The Slow Burn: A Conversation with ‘The Exorcism’ Filmmakers Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin

The Exorcism stars Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe as Anthony Miller, a troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a supernatural horror film. His estranged daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins), wonders if he's slipping back into his past addictions or if there's something more sinister at play. The film also stars Sam Worthington, Chloe Bailey, Adam Goldberg and David Hyde Pierce.

Buckle up for a wild ride in this psychological horror from filmmaking duo Joshua John Miller and M.A. Fortin, writers behind The Final Girls (2015) and creators of the TV series Queen of the South (2016-2021). With a direct nod to horror films of the 70s, and the rather ambitious and self-loathing spiral that comes with making a movie (which feels rather meta - making a movie within a movie), Joshua and M.A. bring their singular vision to this film. 

The Exorcism filmmakers spoke with Script about their journey from writing the script to making the movie, what emotionally attracted them to the story, capturing the specific visual language of the film, and more.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: This mindset of this actor, that is Anthony Miller, and how he's battling his own demons, alcoholism, being a bad father, and how he's dealing with all of that manifests and taking over his world – what was your approach to developing that character and world?

Joshua John Miller: In terms of the question being more focused how did we get there with that character - in terms of the writing process…it seems that we always have a kind of different process for each project. And I think one of the things that we've always realized, you know in Hollywood, normally you go on your pitch, you do an outline, then you go to script. I think what we've realized that has been really successful, is we do sort of a biopsy, which we call it - let's write some scenes and see if we even can write this, if we even feel connected to the material. Because I think there's a great difference between an idea and actually doing the writing and really feeling like you have authority over it.

And often, we found ourselves suddenly writing a script and going, ‘Oh shoot. What did we just sell? We don't get this.’ Or this isn't just writer's block, this is the wrong writer. Or the story really just doesn't want to be told.

I think what was nice about this is that if you take a genre, you have at least a net, right? And there's sort of these markers you have to hit. And then the question is, how do you subvert those as well, right? Because a lot of horror movies are gonna be like, ‘Well, you got to have this amount of kills by this amount of time.’ But I think we were very much like, ‘No.’ Maybe we'll give something in the opening. But let's go against expectations in contemporary horror, and let's just do a 70s horror film, which is just more the familial dramas, the psychological traumas, the slow burn. Which nobody really likes anymore, but that's the movie we wanted to make. We wanted to do it as if Cassavetes made a horror film.

M.A. Fortin: [laughs] That's the lofty ambitions that we start out with, and I agree with Josh…I think it's very easy the longer you work in Hollywood…that there's a difference between what you should sell and what you can sell. And just because you can envision something being a story does not mean that it's going to be the thing that nips at your heels, until you get to the computer or legal pad, or whatever it is you use to do it.

And like he said, you learn the hard way, I think in terms of where you're willing to actually light up and do the kind of work that is tapping into something that's very, very, very pure, as opposed to something that's calculated, because you know Warner TV is looking for medical dramas with a teenage lead, you know what I mean? I can't speak for Josh, but I think my life was just consistently like walking into different rakes until I eventually find the open doorway. [laughs]

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Sadie: You made the movie that you essentially wanted to see. It has that love language to those horror films from that period of time.

Joshua: Thank you for saying that. We got to protect the material as much as we could, despite it being a studio movie and working within the studio system. But that was the great thing- we could fight for the material and that was great. And I think certain people fell into, ‘Only Josh and Mark could write this story. It's so personal to Josh and Mark has such an adaptive understanding of genre, why not trust them?’ And so, we had a certain level of agency, but you are always fighting to protect that original vision.

As I learned, and this is more of a directorial thing, but I think it's the beginning of a project - and maybe this is a writing thing, too - I think so many people sit in that room, and everyone's just so excited to make a movie. But often, I don't think they know the movie that they're all making…

M.A.: Or is everyone agreeing with the movie that they’re making?

