I got some pretty big “Get Out” vibes from this movie. Was that on your mind when you were developing the adaptation, and what were some of your other cinematic influences?

I love “Get Out.” I love Jordan Peele. I think he’s brilliant. Actually, there’s one scene where the PTA ladies and one woman’s stirring her tea and I said, “Put that sound effect in. I want to hear that.” So definitely that vibe.

But I’m probably most inspired by Hitchcock, I think. Just because I love the tone of Hitchcock movies, because they’re tense and they’re scary and they’re thrilling and all that, but they’re also kind of funny at the same time. Because he finds these funny side characters, and he was really good at releasing the tension with a laugh. So I think that’s definitely a big influence for me.

Amanda Seyfried is so perfectly unhinged in this movie. What were your discussions like with her about the character, especially when it comes to tapping into that intensity and just the wide-eyed rage that she has?

Yeah. I mean, she was really up for everything. And it was fun for us to kind of figure out how far can we push Nina in each scene, because the biggest thing was if she’s just crazy and mean the whole time, she becomes a cartoon, and Millie would just be insane to just stay in this job, even if she needed it for the reasons that we find out she needs this job. 

But it needed to be that push and pull of what we consider a crazy person to be, which is a flash of anger then like, “Oh my God, I’m so glad you’re here. What would I do without you?” And then it turns into another [thing], so you’re just always off your game.

I heard Freida McFadden who wrote the book saying that one of her inspirations for this was just some of the women bosses that she’d had who were so unpredictable. So it’s really fun for Amanda and I to kind of find that balance.

Yeah, and I love that it wasn’t a slow burn to get there. Literally the first morning after she’s gotten the job, it’s just an explosion.

Exactly. After being completely pulled in. We were able to, very fortunately, except for the attic scenes, which we had to shoot later because that was on a set, we were able to go in chronological order of shooting this.

Oh, okay.

So those first couple of days of just the house tour and the first interview, my only direction to Amanda was just like, “Just kookier, kookier and sweet.” So then the next morning it’s just like, you see it in Millie’s face like, “What the f*** just happened? Who is this person?”