Interview: The Perfection star Allison Williams and director Richard Shepard on their shocking Netflix feature

The following contains minor spoilers for The Perfection.

Certain films benefit immensely from the audience going in absolutely cold. With most releases getting a number of separate trailers before they hit screens, audiences generally know what to expect, which removes that sense of discovery and surprise that used to naturally unfold before we became bombarded with information about every film months before they open.

That’s part of what makes film festivals so exciting – the ability to see films removed from all that context can lead to some surprising revelations, which is precisely what happened when The Perfection debuted at a midnight showing at last fall’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. With only a single image from the film available, the crowd had no idea what we were in store for, which made all of its insane twists that much more exciting and rewarding, a journey that viewers can now replicate with the film’s arrival on Netflix this week.

Directed by Richard Shepard and starring Allison Williams (who worked together on Girls), Logan Browning, and Steven Weber, at its essence The Perfection is about the rivalry between cello players Charlotte (Williams) and Lizzie (Browning), who are both vying for the attention of their mentor Anton (Weber). But it’s the shockingly audacious way that triangle unfolds over the course of the film that cements The Perfection as one of the most wildly unpredictable and thrilling cinematic experiences in some time. With revenant nods to lush and sensual films like South Korea’s The Handmaiden, along with one foot firmly planted in the world of grimy grindhouse cinema, this is the rare film that truly melds its myriad influences into its own unique stew of madness.

Speaking in Austin the morning after the film’s world premiere this fall, Williams and Shepard explained the difficulties of marketing a film with so many twists and turns.

“I do think there’s an audience for, ‘It’s good, and you won’t know what the fuck is happening until there’s 10-minutes left of the movie,'” says Williams. “I think I would go see a movie based on that premise, because some of the best movies are like that, and they come recommended with almost no information, but if you know that it’s made well, with love and attention and care, and that you’re going to be confused for the entire time and then things will be explained, that sounds like a pretty good ride to me. And so we may end up having to market it like, ‘I don’t know, what do you think is happening?’ [Laughs] But luckily there are professionals for that. I don’t think that’s the marketing strategy.“

“We do know that it’s going to be a tough marketing thing because it’s not a straight-ahead thriller, right, it’s not just a simple revenge movie, there’s a lot more going on,” adds Shepard. “And I know for a fact, having had other movies and seen trailers where things have been given way that it drove me crazy, and the fights you have. And they go, ‘Well, you can not show it, but then no one comes to the movie.’ And it’s like, ‘I know, but then you’ve given away the thing…'” There’s a scene in my movie The Matador where Pierce Brosnan walks through the lobby in his underwear, and it was in the trailer. And I was like, ‘Guys, this is the single biggest laugh of the movie, and you’re just giving it away.'” And it was like a freaking fight, you know?”

With the amount of tonal changes and shifting perspectives in the film, the filmmakers wanted to ensure that everything lined up and held up on repeat viewings. As wild and outright shocking as many of the film’s best moments are, it was vital that nothing be played simply for shock value – every character choice and reveal had to make sense within the twisted logic of the film.

“We wanted people to see the movie, [and] if they saw it again, we really went out of our way to make sure that we weren’t bullshiting the first time,” says Shepard. Except for one specific thing, which I will not give away, when you see it again, you’ll see that it’s exactly the same and it makes sense, if you know what’s happening. And there were a number of times in editing where we could have taken a short cut if we had broken that rule but we just didn’t want to. And I think in a movie like this, if you’re not like that you deceive the audience a little bit. You want people to go, ‘You know what, actually, fuck, it’s working on this level.'”

“There are so many stages of the movie where the audience knows different amounts of things about what is going on, mostly nothing,” adds Williams with a laugh. “We spent literally months before we shot the movie like, beating that out especially since it was a quick shoot. We knew there wasn’t going to be a ton of time to have deep convos about where we are. We had a ton of deep convos before! That was a lot of work, but I hope it paid off. The thing about the movie that I love is that you know Richard’s in control, you know that when you sit down, the person who made this movie is in control of it. You just have no idea where it’s going. So it’s like a really good driver and you’re just blindfolded or something, like, ‘Alright, I guess I’m just going for this ride, I don’t know where it’s going to end up.'”

With its strong overtones of revenge, sexuality, and unsettling violence, The Presentation owes a great debt to South Korean cinema, which Shepard acknowledges was very much on his mind in the early stages of putting the film together.

