‘Heretic’ Directors on the Ending, Casting Hugh Grant as Villain

[This story contains some spoilers to Heretic.]

The heavens have smiled on Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Heretic. 

Critics and audiences are of the belief that their fourth outing as writer-directors is their finest work yet, and it’s been a long time coming considering the Iowa natives’ thought-provoking religious horror movie was conceived before they broke out as the co-writers and originators of A Quiet Place (2018). The film is largely a three-hander between two Mormon missionaries, Sisters Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Paxton (Chloe East), and a potential convert named Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant). Upon entering the Englishman’s home in order to peddle the wares of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the two missionaries soon realize they’ve been ensnared in a terrifying game of wits that is meant to test and contradict their faith.

Knowing that Barnes and Paxton had knocked on the door of a religious scholar, the childhood best friends turned creative partners had to press the pause button and hit the books before expanding on their initial pages.

“We started writing Heretic about 10 years ago, and basically, when we got to the scene where Reed sits down with the two missionaries, we were like, ‘Uh oh, we’re not fluent in Reed’s voice,’” Woods told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of their A24 film’s Nov. 8 wide release. “Every time we’d write a line, we’d have to stop and then go to Wikipedia to research something. It just felt inorganic, and so we did some fun research over the course of 10 years … so that it could be a first language once we got further into writing Reed.”

To play the complex character of Mr. Reed, the duo had only one person in mind, and they applied a full-court press to pull off their dream casting. 

“It was a meticulously planned battle campaign. When we decided that Hugh was the person for this role, we basically called up everyone at CAA, everyone at A24 and anyone we knew who had any connection to Hugh,” Woods recalls. “And we basically asked, ‘Please, please, please. There’s only one person who can play this role. It’s Hugh Grant. Help us get it to him. Please convince him that this is a good project for him.’”

For the role of Sister Barnes, Beck and Woods were already familiar with Thatcher, having co-written and executive produced Rob Savage’s The Boogeyman (2023), which she led. And when it came to Sister Paxton, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans tipped them off to East, who played the devout girlfriend of Spielberg stand-in, Sammy Fabelman. (According to Beck, Spielberg recently relayed a glowing review of Heretic and East’s performance in it.) Thatcher and East also happened to grow up in the Mormon church before exiting early for acting careers, and while their personal backstories factored into their castings, they were by no means the be-all and end-all.

“We kept responding to the truth in their shared experience, and at the end of the day, I suppose it did tip the scale,” Woods says. “But we hesitate to say that because there’s something that feels reductive about that. It almost makes it sound like they were stunt castings and that they weren’t brilliant. But the truth is that they are brilliant actors, and we hope to work with them many times in different roles.”

Below, during their conversation with THR, Beck and Woods also discuss their takeaways after a year of owning a boutique independent cinema called The Last Picture House in Davenport, Iowa. Then they address whether they’d ever launch an effort to finish the directors’ cut of their Adam Driver-led sci-fi vehicle, 65.

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Heretic is currently sporting the best reviews of your directorial careers. Did the stars align throughout the process in ways that were unique from your previous go-rounds? 

SCOTT BECK I have to say this has been the most fulfilling experience we’ve had since we’ve been professionals. It was the combination of working with people as incredible as Hugh Grant and Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher, and then working with such an artist-friendly studio like A24. We also got to work up close with Stacey Sher, one of the producers that we’ve always admired. So I could go on and on about all the insanely creative collaborators that we’ve had on this project, but we also set out to make a movie that was deeply personal in terms of our relationship with the subject matter of belief and disbelief, and what happens when you die. So, after pouring all our neuroses and spilling our guts into this movie, it’s very exciting to see it connect with audiences, to say the least. 

Heretic was announced shortly after 65, so I figured you’d already been working on it a while, but I didn’t realize it actually predates A Quiet Place. Did Mr. Reed’s (Grant) intellect really put you through your paces?

