Interview: Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson For ‘The Endless’

Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are a writer / director duo that you might not be familiar with at the moment, but their new (third) feature film The Endless is sure to change all that. The film, in which they both star, follows the tale of two brothers whom escaped a cult several years previous. Older brother Justin (Justin Benson) is happy to be out of the life, but younger brother Aaron (Aaron Moorhead) can’t let the life go. In an attempt to help his brother move on, Justin agrees to re-visit the old commune. Once there however, it soon becomes clear that there’s something rather strange occurring.

The Endless is a mind-melting science-fiction thriller with an undercurrent of horror that is well worth your time. With such an intriguing and intricate story, we jumped at the chance to sit down with Moorhead and Benson to find out more about the project:

The pair of you have been working together for a number of years, how did you start making films? 

Aaron Moorhead: We were interns together at a commercial production company. We just sat at the same table on my first day, his last day, and just started talking about the things that we love – movies, books, that sort of thing. We were both…I mean I would almost say struggling, but almost at that point wannabe filmmakers. Where, if you wanted anything made, you just had to throw down some money and gather all your friends, no one is going to give you anything. So we started working on each other’s projects a little bit. More and more it became apparent that we should work together, not for each other, so we made Resolution, our first feature.

It’s great that you guys had a dynamic that worked together, I tried a similar thing with someone I used to work with and it went terribly…

AM: Well it’s funny because we…I wouldn’t work with Justin if it was contentious. We wouldn’t work together if we didn’t share the same tastes. But we also wouldn’t work together if we were extremely similar. Because then we don’t add anything to each other. We are similar in so many ways, but also our minds work in different ways. Ways that plug into each other rather than just repeat the same thing over and over. So we build on each other and we know that we’re always headed to the same end goal, but everything that we bring is different than what the other one might have brought in the same scenario. Then it’s just an idea that you can debate and find out which one is best.

And this film features a little cameo from some characters from your previous film Resolution, did you always know you wanted to bring them back?

Justin Benson: It was more just a thing where you just never know where inspiration is going to come from. In this case we had this tiny, tiny, tiny little movie that no one will probably ever see. It did very well for us in kick-starting our careers, but it was one of those things where we live in a day and age where movies get bought for nothing and get released for even way less. It’s a film that’s become beloved over the years, people seem  to like it quite a bit – you know – the twelve people that have seen it. We love it quite a bit and we were always talking about those characters and that world. There was a much deeper mythology to it that we didn’t feel as completed to go as deep into when we made Resolution, but we kept talking about it – ‘that would be so cool if we could actually express that, if we could dramatise these ideas’. So after five or six years of talking about it we reached this point where all of these bigger projects in our careers were snagged in casting, or we got to wait forever for a celebrity to read the script and we’re not making movies, we’re just taking meetings. So we were like, ‘let’s just take these five or six years of ideas, this thing that we’re really inspired by, and make a feature that’s totally self reliant’. Nothing can stop us, if we act in it, if we do everything, we’ll be able to make this film. We’ll just say yes. We’ll pull the trigger. We will decide.

AM: It was cool to say we were green-lighting ourselves. We’re gonna go shoot this film in September. It was a weird thing being like we’re green-lighting ourselves meaning now we have to do it all, but we get to do it all. We get to actually do it.

On The Endless you guys wrote, directed, produced, edited, shot and starred in it. How did you manage to juggle all those different roles and responsibilities?

AM: Actually it was really, really natural because we’d normally jugg… juggling isn’t even quite the word – it kinda just falls into this big blanket of film-making in general. So for example, when I’m the cinematographer of our other films, I have the camera on my shoulder, but it’s the same thing as standing behind a monitor, it’s just the monitor is right here on the camera. It’s something that has always come very, very naturally to us.

The acting was obviously a different challenge this time, but what it could have been is that things took a lot longer where we have to keep watching things back and making sure it’s okay. What it ended up being was we barely had to do that because we’ve worked with our wonderful crew before, so our operator knew what we wanted. It was actually even faster because directing yourself is way easier than directing someone else (chuckles), because you already know the information, you don’t have to tell them differently. We have to direct each other a little bit, but rehearsal weeds that out. It also ended up being that we had to take less steps to talk to the other actors. Instead of going from behind the monitor to them, you’re just standing right in front of them so you can say what you need to say. So it worked out really, really comfortably. We had a nice rhythm by the end of it. Very surprisingly, not confusing, exhausting of course, but definitely didn’t feel like juggling too much.