Joshua: There's not a real clear duplication of what we're all going to do. And then the eruptions happen later, because of that lack of clarity in the beginning. And if people can really get on the same page, and not be afraid to have to maybe get to that moment where you go, ‘Well, you know what, you want a different movie. And that's OK. And we can agree to separate, I'm not the one to make that movie, but you go ahead and do that idea.’ But everybody is afraid to get to what I think is a really actually humane place to be. Because it might mean you don't have the job.

M.A.: It wouldn’t mean honoring everyone’s point of view and time.

Joshua: And most disasters all stem from that one little, let's say hypothetical meeting, or two, if people could just get on the same page of what this is. And it sounds so simple. And I think it's impossible.

M.A.: It's very, very, very complicated.

Sadie: Because this is a beloved IP in the horror space and with your own history with it too Josh, when developing this so that it can stand on its own legs, was there pressure for the two of thinking about the fanservice or were you able to stick to your own vision without that bleeding through?

Joshua: I think over more time, I've become more confident about that, or the distance I've had for the project because it's been an elongated process. And the more space we've had, the more confident I think we are not necessarily thinking about our abilities being bad or phenomenal. But the commitment to make that distinction of…you stop telling yourself, ‘Well, I'm not Coppola.’ You start saying, ‘Well, I can make this better.’ [laughs] I love Rick Rubin. And he talks a lot about this in that Creative Act book, which I'm not for self-help creative books. But to me, that book isn't a self-help book. I feel like it's dark magic in the best way possible. It really opens you up to a more pure creative process. And I love that part about you get to the point where you just kind of say, ‘OK, well, maybe what if I'm not Scorsese? But I can make this scene better.’

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And then over time, cumulatively, I'm not saying for us - maybe you do become Scorsese, or somebody else - I think that over time, I think we started to feel more clear about the vision because I think when you're in the hellscape of making the movie, which is just making your days, and then you're directing it, and maybe even writing again, in the editing room, I think you have a moment to be more reflexive and more, ‘What do we really want to say here?’ And that changes over time, too. So that's been a weird thing with this movie, too. It became more distilled as to why we made it. Now we go, ‘That's what inspired that movie.’

M.A.: Yeah, I think the only thing that you can really do when you're writing is because it's so easy to fall into the idea of like, ‘Oh, I have to write this person, or that person’ in order to get this particular story across, but I think the only real barometer is discomfort. I think if you just write long enough, or just carefully enough to find where you're like, ‘Ow…I don't like that' - that's where at least the road starts really to doing something really good.

And I agree with Josh, I think that this movie, in particular, in certain ways for me is like I go, ‘Oh, it's about growing the fuck up and realizing that your parents are not these sort of monoliths that you can beat up on, that they're vulnerable, that they're fragile, and that they're maybe more vulnerable than you know.’ And part of growing up is about having to take care of them. Now, granted, Lee is going through it in an awfully codependent way. But putting that aside, it really is remarkable how your relationship to something changes, especially when it's inside a protracted road to daylight.

Joshua: And to be very honest, and this is about the business of writing, I can honestly say in hindsight, the more distance we have from the movie, and we've started to talk about this, this movie is very, on the surface, it seems very much about my dad and Exorcist, and those are all real. And that's a factor in there. But really, we made this movie out of great sorrow and rage about a professional experience we had prior…

M.A.: It was kind of demeaning.

Joshua: Kind of? [laughs] It was such a colossal struggle to fight for what we believed it should be. And there was such a demon attached to the process, that I think many ways The Georgetown Project aka The Exorcism was our way to deal with that.

Sadie: You touched on this, putting your parents on a pedestal and realizing they are vulnerable, was that your emotional anchor at the beginning?

M.A.: No, the thing that really hooked me into it was the idea that because we were doing a gender reversal on the sort of more, to overuse a word patriarchal, kind of aspects of your typical exorcism sub-genre dance steps of like, ‘a woman in distress,’ ‘strong man,’ ‘Catholic Church, ‘inviolable,’ ‘Teflon’ – there’s nothing wrong here. Those never interested us because whether it's horror or any genre, I think women protagonists, women antiheroes, they're always the thing that really sort of gets us excited about a story.

