Interview: Here After Director Robert Salerno Talks Supernatural Thriller

ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Here After director Robert Salerno about the supernatural thriller. Starring Connie Britton, Paramount Pictures will release the film in select theaters and on digital starting September 13.

“Connie Britton (Nashville, The White Lotus) stars in this gripping supernatural thriller. Claire Hiller is overjoyed when her daughter Robin is miraculously revived after a fatal accident. But her relief turns to dread as Claire notices changes in her daughter, suspecting something dark has followed her back from the brink of death,” says the synopsis for Here After.

Tyler Treese: You’ve been a producer for a long time, so what about Sarah Conradt’s script really appealed to you, and made you want to get more involved and actually direct Here After?

Robert Salerno: I feel like I started my career wanting to be an actor. That’s where I started early in my twenties and then wound up gravitating to the other side of the camera a bit more and found myself working more in the production side of things and then producing. I was fortunate early on in my career to be producing for some amazing actor-directors with Billy Bob Thornton, Al Pacino. I got a real sense producing for them, kind of watching a lot of the process come together. It’s a really specific experience with an actor-director. Because they’re coming from it from a different place in some ways.

Working so closely with actor directors for so many years, and also at such a young age and having such access to their process on an intimate level, I think, started to forge a way for me as a producer. Working more with auteur filmmakers throughout the years, and also probably being young and not knowing as much… I was starting to just insert myself maybe in places I wouldn’t initially, but got the opportunity to do with youth and an openness for the filmmakers that I was working with. I just feel like over the years working, then also with some first-time filmmakers, I had the great opportunity to help guide them as well, and in some instances, help support them and step in in ways that I think were advantageous to me wanting to pursue directing.

I’d been thinking about it for some time now and felt like it was a pretty organic transition for me. Not acting but being in this other vulnerable place as the filmmaker. I found it a much different experience as a producer in some ways. I found it easier. You’re passionate, and I’m all in for whatever I’m doing as a producer, but for a director, it feels like a much more vulnerable place to be telling a story from your point of view. In a similar way that the actors go through.

So Sarah Conradt’s script I had read a couple of years back and was really drawn toward a lot of what I found. This guilt and repressed feelings that Claire has had for so many years. She’s buried and hidden it. I think this is an extreme, probably the worst-case scenario, but I feel people carry different types of guilt or repressed feelings. It could be in very small ways and minor ways, but even if it is a much smaller incident than portrayed in the film, it still carries something. There is a catharsis that I was interested in finding in this screenplay, in this film, and making the character and making Claire able to come around and see her journey.

The same with Robin, with the young daughter. She had her own repressed feelings and maybe at a much younger age, not even understanding what was repressed, but there’s a little bit of a combination of her being a 16-year-old girl, and also this traumatic experience that they’ve both gone through and nobody has acknowledged or recognized. So coming to the place where we could, where I could examine that a little bit deeper was, I think, initially what drew me to the script and then making my own take into what that all was going to look and feel like.

I love that you mentioned parental guilt because you’re grappling with a lot of heavy themes here, and this winds up being a very spiritual drama. But it does have that frightening premise of the daughter having this near-death experience and just coming back changed. This very easily could have gone down like a much more horror slanted route. I like the way you went with it. How was it finding the balance of grappling with these really heavy themes and then still having that sense of dread that’s throughout, especially in the early portion of Here After?

A lot of the films that I’ve produced fall more into that dramatic category. But I did think there was some opportunity for some bits of tension and fear to portray itself. I think it was an extremely ambitious story to tell, especially for my first film. But it was also something that at the end of it, and at the end of the kind of the heart and soul of it, I think there was a cathartic aspect to what it is to be able to forgive yourself and to come to terms with the past.

I don’t think you ever forget whatever has happened to you in the past, but a way to say that we’re all human, and everybody is really just trying to get through their day and their life. I don’t think anybody really has the answer because I don’t think there is a one-fit answer in our society nowadays. So it’s like allowing everybody to have the feeling of what it is for them that helps move things on.

I loved the actress that plays Robin, Freya Hannan-Mills. She does such a great job. You really found a great young talent there.

Freya was great. She’s from the U.K. and a bit of a newer actress and writer herself. I was really happy with all the casting. There was a whole isolationist aspect to this as well for Claire and her character being an American woman living in Rome in Italy. In some ways, myself as the director directing my first film in Italy. Connie and I were the only Americans in the entire production. So we were also a bit isolated and alienated in some ways with that. So I think was helpful.

Thanks to Robert Salerno for taking the time to talk about Paramount‘s Here After.