Miss Flicks

Jed Hart and Lyndsey Marshal on new thriller Restless

To celebrate the release of the psychological thriller Restless this week, I recently hopped on Zoom with writer-director Jed Hart and lead actress Lyndsey Marshal to discuss the film.

Marshal plays Nicky, an empty nester whose newfound quiet life is upended when a rowdy man named Dean (Aston McAuley) moves in next door and parties every night, blasting pounding dance music until the early hours. As the sleep deprivation, despair and paranoia build, Nicky is pushed to the brink of madness and forced to take matters into her own hands (you can read my review here).

In the following interview, we discussed how Marshal charted Nicky’s descent into insanity, how they pulled off the key “breakdown scene”, and whether or not she could hear the pounding EDM music in her house.

When you look back at the finished film, what scene or sequence are you most proud of?

JH: (I’m) probably most proud of the kind of breakdown scene, if you know the one I mean. Mainly the performance coming together, an amazing performance from Lyndsey. We did that kind of sequence in one take and we knew we probably had two goes at it, max. So I think that that came together, obviously largely (because of) Lyndsey’s performance but also the movement of the camera, there was a lot of stuff going on with lighting. If you could see behind the camera, it was a bit comical. We had people with like strings on sticks wobbling picture frames just out of shot and all this stuff going on that we hadn’t really rehearsed properly so it was one of those ones where you kind of cross your fingers and hope that it all works out. Luckily, it did that, so that’s probably my proudest one.

LM: The same for me. I felt like we were in a travelling group of players (laughs) putting this story together. It was quite late, it was like the last scene we were doing, and as Jed said, we just had everybody kind of coming in, whoever was available, going, ‘OK, if you can move that and you do that and twitch that curtain there, pull that string there, hopefully that will fall off there… you hold the watering can, OK, pull the watering can.’ We did it almost like a piece of choreography of like, I walked through it, ‘I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that, you’re gonna do this’ and so when we actually got it, the feeling of elation. Everyone was just so happy and excited and pumped because everybody likes to feel needed as well as don’t they? Everyone really was needed.

With that scene, with you only getting one or two takes, how did you get into the mindset of Nicky before Jed yelled action?

LM: It takes a long time to really know how you work and what is good for you. Some actors I work with, they get better and better on takes and they’re in their flow on take eight. For me, quite often, it’s my first couple… (For intense, emotional scenes), I just can’t do it more than twice; I don’t want to do it more than twice. I feel like, in a way, it galvanises a crew if you put out your boundaries first and go, ‘I can’t do this more than two times.’ I get mentally ready to really try and do it on the first take. That’s why with that particular scene we marked it, we rehearsed it. I’d say, ‘I’m gonna go here, then I’m gonna go there, then I’m gonna crash this here and if I go over there.’ So it would be mapped out. We did it quite a few times, like four or five times, so everybody really knew what we were doing. And then when we went for it, I felt like we did it more than once because we had a map.

Was it easy for you to just snap into that mindset once Jed yelled action, or did you have to work up to it mentally beforehand?

LM: I had to work up (to it) mentally beforehand. I had my way of getting there to do that, whether it’s music, breathing.

Did you film in sequence so you could track the escalation of Nicky’s exhaustion and despair?

JH: It wasn’t completely in sequence ’cause we couldn’t do it that way, but we tried to map out some of the key scenes. So those bigger scenes came towards the end, which made sense that Lyndsey had time to kind of develop the character and get in that zone. (She also had) to spend three weeks with us on a tough, intense shoot to get her in the zone for those big scenes. We tried to map out certain moments that were in chronological order but you know the practicalities of shooting meant that there was a lot of jigging around that schedule.

Was the pounding EDM music actually coming into the house you were filming in or were you reacting to silence?

LM: We played the music before action to get an idea of the beat, the rhythm, and then it would be to silence.

Oh wow. That’s incredible. Speaking of sound, I really wanted to applaud the sound design. The way the classical music and the dance music weave together. Also, when the toast popped, I literally jumped; I thought it was a gunshot or something.

LM: I still jump when I know it’s coming, which I think’s brilliant because obviously, the cat’s gone missing now, and at that point, you are so tense and stressed with everything that’s going on. Yeah, it’s brilliant.

Jed, could you talk me a little bit about how you built Nicky’s psychological state through the sound design like that?

JH: It was always scripted that a lot of the heavy lifting of the film would be done with either music or sound design. We wanted the film to feel really subjective so you’re very much in Nicky’s shoes the whole way, you’re in her point of view, you’re hearing the sound of the music how it would actually sound in the house. But also for those two kinds of musics to reflect the personalities of the two characters and for them to be contrasting and at war with each other to the point where at the end the two kind of blend into each other and then the sort of operatic finale.

There were so many different ways this film could have gone, and I had no idea which way it was going to go. When you were writing it, did you have a bunch of different ideas of how it could go? And were you ever tempted to go darker?

JD: Yeah, I was. I think I probably did consider going darker at the beginning. For a start, I already have a lot of scripts that are pretty dark, that are horrors and what have you. I felt, for this film, it was actually the more obvious way to take it. I thought it would actually be more interesting and unpredictable actually to not do that and give the audience something they’re not expecting because you’re going down a certain road and then it twists and then it kind of twists again back… I didn’t want to create like this straight line kind of misery fest. I wanted it to have some levity and some kind of satisfaction, some cathartic energy to it at the end.

I also liked that Nicky wasn’t perfect and she makes some very questionable choices. Was it important to you both that she wasn’t just a complete saint?

LM: 100%; otherwise, you just don’t like her because she’s not a real person. Aston said this, he’s like, ‘She’s f**king mad.’ Some of the things she does, it’s just like, ‘What are you doing?!’ It’s quite bonkers. But I quite like that because… I think it would be a boring thing to play. I really wouldn’t want to do that. She’s got a bit of bite to her.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

Restless is in cinemas from Friday 4th April. Check out my review here.