THE OTHERS
You’ve got veil...
HOME DISCOMFORTS
Nicole Kidman’s Grace waits as her daughter Anne plays dress-up… Written as a small, South American-set film, Alejandro Amenábar’s hushed post-war horror underwent an Englishlanguage overhaul at producer Tom Cruise’s request. It was a makeover that nodded to the film’s classic Victorian ghost story flavours.
PRIMAL SCREAMS
Is that an old woman under Anne’s veil? Before the film’s climactic séance explains Renée Asherson’s eerie cameo, Amenábar plays with the primal stuff of (near-)silence and uncertainty to instil anxiety. Shocks and his self-composed score are used carefully: The Innocents (1961) was, he says, “a big inspiration”.
LIGHTS OUT
Under a communion veil, the photosensitive Anne (Alakina Mann) plays with a puppet, deep in shadow. “Light kills,” Amenábar advised DoP Javier Aguirresarobe, who often shot by candlelight. Child actors Mann and James Bentley were kept indoors at daytime to preserve their pallor. “Like little vampires,” says Amenábar.
NO FEAR
Grace attacks the interloper. While Mann’s subtle confidence assuaged Amenábar’s fears about directing children, his child leads couldn’t be spooked. He played his score on set and even had AD Javier Chinchilla bash wooden blocks together to keep them jumpy; nothing worked. “They were laughing,” laments Amenábar.
EYES WIDE OPEN
Grace suspects Anne is… not herself. Seeing and the unseen are crucial rhyming metaphors and motifs in The Others. For Amenábar, Kidman’s piercing peepers helped to project his optical thinking: he and Aguirresarobe were “very focused on the eyes… we wanted to play with very simple elements.”
AFTER SHOCKS
Grace quivers before Anne’s foreshadowing tirades. Kidman struggled emotionally with Grace’s actions in pre-production; she even quit the film briefly. But The Others netted $210m on a $17m budget, boosted Kidman’s career and banked Amenábar’s global rep. This house is theirs: good luck to the remake. Kevin Harley