“It’s Not Strictly A Horror Movie, It’s Kind Of A Relationship Drama First.“ Interview With Actress Sheila Vand of THE RENTAL

You might remember her as the ultra-cool The Girl in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night or perhaps the mother in We The Animals, but now Sheila Vand is about to star in The Rental, Dave Franco’s directorial debut. She’s also a series regular in TNT’s Snowpiercer which is heading towards its explosive season one finale and has already been confirmed for a second season.

We got on the phone with the actress to talk about actors turning directors, finding chemistry with your co-stars and Snowpiercer’s timely portrayal of systemic change.

Maria Lattila for Film Inquiry: Hi Sheila! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me about The Rental and hopefully also Snowpiercer. I really loved The Rental, it’s such an interesting film, and it’s a film that I could probably watch 15 times and every time get something new out of it. So I just wanted to start by asking how did you get involved with it?

Sheila Vand: I had met Joe Swanberg a couple of times before this film, he co-wrote it with Dave [Franco] and then I’m not sure how I first came up. I know that Dave had recently seen an indie film that I was in called We The Animals and I guess when he decided that he wanted me to play Mina, he reached out to a few mutual friends of ours, and we ended up meeting. He sent me the script, he sent me all the influences, for the sort of tone and for his vision of how he wanted to create this world and what the movie was going to look and feel like and I was very excited by it.

I was excited about the group of people he was putting together to make it and to be in it. And then, when he and I met, we just really got along and hit it off and I felt like he totally had his head on his shoulders, he had thought through exactly what his vision was, he was just so prepared. I thought he might be able to really pull this off and I think he did, especially considering it’s Dave’s film as a director. I think it’s super impressive that he was able to achieve all the things that he set out to achieve.

Is there anything specific that you’re always looking for in a script or a project and what was it about The Rental that then finally sort of convinced you?

Sheila Vand: It’s always a kind of combination of the role and the script and then also the people involved in the thing. Variety is something I look for a lot, I love doing characters that I haven’t quite played before in different types of movies that I haven’t done before. But in addition to that also just scripts and stories that have depth are really interesting to me and ones that take risks. I felt this did both, especially with horror.

Sometimes horror films can lack that, because they’ll pander more to the fun of the horror element, but I knew that Dave wanted to make a movie that was deeper than that, that spends just as much time, if not more, with the people and their relationship, as it does with the horror elements of the movie.

And I was excited that it was going to be kind of stylized visually as well and have a little bit of a nostalgic throwback feeling to the horror elements of it. So yeah, I look for those things and I felt like they were there in this, but the people involved were people who I really admired and was excited to work with. And the story as well was something kind of different, with a different twist, for me at least, because it’s not strictly a horror movie, it’s kind of a relationship drama first.

Yeah, it’s funny because the horror stuff doesn’t really come in until quite late in the film, and there’s a lot of tension before that, but it all comes from the relationships between the characters and the secrets constantly on the verge of coming out, and it’s incredible to to watch all of that play out.

Sheila Vand: Yeah, exactly, the horror actually starts in small ways that are just interpersonal, like the trust between these two couples starts to fray. And there are other elements as well.

There’s this kind of discrimination that my character faces early on that starts her level of distress in the situation. And then it’s just one little mistake after another, which creates this web of conflicts for these people, and all of them are very realistic situations that any of us might find ourselves in. There’s nothing fantastical about the horror in this movie, which I think makes it extra scary for me because it’s like it could really happen.

I’ll never go to an Airbnb again.

Sheila Vand: Exactly. But it really starts with the breakdown of trust between the people, and I love that element of the horror starting first just interpersonally and then it gets way out of control.

Absolutely. And your character Mina is kind of the moral centre of the film, although obviously she’s not perfect either. But was it something that you immediately connected with?

Sheila Vand: Yeah, I’m Persian-American myself, I loved that there was a character that they’ve created that acknowledged her Persian-American-ess to some degree and acknowledged the micro racism she experiences but at the same time, she’s also just a girl in the movie. She’s not overrun by her racial identity or ethnic identity, if that makes sense.