BRYAN WOODS (Laughs) Yeah, we started writing Heretic about 10 years ago … and it just felt inorganic, and so we did some fun research over the course of 10 years by reading interesting thinkers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. It wasn’t rigorous research every night at the library, but we read a lot of atheist thinkers and contemporary philosophers, as well as holy books we’d never read, like the Book of Mormon or the Quran, just so that it could be a first language once we got further into writing Reed. There was an emotional low point that Scott and I hit. We were just going through it in life, which happens sometimes. My dad unexpectedly passed away from cancer and all this other stuff was happening, so we just got to the place where it was time to write the thing about religion that we’d always wanted to write. It was time to express all of our fears and anxiety about what happens when you die and the mystery of death. So that’s where it came from, and once we sat down to write the script in earnest, it just poured out of us.

You guys always have compelling hooks in your work. They’re usually premise-based, like an astronaut crash landing on prehistoric Earth, or a family surviving in silence among sound-hunting aliens. In this case, it’s the implication of a blueberry pie-scented candle.

BECK and WOODS (Laugh)

How did that materialize?

BECK We wanted to swing in the opposite direction of A Quiet Place and 65, two films that are void of dialogue, and are, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, straightforward thrillers. For Heretic, it was all about, how we could weaponize dialogue and ideas about theology to create something that hopefully feels as scary as A Quiet Place? It was also about how weird we could be with it. It’s been funny to see how A24 has latched onto the blueberry pie from a marketing perspective, but putting in the board games like Monopoly and speaking about ideas of iteration and how Radiohead, Lana Del Rey and the Hollies all have iterations of each other’s songs. So it’s a barometer of our taste. We absolutely adore every single film in Francois Truffaut’s filmography, but we also are students of Dennis Dugan’s filmography as well. There’s this wild spectrum of movies that we absolutely adore. 

WOODS Heretic is the marriage of lowbrow and highbrow, at least that was the intention.

Did you send the script to Hugh Grant’s agent on a lark just to see what would happen? 

WOODS It was a meticulously planned battle campaign. When we decided that Hugh was the person for this role, we basically called up everyone at CAA, everyone at A24 and anyone we knew who had any connection to Hugh. And we basically asked, “Please, please, please. There’s only one person who can play this role. It’s Hugh Grant. Help us get it to him. Please convince him that this is a good project for him.” And that’s a risky move to take because if Hugh says no, we can’t go back to those 20 people and go, “Just kidding about Hugh. Actually, this person over here was the only person who could play the role.” So you can only do that once, but we just felt so strongly that it had to be Hugh, especially after revisiting all of his work in the last 10 years and this character actor journey that he’s been on, starting with Cloud Atlas to playing an Oompa-Loompa in Wonka. The bizarre risks that he’s taking are insane and really inspiring. 

I assume you cast Sophie Thatcher on the heels of watching a cut of The Boogeyman, which you co-wrote and executive produced. But did you both walk out of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans with Chloe East in mind for Sister Paxton?

BECK We did. Chloe East was so unshakeable of an idea after we saw The Fabelmans, and it’s funny that there’s a correlation between her playing a religious character in that film and now this film. She was so genuine and authentic as a human being, and she brought that onto screen, so it became this idea that we were chasing and we kept bringing her back for callbacks and matching her with other people. So it absolutely connected for us. We haven’t mentioned this to anybody outside of our parents, but we got the ultimate compliment yesterday. Steven Spielberg called up our producer Stacey Sher, and he had watched Heretic, in part because he had cast Chloe in The Fabelmans and he wanted to see where she had gone in her career. And he adored her performance [as Sister Paxton]. He also adored the movie. So it was one of those moments where you see the master at work and you try to pull somebody from his orbit into your movie, and then it came full circle when we got that call yesterday.

Sisters Barnes and Paxton are Mormon missionaries, and Sophie and Chloe both spent their youths in the Mormon Church before leaving early for acting. How much did their shared backgrounds tip the scale? 

