Flipping the Script on the Final Girl: A Conversation with ‘Strange Darling’ Writer-Director JT Mollner

In Strange Darling, nothing is what it seems when a twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer’s vicious murder spree. 

Strange Darling is a vividly nuanced and crazy rat race – something you just have to watch and witness for yourself. Shot entirely on 35mm film, with Giovanni Ribisi behind the glass, the film also includes a stellar cast and twisted story written and helmed by JT Mollner. It’s a slow burn where needed and ramps up to 1,000 “what the hells” when unexpectedly warranted.

Without going into spoiler territory, JT Mollner spoke with Script about the genesis of the story sparked by an image, his collaboration with key creatives from his cinematographer to production designer, developing nuanced characters, and how his background in haunted houses has strong parallels to making movies, and so much more!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: I read that this initially started out as a visual image for you - the woman running out of the car in red scrubs, and that you already had the song in mind. How were you able to take that spark of an idea and break a story out of that?

JT Mollner: It's interesting, that's how my writing process is in general. It's like I'll sort of have an idea that'll come to me, either before I go to sleep, when I'm hiking, when I'm in the shower, or doing some mundane task. And I'll have something come to me, and I won't be able to get out of my head. Sometimes it doesn't go anywhere. And then if it seems compelling, I'll pay attention to it, and not in a rush to write it, because I usually have other ideas and other things I'm working on, but I'll usually pay attention to it and then see if it continues to haunt me and becomes more. And many times, it does become more. And then the final thing if it isn't compelling enough in its full form for me to write and then sometimes it becomes something that maybe I should get to work on right now.

And this was really interesting, because I was drawn to the image of this final girl running through the woods. And I kept seeing that, and I knew it was a trope, except the way I saw it was there was dressing on the image that I saw, that that made it unique to me, the scrubs and the music and the frame rate, the slow motion I wanted to shoot, and the lens. I had this very stylized image in my head, but I wanted to make sure, beyond just style, there was some story here, or a unique side of a character we could show that we hadn't seen in other films, not just horror films, but films about people who are being pursued or in distress.

This was the weirdest thing, because it slowly came to me over the course of a few months. And then all of a sudden, one day, I had it, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go with it, and it all kind of clicked. And I knew how many chapters there were going to be, and I knew how it was going to end. And once I know the ending of the story, I know whether it's good or not, or whether it's good enough for me. I don't know whether audiences will like it, or critics will like it, but I know that it's good enough for me to work on.

So, when I have an ending, that's how I gauge everything. I have to have an ending, and I knew where it was going to go. And then I called a few of my close confidants - my editor, Chris Bell, and I always talk to my wife first, and my parents and I said, ‘What do you think about this idea?’ And I had a number of other ideas that I was considering, kind of working on at the time. And I also remember running it by my manager, and this was the one that everybody thought I should get to work on, and I got to work on it.

It was a weird process on this because after I decided to write it, there were a lot of personal things that happened in my life, death in the family, there were a lot of stressors going on, and a lot of things were happening. And all of a sudden, I had a feeling that if I finally had time to sit down and write this, it would happen quite fast. And it did, which was the easiest typing process I've ever experienced, but it took a long time to get there.

Sadie: There's something very satisfactory, but also scary when that happens, when you're like, ‘Why did this pour out of me so quickly?’ But it's been ruminating for 20 years. [laughs]

JT: [laughs] Yeah! A similar thing is happening to me now. I have an idea that I came up with right after Fantastic Fest last year, and I called all my team, the people I work with, like my production designer and my editor and I was like, ‘I have this idea. I have this thing I want to do.’ And I wouldn't really tell everybody details, but told them the basic thing. And then I was like, ‘I got to get to it, and we'll have it ready before this movie even comes out.’ And here we are, months and months later, and I have most of a script finished. Actually getting something written - it's a mountain to climb. So, every time somebody has a completed script ready to go out, I think they should pat themselves on the back.

Sadie: Absolutely. You flipped this script intentionally for this story, and it's non-linear, and you've broken it up into chapters. Since you already had that written out in your script, and you're having conversations with your editor, once you got into post, were there any bumps or surprises?

JT: The way we work together, it's so cohesive, and we have a language - we've been working together for a bit. And he knows that the way I like to shoot, I like to shoot exactly what we're going to use, and not much more. So, a lot of what you see, the music, even the cuts, dissolves, it was written into the initial script. And when we were sending him footage, because the way we do it is, we go to work, he doesn't like to be on set and meet the actors. He feels like it gets in the way of honestly, cutting dialog scenes and performance scenes. He doesn't want to be attached to the humans until after the movie's finished. But the way it works is I go off and shoot, if we're on location, and we send him the dailies, and footage to start working on, and he'll start to do a rough assembly based on my selects.

