Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies, Sony | Tagged: exclusive, Fivel Stewart, interview, Iris Kim, Sandra Oh, sony

Umma Director Iris Shim Talks Mother-Daughter Horror Film & Sandra Oh

It's often a generational fear that the young don't want to end up like their parents, and that is the case literally in the Sony horror film Umma, which translates from Korean as "Mother." The film follows Amanda (Sandra Oh), a mother, and her daughter (Fivel Stewart). They live quietly on an American farm when the past catches up with the mother in the form of the life she left behind from her late Korean mother cursed from the effects she left behind. I spoke to writer and director Iris Shim about the inspiration of the film, her own influences, and Oh and Stewart's chemistry.

"Really, what I was trying to do is draw upon my own experiences in terms of grappling with identity," Shim said. "I think that's a big theme in the movie, but the central theme is the mother-daughter relationship and the fear of becoming your mother. That's something that I think is very kind of universal, even it's not specific to any one sort of culture or country. It's definitely a fear that I think most women have." When casting for Amanda, the director had her own doubts about landing the 12-time Emmy nominee and Killing Eve star.

"I think Sandra could honestly do anything, but I hadn't really seen her doing any genre before, so I wasn't sure that she would be open to this kind of project," Shim said. "When I wrote the script, I really had her in mind. I wasn't sure if we'd ever be able to actually get her attached, but it was something that I really thought about a lot. When we were able to get the project to her, she really responded in the sense that she was very interested in exploring characters that layered in their ethnicity without it being necessarily the sort of the focal point of their character's journey. So I think the timing was really good in terms of this is the kind of role that she was looking for."

Shim broke down the process of casting Amanda's daughter and found the perfect pairing in the Atypical star. "Working with the two of them was really amazing," she said. "Once we got Sandra attached, we did some chemistry reads with other actors. From the get-go, it was clear that not only was Fivel a great actor on her own, that the two of them did have the sort of natural chemistry together. As we had a little bit of time before we actually started to prep in Sandra and Fivel, they made sure that they spent some time together to get to really know each other so that they could build their own relationship that could then translate organically onto the screen. I was very lucky that they really wanted to do that work and form their own relationship before we started shooting."

One such inspiration that helped drive Umma was a 2010 Darren Aronofsky film. "There were definitely some psychological horror movies that I was drawing upon something like 'Black Swan' is a movie that I love that is so much about a character losing her own identity and in losing their mind," Shim said. "That was something that I thought about a lot in developing the story and in making the movie focusing on this character who felt like she was losing control of herself through her mother's spirit, invading her persona. Movies like 'Gray Gardens' were something that I thought about a lot about this mother-daughter dynamic that is very codependent on each other." Produced by Sam Raimi, Umma also stars MeeWha Alana Lee, Tom Yi, Odeya Rush, and Dermot Mulroney and comes exclusively to theaters on March 18th.

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