Yahoo Movies Longlegs' Osgood Perkins responds to Silence of the Lambs comparison
Longlegs finally arrives in cinemas this week after heaps of critical acclaim, with a lot of rave reviews comparing it to Oscar-winning classic The Silence of the Lambs.
Writer/director Osgood Perkins hasn't shied away from the influence of Jonathan Demme's 1991 horror. After all, Longlegs also centres on a talented young FBI agent on the hunt for a serial killer.
But Longlegs is also its own thing, and Perkins looked elsewhere for another major influence on his new movie.
"I don't think about other horror movies when I'm writing. Silence of the Lambs, yes, that was the keycode to get into the thing. But once you're inside, you've got to get rid of all that stuff otherwise you're going to do [something] generic," he told Digital Spy.
Related: Maika Monroe had "visceral reaction" to Nicolas Cage's Longlegs transformation
"For me, it was Gus Van Sant movies. It was My Own Private Idaho and the soft touch of things, the gentleness, the weird kind of rootless, free-floating sadness pictures like that have.
"It's far more interesting to me than, like, it's gonna f**king jump out of the f**king thing and grab you by the neck. That stuff's easy, but casting a spell like something like Elephant does or Last Days does was much more powerful to me."
It's easy to assume Maika Monroe, who plays FBI agent Lee Harker in Longlegs, would take inspiration from Jodie Foster's performance as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs as well.
But for Monroe, the inspiration came more from Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Related: Longlegs is one of the best movies of the year
"I thought that there's a lot of similarities to sort of how they go through life; being a bit of an outsider, uncomfortable in normal situations [and] holding conversations," she explained.
"Yet there's this light that comes out of them when they're working on these cases. That's where they're the most comfortable and that's where they're at ease."
At the time of writing, Longlegs still stands at a flawless 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. While Perkins is getting most of the credit as the writer/director, he's also keen to stress that it wasn't a one-man band.
"The great thing about making movies is that you're hardly alone; you're the opposite of alone. The idea that a director makes a movie is pretty antiquated, I think, and kind of bullshit because everybody brings their spirit to it," he noted.
"There's this gratifying moment on any movie where you realise, 'Oh everybody involved wants this to be good'. Everybody wants to do their job better than the person next to them or as well as the person next to them.
"I just try to approach it with a light touch and let people do their thing... I say that all the time, you just try to make something good that you might like and want to stand by.
"You're going to have to do blocks of interviews for seven hours at a time talking about how you did it. The answer might as well be, 'I did it because I wanted to do it nicely and good and make people have an experience that was positive'."
Longlegs is released in cinemas on July 12.
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