Sometimes I feel like when I play a part that’s Middle Eastern, all of a sudden, a bunch of different stereotypes get added on to it and Dave does such a good job of not doing that with this film without ignoring the fact that she is different from them. She is an outsider in this family and she isn’t a white person like the rest of the people and she does experience discrimination because of her name. I can relate to that in my real life. I just thought he did a good job of that delicate balance of addressing a character’s ethnic background without having that be the only thing that defines that character.

And Dave’s obviously had a long successful career as an actor. Do you think actors generally make quite good directors?

Sheila Vand: I really do actually and I feel like we don’t get enough credit for that, like actors who flip and are successful, there are so many good examples of it like Donald Glover and Greta Gerwig and Issa Ray. So many actors who do both, and do the writing side and the directing side, and the acting side and I just think that it inevitably benefits you to understand more processes of how these stories get told.

I think it’s just as good for actors to understand the director’s side of things as it is for directors to understand more the actor side of things and it’s hard to do that without just doing it, without putting yourself in those shoes. I personally like being directed by actors because I feel like they just care for the performance a little bit more and are a little bit more understanding because they’ve been on the other side, like speaking my language a little more sometimes.

I also feel like they got to give you what you need for you to do a good job because they’ve been on that side of things. So I really like working with actors, I hope more actors get chances to write and direct because we’re just crazy psychos, we think so hard about our characters. We will put so much work into fleshing them out and making characters feel real and I think a lot of those traits and things we put into bringing a character to life translates so well to bringing the whole story to life.

And Dave’s obviously married to Alison Brie who plays Michelle. Is that weird? I mean, how is it observing a married couple work together? I’m asking this as somebody who could never work with their partner, ever.

Sheila Vand: It’s definitely a gamble but they are the cutest, sweetest couple and it was just a complete joy. Honestly, to be around them and have them be married because they were kind of the mom and dad on set, who just have a nurturing energy towards everybody and they’re both just such seasoned vets and complete professionals.

They didn’t make you feel weird in any way, but any moment where there was some cuteness going on between them was like much appreciated by me and I just felt such a warmth, because they’re both such sweet and generous people. They’re very generous with their energy and they’re so supportive of each other. It was really cool and inspiring to see how they were able to keep that separation as actor and director and husband and wife but also support each other as husband and wife through it. It was cool to see that.

You already mentioned Joe Swanberg who co-wrote the script, he’s an incredible writer, and he’s known for his mumblecore films and his improvisational style. Did you get to do any of that on set? This does feel a lot more structured than a lot of his other films.

Sheila Vand: We didn’t do too much improvisation. It was honestly just pretty concise on the page. So it didn’t need too much massaging. I feel like sometimes when you’re improvising it’s just because you need to finesse the script a little bit. And I also think that Dave had thought through everything so much and he was so well prepared like he’d gone up to Oregon well over a month before we even started shooting. So I think this was a little more structured because he was being very intentional about how he crafted the tension in the movie and how he’s built that tension up.

It’s definitely more stylized than that mumblecore-y kind of improv energy that I think both of them kind of did something different, and it’s definitely different for Dave, Joe as well and it’s exciting. It’s fun to have people who have strengths in other areas apply them to different kinds of stories.

And you obviously have a lot of scenes with Dan Stevens and Jeremy Allen White and you’ve got such great chemistry with both of them. Is that something that you have to work on before shooting or does that just happen naturally?

Sheila Vand: It doesn’t always happen. We got lucky that, again, I feel like the attention to detail, the effort that they’ve put into it, to casting and putting the crew together, is really why it was such a success. He did a good job with the people he chose like we all had actual chemistry with each other and it was just such good people, it was such a good experience. There was so much love all around and honestly, I say that as someone who’s normally pretty salty and cynical, I don’t always have happy-go-lucky things to say about every job I do but this one was genuinely really wonderful.

