Finally, what projects are next on the horizon for you?I have another feature I’ve written in the edit, directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah, called Ballywalter. And I’m working on my next feature with Rooks Nest and BBC Films. And I have a bit of TV coming up. And a play commission. I’m pretty spoilt and very grateful.
Here Before screens at the 2021 SXSW film festival.
