Amy Seimetz: ​‘There is no wak­ing up from death’

Amer­i­can actor Amy Seimetz made her first for­ay into direct­ing with her 2012 fea­ture Sun Don’t Shine. After mak­ing two sea­sons of The Girl­friend Expe­ri­ence, inspired by the 2009 Steven Soder­bergh movie of the same name, she’s writ­ten and direct­ed her sec­ond film, She Dies Tomor­row. Being released on VOD due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, the atmos­pher­ic hor­ror exam­ines how fear spreads when a per­son is faced with inevitable death. It’s a sharp med­i­ta­tion on Seimetz’s own anx­i­ety and is rich with her own caus­tic sense of humour.

LWLies: The anx­i­eties in She Dies Tomor­row res­onate with the pan­dem­ic and lock­down. Does the film feel more time­ly now than when you made it?

Seimetz: It was a per­son­al film to begin with – I’m not sure if you can tell because I named the lead char­ac­ter Amy and I shot it in my house! I was deal­ing with two things: my own anx­i­ety and exis­ten­tial dread, and then I’m addict­ed to the 24-hour news cycle. Before the 2016 elec­tions I start­ed watch­ing it inces­sant­ly, and I noticed that every few days it would be like, ​‘It’s the end of the world!’ Then I made the con­nec­tion with my own anx­i­ety, because when I would talk about it with friends I would feel like I was spread­ing it.

I could not have imag­ined that we would be in this sit­u­a­tion with Covid, but I think what’s inter­est­ing are the themes of iso­la­tion and the desire to con­nect. In Cal­i­for­nia we opened up and now we’re locked down again, so there’s this con­stant bat­tle that you’re going through of, ​‘What do I do now?’ Then in writ­ing I was like, ​‘What would you do if you knew you were gonna die tomor­row?’ and it’s so over­whelm­ing that you can’t make a clear decision.

Did you intend to play Amy, or did you always have Kate Lyn Sheil in mind?

I always thought it was gonna be her. I don’t like act­ing in my stuff. Kate is a far supe­ri­or actor than I am – my act­ing agents will not like hear­ing this, but it’s true! I wrote Sun Don’t Shine and this for her because we’re such good friends. We have this short­hand – I don’t have to say much to direct her, I can be like, ​‘Remem­ber when I told you this sto­ry?’ and she knows how to trans­late that into a per­for­mance and emote things that aren’t lit­er­al. When I final­ly com­mit­ted to nam­ing her Amy, I was like, ​‘I’m gonna regret this later!’

Because everyone’s ask­ing why you did it?

Yeah! Well, more because it’s like, ​‘Oh, I’m gonna have to talk about anx­i­ety and what­ev­er, and it’s gonna be so per­son­al when I just want them to watch the movie.’ But it actu­al­ly is a ben­e­fit because my inter­views are much more per­son­al. Not just because of the times we’re in, but also because I went ahead and named her Amy, so she’s a proxy for me.

Doing that with Amy and call­ing Jane Adams’s char­ac­ter ​‘Jane’ makes it eas­i­er to project your­self onto the film.

Yeah, and Jane also is my friend – she’s who I call when I have anx­i­ety, some­times at like 2:30 in the morn­ing! Pret­ty much every­one in this movie is my dear friend or I’ve worked with them close­ly in the past.

Have you ever told Jane that you’re going to make your­self into a leather jack­et like Amy does in the film?

No, I haven’t gone that far! But I do make jokes. I feel like every day I’m talk­ing about my anx­i­ety, but I func­tion quite well in the world. Although, on the high­way when the semis are there I’m over­whelmed with the fear that they’re gonna not see me and run me off the road. It con­sumes my whole body, but it’s very brief and once I get passed a semi it dissipates.

What Jane and I laugh about, and Kate too, is when you are in the throes of some­thing that’s mak­ing you spin out, whether that’s a trau­ma or a loss, when your emo­tions are tak­ing over your rea­son­ing, you say and do real­ly bizarre things. So, there is humour to it because you have to stop and laugh. I do, because it’s how I get out of these things. So that’s where the idea of the leather jack­et came from.

One of my favourite scenes is when Amy dances to the ​‘Lac­rimosa’; it’s hilar­i­ous­ly absurd to dance to a requiem! Could you talk about the music and the Mon­do Boys’ score?

Oh yeah, they’re amaz­ing. One of the ear­ly things we shot was that scene where Kate’s danc­ing to the requiem, and when I sent it to them they real­ly enjoyed it and they sent me anoth­er track which we used when she hears the baby cry­ing and she walks into her hall­way. They were just toss­ing around ideas, but I loved it so much that I used it on set to pace Kate’s walk. It just felt like this won­der­ful collaboration.

