Kate Siegel Tells Us What She Learned as a First-Time Director

You probably know the famous Seinfeldquote, "I gotta focus. I'm shifting into soup mode." Well, that's me—but with horror, especially when October rolls around and all the best movies finally hit the big screens. Everyone, quiet. I'm shifting into scary mode.

If we're lucky, every year, one of those movies is a new entry in the V/H/S anthology series, which always brings a diverse group of writers, directors, and actors together to come up with twisted new stories, almost always in analog form and often following found footage rules.

This time, it's V/H/S Beyond, and all the segments get a sci-fi twist, which means alien invasions and abductions galore.

One segment is called "Stowaway," directed by Kate Siegel from a script by Mike Flanagan. It stars Alanah Pearce as an intrepid filmmaker trying to find proof of extraterrestrial life.

We spoke with Siegel and Pearce ahead of the film's premiere and learned this was the perfect space for both of them to play around creatively and learn new things about their crafts. Siegel, who stars often in Flanagan's works as an actor, stepped behind the camera for the first time, while Pearce took on a role that required more physicality than she was used to.

Their experiences can teach us a ton, so let's dive right in.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Editor's note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

No Film School: Can you walk us through how you prepped for your project?

Kate Siegel: When I'd had a series of conversations with the V/H/S team, and I finally got the green light on the "Stowaway" treatment, the first thing I did was gather image references. Before even the script was done, I had an idea of what the story was, and so I went mostly on Pinterest and then that would send me down NASA website rabbit holes and film stills and film references.

Once I received the script, I went into storyboarding. I literally just printed out, I think it was comic book pages or some free template of storyboards, and I would just draw. I wanted it to feel free and playful because I was very intimidated by the process. I was very intimidated by being a "director." I had never done this before. I had never picked up a camera before, and every director I tried to talk to about it said, "I don't know. It's just every process is different." They're like, "You'll find your way."

So I was like, all right. I thought about my process in acting, which always starts with goofiness and play. So I got out my daughter's stamps. She has a space-themed rubber stamp set. I got out some colored pencils, and I started printing out pictures of Alanah from Instagram, and I would put Alanah in a drawing—

Alanah Pearce: I forgot you did that.

Kate SiegelPhoto by Sela Shiloni

Siegel: And I just made them all this kind of bizarre arts and crafts thing. I color these wild sunsets in the desert, just to remind myself I wanted color, and it was so free. And then I started distilling it.

And what I ended up doing was arts and crafting pieces of the script, like important moments. And I would paste that in the middle of the storyboard, and then I would draw and craft around it until I had the whole thing storyboarded. The script was 21 pages, the storyboard was 17 pages.

And from that, I started working on prep with Michael Fimognari. I delivered him the storyboard. I would take this binder around. I gave one to Josh Goldblum so he could show department heads, and they would come to me with questions, or I'd go to my DP, Michael Fimognari, and we would talk about it. And then we got into shot listing, which we did with full overheads, and we would talk through every moment.

We had talked about it a lot back and forth, back and forth, and this was around the time where we started coming up with the ideas for all the infrared and shooting entirely in infrared.
And when we discovered the existence of a Trinity head and how that worked and how we could do that, and some of the solves for gravity just in me and Fimognari going back and forth and me talking about how I didn't need to see all of Alanah float. I just needed to see a piece of her float out of frame.

Eventually, we ended up on stages, and they're building our set down below on the big stage, and Michael and I are up in this little office, and we would go down and we would dance the dance. I would be Alanah and Michael would be the camera, and Michael would do this with a iPhone or sometimes just his own head.

And I would scurry into a little hole, and we'd talk about what we'd see, and then we'd run back upstairs and he'd put it into his computer while I frantically answered the 17 questions that came up from then. "What was the dinosaur going to look like? What animals were in the ship? What is this? What is that?"

And that went for two weeks. Then we had to do a bunch of scouts for our Joshua Tree location. We ended up getting a different place closer to LA. And then we started including Alanah, where Alanah started dancing the dance. And this is when we start shooting. So that's basically the shortest answer to the process.

The closer you get to day one of filming, the more it's just a million questions in a row. This or that, that or this? How does this look? Where do you want that, this? And so I started alone with me and my arts and crafts, and I ended up just in a constant interrogation of people and questions.

