If your looking for some new year scares going into 2021, you can look no further than RLJE Film’s The Beach House a Shudder Original. This film features the directorial debut of Jeffrey A. Brown. This film doesn’t use your traditional jump scares to get your blood pumping. Rather it uses the performance of the actors and actresses to get your imagination going. Sometimes it’s not what you see but rather the unknown that can be scary.
The film stars Liana Liberato, Noah Le Gros, Maryann Nagel, and Jake Weber. Here is the synopsis for The Beach House.:
In THE BEACH HOUSE, hoping to reignite their relationship, college students Emily (Liberato) and Randall (Le Gros) arrive at their weekend getaway only to discover a peculiar older couple already staying there. They all agree to share the home but, after an indulgent night of partying, they’re awoken to a living nightmare of apocalyptic proportions. A mysterious airborne microbe has infected the water and it’s making its way to the house….
LRM Online had the opportunity to talk with a star of The Beach House, Noah Le Gros. During our conversation, we talk about his character and the crossroads that he and his co-star find themselves in their relationship and in life. Also, we touch on Brown’s debut as a director. You can check out the trailer then check out the interview down below!
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Emmanuel: Thank you for taking a few minutes today to talk with me about The Beach House.
Noah: Yeah. Happy to, man.
Emmanuel: Can you tell us a little bit about your character?
Noah: I play Randall in The Beach House. He’s, I guess, in a way, the main reason we ended up at the beach house. He’s sort of a maybe overly intellectual college kid who’s sort of questioning everything, trying to figure out a crossroad, like so many people are at that age. Thinks he knows probably more than he does. He takes his girlfriend, who’s played by Liana. I think she did a really incredible job, back to his family’s summer beach house, expecting things to go one way, for it to be a moment to make things work with this relationship, just unplug a little bit. It obviously goes in a very different direction, goes all Lovecraft all of a sudden.
Emmanuel: I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your relationship with, in the movie, Emily, Liana. It seems like you guys have hit a crossroads yourself as far as ideology and what you guys want to do with your future. That is one of the points of this kind of getaway. Am I correct?
Noah: Yeah. No, for sure. Like I said, college, I think, for that age, early 20s or whatever, is a moment of intense growth for a lot of people. It’s the first time in a lot of ways when people began to make real, more adult decisions, at least. I think college in a lot of ways is sort of an extended childhood for a lot of people, which is cool. But I think it’s also an opportunity I think, for kids to really start making more decisions and asking themselves, “Who am I outside of my parents? Who am I as I’m making decisions for myself?”
I think this is the case for Liana’s character. She’s very driven, super career-focused. She has a very clear idea of what she wants to do, and that’s I don’t know if traditional is the way I’d put it, but she’s career-focused. She has a goal. She’s really smart. Randall, I think, is a bit disillusioned. I think he’s disillusioned with college. I think he’s disillusioned with the traditional framework of how to live a life. Those two ideas obviously kind of clash, because Randall wants to withdraw and kind of live this sort of fairy tale life. Liana’s character, Emily, wants to follow her career. She wants to be a scientist and do big things. And those are two sort of clashing ideas for how to live a life, I suppose.
Emmanuel: Then a little bit into the movie you guys run into Mitch and Jane. You see that difference, where you guys are really about to kick off your lives and kind of maybe even go your separate ways. Then you see them where they’re almost at the end of their lives. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Noah: Yeah. I think, maybe more for the audience necessarily than the characters themselves. Just to give you that clear sort of exposition of people at two different places, different stages of relationships. So when we were doing it, I wasn’t necessarily thinking Randall and Emily are seeing this couple and reflecting on where they are at in their life. I think that’s kind of the point. Like when you’re young, you don’t necessarily realize things. You’re sort of just living and trying to figure it out. You don’t have the experience yet. You don’t have the experience that older people have, or any wisdom. You’re just sort of just like, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to figure it out.”
But I think I think Randall has all these plans. Emily has all these plans. All the characters in this movie have plans big and small. They’re sort of made obsolete by the experience that they all forced into. It’s like, you can want to do whatever you want with your life. But when something as big as I think we’re all experiencing it now, to a degree, right? Like everyone had an idea of how 2020 was going to go, and then this virus has other ideas for us. I think that’s sort of, I think, part of the thrust of what the movie is, is we’re here. We’re on earth doing our thing. We’re all at different points in our lives grappling with different things. But in a moment they can all be made very inconsequential by certain just random, natural events.
Emmanuel: So this is Jeffrey A. Brown’s directorial debut horror film. It has a very minimalist way of getting under your skin. A lot of that has to do with your acting, your facial expressions, your movements because it’s something that’s inside your body. Can you talk about how you prepare for that and how you do that on set?
Noah: I think that’s echoed in the direction. I think he chooses to focus on very specific things that are sort of the opposite of a slasher. Like House of 1000 Corpses or whatever, where there’s like blood and all this stuff everywhere, sort of over the top kind of horror. It’s more this very specific, more refined way of approaching things that does, I think, a lot with very little. I think Jeff’s talked about this. He worked in locations for a long time, so I think he knows how to get the most out of where he’s at. We only used really one location the whole time, but I think he knows how to get the most out of what he was working with.
Emmanuel: What is the difference in a project like this, where you’re working with a very minimal cast, compared to some of the other projects you’ve worked on?
Noah: It’s not really honestly all that different when you get down into it. At least as far as my experience goes. Maybe as a producer or something like that, it might be more stressful, because you try to do a lot with, with less, I suppose. But when you’re in it, you’re just doing it. As far as like the actual experience of making things, what ends up happening big or small is you end up in a scene, you end up in a location, and there’s the director, the camera crew, and it ends up sort of feeling the same when you’re actually in it.
Maybe the locations are not as big, and you’re not in a sound stage or whatever. But I don’t really ever feel like it’s all that much different. There are just fewer people around. It can be fun in a way because you’re sort of all in it together a little bit more. But I think the idea that it’s like a fundamentally different experience working on something like a Netflix thing or an indie movie is sort of, it’s not. It’s just sort of different shades of the same color.
The Beach House is now available on VOD, Digital HD, DVD & Blu-Ray.