It’s rare to come across a ghost story-turned-psychological thriller, that highlights the implications of class for both the one percent, and the working poor in America. The Maid’s Room does just this, as a dark, slow-burning, film that haunts the viewer, even as it raises questions about our [mis]understandings of “the other.” Director Michael Walker embraces the uncanny in his plot (it could even be argued that there are some Turn of the Screw parallels to the film), which revolves around a vulnerable maid (Paula Garcés) who witness a crime in the Hamptons home where she works. Paste caught up with Walker to talk comedy versus thriller, the genesis of The Maid’s Room, and never coming clean.
Paste Magazine: When we first set up this interview, I hadn’t realized that you also directed Price Check. I love that movie!
Michael Walker: Oh, great!
Paste: And now you’re back to making psychological thrillers. Could you talk a little about moving from one genre to the next? Do you have a preference between comedies, and suspenseful, darker films?
Walker: I like doing both. I actually just directed a short comedy. Comedies are probably more fun to do, in a way. But with both of them you concentrate on the acting. With comedy, you can’t have quite as much fun with the camera that you can have when you get into a psychological drama. That’s the only real difference.
Making Price Check was just so fun, and Parker Posey was so funny and great.
Paste: She was hilarious.
Walker: Spending time with all of those actors was wonderful, but with Maid’s Room there were only a few of us, and it was much tougher to shoot.
Paste: Our editor was a big fan of The Shield, so I know he’d definitely want me to ask you about working with Paula Garcés. How did she end up playing Drina?
Walker: She auditioned, and she was just incredible. She was just right on. It happens every once in a while, where you just get a great audition from someone. She based Drina on her grandmother a little bit, and she had an accent that she had prepared that was partly based on a friend of hers, who had grown up in New York, but still had a little bit of a Colombian accent.
She was just right there, emotionally. And working with her was also great. She was very professional, and I couldn’t have gotten through the film without her. We focus so much on her, and she’s so vulnerable throughout so much of it.
Paste: I was on your blog earlier, and saw that you started the draft for The Maid’s Room ten years ago.
Walker: Yes, I think I got the copyright in 2003.
Paste: That’s amazing.
Walker: It was much more of a ghost story at first. Over the years it was optioned around. At one stage, it looked like it was going to happen for a much bigger budget, but then that sort of fell apart. I kept working on it, and I worked on other things. I wrote Price Check, and directed it. And as I worked on it, I took out certain aspects of the ghost story—like actually seeing the ghosts—and it just became more interesting.
Paste: That makes sense. There’s such a haunting quality to so much of the film. Do you remember the first scene you wrote?
Walker: I remember there was one scene where they actually saw the ghost of Drina, but ghost stories are really about what you don’t see. So I tried to create the feeling of the character after she’s gone. All of it sort of gives you the unsettling feeling that she’s still around.
Paste: The father/son dynamic is also important in The Maid’s Room. I really like that one scene where Bill Camp’s character is passing on his own father’s advice to his son: “Never confess.”
Walker: Yes, “Never come clean!”
Paste: That’s right, “Never come clean!”
Walker: (laughs) My Dad actually said that line to me. I think we were talking about Bill Clinton when he said it.
Paste: (laughs) Wow, that’s great!
Walker: I always liked the expression.
Paste: Well, that explains some things. How did you approach the relationship between Mr. Crawford and Brandon?
Walker: Mr. Crawford is a self-made man, and he expects a lot. So he puts a lot of pressure on this kid. For Brandon, there are a lot of decisions that are being made for him in his life. And he really doesn’t know how to navigate the world, even though he’s probably a smart kid. He’s a mama’s boy, and he’s just very afraid of his Dad. When this terrible thing happens, all he wants is his father’s respect, but this is just another big screw-up. So he’s caught bridging the gap between what he knows is right and wrong, and what his parents have always told him is right and wrong.
Paste: There’s also this implied sexual tension between Brandon and Drina. In your original drafts, was it ever more explicit?
Walker: Yes, it used to be more about those two. Before it was a feature, it started out as a short. And I was really interested in exploring their relationship. First of all, there’s an 18 year-old boy, and there’s a pretty woman living in his house. He’s not going to ignore that. And he’s young, so he’s probably not as aware of all of the class issues there. The maids and the kids often have a unique relationship, partly because the kids spend more time with them than they do their own parents. Whenever the sexual tension comes up between them, there are all of these other obstacles that come up.
Paste: Do you have any upcoming projects that we can look out for?
Walker: I have a short film that’ll come out soon, and I have a fun slasher movie that I’m just now starting to send out. It’s about an actress who gets a job on a slasher film, and it turns out the crew is really killing them. (laughs) So hopefully I can shoot that next year.
Paste: I’m looking forward to it. Thanks so much for this.
Walker: Thank you.
Shannon M. Houston is Assistant TV Editor at Paste, and a New York-based freelance writer with probably more babies than you. You can follow her on Twitter.