I always thought of myself as [that] I held the story from A to B to C like a football, and I had to run through fire, and my only job was to make sure every shot was telling the story.

"Stowaway" from V/H/S BEYONDCourtesy of Shudder

NFS: Alanah, what did it look like for you?

Pearce: Well, Kate asked me to be a part of the movie, and I said, "Are you sure? Okay, yeah, let's do it." And then she sent over the script, and so I read through.

My immediate response was, "How the hell are we going to make this?" Because reading all of the direction in the latter half of the script, I just could not picture what it was going to look like, which was really exciting to me.

I think one of the best ways to start any creative endeavor is that question: "How the hell are we going to make this?" It's such an exciting space to play around in. I asked Kate for a meeting before I started thinking about how I was going to approach playing the character. I wanted to ask her the questions I asked, which were, "What are you trying to say? What do you want people to take from this? What do you think the most important beats are for the character?"

It's a great script, obviously written by Mike Flanagan, who is very good at what he does. So everything that I needed really was in those pages. And then it was figuring out how to put bits of myself into some of those moments and think about the human reaction and the desperation that she has and how I can apply that to things that I've been through, which was actually very easy.

I think even though we go into space, it's a pretty crazy sci-fi story, there are a lot of very relatable things that the character goes through. Trying to prove yourself, stubbornly, defiantly against people who doubt you is something that I think everybody deals with, even on a macro level. So it wasn't difficult for me to find ways to put myself in there.

A little bit of what I delved into is conspiracy theorists and how they become that way. I actually looked up a YouTube interview with psychologists talking about conspiracy theorists who concluded that they are just people who are trying to feel special, in a lot of cases. People who get very far on that spectrum are just people who are trying to find a way to feel special, which we all are really. It's a survival instinct, right? ... So much of that is obviously extrapolated and expanded onto a very high, disturbing degree in this movie, but it's at its core, really, really human thing, and it was the easiest option for me when performing to think about the macro.

"Stowaway" from V/H/S BEYONDCourtesy of Shudder

"I am just trying to prove myself. I am just trying to tell people that the thing that I've been telling them this whole time is important, and I'm willing to sacrifice everything to prove that, to prove that I'm right about something, which is really just about feeling special."

So it made more sense for me to focus on that regular boring human reality than to focus on aliens specifically.

From there, we start shooting, and it was a really, really fun experience with a lot of, like Kate touched on, a lot of dancing with our director of photography, Michael Fimognari. We're trying to figure out, "Okay, I need you to be looking this way when I put my finger up here, and if you have your hand too far away, it will look like it's coming in from the outside."

And so much of that in the fact that the character is supposed to be holding the camera when, in fact, he was holding the camera or someone else was camera operating. Seeing how it felt on the day.

And that was a challenge that I actually didn't expect beforehand. I have a background in reporting, so I can remember a script really, really easily, and I found that easy to do, except when I added motion, which is something that I didn't expect going into this. I could recite you the monologue while sitting, but when I also had to move and act or have to add in the steps of what me and Michael Fimognari were doing walking around, that became a lot harder.

So I know now that if I do something like this again, I will prepare the lines in motion, in that I will do it while playing a video game or while cooking or while going for a walk. ... "Okay, yeah, next time maybe I'll do some boxing while saying my lines or something, if it's a bunch of physicality."

"Stowaway" from V/H/S BEYONDCourtesy of Shudder

NFS: Especially now that you have experience on both sides of the camera, do you have advice for how a beginning director can best interact with talent?

Siegel: I think the answer to that is you must be very careful about who you pick, because once you're on set, you're stuck, right? You're going to deal with whatever's in front of you, and unfortunately, everyone's way of dealing will be different.

I do think all directors should take an acting class. I think it's worth it. Just learn the language, see how hard it is to do certain things, try that point of view.

When you have the privilege of getting auditions or a meeting, you want to make sure you talk to your actor about how they work and how they communicate. There are people who want to be treated gently and protected. There are people who want to have birds thrown at them. All actors are going to want to do this differently. And so there's a certain level of intimacy to that.

I think my piece of advice would be it's all about the preparation. Take an acting class and talk to your actors.

