Riley Keough on why she loves work­ing on inde­pen­dent movies

She’s the newest dar­ling of indie cin­e­ma, hav­ing recent­ly turned heads with stand­out per­for­mances in Andrea Arnold’s Amer­i­can Hon­ey and So Yong Kim’s Lovesong. Now every­one from Steven Soder­bergh to Lars von Tri­er is lin­ing up to work with her.

Her lat­est film, It Comes at Night, is writer/​director Trey Edward Shults’ genre-defy­ing fol­low-up to his 2015 break­out fea­ture Krisha. In it she plays a woman who seeks refuge from an unseen threat, along with her hus­band and young son, in a seclud­ed cab­in in the woods. Here she tells LWLies how the pro­duc­tion was a far cry from the pres­sure cook­er envi­ron­ment depict­ed in the film, and how she keeps grow­ing in con­fi­dence as an actor.

“A lot of things are real­ly appeal­ing about work­ing on a scale like this. I haven’t done many films which have been this con­tained — prob­a­bly two movies that take place in a sin­gle house — and I like it. It’s about how per­son­al it can be, noth­ing but these four peo­ple, work­ing together.

“When I read the script, it felt like a dra­ma. When I saw the fin­ished film, it felt like a thriller with psy­cho­log­i­cal under­tones. I thought it’d be a lot heav­ier and dark­er than it turned out to be. But then there are hor­ror ele­ments in the film too, with the black goo… After try­ing it once or twice, we realised that I had to be very par­tic­u­lar about how much I let come out of my mouth. Trey had to talk me through it dur­ing the take, because we tried doing the first one nor­mal­ly and that didn’t work. He’d be qui­et­ly say­ing, ​‘Okay, a lit­tle less, a lit­tle more.’ It was pret­ty difficult.

“I like all the direc­tors I’ve worked with, prob­a­bly for the same rea­sons you do, because their films are fuck­ing cool. It’s just about hav­ing been for­tu­nate enough to work with them, how­ev­er that comes to me. I’m feel­ing more con­fi­dent that there’s no set way to do any­thing, and to nev­er think that I know what I’m doing. You get cocky when you’re 22, like, ​‘I got this’, but you don’t know shit. I’ve been learn­ing from every direc­tor I’ve worked with.”