Then with Kate danc­ing to the requiem – I always find that when I’m feel­ing bad, I try to con­nect to that feel­ing intense­ly. Amy knows she’s gonna die so she tries to con­nect with some­thing. By choos­ing a requiem she’s fac­ing death, but also try­ing to con­nect to a feel­ing. It’s so over­whelm­ing that, in an ADD fash­ion, she starts danc­ing, then she’s on the floor, and now she’s out­side. She’s try­ing des­per­ate­ly to con­nect but can’t sur­ren­der to it.

Putting on a requiem for your­self while you’re still alive is so mat­ter-of-fact. That’s what’s so fright­en­ing, the sto­icism with which every­one says, ​‘I will die tomorrow’.

I’ve seen the apoc­a­lypse movie where we run from the thing and I want­ed to make one where you can’t run from it, it just is. There was a real­ly great Ray Brad­bury sto­ry in Esquire years ago. It’s about this cou­ple who dream the world’s gonna end tomor­row. They talk about it very calm­ly and one asks, ​‘Should we try to escape?’ and the other’s like, ​‘It’s not worth it, it’s just gonna hap­pen.’ Then they say, ​‘Should we tell the chil­dren?’, and they’re like, ​‘No, they’re just gonna be like real­ly upset.’ They don’t do any­thing except drink tea and go to bed.

I read it when I was younger, but I’d for­got­ten about it, then halfway through shoot­ing my assis­tant Alex sent it to me. This movie was inter­est­ing because I was pulling from my sub­con­scious movies that I love, but I wasn’t try­ing to overt­ly ref­er­ence any­thing. But with that, I was like, ​‘I’m not crazy! Ray Brad­bury did it!’

It’s so orig­i­nal, like the exper­i­men­tal shots of blood-like liq­uid you inter­cut with the action. How did you make those?

What’s so fun about mak­ing films with your friends who are at the top of their game is that it feels like you’re a lit­tle kid again and you get to make potions, but you have all this adult knowl­edge. So, with Jay Kei­t­el, my cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, we turned my garage into a lab, and I bought a micro­scope. We were play­ing around, like putting pro­sciut­to in there and food colour­ing. Then we built this thing with plex­i­glass and a cam­era down below on a motorised track and we were using these macro-lens­es, extreme­ly tight close-up lens­es. We had the cam­era beneath the plex­i­glass, and I went to this craft store and bought glit­ter, Rit dye, and oil. Then we went into my yard and filmed it until we got images that we liked. We have like four hours of that footage because it was so fun.

It’s an exten­sion of the images of water you often use, like the mer­maids in Sun Don’t Shine and the con­ver­sa­tion about dol­phins in She Dies Tomorrow.

Well, I’m from Flori­da so I think it just makes its way into the con­ver­sa­tion some­how. I have this joke with Jay where pret­ty much every piece of mine has a pool at the end. There’s a pool at the end of Sun Don’t Shine, of the Sun­dance short I made, When We Lived in Mia­mi, and then this movie. I even end with this like desert lake in The Girl­friend Expe­ri­ence sea­son two. I just love bod­ies of water, they’re a bap­tism of sorts, a meta­mor­pho­sis or trans­for­ma­tion for the char­ac­ter when they reach a body of water.

When I was younger my grand­moth­ers would say the ocean could cure every­thing. Like I would be vom­it­ing, and they would be like, ​‘Go swim­ming in the water!’ What’s strange is they’re kind of right, it actu­al­ly makes you feel bet­ter. There’s just some­thing so ther­a­peu­tic about being in the ocean that it actu­al­ly does solve cer­tain ill­ness­es and moods.

It’s like Amy is ris­ing out of the water at the start and end of She Dies Tomor­row, and the same in the open­ing shot of Sun Don’t Shine where Kate Lyn Sheil is gasping.

Yeah, me and Kate laugh that I just like mak­ing her gasp. Look, I only have a few tricks to share, it’s only one brain work­ing here! Both of my movies are deal­ing with off­shoots of death. Sun Don’t Shine was the denial of death, and the suf­fo­cat­ing nature of denial. You just real­ly need to breathe; you’re gasp­ing for air and gasp­ing for life. Then the metaphor of these mer­maids. My favourites aren’t the jol­ly, sweet mer­maids but the old sea-shan­ty leg­ends where they’d lure men into the water and love them so much they’d squeeze the air out of them.

In She Dies Tomor­row, it’s the con­fronta­tion of death, of not being able to deny it. When you’re like, ​‘Can I wake up from this bad dream?! Oh, wait – death is inevitable.’ We’re in a liv­ing night­mare because it’s just gonna hap­pen! There is no wak­ing up from death. It just is. For me, the gasp­ing for air is ask­ing how you can escape these things. These films are real­ly good com­pan­ion pieces to me. I didn’t plan it this way, but their ini­tials are ​‘SDS’ and ​‘SDT’, so I’ve made a joke where the next movie I make has to be ​‘SDU’.

Maybe that should be a mer­maid hor­ror film.

Exact­ly!

She Dies Tomor­row is on Cur­zon Home Cin­e­ma, BFI Play­er and Dig­i­tal Down­load 28 August. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.