You guys kind of lucked out with Callie Hernandez, recently she’s been in Blair Witch, La La Land, and Alien Covenant, how did you guys get her involved?

JB: It’s funny, this is the first movie where we used a casting director. There was a casting director that wanted to work with us, he’s way too good to be working with us, but he was willing to do it, and it just basically came through him. He has his people he goes to and thought she’d be a good fit. We were sent audition tapes of her and [points to Aaron] him, and I don’t know who anyone is, ever. We got hers and thought that was the best one. That was the best audition for this movie for that role. Luckily she came on-board and did it. She’s really lovely. We’re a very low budget movie, very boot strapped, very small crew and we’re out in the middle of nowhere and she came from…well she first came form Los Angeles, but there was this weekend where she had to go do press for Blair Witch and La La Land at TIFF and go there and then make it back to our set in the middle of nowhere in San Diego, and that had to be exhausting.

AM: Yeah and she was an absolute team player for the whole thing. We didn’t know, we knew that she was doing Blair Witch and La La Land and all that after we cast her, but when we cast her she just had a killer audition and that was it, which is pretty cool actually. To not know that they are successful and they actually just are the best person for the role.

JB: We made a really interesting discovery with her. We do rehearsals way before set. The performers, way before set, will come over to one of our apartments and we’ll work through scenes and try to figure things out. We were talking about the relationship between Aaron and Anna in the movie and how it was like ‘ok, it would be nice to tap into that uncomfortable thing that you feel, like for example, Back to the Future, when his mom tries to hook up with him’. It’s a weird circumstance, it’s not literally incest [laughs] because his mom doesn’t know, but there was something about…we wanted to have that feeling of okay there’s this woman and she’s actually much, much, much older, she’s from roughly the 1950’s and that she would feel like a maternal thing towards Aaron and maybe a slight interest – there’s not that many people coming and going, but that ultimately she would see Aaron as someone you used to babysit. Or like an Aunt to a young nephew. We were trying to find a way to communicate that so they didn’t feel like a traditional love interest, but we still had the uncomfortable thing of like your mom trying to hook up with you in the past.

In rehearsal we came up with this moment in the movie where Aaron tries to hold her hand, and she just kinda drops his hand and puts her arms up. That was her, that was all her. That was a neat little discovery that said a lot in one one thousand, two one thousand, it said everything about their dynamic. Then it didn’t become some corny romance that doesn’t seem to make any sense. It feels like a male writer’s fantasy of what would happen.

AM: She ended up re-defining the dynamic between Aaron and Anna. Whereas before that rehearsal we saw it as a romance that wouldn’t work because of the situation of it. Then we realised it was actually she likes him like mother’s like sons, and I [Aaron] like her in a way that a twelve year old has a crush and has no idea. That completely changed from what could have been just a traditional romance that didn’t work out.

The film deals with a cult, did you do you guys do much research into cults and how they work, or did you want to just go in fresh and make up your own version?

AM: We did as much research as you have done. Maybe a little more Wikipedia, maybe a few more documentaries, but it wasn’t any deep dives because our movie isn’t really about cults, it’s not saying anything about cults. What we wanted to do was use the cult for two things – one, tell a really… if you wanted to give the story a theme it’s about anti-conformity and the healthiness of rebellion. That’s on every level, that’s on the sci-fi level, that’s in the relationship between the two brothers, but the most of the surface part of that is – do you join a cult or not. So we wanted to use that to talk about the theme, but then we also wanted to use it as a red herring where everybody, because you are watching a movie, everybody would think we are watching them go back to the cult and the cult will be dangerous. We thought it would be much more interesting to find all these things and ways in which it could be a could or maybe a commune. The audience, no matter what, is going to think it’s dangerous, and then have the danger come from somewhere else whilst still not completely pulling the rug out from the cult, having nothing to do with it.