Pearce: From my perspective, working with Kate versus working with directors that I was a lot less comfortable with and thus had much worse performance with—it was comfort. So I wasn't worried that I would be embarrassed or that I would be judged or that I would look silly.

In fact, Kate told me to do the silly take. Kate was like, "No, do the silly thing. Be silly." So having the freedom to explore and to not be actually conscious of doing something wrong I think was the most freeing thing for me and the most beneficial thing for my performance.

[There are] other experiences I've had where I feel like directors were so specific about me only doing one thing, and their feedback could often be so pointed and specific that it was robotic. I wasn't getting notes that would be along the lines of, "Think about how you're feeling," or "Think about the gravity of this situation," or relate to the words that you are saying.

They would instead say, "Say it this way." The thing that made Kate so easy to work under was freedom and total lack of judgment. I don't have a ton of experience compared to a lot of people who would take roles like this, and no one ever treated me that way, which was really, really nice. I never felt like I needed to prove myself to anybody in the room. So it was understanding freedom to be silly, to have the bad take, and for that to just be a thing that we do and for nobody to care about it. I think [it] was the best circumstance that I ever could have asked for.

Siegel: The silly takes, they're so helpful, because you almost never use them for the lines. Actors will just, as they should, not be thinking about what's right or wrong. All of the silence and connective tissues in those moments are so usable. How they feel about what they're doing and they're really thinking, it's totally fresh. They're trying to decide, "What is the silliest way to do this," or things like that, or a little smile that you would never expect. You just had so much fun watching her do those silly takes.

"Stowaway" from V/H/S BEYONDCourtesy of Shudder

NFS: I did want to touch quickly on post, Kate, because my friend Kelli did your color. Did you learn anything from that?

Siegel: I really did. I mean, I learned something from everything. I'd never done any of this before.

I learned that after your first assembly in the edit, I mean, I sobbed like a child. I was so sure that I had ruined [it], I had directed so badly they weren't going to let me act again. It's so bad that I was going to be removed from all of it. And I called up some of my favorite director friends of mine, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, oh yeah, first assembly makes you want to kill yourself."

And I was like, "Okay, okay, here we go. I'll go from there." So everything was brand new. I would go to do something, for example, color, and I would say, "Hey, Mike Flanagan"—because I live with somebody who has so much experience—I go, "What is color? What's that?" And he would walk me through it and he would say, "Colorists are artists, too."

I would say that's the thing I take away from all of it, was that everybody I encountered in post, even though they're doing a more technological aspect of that, they're artists. And so I didn't need to have all of the expertise. I just needed to speak to them, and I would speak to them emotionally.

I was like, "I want to feel more vulnerable in this moment. I need it to feel a little harder for her to understand what's going on." Also, I would say things like, "Her socks are too white. Can we un-white the socks for the love of God?" And so you just talk to them like artists. I got the results I wanted without coming across as sort of like a pompous fool who read a couple of Wikipedia articles on color.

NFS: Is there any other advice that you would offer an aspiring filmmaker?

Pearce: I feel this way about all kinds of creation. Just do it. I made a short several years ago that's not very good, but I wanted to do it. I wanted to direct something myself. it was just one person. One location. We had no budget. So I just wanted to do it.

And I think a lot of people stop themselves from creating, or from beginning to create because they're worried about being bad. You don't get good until you're bad first. There's so much fear in failing, but you have to fail to get good. Any kind of thing that you want to create. Whether you want to be a YouTuber, which everybody does these days, or you want to be a filmmaker, you want to be the next Scorsese.

You have to be willing to just make the thing. You don't actually need to go to school first. I am not going to tell you not to study, but everyone has an iPhone now. You can absolutely shoot something in HD over a weekend with your friends.

I did this not long ago. We had a long weekend, and I asked five friends to come to an Airbnb with me where one of them had a camera, one of them had a microphone. Two of us were writing, and we had an actor. We just made something that nobody will ever see because it doesn't matter if it's good, it matters that you had the experience of making it.

And you can only learn what you're good at when you're doing it. So much of your career is built on just having done it. And nobody can take it away from you, and you don't need anyone's approval to do it. I don't mean to be the Nike tick, but really just do it. Just start doing it. Don't wait. You have nothing to wait for. It doesn't have to be good. Stop waiting for it to be good. You don't need the perfect script. Just make the thing.

Siegel: Just make the thing.