Miller’s Girl Writer/Director Jade Halley Bartlett Details the Thriller’s Long Evolution

Writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl is set to hit theaters this weekend, marking the end of a journey that has been more than a decade in the making. The project, which is equal parts uncomfortable romance and thriller, has been a property floating around the industry for years, even being praised back in 2016 as one of the best scripts on Hollywood’s Blacklist of unproduced screenplays. Starring Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega, it’s a film that borrows a number of familiar tropes about romance among power imbalances and turns those tropes on their head. Miller’s Girl lands in theaters on January 26th.

Miller’s Girl is described, “A talented young writer (Jenna Ortega) embarks on a creative odyssey when her teacher (Martin Freeman) assigns a project that entangles them both in an increasingly complex web. As lines blur and their lives intertwine, professor and protégé must confront their darkest selves while straining to preserve their individual sense of purpose and the things they hold most dear.”

ComicBook.com caught up with Bartlett to talk the film’s development, casting the compelling leads, and more.

ComicBook.com: This script, this story, has been kicking around for years. In that time, luckily, our culture has gone through quite a few changes. So for your script, for the story, since those early stages, were there any major changes over the years or is it still pretty much the same story?

Jade Halley Bartlett: It is technically the same story, but you are correct. What changed was my character development. So this was originally a play that I wrote in 2011. Cairo’s journey stays pretty much the same. I knew, when I originally wrote this, that I was going to write about the birth of a villain. I use the word “villain” lightly, but I knew that I wanted her heartbreak to metastasize. She goes through Kafka’s Metamorphosis, right? She’s a bug at the end of the movie, but Me Too happened while I was working on the screenplay. I was really stunned by the fact that I had written not one villain, but two.

Then, the story shifted into the exploration of Jonathan and his hubris and his inability to see himself for what he is. Jonathan’s inability to see himself for what he is is my journey of not having been able to see what he was during the original process. Beatrice, of course, is that voice within me that is like, “My guy…” So that character development did happen, but I think, too, what also happened is that all of the characters in the story, the entire court, is out of order. Nobody really has a leg to stand on, which I think is really exciting. Characters that are more nuanced than those that typically sit in the binary of the trope of this type of movie. 

Well, that’s interesting that you say you’re using the term “villain” lightly, and this being almost the origin story. Looking forward, did you envision an overall trajectory for the character or characters and what the aftermath of this movie and what the rest of their lives would look like? Or were you only interested in this defining chapter in both of their lives?

I was only interested in the defining chapter, I think, and that’s why the movie ends the way it does. I wanted the audience to be left with the same questions about those characters that I had.

Along those lines, over the years, really finding that balance in this movie between being romantic and alluring, yet not romanticizing the situation or sensationalizing what’s going on, how much of that was in the script versus in the tone of how you shot it and how you edited it? Was it everything constantly all the time you were fine-tuning, or did it start in one place?

I don’t know that it was constantly fine-tuned. It was something we were really aware of. I think, typically, with stories like this, this particular trope is usually told by men. This is not told by a man, and so everything is from the female gaze. The movie is from Cairo’s perspective, so I think that if you consider Cairo within this as a Southern Gothic, Cairo is the ghost in this story. Jonathan’s also a ghost, but she’s our main ghost, and she’s grown up basically alone in this mansion in the South. All of the books and movies that she has at her disposal are 18th, 19th, and 20th century, so they’re inherently problematic. She comes into this situation feeling quite unseen, Jonathan also feeling quite unseen. They see each other as artists first, and then they start to see each other as people, and, of course, she romanticizes that.

When I describe this movie, I talk about it as a romantic horror, and I describe it in two acts, because it’s always going to be a play to me. The first act is the romance. It’s Cairo, and we shot it that way, we shot Jonathan from below, so we’re looking up at him the way she does. Then, her heart breaks, because he … by definition, gaslights her. Truly, what he does is reprehensible. Then, it shifts, and so now we’re looking at him from above, so that we’re looking down on him. The first half is the romance, and the second half is the horror. The horror is her turning into a bug. It’s her growing these scales over all of her vulnerability and her heartbeat. 

You had such powerhouse performers with Jenna and Martin. What do you feel that they brought to these characters that you hadn’t entirely anticipated? You know they’re incredibly talented people, but they’re going to bring their own perspective, so how do you feel they really elevated or changed the material in perspective ways?

Everything is three feet off of the ground in this film. It’s too beautiful, nobody talks like that, everything is really heightened. It’s very easy, I think, to lean these characters, any of them, into being really arch or really melodramatic. They both brought such warmth to these characters, such humanity, that I think that really stunned me, because I want this to feel like a dark fairy tale. The heightened nature of it, they were able to make feel so natural, that you get lost in it. 

Also, even though the material is dark, they’re quite charming, which I think also lets you really fall in love with them. Jenna’s a very funny person, and I was just really surprised at the balance, how swiftly she could shift between Cairo’s calcification and her humanity and her warmth. I think Martin is also a terrific comedic actor. All comedy, if you strip away the quips, it’s devastating, so I think being comedic actors in a drama, they were just perfect to bring these characters into a real, relatable humanity. 

I am here with ComicBook.com, I have to look back, I know there was a point where you were attached to a Doctor Strange sequel. I wondered if that was something where there was ever a script? Was it a story pitch? How far into the process did that ever get?

Oh, yeah, pretty far. I was on the project for about a year. I was the first writer in on Doctor Strange 2, and it was really fun. There are two versions. There’s the [Sam] Raimi, Michael Waldron version, which is exquisite, and I love both of them. Then, I was with Scott Derrickson. We developed it for about a year in the room with Kevin [Feige] and Eric [Hauserman Carroll] and Lou [D’Esposito] and Richie [Palmer]. It was Scott and it was really exciting and it was really fun. I still cannot believe I got that job. I don’t know how I got that job. I did get the job. We had a whole draft, and then of course the pandemic happened, which was a nightmare.

I am not allowed to say anything about the draft. I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you anything, but I can tell you that working with them, everybody there really loves their job. They’re so kind and they’re very generous. It was like getting to work with scholars, I guess, scholars of these comic books. So that was really fun. I think I have this giant binder of, I think, every Doctor Strange ever, which is pretty amazing, and it’s in color. They printed it in color, so that was really exciting. 

I appreciate the input and, knowing that you can’t get into the drafts, I’ll put away my bullet points of breaking down your draft to the final version comparison. I’ll save that for another time. But now that you’ve had your directorial debut, you’ve toyed with the big IP, big-budget stuff in your past, is there now a franchise or a big IP like that you would like to venture into? Or has this, Miller’s Girl, unlocked what is definitely more your speed and what you want to stick with?

No, I do consider myself a Southern Gothic writer, so of course there’s a type of movie that I would like to do, but I’m open to big franchises. I think that anybody can put their voice on something. I think my proclivities lean more toward Yorgos Lanthimos or Park Chan-Wook, who are both geniuses. But, gosh, if I was thinking of a franchise, I don’t know. I would like to do something spooky, if there was something ghost-y or southern. 

Miller’s Girl hits theaters on January 26th.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter.