Interview (Part 3): Lori Evans Taylor

In July, Lori Evans Taylor sold the spec script “Bed Rest” to MGM. Deadline reported it this way:

Spec is a Hitchcockian thriller in the vein of Rear Window and What Lies Beneath, centering on a pregnant woman who is isolated and confined to bed rest.

I reached out to friend of the blog Chris Sparling, whose screenwriting credits include Buried, ATM, The Sea of Trees, and The Atticus Institute which he also directed. Chris is adding the role of producer to his credits with “Bed Rest”. He got me in touch with Lori and we ended up having a great one-hour conversation.

Today in Part 3, we dig into some of the key narrative elements in “Bed Rest”:

Scott: Let’s talk about your heroine in “Bed Rest”. The protagonist is a young woman named Julie. How would you describe her as a character and what she’s having to deal with, psychologically?

Lori: Julie is a woman who’s getting a second chance. She and her husband suffered an unthinkable tragedy, but after three years, life is finally getting back on track. They’re pregnant. They’ve moved into a new house. But shortly after the move, Julie suffers a fall and gets put on strict bed rest. That’s when her old psychological demons come back to haunt her. She can’t escape her own mind.

It’s interesting because I wanted her to feel all-American, somebody that we root for. I considered her like an icicle. The movie is set in winter. There’s storms coming through. There’s sleet, there’s snow. And you’ve got these icicles dangling from the house. They look delicate, but they’re also quite strong. Quite solid. And icicles, when you look at them, you can kind of see your reflection, but it’s distorted, too.

That’s how I pictured her. Seemingly delicate and psychologically fragmented, but ultimately strong at her core.

Scott: That’s a really interesting insight. You’re providing a single image or touchstone in terms of developing her character, one that does describe her arc. She has a tragedy in her past. How early on did you hit on that, in terms of her character development, where you knew you wanted to deal with significant event in her past?

Lori: That came on a little bit later. I knew that she was going to have to have some sort of tragedy, I just wasn’t sure what the tragedy was and how it was going to play into the larger plot.

Ultimately, in any haunted house movie, you always have to answer that question, “Why don’t they just leave?” If you’re on bed rest you’re not supposed to physically move, but if your circumstances get frightening enough, you’re gonna find a way to get out of dodge. So why doesn’t Julie leave?

I realized the answer to that question had to be in Julie’s past. I created a past for her that actually keeps her emotionally and psychologically invested in the house. It became a psychological and an emotional anchor within the movie.

Incorporating that past actually posed an interesting challenge for me as a writer. The truth of the situation is that my husband and I suffered a similar tragedy. We lost our first child during labor.

Needless to say, it was an emotionally shattering experience. For nine months I had bonded with this child in my belly and in a New York minute, all those dreams and aspirations I had for this child and our future was taken away. It was devastating. I find that couples that go through tragedies either grow stronger or are unable to cope and go their separate ways. Luckily, my husband and I came out stronger because of it.

A couple of years later, as I was in the midst of developing this script, I begin to realize that the strongest choice for Julie’s backstory was the loss of a baby. That put me in an interesting, yet gut-wrenching, position as a writer. Internally I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there. I know that a lot of writers approach their work from an autobiographical perspective, but I always found that the more I included my own life, the more I lost objectivity about the story and the characters.

But the more I thought about it, the more I knew it was the right story choice. My own life experience gave me a unique perspective into this character and instead of backing away from the choice I knew I needed to embrace it. However, before I fully committed to the storyline, I needed my husband’s endorsement. It wasn’t just my experience. It was our experience. So I had him read some scenes and we had a discussion and he said, “Yes, you absolutely have to do this. You’re uniquely qualified to tell this story. So go tell it.”

Scott: One of the classic tropes of horror movies and psychological thrillers are feints, fake scares. How conscious were you about that, and did you approach that in a conscious fashion, or did you just sort of feel your way through?

Lori: A lot of producers and studios like to throw in scares for the sake of it, but it was very important to me that all the scares be firmly anchored in the truth of the story, the characters, or the mythology.
I didn’t want there to be any kind of scare that you could point to and say, “Why is that there? There’s no reason for it.” For every single scare, there had to be an element of truth.

Scott: Also, you play around with the dynamic, which is, “Is she imagining this or is this real?” That plays out on several levels, personally with her wondering about her own mental state, and also other people thinking, “She’s under stress. The pregnancy, the bed rest, that’s what’s led to her fantasies.” How much did you pay attention to that particular dynamic as you were writing the script?

Lori: A lot, actually, because that’s part of the fun, “Is it all in her head, or is it real?” You want to always keep the audience guessing. So ultimately, yes, that was absolutely part of the crafting of the story — is it actually happening or is her prior psychosis kicking back in?

Scott: It grows from her becoming convinced she is right — this is happening — but then there’s the husband, then the doula. You expand that out, and it gets wider and wider, in terms of this question, is it real or is it not? A kind of “the boy who cried wolf” type of thing.

Lori: Certainly, as her husband and the doula are seeing her behavior unravel their first thought is, “Obviously, she’s relapsing.” That gave me a lot of emotional meat to play with.

Scott: You mentioned how this is a haunted house movie. That was a key for you, when you said, “If we match up bed rest and haunted house,” and then your manager said, “Yeah, that’s the movie.” So let’s talk about the house a bit. I don’t want to get too specific, but it has its own back story. How did you go about developing the house as a character?

Lori: I knew whatever the backstory was, it needed to mirror Julie’s personal journey. Her pregnancy needed to be an important element, not only on a bed rest level, but also on a psychological and thematic level.

So whatever the mythology was, it had to be a parallel to her own experience, so we could take full advantage of Julie’s psychology.

Scott: I don’t want to give away the ending, but you’ve got some really interesting surprises there at work. How many endings did you come up and work with?

Lori: I feel like endings in horror movies are really hard to nail. It’s hard to stick the landing. I find myself loving a lot of horror movies up until the last twenty minutes and then, for some reason or another, I end up walking away disappointed.

For “Bed Rest”, first and foremost, I knew I wanted to serve the story. I played around with a few endings, but nothing seemed right. Getting her out of the house wasn’t enough for me. I wanted her to win. I wanted her to actually defeat the villain. Then I had an epiphany and wrote the ending.

The ending is something I don’t think a lot of people see coming. It packs a punch as well, so I felt it worked on a bunch of different levels.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Lori provides details on the sale of her spec script “Bed Rest”.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Lori is repped by ICM Partners and Kaplan/Perrone.