We spoke with filmmaker Alexandre Aja leading up to the release of Never Let Go, his 10th film to date and counting. It stars Halle Berry, and just like past hits The Hills Have Eyes and Crawl, it brings the scares. And speaking of Crawl, Aja will helm a highly anticipated sequel, about which he shared briefly to MovieWeb.
“I’m really excited to go back into the Crawl universe. I mean, it’s a weird thing when I make movies, even when they are finished, I keep thinking about them,” he said.
“They are finished and over, but because of all the storm and all the hurricane happening and all the craziness happening around the world, every time I see a picture, like, I set up… a new scene that we could create that would be very interesting and scary.
And so to have the opportunity of going back there, it’s going to be something different
.”
Halle Berry Is the ‘Anchor’ of Aja’s New Film
In the meantime, fans of Aja’s visually stunning work can also enjoy a tour-de-force performance in his latest offering Never Let Go, featuring none other than the Oscar-winning star of Monster’s Ball (2001).
“She’s the center, the anchor of the movie,” said Aja. “She’s the pillar in the middle of this family. But she’s also, like, a very dual character. We have, on one hand, the two brother-twins. But she also is doubled. She also has a really dark side and a bright side. She’s like that mother that’s loving and that wants to protect the kids from the evil lurking outside. But she’s also that mother that holds their kids on that rope and that doesn’t let them go away, that kind of, like, cut them away from the world, and they might die of starvation because of that.”
Aja continued on Berry’s performance:
“There’s so many complexities, and she’s struggling with that, so that was really important to find someone who understood.
And I remember the first time we met, I realized that the meeting was really about her making sure that I understood that as well, and that I will not compromise
to get all that nuance and contradiction in a character on the screen. And so, you know, from then to today it was just an amazing collaboration.”
Never Let Go Is ‘Something Close to a Fairytale’
As expected with any Aja production, prepare to feast your eyes on a visually striking film, a process he detailed to us as going back to square one. “What really stuck with me, beyond the fear, beyond the suspense, beyond all the layers and the theme that was really striking, was the opportunity of creating a world, like, something close to a fairytale, a dark, classical fairytale,” he said about Never Let Go.
“I went along with the voice of the writers…
the world is very symbolic
, from the rope to… every meaning, even the color, everything was kind of really in the script. And so I wanted to use that as like an opportunity to create a really textured world, like
to have the forest as the fourth character
.”
From Lionsgate,
Never Let Go
will be released in theaters on Friday, Sep. 20, 2024.