WOODS A lot and not at all. I say not at all because we weren’t consciously trying to find people who were Mormon to play Mormons. Our goal is always to find the best actors to represent the characters in terms of their skillset and what they’re bringing to the table. But part of the reason we kept calling them back is because there was an authenticity in their portrayal. Chloe could access this Utah missionary accent, and not only could she access it, she knows it. It’s a truth that she knows from growing up and being surrounded by Mormons and missionary friends. So we kept responding to the truth in their shared experience, and at the end of the day, I suppose it did tip the scale. But we hesitate to say that because there’s something that feels reductive about that. It almost makes it sound like they were stunt castings and that they weren’t brilliant. But the truth is that they are brilliant actors, and we hope to work with them many times in different roles.

The question of where Mr. Reed ends and the two of you begin is probably on some people’s minds. 

BECK and WOODS (Laugh)

Of course, I’m referring to the several valid points he makes and not his sheer insanity. So how much overlap is there?

BECK I think there’s as much overlap between us and Mr. Reed as there is with probably anyone who’s watching the movie and starting to nod their head. If you look at the history of even cult leaders like Keith Raniere — or you could argue, L. Ron Hubbard — these are charismatic leaders that do make certain points. Now, they also get a lot of things wrong, but there’s a standpoint at which you could argue religion can be both good and bad. It’s all about the argument that’s being made; is it infringing on other people’s beliefs or their rights? I think Mr. Reed has a lot of valid opinions and a lot of valid thoughts about deconstructing things that we take for granted or deconstructing religion. So there is a lot of carryover, but it’s also emblematic of many conversations that Bryan and I have had over the years. It’s about investigating why we, as a civilization, come to our certain conclusions about religion.

WOODS Often, villains are hard to connect with. James Bond villains who want to take over the whole world are not really relatable, but the most compelling villains are when you see a part of yourself in them. So we were definitely excited to put a lot of our thoughts and feelings into his mouth, but to be honest, we put a lot of our thoughts and feelings into the missionaries’ mouths, as well. We’re all over the place. There’s a line in the movie, “The more you know, the less you know,” and the older we get, we find ourselves gravitating to the philosophy that life is a mystery. And what happens when we die is the greatest mystery, but there’s something beautiful in not knowing. There’s something beautiful in the pursuit of the truth of knowing, while also embracing the fact that you won’t know until it’s too late.

If you couldn’t clear the Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe” and that acoustic version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” what was your backup plan to illustrate iteration in music? 

WOODS There was no backup plan! We were terrified. When we wrote that scene, we were elated and so proud of it, but then that feeling was instantly followed by: “This will never get off the page. We will never get Monopoly cleared. We will never be able to air Radiohead’s dirty laundry.” So it became a depressing moment, and that’s where you pick up the phone and you ask Stacey Sher, the producer of Pulp Fiction, to please help produce this movie with us. We asked her to help us do what felt like the impossible, which was get all of these pop cultural touchstones into the movie. So there was absolutely no backup, and we were sweating it even up until three weeks ago. There was some last-minute wrangling with rights.

BECK We kept making sure, from a legal standpoint, that everything was tied up. Bryan and I were very incessant about that. Without that example in the middle of the movie, there was no real way for Reed to get across his point.

So you didn’t tell your music supervisor to have Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” and Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” waiting in the wings?

BECK (Laughs) That would certainly make a valid alternative version. I’d love to see and hear Reed start to sing some of Vanilla Ice’s lyrics.

Did any of your Iowa friends try to convince you to include Slipknot’s “The Heretic Anthem” from their record Iowa? 

BECK (Laughs) It absolutely came up in conversation, yes. We love bringing in anybody from our home state, as much as we can.

The final scene created a lot of debate after my screening since it connects to a theory mentioned in the movie. Is this ending meant to be the Beck and Woods’ version of Inception’s spinning top? 

