Artists, filmmakers, and genuinely best friends, Riley Stearns and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are about as cool of a couple that you can think of. Aside from being husband and wife, Stearns and Winstead paired up as director and actor to make Stearns’ debut feature Faults, a thriller about one girl’s forced attempt to break free from a mysterious and all consuming cult (a character that was written exclusively for Winstead, and is something, Stearns tells me, he can’t wait to do again). Sitting down with the young writer-director and actress during our exclusive and enjoyable conversation, we talk about making his first movie, why getting blacklisted was a good thing, and the type of role Mary wants to play next–something that will requite her updating her hilariously outdated IMDB profile page. We begin:

 

SO THE FAULTS SCRIPT WAS BLACKLISTED, WHAT EXACTLY DOES THAT MEAN?

RILEY STEARNS: So agents and managers all vote on their favorite [unproduced] scripts of the year, and at the end they tally up the votes and you’re given a point value, the higher the points the better the score, [best scores end up on the Blacklist]. What’s weird about us ending up on that list is that we had already made the film when we ended up on it, so we weren’t an unproduced script.

MARY ELIZABETH WINSTEAD: We kind of made it under the radar…

RS: But not to manipulate anything, we were just a small movie! So I’m sitting in the editing room and I’m getting tweets and text messages from people like, “You’re on the Blacklist!” It is a big deal, especially because we were in the top 10. Had the film not been made, it would have been huge for us because I think it would have gotten read by even more people and actors, but the film worked out the way that it did for a reason. Everyone who was involved already really wanted to be there, not just because it was on something like the “Blacklist.”

 

IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE INITIALLY, GETTING “BLACKLISTED” SOUNDS LIKE A BAD THING.

RS: Yeah like Blackballed.

MEW: Haha I know!

 

WHAT PART OF MAKING THIS FILM DID YOU FIND MOST CHALLENGING?

MEW: I would say the initial casting and just getting it off the ground was the hardest part. We got our producers, which was such a wonderful thing knowing that somebody was going to actually fund this movie. That was incredible.  After that, we didn’t really know how it all worked in terms of how you find your lead actor. Of course you get casting directors, but we were all over the map in terms of who Riley and I thought should do the movie. [Ansel Roth] is such a tough role, we didn’t know who could pull that off. The character goes so many places; he’s got to be funny, then he’s got to be sad.

RS: A lot of actors just look like models or are just boring, but we wanted a guy who had “lived.”

MEW: We wanted some life on his face.

RS: Leland just kind of fell into our laps and once that happened, everything was perfect and fell into place. I know it’s cliché to say, but I don’t think I could see anybody else playing this part other than Leland.

I’M ACTUALLY WATCHING ‘THE WIRE’ RIGHT NOW AND SEEING LANCE REDDICK WAS SO SURPRISING!

RS: I was a huge ‘Wire’ fan, Mary watched some episodes…

MEW: I would come in when he was watching it, but I never sat down and watched it

RS: I think she was shooting Scott Pilgrim vs. The World or something like that when I first started watching them. But yeah, Lance was about to work on ‘The Guest’ with our producer so they had met a few times and passed him the script. We had a few phone calls about the character he’d play and he was a little hesitant, I think he wanted the showier role, which is Terry, and I told him why he was actually better for this one part. He really liked what I had to say and trusted me, and showed up and knocked it out of the park.

The funny thing about him is he’s so different from his character on ‘The Wire’ that it’s almost disarming. He’s a really nice guy! He’s in the best shape out of anybody I’ve ever met; he walks in and he’s like the Terminator, looking like he’s posing and flexing all the time when in fact he’s just standing normal.

 

THE PART OF CLAIRE WAS WRITTEN EXCLUSIVELY FOR YOU MARY, DID YOU HAVE ANY RESERVATIONS OR FEEL ANY PRESSURE?

MEW: Both, yeah, haha. My reservations weren’t about [accepting the role], but being uncertain if I was the right person for it. I wanted the film to be great and I thought it was a really challenging role, and I didn’t know if I was a natural fit for it or if I was going to have to try to push to be this weird cult member girl and I was terrified of it coming off fake. There were all these fears I had in terms of just the performance. The more we talked about it and started having discussions with everybody, I was staring to feel more comfortable. Once we started shooting and the scenes were coming to life, I really stared having fun with it.

 

WHAT WAS THE LAST SCENE YOU SHOT?

RS: We actually got ahead of schedule by a day, so we ended up doing 19 days instead of 20, and the last scenes were supposed to be with the parents, but it ended up being that we were able to shoot the talk show segment, about six minutes long. We used this old vintage tube camera that has ghosting when you pan, really cheesy lighting, and I was the camera operator. It was the coolest way to end the shoot because everyone would die laughing.

MEW: Oh yeah, it was really funny.

