Featuring Elisabeth Moss as a down-on-her-luck actress and Kate Hudson as the super-glamorous CEO of a wellness company who might be guarding a huge secret, they get swapped Witty quips. Add a new follower with long hair. Plus some retro energy from the likes of Kaia Gerber (saturday night, royal palm hotel), Arian Moyed (succession), Heim (Licorice Pizza) and Elizabeth Berkeley (showgirl, saved by bell). Director Max Minghella then mixes it all into a 100-minute self-aware genre film with a mash-up of horror, thriller, fun and wild abandon. what you get is shellwhich had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival’s special screening lineup.
Moss and Minghella hope his second feature as a director will be a “dark comedy and body horror about society’s obsession with youth and beauty” that will give viewers a roller-coaster ride. “One of Max and my goals was to make something fun and make something fun,” the star told THR During her brief break from filming The Final Season this The Handmaid’s Tale In Toronto. “People sometimes need a little break and just want to go to a movie and be entertained. But this is really well-made entertainment.
The director agrees with this. “I’m excited to make a real popcorn movie for audiences,” Minghella said THRshared that his mother often told him bedtime stories that included plots from movies she had seen while working for the British Board of Film Classification. “They were making a very special kind of film during that time,” he said. “So this movie is a love letter to studio filmmaking of that period.”
The two creatives have been acting opposite each other The Handmaid’s Tale I have enjoyed the changes in work dynamics over the years shell. “We are very accustomed to working together because The Handmaid’s Taleeven though I was the director and executive producer, it felt very collaborative,” Moss shared. “We were used to talking about scenes, scripts and shots.” Minghella was ultimately responsible for shell“There’s definitely a lot of trust there,” she added. “He gave me a lot of confidence to try different things. I could step outside my box a little bit. We transitioned into this different relationship really easily.
Minghella found the experience “very energizing for both of us” and called Moss and her “innate” talent a “filmmaker’s dream.” He also emphasized: “We had a very challenging schedule for this film, and she was able to deliver these extraordinary performances so quickly and with such precision.”
Both gushed about the cast of other names appearing in the movie. shellMoss talked about the talent of “Murderer’s Row.” “Working with Kate [Hudson] So cool. She’s someone I’ve admired for many years,” she explained, praising her co-star’s “really nuanced and very funny, but also very complex and interesting” performance. “There’s a way to play that can be super camp and super exciting.”
Meanwhile, Moss told Gerber of “her brilliance.” THRsaid “it was so cool to come face to face with someone who was exploring other parts of her craft and crushing it.”
Plus, there are all these other names. “I’m a producer on this movie, and sometimes I’ll show up and say, ‘How did you end up like this?!’ I think it was just this script and working with Max and everything. It was, ‘For You’ll see the characters on the poster, but then you’ll be surprised to find out that 20 characters you didn’t realize were going to be in the movie’.
Kate Hudson and Elizabeth Moss in Max Minghella’s “The Shell”
Courtesy of Toronto International Film Festival
shell Showing a lighter side of herself, Moss admits, is “different from what I’ve been doing lately.” “The closest I’ve come recently was working with Ruben Östlund square”. But she says she never really chooses a project just to do something new. “I was just attracted to the material, and I thought the script was so unique,” she explains. “I think it ended up being a lot funnier than we thought it would. It’s really fun because obviously, Max and my day jobs don’t necessarily have to be comedy of the year.
But both are grateful for Moss’s chance to shed her comedic…well, shell. She might not even mind the bad pun on the movie’s title. “We’re both people who really appreciate comedy, and we really appreciate these kinds of movies, so we laugh together a lot as friends,” Moss said. “So it’s really fun shell Together, there is no need to be too serious.
That said, the film touches on issues like aging, body image, and expectations. “We’re still uncomfortable with aging and whatever the body ideal is,” Moss said. “There’s certainly more inclusivity, but at the same time, people still have an idea of what they should look like, and that’s often not possible in our industry. As a woman in this industry, I’m very concerned about that. Not unfamiliar.
Her director felt the theme could resonate with audiences around the world. “We all have a relationship with death, we all have a relationship with vanity, it’s universal,” Minghella noted. “So it’s great to find an entry point or theme in the story that we can all find entry into. It’s about things that affect us, regardless of age, race or gender.
shellProduced by Range, Blank Tape, Love & Squalor and Dark Castle Entertainment, it is distributed by WME and CAA in the U.S. and Black Bear internationally.
Buyers can expect the director and his cast to have fun with old movie tropes, such as the henchman or Haim’s character, who he shared “basically just serves as the film’s soundboard and shows up at the most convenient moments” with THR. “It’s very much a satire on some slightly obscure characters” found in films from the past that he’s long loved. “I like a movie called look who’s talking. That was a movie that had a huge impact on me as a kid. In fact, there are quite a few look who’s talking In this movie, Lydia feels like she’s from look who’s talking”.
Moss and Minghella clearly saw an opportunity to benefit from audiences nostalgic for old-fashioned escapism. “I don’t think there are a lot of movies like this being made these days,” she said. Minghella shares what he wants to do shell A film that is “perhaps a bit dated entertainment”. The director explains that he calls himself a product of another era, when major studio films were “very character-driven and genre-driven.” “We don’t see a lot of that anymore, and I really miss that. As a viewer, I’m eager to see movies like this.