And it does help a lot because when that natural chemistry isn’t there you just do more work as an actor to fake it and I feel like we didn’t have to because we all just like got along so well and I think also the fact that it’s such a small cast and it all takes place pretty much in this one location. We were able to get a little closer because it was more of a tight ensemble, where we spent a lot of time together, we’re all kind of around the same age.

It was easy to get along but also those guys are just, they’re so great. We actually got to the point where it felt sometimes like we were playing off of each other and with each other in the scene and you don’t always get that chance. Sometimes it’s just a lot more surgical than that but in this case, everybody was so strong that I felt like I could just exist right there in the moment with them. 

You’re also in Snowpiercer which will conclude on July 19th, and I watched the last four episodes last night, and it is wild! I think you’ve filmed most of the second season so what can you tell us in terms of your character Zarah?

Sheila Vand: I don’t know how much exactly I can say, but she continues on the same trajectory she’s on in the first season which is looking out for herself a lot. One of the things that’s the most interesting to me about her is the fact that she started at the tail of the train and moved up to third class. I think she left the past behind her, she left the tail behind, it was really controversial that she left them to get more opportunities for herself in this world.

Some people might call that betrayal but for her it was survival. And what I can say is that she kind of keeps on moving up the ladder in her own way, moving into the second season. She’s complicated in that way where a lot of the people in the train think she turned her back on them but for me, I think she’s a strong, savvy woman trying to build a life in the world that is worth living and the way she does that is not always easy. But I like characters that make questionable choices because I feel like that’s what it is to be human, to be complicated, to have contradictions inside. It’s more fun to play someone who’s a little broken for me than someone who’s like just a good guy.

It feels so timely with not only just the confined space that everybody’s in on the train, but the class divides and the human rights issues. It keeps coming back to this really uncomfortable question of whether progress and change for the better can ever be achieved without sort of this terrible, violent price that has to be paid which I think the show makes a real point about. Do you think people will see a connection there?

Sheila Vand: Yeah, it’s hard because we shot it before coronavirus before the pandemic stuff happened but now this is the lens that all of us are seeing the world through and it does really change I think how we process stories and I’m glad that this show is able to be more relevant. But at the same time, I’m curious what people think because I was worried when it first came out about the fact like, gosh, do people want to see an apocalyptic, confined show like that when it feels like we’re living in an apocalypse now? But I think it has resonated and I think that when you’re going through something difficult that sometimes it’s comforting to just take it out of yourself and look at it and just see it happen to somebody else.

But yeah, there’s that element of classism and social unrest and all that we’re absolutely going through right now and so I only wish that we could have incorporated it even more just because now it’s not so much on the back, because it’s on the forefront of people’s minds, but it’s so important, it’s so important to make sure that we reflect what’s happening in the world around us as storytellers and moviemakers and stuff. But the show does definitely get into the politics of change and how it’s not as easy as it seems, to have a revolution and to make a huge systemic change but definitely doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting for.

Absolutely. And I can’t wrap this up without asking you about A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, which is just phenomenal. And looking back to that how do you think that has impacted your career?

Sheila Vand: It definitely opened up a lot of doors like particularly in the indie movie world, which is one of the most exciting spaces for me anyway. I find that some of the most boundary-pushing stuff and ground-breaking work is often happening in the independent cinema realm. So it felt amazing to get that kind of recognition in a community that I respect so much. And it was also nice to, after so many years of hustling so hard as an actor, trying to get by to just have a movie that shows you what I can do.

And it’s not the only one, also the subsequent films I’ve done, and even stuff I did before that one. I am trying at least to build a career where it’s an accumulation of the things I do more than anyone thing, but it is nice that that helped to sort of just be something that people could see where I didn’t have to say hire me, I swear I’m talented. I like it when my work can speak for itself when my work can speak for me. I feel like it does a better job of that usually when I do speak for myself!

Thank you. It’s been such a pleasure.

Sheila Vand: Yeah, thanks for talking all the way from London.

Film Inquiry would like to thank Sheila Vand for chatting with us.

The Rental is in select drive-ins, theatres and on-demand July 24, 2020. 

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