“The hardest day on Obsession was the easiest day on Anything But Ghosts.”
Curry Barker shared with us the following earlier last weekend at Deadline’s TIFF DGA panel about his next horror movie with Focus Features and Blumhouse Atomic Monster.
Unlike his half-billion grossing Obsession, Barker says that on Anything But Ghosts, “We had a 130-page script and we had 26 days to shoot it. I’m also starring in it and directing and I’m the lead character. I have more lines than anyone in the movie.”
Talk about stress.
Watch on Deadline
“Zach Kregger just told me, ‘You have to cut 30 pages’ and I probably should have listened to him. So, did my manager; he told me that, too.”
“But I didn’t cut a single page because I wanted to shoot all of it,” says Barker who was at TIFF for the one-year anniversary of the Obsession premiere, “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and we were compromising shots left and right off the shot list. Gone. Just like coverage was going out the windows. It was crazy.”
Barker also spoke to us about how he cracked the idea for Obsession, a movie that has pulled in everyone from Gen Z to their ’50s, with couples leaving the cinema and either taking Bear (Michael Johnston) or Nikki’s (Inde Navarrette) side.
“I think it’s really interesting that we as humans can fixate and obsess over something. And turning that into a place of danger and horror was really interesting to me,” he said.
“I had already had this idea for a while of maybe a woman obsessed with a man or a man obsessed with a woman. And I actually hadn’t cracked exactly how I wanted to, like, figure that out. And then once I figured out the wish element of it, I was like, oh my God, my obsession idea. I could make it like a wish gone wrong thing.”
“I discovered that when I watched some of these wish gone wrong movies nobody really talked about how uncomfortable it is. Some of these wishes — what would it actually be like if you wished for someone to love you back, would it be them actually loving you? Or would it be an entity that loves you and what does that actually look like? And how does a person respond to that?”
Still the half billion success has shocked the director.
“I knew that there was going to be parts that were relatable, because I always told Inde to play it like a real person and not to play into this possessed demon, but to just play it as a jealous girlfriend.”
And the response he’s gotten?
“Sometimes people are like, ‘Dude, this is just like my girlfriend.’ I’m like, ‘Which part?’ They’re like, ‘The whole movie!’”
As far as one of the boldest directs he pulled off on the set of the $750K costing Obsession, was that Barker only had one take for the scene where Nikki bashes her head through the car window. The first prop window shattered in the art department’s hands because “it’s made of candy,” says Barker.
“We literally just had one piece of glass. I was like, ‘Alright, Inde, you got to ram your head into this window!’”
“That was crazy. If that didn’t work out, we would have actually been screwed for the day and we didn’t have the budget to come back the next day.”
Anything But Ghosts was also written by Barker. He costars with longtime collaborator and Obsession star Cooper Tomlinson. The movie follows ghosthunters who are hucksters. Barker has said that the pic takes place in the same universe as Obsession. Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard co-star. The movie doesn’t have a release date yet.
