[Editorial] Interview with Bishal Dutta, Writer and Director of It Lives Inside (2023)

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist.

With It Lives Inside, writer and director Bishal Dutta created a horror film that is as moving as it is terrifying. Ghouls Magazine was able to sit down with the award-winning filmmaker to discuss the inspirations behind the movie. You can read Ghouls Magazine's review for It Lives Inside.

This interview contains spoilers for It Lives Inside. 

Bishal Dutta: Hi Liz, so nice to meet you! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat today.

Ghouls Magazine: Of course! I saw the screening, and I really loved it, and my Ghouls Magazine colleagues in the U.K said that this also screened at FrightFest.

BD: It did! And I thought it got a wonderful response.

GM: Yes, and I was so excited to hear that. In your director's statement, you said after you moved to North America when you were four, a lot of your social education came from watching American horror movies. I was wondering if there were some that stick out to you, or horror movies that you watched when you were younger that had the biggest impact on you.

BD: Certainly. It started even before then. I saw Jaws when I was three; my grandfather in India was one of the only people in our small town who had a VCR, and he showed me Jaws. It just ignited this kind of love for movies, and I only wanted to make movies after all. But once I moved [to North America], there were certain films that I was certainly too young to see. The Terminator, Aliens, those two movies just blew me away – the sort of possibilities of visuals and storytelling. And of course, Jurassic Park. 

But then as I got older, it was like these very kind of iconic moments in movies – A Nightmare on Elm Street certainly was a big one, the phone with the "I'm your boyfriend now, Nancy" -- it was these moments that people would reference because kids my age were watching these movies because their parents watched these movies. They were such significant films that it felt like learning to be American through these movies was a real possibility. It felt like watching these movies and sort of absorbing culture, that was something that I could do. In a way, it just really kind of kickstarted an even bigger obsession with horror movies, and with genre movies at large. I think that's why I credit the horror movies to my social education, because they've so deeply seeped into culture and American culture. 

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GM: That's a great answer, I love that. I know you also said in your director's statement that It Lives Inside was semi-autobiographical – not totally, but a little bit autobiographical, and that people in your life influenced the characters. Do people in your life know that, and did they have responses to this movie in particular?

BD: I certainly think so. I've shown it to people who were close to me growing up, and I wouldn't say that anybody necessary was a direct autobiography, but in this case, I think there were little sort of snippets of moments that I was kind of pulling from, and certainly pieces of behavior. And it felt like making a movie about this subject, like … I couldn't capture the entirety of the Indian-American experience, of course, or explain it. I didn't want to be intellectual or didactic about it. 

But what felt like a real way forward was to pull from real moments that I remember -- the little things, like [Sam] smelling her outfit to make sure she doesn't smell like Indian food. It's my favorite smell in the world now, but back then, when I was in high school and middle school, it was mortifying that I would smell like that. So we really tried to build from these sort of anecdotal things within the family and within the friend group and whatnot. 

But I think what's exciting about seeing the film in its final form – with family, with friends – I think it's nice to see that kind of transformation that the main characters have, especially that kind of relationship that grows between Sam and her mother. I think that people watch the film that are close to me and find that find very kind of cathartic. 

GM: That's one of my favorite parts of the movie. It's a rare movie where you're so scared, but it's also so heartwarming, touching and really moving. On that note, I thought the last scene of the movie was also very, very powerful. When you were writing it, did you always know that was going to be the ending, or did that come to you gradually?

BD: This is actually a great story to talk about with the power of development, right? Continuing to pull at the strings of a story. That wasn't the original ending when I first wrote it. It was a much more traditional ending where they trap it inside of another jar, and it had this circularity, but something about the ending of the film just didn't feel satisfying to me. Something just kept bothering me; I felt like there was a better ending to the film somewhere. 

