SANDBERG: Absolutely good to get that in. QUESTION: Is it reassuring to still be working with your wife, Lotta Losten, who plays Esther in the film?ĭAVID F. I’d never met people with those jobs before, so this is like film school, but getting paid for it. He told me, ‘When the camera guy says “set,” you can say “action”…’ A lot of it has been meeting with people like the script supervisor and asking what they do. QUESTION: Has the shoot been a learning experience for you as a filmmaker?ĭAVID F. They do such a good job that I often feel like I’m the weakest link – I’m the one with the least experience! It’s weird coming in and knowing I’m supposed to tell these pros what to do. But, at the same time, these are professionals. I shoot all my films I’ve never shot anyone else’s script. On the one hand, I’m used to doing it myself. QUESTION: How was it giving over the kind of control you have on a short film and collaborating? Was it an easy transition to make?ĭAVID F. I think the original intent may have been a little more arthouse film than the final result, which is a little more popcorn, but it still has that allegory, I would say – just in a more fun way than it might otherwise have been. I wanted to do sort of an allegory of mental illness and depression. So losing your mind is the most terrifying thing to me. You can encounter monsters – we know they don’t exist, but they can become real to you. But your brain is how you interpret the world, so when the brain stops functioning, anything can – to you – become real. SANDBERG: Mental illness has always fascinated me and I’ve been depressed a lot as well throughout my life. QUESTION: How did you hit upon depression as a core theme?ĭAVID F. It was the mother and daughter dynamic, where the daughter needs to come back because her brother is going through what she went through when she was a kid, and her realizing that it wasn’t just her mom being crazy – there’s something real. SANDBERG: It was about 14 to 17 pages that pretty much told the story of the movie, although there have been some tweaks. QUESTION: You wrote a template outline that screenwriter Eric Heisserer worked from. But to then see all the pools of light that I’ve drawn turned into reality was incredible. The first sequence in the film was among the scenes I looked forward to the most, and that I planned out the most, because I storyboarded the whole thing. So it’s just been weird having other people working with me on the movie and me just telling them what to do, but also pretty amazing. This was a much bigger scale and a whole lot of people. I’m so used to doing everything myself on a very small scale. SANDBERG: There has been a lot of learning and adjusting. He just seemed to be wanting to do the same kind of film.ĭAVID F. We had very similar tastes and he offered good feedback when I presented what I wanted to do. SANDBERG: He was very responsive to the idea I had for what the feature would be. QUESTION: What was it about producer Lawrence Grey’s pitch that made you feel he was the right guy to work with?ĭAVID F. The days were pretty normal, but then the evenings and the nights I’d be on the phone with people in Hollywood. ![]() It was so much attention that I had to make spreadsheets with everyone I talked to and what was said last because of the time difference. Then people started getting in touch, people who wanted to work with us, managers, agents, producers – the whole circus. It was over a million, then two million very suddenly. I was thinking, ‘That’s great!’ All of sudden it was 70,000 views and it just kept going up. So I went to see the stats for the video and it was at 8,000 views. We had put it online and a few months later, I saw that someone had linked to the film and I thought that was awesome. QUESTION: When did you first realize the original short film you made was getting such a huge reaction?ĭAVID F. ![]() Made on a budget of just $4.9 million, LIGHTS OUT has already earned a whopping $87 million at the box office and is responsible for keeping many of us awake at night. Light’s Out is based on his 2013 short film and features Lotta Losten, who also starred in the short. Sandberg in his major directorial debut, who’s best known for his no-budget horror short films under the “ponysmasher” alias. ![]() LIGHTS OUT is the new horror movie terrifying movie goers across the world.
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