Back in 2015, Lenny Abrahamson enjoyed what every film-maker dreams of: an Oscar-nominated movie. Room, the story of a mother and child incarcerated by an unseen kidnapper, gleaned four Academy Award nods — including Best Director for Abrahamson.
Industry doors suddenly were flung wide open for the Irish-born, Jewish-raised film-maker previously best known for low-key indies like Frank and What Richard Did.
With his star Brie Larson winning the Oscar for Best Actress, Abrahamson suddenly found he was courted by Hollywood. “It’s amazing how it works,” he reflects. Suddenly studios were listening to his ideas for future feature projects. “The biggest advantage is not having to sell yourself in every conversation. Having had something that worked as far as the industry is concerned, as well as something that people really liked… it’s a huge advantage.”
The question was, ‘what next?’ “For a while, I thought, ‘should I grab the biggest thing that comes my way?’” he admits. But, fortunately, Abrahamson, 51, had already been developing an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s 2009 Gothic novel, The Little Stranger, with screen-writer Lucinda Coxon (who wrote The Danish Girl). “I’ve never been particularly strategic in my thinking about what projects to choose,” he says. “As much as it was lovely to be on lots of lists after Room, I stuck to my process.”
His heart told him to keep with Waters’s novel, a 1948 rural England-set tale narrated by one Dr Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson), a medic who returns to Hundreds Hall, a once-grand home he visited as a boy. As he meets the Ayers family, headed by Charlotte Rampling in typically icy mode, strange and possibly supernatural goings-on occur. But it’d be wrong to think of The Little Stranger simply as a ghost story. “It really operates as a drama, as a character study, as a meditation on these people and particularly on the character of Faraday.”
On some level, it’s comparable to Henry James’s eerie tale The Turn of the Screw “in its commitment to ambiguity”, as the director puts it. “The ghost story is not the point. A ghost story is something which helps us to unearth aspects of this character in a really vivid way. I think all good classic ghost stories probably do that… [they have] to tell us something about the people in it and the times they’re in. Otherwise it is just fireside spook fest, and that’s certainly not what this is.”
While the marketing for The Little Stranger — particularly the doom-laden trailer— might suggest it is a horror, Abrahamson argues that, in a typical scary movie, the viewer is on the outside. “You identify with the protagonist to the extent that you feel the fear they would feel in that situation, but you remain safe in the cinema. But, in this story, the questions it raises should have the potential to make all of us feel uneasy. One might, I’d hope, walk out of the cinema not completely separate from the Faraday story.”
Casting Faraday gave Abrahamson the chance to reunite with Gleeson, who was similarly the outsider-narrator figure in Abrahamson’s oddball Frank Sidebottom tale, Frank. “It was great to give him something really meaty, dark and layered in this film,” he says. Arguably, the role of Faraday is one of Gleeson’s most mature and complex yet, something Abrahamson expects to continue as his career unfolds. “He’s very good at playing the everyman centre of a story but it doesn’t make use of all his talents as an actor.”
Abrahamson, like Gleeson, is Dublin-born, though his roots stem largely from Poland; he had three grandparents from there (and one from Latvia). He knew his mother’s father well, he says, and one of the first things he ever shot was a sit-down interview as his grandfather recounted his memories of life in Poland.
“He had this fantastic accent — a mixture of his own Yiddish-Eastern European accent and then a strong Dublin accent, because he came over and learnt his English in a factory in Dublin.”
Curiously, Abrahamson has come to know his grandfather’s homeland “much better than I ever thought” after his 2004 feature debut Adam and Paul was invited to the Warsaw Film Festival.
“It was the first time I was in Poland,” he says, though it turned out to be significant. There, he met his future wife, who is Polish, and they now have two bilingual children. “My Polish isn’t too bad,” he says. “So it’s a long-term ambition to make a film in Polish…which would be a huge challenge.”
In his youth, Abrahamson had his barmitzvah and the family “went to synagogue on the High Holy Days”, though he’s no longer practising. “I’m not at all religious,” he says. “But culturally [being Jewish] had a profound effect on me, in ways that are so hard to unpick; it’s a big part of my formative years.”
So much so, I am moved to ask if he is considering any projects informed by being Jewish and he reveals he’s been developing an adaptation of Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, a biography of Franz Stangl.
The commandant of the extermination camp Treblinka during the Second World War, Stangl’s story is, Abrahamson says, “an analysis of how it is possible for a relatively ordinary person to do what he did.
“It seems to me the biggest question of all… the capacity of people to become swept along by the ideology of the time.”
It is surely a project that will resonate in today’s climate, given the unsettling rise of the far right. While Abrahamson has other projects on the boil — an American Civil War tale, a biography of boxer Emile Griffith – this feels like a film screaming to be made.
‘The Little Stranger’ opens on September 21.