I think fairly early into the process, but still relatively deep into the development process, it was like, there is a way to kind of reconfigure the idea of a vessel and tie it back to the themes of the movie. It felt like a bit of a swing of an ending, and it felt like something that wasn't exactly safe. But it also felt so right for the movie. And so, working with my partners at QC Entertainment and NEON, we talked a lot about this version of the ending. We knew it was a risk, and it wasn't how the audience would expect the film to end. But it really felt like this is right for the themes of the movie, and this is going to wrap up the movie in a satisfying way and make this a self-contained story.

GM: That's really fascinating to know. I thought it was the perfect ending. It may not be exactly what you wanted for the character, but it was the only real way it could end, I felt. 

BD: I love to hear that. 

GM: I thought the music in the film was pretty amazing, and I especially liked the song that's playing when she's shaving her arms in the very beginning: Mallrat's song "Teeth." I don't know if you were involved with the music, but I thought that was so perfect; the lyrics were so in line with the story that you were going to tell. It was this nice bit of foreshadowing, but also set that scene perfectly. Did you always have that song in particular in mind to set the tone for the movie?  

BD: I didn't until towards the end of the film. We were always trying to find that song. It felt like after our very atmospheric opening, it felt like a good song like that could really pull us back into Sam's world. But this was one that my fiancé listened to on the radio or on Spotify or something, and she said, "Hey, check out this cool song!" We were so deep into the editing process. I heard it, and I was like, "This song was written for our movie!" I was so obsessed with it immediately. 

I called our music supervisor Chris Mollere and said, "We have to get this – this has to go in the movie." That was such a serendipitous moment, and it was one of those moments that makes you so excited about making movies because you're trying to figure it all out – and you hear that one right song, and it's like, "This is the identity of the movie!" It adds so much to the texture without us ever needing to outline what the themes are. This song that we didn't even write – Mallrat did this beautiful song by themself -- it adds so much to the film. So it was such a great moment when we found that song.

GM: I couldn't believe how fitting it was. It was the perfect puzzle piece, especially for that moment in the film. 

BD: Right!

GM: You said in your director's statement that the movie "is a love letter to the community and culture." Are you able to elaborate a bit more on that?

BD: For sure. There were things I was able to put on screen – the puja parties are a great example of this – that felt like I was pulling them out of my own memories; I went to those parties. To be able to recreate those down to the costumes, down to the food -- I think that those were things at the time that I was maybe feeling anxious about, but now I look back on those memories so fondly, and I think about those expressions of culture with so much reverence and so much love. Being able to put those things on screen and being able to convey that to an audience, to be able to pull that into the Western audience, was a real privilege on this movie.

I think it also comes down to things like how we photograph the food. We were very, very particular about how the food was photographed, and how it was lit, and how it was shot, and what frame rate. It's because it felt like there was a real opportunity not to just show a closeup of food, but to convey its essence, to convey the importance and the significance. I think those are the things that, for me, make it feel like a love letter to what I really loved about the culture growing up. 

GM: I'm glad you brought that up because the way the food was shot, you wanted to eat everything – it was lovely. The colors in the movie – these deep reds and autumnal colors -- just lent such a wonderful, spooky atmosphere. The colors of the food were great, but then it also extended to her outside world. 

BD: It makes me so happy that you say that, and I just want to touch on that. Matt Lynn was the director of photography on this movie, and he did an incredible job with it. We talked always about the trend in horror films recently of desaturation and kind of flatter imagery, where essentially the highlights in the image are really the midtones of the image, and we said, "Let’s do something different with this." The culture is so colorful. These characters – I think they live in a world of lots of saturation, and I think they live in this very punchy, almost comic book levels of saturation. We used reds and oranges and golds and greens. We really wanted to accentuate the color in the film throughout, so I'm so glad you noticed that. 

GM: That's a great perspective! Thanks so much. I sincerely love the movie, and I've been recommending it to everybody, so congratulations. It was so nice getting to chat with you.

BD: It was so nice getting to chat with you. Thank you for taking the time!

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