BECK Yeah …

WOODS The fact that there was debate in your screening, that’s what we’re going for, and that’s so exciting to hear. I don’t know if it’s the spinning top, but I do understand the comparison. There’s a validity to it. One of the pieces of work that we were inspired by was David Mamet’s Oleanna, which is about gender dynamics in the university climate. I don’t know if this is true; I wasn’t there when that play was performed in New York, but the legend is that people would get into fights as they were leaving the theater. Now, I don’t think that Heretic is that explosive. It’s probably not, because Scott and I can’t take the Iowa nice out of ourselves. It’s not true to us. We have a lot of empathy for all of the characters in this movie, oddly. But the sense of debate and the sense of conversation on the way out of the theater is what we were driving towards. What we’re critiquing in the film is, if anything, not necessarily belief or disbelief, but certainty. It’s the idea that, “I know what the one true religion is, and you’re wrong,” or, “I know that there is no [one true] religion, and you’re crazy.” That idea of certainty is what we’re trying to put under a microscope.

BECK It’s been really exciting to hear from people that have actually now seen the movie a couple of times, and even in the short span that they’ve had to sit with the movie, they have an evolving point of view. I’ll never tell you what it is, but we have a very specific point of view of what the ending is. But five years from now, we may have an evolved perspective of what we actually feel, and that’s the relationship that many people have when speaking about the idea of atheism to staunch conviction of one’s belief. It can be an ever-evolving relationship.

I must add that there was a lot of debate as we were stuffing our faces with the blueberry pastries that were served to us afterwards. They called it a “multi-sensory experience.”

BECK (Laughs) That’s great. The only thing better would be Taco Bell.

How did the end credits’ generative AI disclaimer come to be?

BECK Adding a generative AI disclaimer is our statement of despair of the current artistic climate. The acceleration of AI technology has been breakneck, and the unbridled abuse of generative AI is terrifying. Not only are we concerned for the amount of jobs that generative AI is replacing, or the unchecked theft of intellectual property, but the current use of the tech threatens the very soul of human artistry. It’s easy for people to grasp the importance of protecting human truth in journalism, but what about human truth in art? We’ve read so many comments from supporters of generative AI who use the technology to make films or images, and the irony is many of them are pursuing a career in the arts. I’m not sure they realize they’re a snake eating their own tail. 

BECK We were listening to one of our favorite movie podcasts, The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, the other day. It was the one where Bret interviewed Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. And there was this insane moment where Bret is talking about a film he’s directing, and how his FX team couldn’t design a creature that he liked, and so he spent five minutes using generative AI to automate a design he was happy with and gave it to the crew to replicate. And Tarantino and Avary didn’t really pushback, they just kind of moved past it. That’s absolutely crazy to us. That’s stolen work as far as we’re concerned, since generative AI is just using other people’s artwork and smashing it together. And how humiliating must that be for the artists working on the film, to be handed something that was created by an algorithm and be told to match that. Our hope would be that powerful voices like Tarantino and Ellis would be speaking out against this kind of stuff. And we say that with love, because we want the future of brilliant voices like theirs to flourish and not be automated. Maybe it’s just not a topic those three have thought much about. So that’s why we have a disclaimer. People need to start thinking about it.

The Last Picture House, your movie theater in Davenport, Iowa. How’s that side of the coin been treating you?

BECK It’s been great. We’ve had our cinema open for almost a year come Thanksgiving, and it’s a wild ride, to say the least. We thought we knew the film business as filmmakers, but as exhibitors, it’s the Wild West in a really exciting way. You certainly still feel the ups and downs of the strikes and their fallout on the line of movies, but some of the smaller movies are the ones that are really engaging audiences. Earlier this year, we had so many packed houses for a movie like Late Night with the Devil. We’ve got a rooftop component that’s open during the summer, and we screen so many different classics. So, for people whose relationship with movies as of late has usually just been sitting at home and streaming, it’s rekindling the communal aspect of moviegoing, which was the goal of this experiment to open up a movie theater. So we couldn’t be more excited, but it certainly adds more stress to us. Now, we’re looking at the release schedule of movies down the pipeline and trying to figure out which ones are going to really connect with an audience. But we’re just incredible believers in the cinema-going experience. It’s a shared communal moment of experiencing something on screen, and it’s something that we factored and injected into the design of Heretic and all our movies.

WOODS It’s the reason why theatrical movies still create cultural moments in a way that streaming movies haven’t, no matter how many people see them. They, oddly, struggle to create a cultural moment and a big conversation that brings everybody together. So cinema-going is a beautiful thing.

