Interview: Lucky Star & Writer Brea Grant Discusses Horror Film’s Themes

RLJE Films and Shudder’s horror film Lucky is now available digitally and on Blu-ray. Directed by Natasha Kermani, the film stars Brea Grant, who also wrote the script, as a self-help author tormented by a killer.

“Life takes a sudden turn for May (Grant), a popular self-help book author, when she finds herself the target of a mysterious man with murderous intentions,” reads the official synopsis. “Every night without fail, he comes after her, and every day the people around her barely seem to notice. With no one to turn to, May is pushed to her limits and must take matters into her own hands to survive and to regain control of her life.”

ComingSoon’s Sabina Graves spoke with star and writer Brea Grant about the film’s themes, its horror cameos, and her writing process.

Sabina Graves: Congratulations on the movie. It was fantastic. I was also very surprised to see a lot of familiar faces. I’m in the horror community in L.A. too, so I recognized Megan Rosati and Kalyn Corrigan in the book club scene.

Brea Grant: That’s like the who’s who for horror in L.A. Literally put out on my Instagram, I was like, “Y’all I need to fill up this room. This is a low-budget movie. We don’t have any money,” and folks came out. Like every person in that crowd is like a very established genre filmmaker or a journalist. It’s very funny that you recognized all of this

To start off with, I want to talk about how your collaboration with Natasha Kermani started. When did you connect over this story to tell together?

So I actually took the script to Epic Pictures first. They reached out to me and asked if I had any projects and I sent them this one. They got back to me really quickly and said, “We want to make this. We want Natasha Kermani to direct it. We want you to star.” I had never planned on starring, so that was like a whole thing I had to wrap my brain around. I had known Natasha through the L.A. Horror world, and then we also have the same manager, but this just happened to come through a different channel. I was a fan of Imitation Girl. So, all of those things sounded like a cool possibility. Then I talked to her and she was really got the script and she understood it in a way that people hadn’t before. It had been at a couple different places and I kept feeling like people were sort of missing the point. She didn’t, she got it. She was there for it. She was there for the darkness of it. She was there for like the bizarre ending. She, she was ready for it. I was like, okay, cool. Let’s just do this thing. It worked out.

Amazing. Take me back a little bit. Can you tell me about your writing process on this story and what inspired you?

Obviously, the movie is a big metaphor about the normalization of violence against women. I think I was writing it in part as a catharsis because I had gone through an experience that was very unsafe and not good and had gone through the court system and had to deal with the police. I was having trouble processing it, honestly, and I wanted to write something that would help me deal with the absurdity of what women have to go through and what I had been through. So I wrote this movie that is a little absurd and it is a little tongue in cheek, but it also hopefully tackles some of these issues that I was thinking about all the time.

You do a great job of portraying a psychological state of anxiety and discomfort. It was portrayed in a way that was really relatable. How did you get it on-screen?

I was definitely trying to write her perspective, obviously the world’s first to go topsy-turvy, but she is still herself and she’s like Alice down the rabbit hole. Right? She’s still thinking the way the world should be working should be fair and she shouldn’t have to deal with this bullshit. The rest of the world is like, no, you have to because you’re a woman. It was very much from her perspective.

I thought it was really interestingly juxtaposed to her being cited as this mental health and self-help writer and May was going out and promoting this book, but at the same time dealing with this. What do you feel is the importance of giving her the space of expressing that about herself, especially in the age of social media and podcasts that thrives on that sort of contact.

I am fascinated by this stuff. I find it so interesting. I didn’t mean it as a knock to the women, generally women who were kind of doing this kind of stuff. But I also think that it’s a difficult thing to grow, right? To constantly be at your best or be okay. So I think that I do read these books. I think these books have like a lot to offer and I think a lot about the women writing them, right? Because they’re not living perfect lives. They’re going to have problems in their lives where their shit does not work for it. Just the way it doesn’t work for everyone.

Like there’s situations where I don’t need to lean in, I need to get the out. I don’t know. Like there’s just situations that are like advice that we’re all being given from this very business lady-style feminism doesn’t necessarily work. That was something I’ve been wanting to kind of explore, is that she has been drinking her own Kool-Aid for a while, and then she’s run up against a situation in which her own advice is not going to actually work for her. She would’ve have been better off if she had actually relied on her community of women and had a way to connect with other women and not try to do all this.

Throughout the movie, you do a lot of stunt work. What was that like? Were you prepared?

I had a stunt double, so I have to admit that I am not doing all that, but I did train for all of it and I did the fights. Then we used a mix of me and the double, but I think on the Blu-ray, there is an extra of me like training and learning the fights and I’m the least coordinated person in the world. So it was super hard, but I had a really good time. It was good. I ended up very bruised up at the end of the day after a lot of those. But my stunt double was fantastic. I have an amazing photo of us because we kind of look alike and we’re wearing the same outfit.

Tell us a bit about what you might be having coming up next. Are you doing more writing or are you also going to be starring in things?

Yeah. I’m literally am in pre-production. I start on a movie in two days, directing a movie for Blumhouse. It just got announced it’s for Blumhouse and for EPIX Television. It’s a horror movie starring Katey Sagal and Alexxis Lemire, that’s all that’s been announced so far. It’s about like country music singers and it’s pretty great. I’m pretty excited.

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