Inside the Minds Behind ''The Exorcism 2024'' with Russell Crowe

Hi, I'm Alison Rose with FlickDirect. Hello, gentlemen. How are you? We're good. How are you? How are you, Alison? I'm a little disturbed after watching that movie, I have to say. You did your job and you did it well. Where did this idea come from? We just want to disturb people. Yeah, we just want to inflict our psychological misery on other people.

Yeah, this is getting too expensive. This is cathartic. To see other people as complicated and conflicted as we are internally, we've done our job. No. It was a love letter to the original movie that my dad was in. It was a love letter to sort of making movies, but also the hell of making movies. A poison pen letter to Hollywood. A poison pen letter to Hollywood, as Mark refers to it as.

But it was also, you know, a lot of it's about childhood traumas and insoluble differences. Between children and their parents. And those are themes that have always interested in us. Because we had perfect upbringings. We had problems. Our parents are really extraordinary people. They are. You know, like, we don't have kids yet. And, you know, I can't imagine how complicated it is.

And how, you know, I think growing up, I think, is a lot about realizing just how fragile and human your own parents are. You know, it's like when you graduate out of seeing them as being like, why aren't you perfect? And then you're like, well, nobody's perfect. And, wow, you're quite vulnerable even. You know, that's, that for us was a big part of the story that I think shone through.

And something I think that absolutely everybody can relate to. One of the things that I talked about with Adam and Riley was the fact that these characters kind of also have other purposes within this film. Like, I feel like Adam is the, we discussed being the devil's minion. And Riley had her own, or Lee had her own exorcism that she was going through.

Was that really purposeful for you when writing this? Or was that kind of an outgrowth of just writing this script and kind of sensing these characters? I think very much it was, it's very much part of the sort of the basis of the movie. And I think you want to have rich characters everywhere. And you, everyone. Everyone has a story, ideally, in the frame.

Anyone that's in that frame, you want to have a story for. So they come alive. They feel complex. I love hearing about Brian talking about her having her own exorcism, which it is. It was a cathartic journey for Lee, right? And I think it is in Adam as well. And I think that Adam's journey is the same thing. I mean, there's even more stuff we would like to do.

And maybe in a further director's cut, we would even allow even more aspects that we weren't able to put. And I think that's what we're trying to do. You could just keep going forever. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things, Josh, I want to talk to you about. I asked this question recently to Rennie Harlan was, how do you know what to make suspenseful?

And how do you know what to make a jump scare? You know, I, we, look, this is a controversial opinion and it is what it is. But I didn't really want to make a conventional horror film. And probably the studio hates me for that. But I wanted to do something that felt like a psychological drama in the way that they were horror films of the 70s, where nothing really happened for like an hour.

If you really watch The Exorcist, it's just a family drama. Yes. Of course, it takes a very steep curve. No, not at all. But also, time goes on forever until it really gets sort of into a very more violent place. I wanted to even take that further. We felt that was more interesting. I mean, our, our, our interest was. I think that's a very good point.