BECK Hugh Grant is such a believer in the theatrical experience. He keeps telling us we need to open a Last Picture House in London because one of his favorite theaters around the block closed. He’s somebody that still loves going to the cinema, and he loves when things are projected on 35 millimeter, just hearkening back to something tangible and real. We’ve seen so many ups and downs in the movie industry. Even if you look back over the last hundred years, it’s always going through these weird cycles, and we believe we’re in one of those moments right now. But much like Heretic, we can’t believe that with conviction; it’s just with instinct.

I just spoke to Kevin Smith about his New Jersey movie theater, and part of the reason he bought it, besides preserving his childhood stomping ground, was that it was a free filming location. So he made a movie there called The 4:30 Movie, which is his Fabelmans. Have you written your theater into any scripts yet as a filming location?

BECK You’re giving us a great idea now. It’s certainly come in handy. When we were in post on Heretic, we had a very, very intimate friends and family screening of an early cut of at the theater. It’s very different to do it there, versus just screening it for somebody in their living room. You feel the palpable tension or the laughter from the dark humor, and that’s irreplaceable. That’s something that we feel very adamant about. But, no, we actually haven’t written it into a script, and now, all of a sudden, we’re like, “Why haven’t we thought of that? It’s the obvious thing.”

WOODS It’s ironic because [The Last Picture House] used to be an old warehouse, and we used to shoot all of our little student films there when we were running around as 16 year olds in Iowa. So it is a hallowed ground for us as far as making movies.

I’ve always been fascinated by the filmmaker community’s support for one another, particularly through note-giving during post. I actually spoke to Chris Stuckmann earlier this year about how you both offered him notes on a rough cut of his directorial debut, Shelby Oaks. The two of you also had quite the note network on Heretic, so what were your overall takeaways from their feedback?

WOODS We were incredibly lucky to have some of our favorite filmmakers give us feedback on Heretic. Some of it was through chance. David Lowery had been giving us advice on remote editing using Adobe Premiere, our preferred format which so few filmmakers use. On a whim, we asked if he’d be willing to look at a cut, and his response to the film was so damn warm and uplifting. He had some great feedback about keeping the tension up and not letting the air out with too much broad humor. In other instances, our amazing producer Stacey Sher got the film in front of some of our childhood heroes. Steven Soderbergh and editors Pietro Scalia and Fred Raskin all had fascinating ideas to try in tweaking the third act, and we took every last note we got. When you get deep into the process, it’s so much easier to see your film through somebody else’s eyes.

I remain curious about the 110-minute director’s cut of 65. Is it ever going to screen at The Last Picture House? WOODS We would love to share that one day. I don’t want to say never, but it’s something we think a lot about. That movie was near and dear to our hearts.

BECK It’s a question of whether it needs to be Zack Snyder’d a little bit with some money for visual effects and to do certain things that weren’t in the final version. So that’s a great question. It’s something we and Adam [Driver] had a lot of love for, but I don’t know. It’s a big question mark right now.

You already had Heretic in your back pockets during our 65 interview, so is the next thing already in your back pockets, as well? 

BECK We’ve got five things in our pockets right now, but the thing that we’re excited about is just original filmmaking. We just love going into the unknown and not necessarily stepping into existing material, as much as we are audiences for those movies. But it ranges. There’s a spiritual sequel to Heretic in terms of a piece that dives into material that might be even more divisive for audiences. But there’s also this huge science-fiction idea that we’ve been sitting with for 10 or 12 years now, and that idea won’t go away. We just love swinging into different sides of the industry pendulum, going from A Quiet Place, this small contained horror idea, to 65, which is bigger, but then swinging so far in the opposite direction with verbose dialogue and something really performance centric. So we might swing in the opposite direction now.

WOODS We love a challenge as filmmakers. We also love to challenge the audience and to see what’s possible. It’s an exciting and scary place to be. Sometimes, you’re lucky to pull it off and connect, and then sometimes you just faceplant. But we’re happy to faceplant if it’s in the pursuit of something interesting.

***Heretic is now playing in movie theaters.