Capturing the spirit of Sarah Winchester
Helen Mirren plays the heiress compelled to keep adding on to her famous mansion
Ghosts may have been less inclined to come out on a brisk, sunny morning Friday, May 5, at San Jose’s famed Winchester Mystery House. As a film crew was preparing to finish shooting at the end of a threeday stop at the house for the upcoming 2018 supernatural thriller “Winchester,” Dame Helen Mirren was on set alongside co-star Jason Clarke at the spooked manor, a major San Jose tourist attraction.
The crew snaked in and out of corridors and the first-floor ballroom (where the shut-in Sarah Winchester never had guests), pushing carts of equipment and toggling camera fixtures — in the process disarming the otherwise unearthly aura felt in quiet spaces throughout the house. A massive light was raised atop an industrial lift — the crew was prepping for a night shoot during which the finishing touches on filming, including aerial shots of the house, would be completed.
Set in 1906, “Winchester” follows Winchester (Mirren), wealthy heir of the Winchester rifle fortune. She believed herself tormented by the spirits of those killed by her family’s weapon following the separate deaths of her husband and 6-week-old daughter. In order to both appease and combat the visiting ghosts, Winchester oversees an obsessive, decades-long construction of her eerie, labyrinthine mansion.
“There’s nothing like it anywhere that I’ve ever seen,” said Mirren, probably most recognized for roles as Queen Elizabeth II on stage and screen and Jane Tennison on the TV series “Prime Suspect,” in a darkened room, one of 160 throughout the
house. “It grew out of such very specific circumstances that are sort of unrepeatable.”
Winchester’s house became infamous while Sarah Winchester was alive. It was shrouded in secrecy, as she was intensely reclusive, while sensational accounts of her and the house swirled publicly.
“It’s very similar to playing the queen,” Mirren said in a roundtable interview with Clarke and twin directing duo Peter and Michael Spierig. “There’s so much to learn about her; and yet at the very center of all that knowledge is this character of utter mystery. And Sarah (Winchester) is very similar.”
Although it bears a share of scares, “Winchester” would not be classified as a horror movie, Mirren and the directors agreed. The film’s inspiration derived rather from the mythos and psychology of the grief-stricken widow, along with the rich history behind her estate.
Winchester dedicated nearly 40 years, until her death in 1922, to a round-the-clock expansion of the original eight-room farmhouse into a massive structure filled with eccentricities: staircases that lead to nowhere; repeated patterns involving the number 13; a conical, wood-paneled room rumored to be the site of Winchester’s nightly seances. Amid its 24,000 square feet, 10,000 windows and 2,000 doors, the house contained one highly fortified safe, which after Winchester’s death was found to contain only a lock of her deceased baby’s hair and the obituaries of her two loved ones.
“It’s a bit like being a rat in a little maze,” said a member of an early-morning tour group while descending an impossibly narrow, zigzagging staircase, whose individual stairs barely differed in height. Indeed, the house was made with the intention of being unnavigable — with doors and secret passageways at all sides — in order to confound the spirits.
As Mirren arrived to the roundtable interview, she opened a random door that appeared to lead to nowhere. “Why?” she asked, bewildered. “The whole thing with Sarah is — why?”
“She would build rooms and tear them down almost instantly, so it’s very hard to know exactly what was there in that period,” said co-director Peter Spierig.
The majority of the film had already been shot in Australia using precise recreations of the house, in part due to the physical, often claustrophobic constraints of filming sequences throughout the mansion.
“I always kind of liken it to Bram Stoker’s castle,” said Clarke, who had arrived to the house for the first time Friday morning and ducked his head in and out of rooms to peek at the strange details. Clarke plays a psychiatrist who arrives at the house to evaluate Winchester’s mental state, only to soon begin questioning his own beliefs within the Winchester walls.
Mirren and Clarke, for their part, do not believe in ghosts, though Mirren said she acknowledges the immense “power of belief.”
Yet, within the confines of Winchester’s home — which have produced numerous accounts of shadowy apparitions seen in hallways, rattling drawers and the like — one’s sense of the material may naturally waver.
“I find if it’s haunted, which it may well be, it’s haunted by a very sweet spirit who I think is actually the spirit of Sarah Winchester,” Mirren said. “I feel it’s very, very benign. Very sweet, with even a sense of humor.”