This is a film that raises a lot of questions, do you have your own answers for everything or are you more interested to see what audiences come up with.

JB: There is a very, very definite answer to every little tiny thing in the movie. It’s not important that [explain it] it would be less satisfying if we tell everyone what it is. Now that said we are never intentionally vague. In fact if you go back and re-watch you’ll probably solve mysteries for yourself. It’s just our instinct is that we give enough information. It’s not an experimental film. But not everything needs to be said out loud for it to be satisfying we think.

Where did the video come from?

AM: That’s the one mystery that is not answered in the movie. It’s very funny that you say that because I was just about to jump in and say there is one mystery that we won’t solve. We have a few answers that we like to that, but there is no answer in the movie about that. Every other mystery in the movie has an answer that is in the movie.

The Endless is a really visually stunning location, how did you guys find that location? You mentioned earlier that it was in the middle of nowhere so how did you stumble across that?

JB: We were talking about how we wanted to be really self-reliant with this film and make sure that no one could stop us from doing it. Also, we were inspired by our first film, Resolution, and we wanted to revisit some of those things. Those things sort of go hand-in-hand in that my family owns, in some very strange circumstances, a whole bunch of property out there in that area. So we could basically do whatever we wrote in those locations and no one could ever take those locations away, no one could charge us too much [chuckles], no one could say no, these were ours to use. Then the camp setting was the place where we stayed when we shot our first film, and we knew that we had a good relationship with them and they wouldn’t charge us too much. Luckily it’s a very interesting looking place. I think that that’s something we talked about a little bit, but it’s kind of an interesting thing in that it’s a – let’s not call it, use the genre term horror movie – but in a scary movie, places where you put things to be presumably make your audience scared. There’s like subterranean places, and there’s on the water which can be pretty scary, and then there’s the forest. Everyone always goes into the forest in horror films. There’s something about looking round and you can’t see what’s behind the trees. There’s probably larger archetypes, there’s always been scary fairy-tales that take place in a forest going back a millennium. But there’s something about telling a scary story, or an unsettling story in a place that you can see everywhere, and there’s lots of light. But it’s just a setting that you don’t quite recognise. Some of its dehydrated and there’s nothing. There are a few trees here and there, but it’s unexpected for a story that’s scary. I don’t know what the psychology of that is, but it’s neat that we’ve been able to exploit it with the places available to us.

AM: One thing I think it is, is you know we have this unseen antagonist that is implied to be at least in some ways absolutely massive and anywhere, omniscient like God. If you are in a sea of blackness, just inky blackness, that idea is still scary, but it has the same scariness as the fact that maybe there’s a pack of wolves out to get you. You have the same danger, but it’s not quite so much there in the middle of the day. But when you can look up into the sky there’s a scene where – it’s in the trailer even – where Justin’s character looks up into the sky and something seems to make the sun flicker, or blots out the sun for a quick moment, blink and you miss it. But you realise that even though you can see everything, you’re still in danger. The sky starts feeling like it’s heavy. That’s why a lot of it takes place during the day. The way there’s these giant landscapes, almost like a Western in a way, where the sun starts to feel oppressive, rather than something that’s helping you shed lights on mystery.

I got a Wicker Man-esque vibe from certain elements, again it’s a coastal rural setting that you’re used to seeing all the time and a lot of it is set in the day – obviously I’m talking about the original Wicker Man, and not the Nic Cage and the bees one.

JB: There is something in the original Wicker Man of that setting being like ‘oh, whatever the druid religion during the iron ages was, they definitely did rituals right here’. There’s something, a feeling of that, of old primordial, old, old, old forms of worship. And there’s something about that. There’s lot’s of stone.

What’s post The Endless for you guys?

AM: It’s basically like returning to the things that we started before The Endless. The larger stuff. So we’ll see how those turn out. We have a couple of TV shows and three features. After the release of The Endless, if none of those are still going, we’re going to go and make another small movie that’s written right now. They’re all in the same space, just at wildly varying budget levels.

Arrow Films release The Endless into limited UK cinemas from Friday 29th June 2018. It’s also available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Monday 2nd July.