Interview: Adam Egypt Mortimer on 'Daniel Isn't Real'

Daniel Isn’t Real is the newest psychological horror movie from director Adam Egypt Mortimer. It’s a film about identity, inner struggle and personal demons manifesting themselves in a very literal way. We were joined by Adam Egypt Mortimer for a great conversation about his thoughts on making it, the rave reception it’s been getting at festivals, and just what it was like to work with the famed genre production house Spectrevision. Check out the trailer and interview below and go see Daniel Isn’t Real in theaters and on digital now.

Andrew Hawkins: If you would, give us a quick summary of what Daniel Isn't Real is all about.

Adam Egypt Mortimer: Yeah, Daniel Isn’t Real is about a 19-year-old kid named Luke who is really kind of struggling with his life and college. He's got a lot of anxiety issues. He's got a lot of traumatic past. He's taking care of a mother who's really struggling with her own issues, and then at a certain point he invites back into his life imaginary friend that he had when he was a child. And that is the character named Daniel.

At first, Daniel really inspires Luke to live his life to the fullest and to be y’know engaged with the world and take risks and do dangerous and exciting things, and then it slowly becomes clear that Daniel wants to take over Luke. He wants to be the one who is real and it becomes quite a terrifying situation for Luke.

This is a film that's been playing festivals that a lot of people have been saying is one of the more exciting horror films of the year. Talk a little bit about the reception to that because this is a pretty singular vision, especially with how surreal and cerebral it is.

AEM: So, I've done my best to go to as many film festivals as I can since we premiered at SXSW, and interacting with the audience and seeing how people respond to it has been kind of overwhelming. It's beyond anything I could have imagined. The thing that's been so incredible, you use words like surreal and cerebral, every session I've had of Q&A with the audience after every movie, people always ask really good questions.

People always seem to be really deeply emotionally engaged with the movie. A lot of people will come up and say, “The way that movie made me feel was really something, like I haven’t quite felt that way in a movie before.” That to me is kind of the highest compliment because as a director I start to think less about what happens and what's the plot structure, and I think more about “how does it happen” and “how does it make you feel?” People are really responding to it on that level, and it's insane man.

The first couple times I sat in an audience with people it was such a terrifying experience. Like there's not a ton of jump scares and screams and stuff like that, so it's sort of hard to gauge the audience. Anytime you hear somebody shuffle or cough or get up to go to the bathroom, you're like “Oh my god, everybody's so bored. I’ve ruined everything!” But then after the movie, people are like, “I was so freaked out like the whole time. Aaahhh!”

And so I finally got used to the idea that people do like it. It's been especially rewarding when people share with me that they have. You know as crazy and cosmic horror and surreal as it might be, it's about real human experiences. People have shared with me, “Oh yeah, I like that. I really recognize in the movie some terrible shit that I went through and that I appreciate how it's presented here.” and that's been incredibly fulfilling as well.

Well, it makes sense because you've made a film about identity and psychology and human interest, but also personal struggles. I kinda want to get your thoughts on taking these kinds of themes and fleshing them out into a horror movie. This seems like a film that really came from a lot of deep and introspective thought.

AEM: Yeah you know at a certain point early on when working on adapting the novel I realized that it was a story about something we can all relate to which is that we want to be a good person or we have this certain self-image of ourselves, but there's some other part of us that might feel like an intrusive voice or like an impulse or just like the desires we don't understand. And so we’re always like two people kind of fighting for control or fighting for our soul, and that’s like an interior psychological idea. But when I realized that this was a movie that could be about that in this extremely exterior way, that's what I got really excited about.

We all have the experience of feeling like we're wrestling with demons. I was like, “What can happen here because it's a genre movie is that a person can literally wrestle literally with his demon and they can be rolling around on a rooftop fighting each other.” To take the journey from the kind of like intimate psychological thriller as it begins and becomes this very externalized big horror story, that was the thing that was so exciting to me and felt like people would be able to relate to that.

I always think about if people who like horror movies are always looking in some way to see the darkness and fears and anxieties that they feel expressed in kind of an exciting way. That's what became really exciting about this was the opportunity to be able to do that.

You mentioned adapting the novel and you have worked with author Brian DeLeeuw multiple times. How was that relationship bringing the story to life?

AEM: Yeah, it's become such a beautiful working relationship between the two of us. We met eight years ago randomly at a birthday party and he told me about a novel he'd written, and I liked him so much that I read it that weekend and we started working together. Daniel Isn't Real was actually the first thing that we wrote together; and then because we felt like it was going to be a struggle to get it made, we wrote Some Kind of Hate to try to get a movie together that could be very low budget.

During that process we we've written two more movies and now we're working on a TV show. So, we somehow found a really easy working relationship and I imagine we'll continue to do it together for as long as we have careers.

That's awesome. Talking about other working relationships and partnerships you have, this is a film that's going to be going out on Shudder and it's also you working with Spectrevision. How was that to work with Elijah Wood his camp?

AEM: Yeah, Spectrevision is amazing and they're a company that I have wanted to work with ever since I had first heard of their formation all the way back when they were called Woodshed. Y’know I was really trying to get them the script of Some Kind of Hate but I couldn't really get in touch with them. So when I finally was able to make contact with them and showed them my work and show them the script for Daniel, it was like one of those things y’know where it's like a dream team. I just knew these are the kind of people who see genre movies and see horror movies the same way I do as a form that can go really deep emotionally and also really wild and visually and really exciting cinematically.

So, we really all shared that. When you know anybody you work with, you're going to have disagreements or conflicts like, “Should we do this? Should we do that?” No matter what, we always all had the same kind of movie in mind. So it wasn't like I wanted it to be weirder and then wanted to be more like a haunted house movie, it was like we all knew what we wanted to make. All the way through they were just great partners who really helped Daniel Isn’t Real be the best it can be. I like them so much that we're now working on another movie together that we're about to start shooting in two weeks. So, I guess I guess we liked each other enough to keep one being miserable together. (laughs)

Daniel Isn’t Real is out now in theaters and on VOD and is also available from AppleTV by clicking the link HERE