And he started calling me about a week into production, and he was just like, ‘This is beautiful. It's like a puzzle with massive pieces that I can just lay together.’ He really felt like it was working. And I was nervous, because it was shot in a very deliberate way, and it was written in a very deliberate way. So, if it wasn't working, we were going to have a serious problem, because we didn't really have a plan B. The movie you saw was the movie we were shooting.

He had a rough assembly and we spent a lot more time together, months and months and months doing editorial passes on the movie, because he always has insight into, ‘Well, I know you wanted to do this here because you want to evoke this emotion, and I know the feeling you want to get here. And I know that you want this scene to be a slow burn,’ or ‘I know you want this to move quickly, but I feel like you can get there if you try this instead.’ And so, he'll start inserting his own ideas into the process as we move on. And sometimes I like them, and sometimes I don't, but more often I do, because he's an expert. That's his department, and I really believe in focus and expertise.

We spent months on it after that, and we tweaked things and made some scenes stronger, but we didn't lift scenes out of it or do any fundamental surgery on the movie. It's pretty damn close to how it was when we started off.

Sadie: In terms of characters, and we won't go into spoiler territory, but for me as a viewer, it was like I got to have a hand in the story in creating their backstory as the story progressed – it really kept me invested, until all of those breadcrumbs really come together. When developing these characters and breaking the mold was there a thematic anchor, or a pivotal element that you were holding on to?

JT: My big goal when I was writing the movie and then when we were making the movie, was to make sure that I didn't ever fool the audience with dishonest direction of performances, dishonest character behavior, or anything that felt dishonest. So, I wanted to make sure we told the truth in every scene, but the narrative structure, the out-of-sequence structure, was what caused the surprises.

There was a time when we were asked by someone who is in the orbit of the movie and asked us to put the movie in sequence. And when we put the movie in sequence, it felt very conventional and I thought it was, frankly, pretty boring. And I think the reason for that, if you watch the movie in sequence, there are no surprises.

I sat down with the two leads, and we went to dinner, and we talked about the essence of this movie. And this might shock people who are seeing it, we talked about it being a love story. A very extreme and metaphorical love story with extreme examples of things. But we talked about it sort of representing different phases of a relationship, and when they do have a connection, these two characters, they're feeling that connection in earnest. So, no character is trying to trick another character into doing something.

 They both actually are feeling the things they're feeling in these scenes when we watch these scenes, and we wanted them to play that stuff straight. Then the brutality and the violence and the aggression, all that stuff would have a heavier impact, because they'd be grounded on some level.

And so, we never said, ‘OK, act like this in this scene, because this is where we want the audience to think this.’ I wanted both characters to play the truth of who they were through the whole movie. And then when we shuffle things around, you see that sometimes we're playing with expectation and identity and sometimes good people can have a burst of rage and do horrible things because of something that happens to them. And sometimes bad people can have good moments, and in the end, we're trying to articulate the fact that there's very little pure good, pure evil. 

We wanted to show that gray area and leave the audience feel a little bit conflicted, and compassionate in a way at different times for both characters, even if there happens to be a serial killer in the movie. [laughs]

Sadie: The visual language of the film, and harmony with the sound design and score – what were those creative conversations like, especially with your cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi?

JT: The movies I was watching really early on that were inspiring this, and then the movies that I started watching with Giovanni, before we decided to do the movie, or before we got the movie greenlit, and also the movies I was watching later with new editions like Priscilla Elliott, who was our production designer - I was in this mood - I wanted to make a movie that really felt like you'd been dipped and soaked in a feeling - like a soup. [laughs] 

And there are certain movies like The Devils and Blue Velvet, Dead Ringers, and Cries & Whispers, all different genres, but there's certain films that just really have a flavor and it's more about the emotions that the colors and the music and the production design and the cinematography, all of that in concert can evoke in the audience such heavy emotions that story and narrative almost become secondary. It's an extra added bonus if there's a really clever narrative too.

But we wanted to focus and make this be like a feeling-forward movie. And so, I knew that the department heads we're going to bring those feelings to life, and those looks and sounds and everything to life were going to be paramount. It started off with Giovanni, and we watched all these movies and talked about how we wanted it to look, and talked about lensing and deep focus, and how we were going to move the camera and everything.

And then when I got to work with the production designer, Priscilla, the first thing we did when I got to Oregon, and I met Priscilla in person, because I had been introduced to Priscilla through a mutual friend of ours. She's amazing. I flew into Oregon and we went to see Lost Highway. It was playing at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland, and we got out of Lost Highway, and I was like, ‘How do they do that, Priscilla? They really stick to their guns.’ 

And we talked about primary colors. I really saw blues and reds and black in this movie, and some yellow, but no tertiary colors, except in the forest in natural settings. And so, Priscilla disciplined me and said, ‘Well, if you really want a movie to feel like these movies you're referencing with your own color palette, we need to stick to color lock, color control, and that means really being disciplined at all times.’

