Jay Rohr
Lindsey Anderson Beer is helping Halloween season get a little more frightening. In a career featuring some impressive highlights, she’s the writer-director behind Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, streaming on Paramount+. The film is a prequel exploring events more hinted at than explored in the Stephen King novel that inspired the movie.
Bloodlines’ plot follows a young Jud Crandall in 1969. About to leave Ludlow for the first time, perhaps never to return, he discovers the dark truth about his hometown. Family and friends will have to be honest about the evil that lives in the sour earth, especially as it begins to corrupt the living and the dead. With the help of childhood friends, Jud must battle the darkness polluting Ludlow. Although whatever happens, nothing will ever be the same again.
Marking a directorial debut for Beer, Bloodlines is the culmination of a career with some interesting developments. After studying neuroscience and robotics, she found her way to New York then Los Angeles. Writing scripts and cold-emailing them to production companies eventually caught enough attention for Beer to start climbing the creative ladder. No overnight success, but there’s something to be said about someone persevering in an industry known for grinding creatives into the dirt. Just ask anyone who’s been on the picket line recently.
Beer has worked on several notable projects. These include IPs such as Transformers, Godzilla vs. Kong, Pacific Rim, and Gal Gadot’s latest film Heart of Stone. Future projects include the next Star Trek film as well as a Sleepy Hollow reboot. In addition, she is the founder of Lab Brew, a production company which, according to a press release, is “aimed at telling genre stories with fresh and diverse perspectives.”
Recently, Beer visited with Film Obsessive’s Jay Rohr about her career and her recent work on Pet Sematary: Bloodlines. The following has been edited for space and clarity.
Congratulations first and foremost on getting [Pet Sematary: Bloodlines] out there, getting it done. Was there something particular about the characters here, this situation, that resonated for you? Besides being a fan of the novel, what made you want to tell this story?
The fact that the book said that Jud’s encounter as a young man with Timmy was why the evil was targeting Jud his whole life. The way that it described Timmy, knowing everybody’s darkest secrets in town and kind of inner worst qualities and the way that it would taunt people in town, that Timmy kind of retained some elements of himself and seemed to tune in and out. All of those things just seemed like such a tragic and compelling version of a villain that I hadn’t seen before and felt like a really great way to take the themes of the “Pet Sematary” and examine them through an origin story of Ludlow.
Was there some element of it that reminded you of a time in your life?
I think that anything that I take on there’s elements of myself or emotions that I’ve been through, that I infuse into it. I grew up in a smaller town, and I relate to Jud’s desire to see the world and get out there and help people. But I also am somebody who’s had a lot of bad things happen in life too, and kind of come out the other side. Like I guess Jud’s a survivor, so I guess I relate to that too.
There’s this concept of generational trauma. You really do a good job of establishing the sense that this has been around for a long time, and everybody has dealt with it in some capacity but kept it hidden. Would you like to talk about that element and how and why you put that into the story?
I really wanted to infuse it with this sense of generational trauma. “Pet Sematary” has always been this kind of intimate portrait of fathers’ bad choices. I thought it was also interesting to take the perspective of a younger generation and look at these children looking at their parents and their parents’ decisions; and weighing those and taking responsibility for a kind of family legacy and trauma.
Given that this is a prequel, did that give you a greater sense of freedom? Obviously, there are components from the preexisting story but since they aren’t as nailed down as the book would be — did you feel freer as a creative when it came to approaching the story?
I felt an incredible responsibility to being true to the spirit and the tone and the themes of Stephen King’s original novel, but when it came to plot points and film aesthetics, I felt very free to do my own thing. I consider this a prequal to the novel and not any one film. So I really did feel a lot of freedom as a filmmaker to make this its own thing.
Stephen King’s works are part of this quietly shared universe. Is that something that intrigues you for future projects going down the line, exploring this world more, or the worlds outside of it? How it can all connect?
Connectedness in general is something that fascinates me as a human, so I certainly would find that interesting, but I have no plans to do it myself.
There are a lot of moments of silence in the movie that really helped with the atmosphere. Is that something you scripted, or at least talked to the sound crew about, got them on the same page?
Very much so. It’s something that I talked about from the earliest stages when I came on. “Pet Sematary” is all about our confrontation of and fear of death and death is silent. So, I really wanted to bring in a lot of silence contrasted with heightened sounds of nature that almost feel violent. I talked to the sound designer and the composer early on, so it was kind of this intricate dance between departments to make that happen.
How much did you have to be hands on with the whole production? Were you able to convey your vision to the crew and everybody was onboard, or did you find yourself hands on the wheel at all times or could you trust people and just let it go?
That’s an amazing question. I hire people that I trust for a reason, and I really allow my actors to improvise a lot, if they want to. But I am a very, very hands on person. I like to be right on set in the thick of things, so I can adjust things in real time. I trust everybody I’m working with to do the job that they’re supposed to do, but I’m always looking for an opportunity to try to do even better than we did before. I wrote it this way, but now we’re in a real set with real people, what we planned for is good, but how do we take what we learn with each take and just improve upon it?
Making films is no longer an abstract concept for you. Now that you’ve done it, do you have a better sense of what you would want to do in future projects? And is that affecting the way you approach writing a film?
The way that I would write was always kind of very directorial, and I’d have to strip things back so that it didn’t feel like I was overstepping and doing somebody else’s job for them, and I was on a lot of sets, so I felt like I knew what I was getting into in terms of the actual directing work. I think the one thing that surprised me was just how full on it is even after you film. How full on it is in post as well and for how long [you are ] promoting the movie. [What] will change is just making sure whatever I take on I’m so passionate about it that I’m okay missing friends and family for three years because it’s really intense.
If I have anything left, it’s just about your production company Lab Brew. If there’s anything that you’d like to say about them and what you hope going forward, is it going to be an opportunity for people who don’t usually get a chance in the industry?
My company that I have through a first look deal at Paramount is called Lab Brew and we’re absolutely focused on filmmaker and writer and actor driven stories that are from different points of view than we often get to see at the center of a story. And that’s important to me to kind of pay it forward and support new voices in the community.