RS: Everyone stuck around even though they didn’t need to be there anymore. And without us knowing, our producers set up a wrap party immediately after, so we just walked out of the parking lot of the sound stage and there were food trucks, people pulled up their car and played music out of them, we had a dance party. It was really fun.

MEW: It felt like a real celebration of “We just finished this,” and that’s so exciting.

I didn’t know if I was a natural fit for it or if I was going to have to try to push to be this weird cult member girl and I was terrified of it coming off fake.

 

I REALLY ENJOYED THE VARIATION OF INTERESTING CAMERA ANGLES IN THE FILM, SPECIFICALLY THE LONG TAKE DURING CLAIRE’S TALK WITH ANSEL.

RS: The cinematographer [Michael Ragen] got nervous because he had to zoom slower than the slowest setting the camera would do automatically, so a lot of it was on him to ride perfectly and end in this one frame with little margin of error. That was the most takes we did on anything, other than some really pivotal focus things, and I would say it was about 13 or 14 takes of that one scene.

 

I NOTICED THERE WAS A LACK OF A MUSICAL COMPONENT IN FAULTS, BUT I THOUGHT IT WORKED PERFECTLY. I FOUND THAT I WAS PAYING ATTENTION EVEN MORE.

RS: That’s nice to hear! One of my favorite films is Dogtooth and I think that’s the first time I noticed a film with a lack of a score. No Country For Old Men is the same, you don’t really notice it. The main thing for me is, I didn’t want to make somebody feel something through music, I wanted them to feel that way because they were experiencing the acting. I realized we were going to need a little bit of music here and there, so we brought on Heather McIntosh, who just did the film Z For Zachariah which premiered at Sundance. She only had two weeks to do the score, but she ran with it and I think it works really well. We were just in New York showing it and there was a really weird reaction at the end of the movie…

MEW: I never thought about that was probably because there was no music, I never thought about that until you said that.

RS: Totally.

MEW: That’s why people were so weirded out, it took people awhile before they were like… [ she slow claps 2-3 times].

RS: A lot of screening we’ve done, New York included, it finally gets to my name [in the credits] then you hear a couple of claps going. I think part of that is people are in a bit of a daze or state of shock and not sure what to feel. Maybe some people just don’t like it and that’s why they’re responding that way.

To read our review of Faults, click here.

 

WAS IT HARD FINDING THAT BALANCE BETWEEN “WORK MODE” AND “LIFE MODE,” BEING MARRIED AND ALL?

MEW: It’s kind of crazy how natural and easy it is, I think we really are the same people when we are at home or at work. We don’t have to put on different hats or anything.

RS: We just went into that mode too where it was professional once we got to set. The thing that people tell me, which is absolutely funny and weird and actually kind of cool, is that a lot of crew members didn’t know until the last day of shooting that we were married, let alone a couple. We kissed at the wrap party and there were people like, “Wait, are you guys together?”

 

THEN THEY’RE TEXTING TMZ… 

RS: It’s so funny because we didn’t [hide anything] on purpose, but it’s a nice thing that people saw us as professional.

MEW: We’re lucky that we like working together and being around each other and we would always want to work together if we could. If he could write or direct every movie that I do, I would totally want that.

WHEN YOU TOLD YOUR FAMILY THAT YOU WERE DOING THIS MOVIE TOGETHER WERE THEY EXCITED?

MEW: Oh yeah.

RS: The people who would give us the weird reaction of, “Don’t do it, it’s going to ruin your marriage,” were people we didn’t know as well.

MEW: Yeah anybody who knew us knew that this was a really exciting thing because we’ve been working towards this for a long time.

 

DO YOU HAVE A POSTER OF FAULTS HANGING IN YOUR HOUSE?

RS: Not yet, but that’s the plan for the alternative poster.

MEW: Yeah the blue fits in really well in our house.

 

ARE YOU CURRENTLY WRITING ANOTHER SCRIPT?

RS: Subconsciously I can’t let go of this until it’s done and out in the world, but now that it’s almost there I’m finally really excited to write the next thing again. As soon as this is done I think I am going to take a couple of days and stay in a hotel with no Internet somewhere and outline, then come back and start getting to work. The next idea is a lead role for Mary. Keeping it in the family.

ARE YOU WRAPPING ON OTHER FILMS?

MEW:  Right before the holidays I finished a film in New Orleans with John Goodman that J.J. Abrams produced, it’s another contained thriller. I have a TV show that starts airing a couple of days after Faults comes out. Now I’m just looking for the next thing to do, and waiting for him to write the next part for me.

I think a theme in a lot of the characters I’ve been playing lately, not really Claire so much, but a lot of other characters is that I like playing people who are trying to be good people but who mess up, then keep trying.  Keep trying to be better and striving to figure their lives out. I feel like that’s relatable, and I like playing those kinds of parts.

RS: And superheroes.

MEW: And superheroes!

 

THERE YOU GO RILEY, YOUR NEXT PROJECT…

 

Faults is in select theaters and VOD today.