“I love The Handmaiden, on so many different levels: stylistically, and structurally, and I thought it was sexy and perverse, and also just like so deeply clever and character-driven,” says Shepard. “And when we started writing this I made Eric [Charmelo] and Nicole [Snyder], who I wrote the movie with, watch it, and I was like, ‘We’ve got to talk this through about what’s interesting about that,’ which is this idea that you can have a second act that almost feels like it has nothing to do with the first act, but then in the third act, you go, ‘Ah, that makes sense.'”

“The other thing about Old Boy and The Handmaiden and all those movies is that they get into areas that would be like very scintillating and shocking to American audiences, but because it’s in context, it sort of just washes into the whole mix of the movie,” says Williams. “And trying to do that with this movie, our sex scene is so early that you kind of forget it happened…or at least, I don’t know, maybe some people forget that it happened! Or the first cello performance, the duet between the two of us feels like a movie ago. And so I love that idea that we have such a light touch with all of those things. It’s sort of like saying, ‘Come on, it’s 2018, we don’t need to freak out about all of this stuff.’ It’s just part of the fabric of this movie, it’s not about that scene, it’s not about any one of the most sort of salacious moments in the movie, they’re just all sort of parts of the aggregate experience, and I think borrowing that a little bit and trying to nudge us forward so we’re a little bit less shockable in that way will just help people tell the stories they want to tell in the most interesting ways possible.”

“Like my favourite Korean cinema, if you can push it to a place that is almost impossible to believe, and yet you’re still buying it, at least cinematically, that’s a fun place to live in, and one of the things we wanted to do,” explains Shepard. ‘Can we live in that space and make it work?'”

“The non-Harvey [Weinstein] version of Miramax that financed this movie, sort of took a risk in a way,” admits Shepard. “The people who run it I’ve worked with before, and so that helped. They were excited about Allison, and we did it for not a lot of money, but those Korean movies, that kind of structure hasn’t really seeped in to American filmmaking. And I’m like, ‘Well, it seeped into me, I love it.'”

One of the most intense scenes in the film takes place on a run-down city bus, while Charlotte and Lizzie are travelling together overseas. For first-time viewers, the scene is unsettling on a number of levels, as it plays not only with our preconceived notions of these two characters, but with the entire reality of their shared world as we’ve come to understand it. As Shepard explains, that pivotal scene was derived from his own rough experience travelling on a bus in Mexico.

“When I was younger I was a really nervous traveler, I never travelled as a kid at all,” he says. “And I now travel so much it’s ridiculous, I’ve travelled all over the world for my job, but I remember at a certain point getting sick on a bus, and not speaking the language, and it’s a tough situation. I had originally thought maybe there was a whole movie in that, like literally a whole movie on a bus. And in fact, we shot a longer sequence, we cut some of it. At one point I was like, ‘It should be 45 minutes!’ And everyone was like, ‘Richard, we get it, she’s sick, OK?'”

Without delving too deep into spoilers, The Perfection features a cathartic act of revenge that not only nods to the filmmaker’s affection for Korean revenge films, but also to the #MeToo movement (especially prescient since the film was financed by Miramax, before the Harvey Weinstein accusations were made public).

“I think after I had signed onto the movie the Harvey Weinstein pieces started to break, so weirdly, we were already in the process of working on it, and thinking of course, there have sadly been so many stories that sort of follow this fact pattern, but particularly when the gymnast, the US National Gymnastics Team started going through what they were going through with their [doctor], that’s when we were already in Vancouver in pre-production, and that felt so intense,” says Williams.

“It just felt so analogous, that you’re working with young people, and you’re giving them this whole value system that’s based on your own twisted desire, and they’re buying into it because of how young they are, and they don’t have options. It’s that sense of not having access to other options, not having alternatives. I think it works very well right now. And even having [Anton] say ‘I’ll get help, I’m sick,’ that was just…Since we filmed that scene of Steven saying that, the number of people who have said something along those lines, and you just know that they mean it as much as Steven Weber does in the movie, as much as Anton does, is just…[Clenches face] And now, next time someone says something like that, they’re going to worry that a hatchet is coming into their shoulder. And they’ll check themselves, like, ‘Maybe that’s not the right thing to say.'”

The Perfection is on Netflix now.