And we decided to turn that on its head. I had some Catholic damage from growing up. But when you grow up queer, and you know what AIDS is before you know what sex is because I was born in ’78, it's really disfiguring to be around religious people. And I was around my fair share of evangelicals who….wouldn't even question for a second anything that they were taught about queer people, or trans people not having a place within God's plan. And I'm not practicing or devout by any stretch. But I think the thing for me that really anchored me to this was that I want this to be a matter of fact about this being about a couple of queer people, one of whom is actually a priest. The other two are teenage girls who are just trying to figure their shit out. Being a part of the solution instead of just kind of the loathsome shit that a lot of so-called religious leaders spew nowadays, which is…about just dehumanizing people.

We were talking about this the other day about how cruelty is a sign of stupidity or lack of intelligence. I'm not saying certain people who behave cruelly are only stupid. I think all of us are capable of cruelty. And when we do behave cruelly, we're acting stupid. It doesn't mean that we have to live there. But we've all been at our worst and been at our best. For us, that was interesting, because nobody blinked about that at the outset of the movie, and then suddenly, it became a bit of a sticking point.

Joshua: The queer storyline?

M.A.: Yeah. We live in fascinating times. [laughs]

Joshua: But the good news is pride, and we got our queer story back in our movie. So, you know what, I’m going to focus on the good. [laughs]

My mom always told me never, and I take this with a grain of salt to some degree, but in work and your passion. she had always said she just never took ‘no’ for an answer. And I think you have to have a certain moxie as a writer, to protect your material, because the people especially within the system, are coming to it with a different agenda. And especially now that the industry has become so tech-owned. And those people are trained to be unempathetic mercenaries. They're now taking that approach to a business that was already morally ambiguous. [laughs] And I think people have to be more radical in the way they protect the material, and more radical about telling the stories they want to tell and not compromising, because now you've got people who are now scared of their jobs and not enough paychecks out there. And I say, ‘Well, push against it even harder.’

M.A.: Don’t take the note, unless it turns you on.

Sadie: I love that. Let’s talk about the visual language of the film, the visual tone, and bringing that from the page to the screen. Were there any specific references you were using as inspiration, especially with your collaboration with your DP Simon Duggan?

Joshua: We always write our drafts very much like a director directs a movie, we're thinking about camera moves, we're thinking about the visuals, and we try to almost, maybe make it feel like prose. I know Quentin Tarantino writes prose scripts. Gus Van Sant, I've actually seen it, he showed me an actual script of My Own Private Idaho, which looks like a novella, I would say. We're always thinking about the visual language - imagery and writing. I can speak for myself - I’m very inspired by photography, very inspired by paintings. There's a great photographer named Philip-Lorca diCorcia, who I love deeply, and Gregory Crewdson who can recreate reality.

It was very important for us to create the movie within the movie to feel dreamlike and kind of appealing, because sometimes when you're making a movie, it can be dry, and not as enchanting. And I think that was very important for us to convey what is the sort of allure of the world and the sort of mood, especially since the set within the set should feel a bit touched by something, maybe supernatural. Whether you project that onto it, or whether there's something existing in it.

What I love about Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Crewdson, but I'll talk more about Philip-Lorca diCorcia, is that he often has these shots on a street and people walking by, but he's got these big lights hitting them as they're crossing the street. So, it has this amplified reality to it. And I think we wanted to play with that. He also has these really interesting relationships between light and dark, they’re cinematic, those moments in his pictures, and I think we wanted it to have that cinematic moment within the frame that's within the frame.

M.A.: What I always think about especially is the scene where Jane Fonda is sitting at her table, alone, singing like a Thanksgiving song in Klute. She's just in a pool of light. It was interesting to play with the notion that some of these characters would rather hang out in darkness where they're a little safer, but it's when they're in the light that shit has to come out. And between that father and daughter, there's a lot of water to get under that bridge. So, for us, playing with that, in terms of story, and with Simon, it was really cool. 

The Exorcism is exclusively in Theaters on June 21, 2024.