CinÉireann May 2018 | Page 51

Elliot: It's indirect harm that's coming to her from him being there.

Matthew: The first time that we wrote it we had a problem where we thought that making him passive got rid of his agency. So we allowed him to move around and do things that a person with agency would be able to do. We had to scrap all of that and the second rewrite saw us try to shift the antagonist label over to the Garda. Which was really difficult as you see this personification of this thing throughout the whole movie and you are going to link it in your head to being the antagonist. The Garda represents the State and the 8th Amendment so we tried to make that the main antagonist, even though you only see him for one scene. He acts aloof and not listening to things. The whole idea was to subtlety shift towards bodily autonomy and choice.

Elliot: We wanted to focus on her story and not the intruder causing the harm. It was more important as that is what the pro-choice side is about. It is the woman's choice and it about her and what damage can come to her from this pregnancy.

Many people will see the fetus as a living being so it's interesting to see how you struggled with that.

Elliot: That was a big part of when we were writing it. The idea of having someone in your house who looks like a person. He has the stature of a man, a really big man. Basically we are confirming for the pro-life side that we would be saying that the fetus is a person.

Matthew: Personification. It's in the word.

Elliot: So that was something that we thought about a lot when making it. The pro-life side so like to argue that the fetus is a persona nd should have all of the rights of a person. We tried to get around that with the fact that he is not quite human, but he is personified. This is an intruder. Somebody made the comment that you wouldn't want to kill an intruder in your house so how is this comparable to an abortion. But the story is not a direct representation of a pregnancy. It's the story of a break-in, but it's also the story of a pregnancy where you want to remove the intruder. It's not about killing it's about removing.

Matthew: The whole thing is that you are working with two parallels here and you have to make both as realistic as possible, because if you allow any sort of chinks in either of the stories then you are open to attack. When we were starting it we had a lot of symbolism going on. You have the idea of the map and different things like that, but I think trimming away those types of things and just letting the message play was better.

Elliot: We had this Easter Egg originally where there would be a map of the world on the wall and she'd reach for that and be scrambling as soon as she saw him. And the map was to represent the morning after pill, the MAP. We took that out of it as it took away from the story. It shouldn't have Easter Eggs. We are making a statement with this.

Matthew: We had to make compromises, but I think that made it better.

Elliot: The last movie that we made before this we shot on a smartphone, and we considered using one on this, but we thought if we used that type of gimmick it might take away from the message.

Matthew: Where most of the problems came from was our source material for the idea. We got this idea from an ethics paper by Judith J. Thompson, who was an American philosopher. The paper is called "On Defense of Abortion".

Elliot: It's one of the biggest papers on abortion. It's an extremely pro-choice paper.

Matthew: Our idea basically came from a throw-away paragraph before a major case that she was studying. She called them 'people seeds' and it was about people who put a mesh on their windows to keep out these things called people seeds which would fly into your house and take root in your carpet and they'd become people. And you would have to nature these things that came in even if you set up all of the defenses against it. But the thing before it was a tiny little paragraph that said "an intruder comes in and you are forced to keep it". And we thought that would be pretty powerful.

Elliot: The story of a break-in is almost cliche in a movie.

It's very common in horror...

Matthew: Actually that was a major thing that we had to work with in editing. We had to make it not seem like a horror film.

Elliot: It is gritty and it is dark, but we didn't want that he was a paranormal figure that's looming over her.

Matthew: It took 5 or 6 days to edit and you can sort of see her progression in how we were working with tone. We released a teaser trailer and it was the most horror thing you have ever seen in your life.

Elliot: It was really cold, blue, and dark. It was just zoom-out of the figure standing in the room while she was on the phone to the police.

Matthew: And then the title. It was the most horror thing that you have seen. So we tried to work back on that. Make it more warm. That contrast almost makes it more uncomfortable to watch. The idea was to make it so that you would see a decline in the colours as it goes along.

Elliot: It starts with her on the toilet and she hears and he is downstairs. The idea for that was that she was on the toilet taking a pregnancy test. And the knock was the positive result and the shock of him being there. We didn't want it to be like a horror where she is slowly walking towards the room and that there is rising tension. We think we managed to get around the horror aspect.

Matthew: You can still see elements of that in it with the low ominous tone, but I think that was necessary to get across discomfort.

Elliot: It is scary and I think that pregnancy can be a scary thing. To make it like a comedy just wouldn't fit.

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