And the first draft of the script, it actually had a woman in teal scrubs running through a field and everything else was red and blue written into the movie. And she goes, ‘Well, why is this woman in teal scrubs, if you just told me no tertiary colors?’ And I said, ‘Well, I just think it'll look cool for the first shot.’ She said,’ See, that's where most directors can never be disciplined enough to make a movie feel like the movies you're referencing. So, let's really stick to it.’ [laughs] So, I went home and changed the teal scrubs to red in the script.

Z Berg's music – I listen to music as I'm writing - and her music had been written into the movie, a few of her other songs that I liked from a previous album. I'd been listening to Chopin while I was writing. I'm always listening to whatever classical music I'm in the mood for at a certain time. But I knew I wanted to give these reprieves with Chopin. I knew I wanted to have dreamy, what I called a Leonard Cohen meets Julee Cruise, sort of pop music throughout the movie, and a booming score.

And Z, her DNA was all over this. I wanted her to do this movie from the beginning. I thought maybe we'd use a song of hers, and then she loved it so much, she agreed to write a whole album for the movie. Both of us had longed for the days of Aimee Mann doing the Magnolia soundtrack, or Cat Stevens doing Harold and Maude. And so, we really wanted to do that. And now her Strange Darling album is my favorite album of hers, and that's a very high bar, because I love her music.

And then we found Craig DeLeon, we talked about the feeling I wanted to get from the score, and he had this incredible idea to do something with modular synthesizers that hasn't been done in this context before. And I just love his score.

After we did all this stuff, we had to find the right sound designers. I've worked with good people who were fun to work with along the way, but I never really found my specific team that I always went back to, and I called the best director I know, personally, Sean Baker. And I said, ‘Do you recommend a post-sound team? I need somebody really, really good.’ And he recommended Andy Hay and John Warrin at Esho Sound, and I called them. They happened to have some time, they ended up mixing the movie, and it was just such a pleasure to do that with them. After we finished the movie, their movie Anora just won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. So, I feel like I got really lucky to link up with them before that happened, because they're probably really busy now, but I plan to go back and work with them again, if they'll have us.

Sadie: You also help run a seasonal business, a family business - haunted houses. How much of that the DIY haunt space from it putting it up, creating the stories, the characters, has influenced how you approach filmmaking?

JT: It's almost the same job. When I wasn't that busy after Covid, I would go back and do the horror shows. It was like I was getting the same adrenaline rush, or a similar one to making a movie, because it's so similar. My parents both came from show business…my dad was an actor, and my mom was a singer, and she's actually singing on this soundtrack. Z Berg wrote a song called “To Forget You” and it's playing on the radio during three of the most intense scenes in the hotel room and in the hotel lobby, but it'll be on the soundtrack album too, which is so cool. My mom's voice is incredible. And my dad came from a very theatrical background and is a great actor. And he's in the movie, he's in all my stuff – he comes out of the hotel and in a robe, and brings a gun out.

But he's the one who started Freakling Bros way back in 1992 - him and my brother started the company, and they always approached it differently. And they said, ‘We want to do haunted houses because we love Halloween.’ And he'd been doing home haunt stuff and in our house, but they wanted to start a company that would do haunted houses that were run like theatrical productions. So it wouldn't rely on any animatronics or stuff like that. It would be all live actors. 

Now we've gotten to a point where it's almost 50 live actors, and there aren’t any characters from horror movies like some haunted houses have - every single character in Freakling Bros show is a Freakling Bros original. I write scripts for each one of the characters. We create the names for the characters, and we create an original name and theme for the show. 

We have three haunted houses at the same location, and every year, in September, we hold auditions, we bring hundreds of actors in, and we read them, we meet with them, and then we decide who makes the cut. We spend days training them on safety and stuff like that, but also teaching them. We call it ‘scare school,’ teaching them how to scare people, and I actually direct them in those roles. We treat the process during Halloween almost exactly how I treat the process when I'm making a movie. It's like rehearsal first and then performances. There's lots of crossover.

I started managing one of the attractions and writing the scripts for them 10-12 years ago. And then I became a partner and created, with my dad, a new attraction called “The Gates of Hell.” It was the first R-rated horror attraction in the Western US. The whole goal there was to do this really hardcore-rated R experience for thrill seekers. Everything about it is all about scaring you and pushing the envelope, right?

And so, part of the reason in my films, Strange Darling being one of them, even though there are horror elements, it doesn't lean directly into just only grotesque hardcore. There's romance, and there's a mix of other things. It's because it's a different outlet for me, and I'm trying to use my horror background to an extent, but then also explore a softer side, I guess. I see a lot of that in the movie - there's tenderness in the movie. 

Strange Darling is now out in Theaters. Check your local showtimes.