“It’s just all about storytelling”: The Surrender Stars Colby Minifie and Kate Burton and Director Julia Max on the Chilling Indie Horror (INTERVIEW)

Starring The Boys breakout Colby Minifie and veteran actress Kate Burton (Scandal), the psychological horror film The Surrender was one of the biggest breakouts of this year’s SXSW Film Festival. Our review called the film “a great entry in the canon of recent indie horror” and said that director Julia Max “manages to achieve a tone that feels genuinely sinister and also very effectively sad.”

We got to speak with Minifie, Burton, and Max about The Surrender, why they think personal, emotional horror like the film is so effective, and the liberating feeling of working in a two-hander. Check out the interview here:

FandomWire: In many ways, I think it would be fair to say that The Surrender is a drama under the guise of a horror film. Why do you find this character-driven approach to horror so refreshing?

Colby Minifie, Neil Sandilands, Vaughn Armstrong, and Kate Burton in Julia Max’s THE SURRENDER. Courtesy of Cailin Yatsko. A Shudder Release.
Julia Max: Well, personally, I’m a huge fan of slow-burn horror. I think that with a story like this, grounding it in reality really allows the horror to come through. I don’t think the horror would land as well without that grounded sense of reality from the characters; without that mother-daughter relationship, I don’t think it would emotionally hit us hard. So it was very important that we nailed that, and I think Colby and Kate just nailed that relationship.

Colby Minifie: Yeah, the wonderful thing about doing genre work is that you get to do these crazy things and try to be a human in the middle of all of it. And what’s beautiful about this movie in particular is that we get to talk about grief, and we get to talk about mourning somebody and dealing with loss in an extreme way.

And the only way that we can go to that extreme is if we build the relationships. We have to establish how much both Megan and Barbara love their father and husband — Vaughn Armstrong, the actor — we have to love him so much, and the relationships have to be so strong for our ritual that happens later in the movie to make sense.

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Kate Burton: And from my point of view, the thing that was so wonderful about it is, you’re exactly right — it’s a character-driven drama that starts with these two women. You meet these two women in a time of crisis, and it’s sort of classic how they talk to each other and relate to each other. And then what happens, sort of very magically and sort of devilishly, is it morphs into something else.

For me as an actor, I always love that moment. I’ve been in a million plays and a lot of TV shows and some films where the story just turns on its axis, and that’s really what happens in this movie. And it’s why I was drawn to it when I read it and when I met with Julia. And then I got to work with the extraordinary Colby.

Colby Minifie & Kate Burton in Julia Max’s THE SURRENDER.Courtesy of Cailin Yatsko. A Shudder Release.

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Neil Sandilands and Colby Minifie in Julia Max’s THESURRENDER. Courtesy of Cailin Yatsko. A Shudder Release.

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Colby Minifie & Kate Burton in Julia Max’s THE SURRENDER.Courtesy of Cailin Yatsko. A Shudder Release.

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Colby Minifie in Julia Max’s THE SURRENDER. Courtesy ofCailin Yatsko. A Shudder Release.

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FandomWire: Similarly, we’ve seen a recent movement in the genre of horror films inspired by intensely personal experiences, which is the case with The Surrender. Why do you think this makes for such compelling horror cinema?

Minifie: I think it gives the audience a way in to be like, “Oh yeah, I’ve been in that situation. Holy shit.”

Max: I think the best art is the stuff that’s the most personal to us because you’re exposing something that’s very vulnerable. And I think that shows, and it’s very compelling to watch.

Burton: I’m gonna be totally honest with you here; I can’t watch horror movies. I mean, watching this movie almost killed me, and I was in most of the scenes, so I knew what happened. I get so scared, oh my god. So it’s always very interesting to work in a genre that I don’t watch much because my manager said, “Oh, there’s this horror movie coming your way that we think is really interesting,” then I started to read it, and I was like, “Oh, this doesn’t seem… oh, wait a minute!” [She laughs.] Although I should have known by the first image in the film, and we won’t say what that is.

But here’s the thing: I, as an actor, love to work in all different genres. It gives us that sense of versatility of what we do. But I also love it when the writing is so excellent, as Julia’s writing is, and that’s what Colby and I look for as actors. If the writing is great, then we’re happy. We’re at least halfway there, so then all we could do is screw it up.

But it really was a fantastic journey from day one. We rehearsed for a week before we started shooting, so by the time we started, we felt like we were breathing. There was no acting going on. I remember feeling like this just feels like real life — except for some of the things we’re doing. That’s hopefully not like real life.

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Minifie: I’ll add that the script, when I read it, I was like, “Oh boy, this feels so true to me.” I have a very close relationship with my parents, and my parents are wonderful, incredible people, but they’re into their supplements and their herbal things. And sometimes, I’m like, “Guys, I appreciate that. That’s really great. But there’s also Western medicine that’s important.”

I remember reading this and being like, I connect to this so immediately because it feels so specific and because Julia wrote it in such a specific way. I think so many people can connect with it. Like these mother-daughter scenes can exist in a movie that does not then lead to a horror. They are true to life.

FandomWire: Although there are other actors in some parts of the film, so much of it is just the two of you. Did you find it challenging to only be working off of one another for so much of the film? Liberating?

Minifie: Doing a two-hander — I’ve wanted to do that for so long. And also, working with Kate. It’s Kate Burton, guys.

Burton: It’s Colby Minifie, guys.

Minife: A legend! So I was like, “Whoo! Kate Burton! So excited!” And also, the script sets up the man who comes two-thirds of the way through the film in quite an intense way. He has a hard job, and we’re like, this guy is coming, and he doesn’t have a name, he doesn’t have a cell phone, and he can only be reached in these ways. And Neil [Sandilands] showed up, and because we had such a tight connection, him being the third was so insane and intense — or the fourth, because we also have Vaughn there.
Neil Sandilands and Colby Minifie in Julia Max’s THE SURRENDER. Courtesy of Cailin Yatsko. A Shudder Release.
Burton: The intensity that he brought to his performance. And we shot this kind of in order, so by the time we got to him, it was like week three. It was incredible. The other thing too, with the two-hander aspect of it, when you get the blessed opportunity to work with such an actress as Miss Minifie, it’s pretty amazing.

And I’ve had one other experience in my life of a two-hander mother and daughter — a play by the great Martin McDonagh called The Beauty Queen of Leenane — which I did all over Ireland, England, and on Broadway. And in that one, I was the daughter, and Anna Manahan, this amazing Irish actress, was the mother, and it had a similar vibe. And also Martin, as Julia knows and Colby knows, deals with this very little Irish world. But then he also goes into this very dark world. I mean, you see it in The Banshees of Inisherin.

So that sort of notion of ordinary life and the darkness, which is something sadly we’re experiencing a lot these days, but in terms of storytelling, it’s what’s so extraordinary about Julia. I mean, you meet Julia, she’s so beautiful. She’s got this big smile. Little do you know what’s lurking in this brain, this intense storytelling brain of Julia Max. It’s so fantastic. And she is just a dream to work with. She created such an atmosphere of goodwill, everybody was on the same page, and it was really thrilling.

One of the things I’m definitely learning as I get older is it’s just all about storytelling. No matter whether you’re a writer, the producer, the director, the actor, the cinematographer, the sound designer — we’re all part of this incredible team. So really amazing to our captain, Julia Max.