In a recent interview, the actress turned writer shared that the impetus for Horse Girl’s story is quite personal to her.
Alison Brie starrer Horse Girl, which is directed and produced by Jeff Baena, recently had its world premiere at the ongoing Sundance Film Festival. The actress used her own experiences to co-write the Netflix film’s script with Jeff Baena. Just a few days before the film’s premiere, Brie in an interview with Vulture shared that the mental-health aspect of Horse Girl is based on her real-life family history with paranoid schizophrenia and depression, as well as her resulting fears about her own psychology.
On how she came up with the idea of making Horse Girl, Brie shared that she wanted to make something about her mother and grandmother her whole life. “My mother’s mother lived with paranoid schizophrenia, and my mother grew up in a really traumatic situation,” she revealed. “And I grew up with the mythology of my grandmother’s mental illness, hearing a lot of stories about my mother’s childhood and how the mental illness affected her. How it trickled down, affected my aunt and uncle and their kids – also how it didn’t affect them. It had different effects on everybody. So when I was younger, my mom would even joke about it with me: ‘I know you’re gonna make a movie one day about me and my mom’,” the actress added.
The actress went on to say that even though she never really knew her grandmother and had met her a couple of times as a little girl before she passed away, she knew so much about her. “In the making of this movie I did a lot more interviews with my mom, asking more questions for Sarah’s personal back-story more than anything.”
Brie continued, “But as I got closer to really putting pen to paper and writing something, I realized I was leaning toward something much less literal and a little more abstract and surreal. I’ve been kind of wanting to be in a thriller, lean into sci-fi – more things I’m a big fan of. And I started to think about the more personal aspect of the story: ‘Where does my fascination come from, having not known this woman?’ I started to realize this is much more about my fear of having mental illness in my bloodline. When will it come out? And will I have the awareness to know when it’s happening?
In my own personal struggles with depression, I know the feeling of being helpless, feeling powerless, feeling alone. Right before I wrote this, I went through my deepest bout of depression in my life.”
The actress and writer also shared that right before she started to write the script back in 2018, she was in a really low place and it was then that she started talking to a therapist. Brie revealed that she realized later that the [movie] she wants to make is about this woman who has this history of mental illness, and what if something real started happening to her? “What if something really wild, really scary, started happening and she didn’t have the ability to know whether it was real or not? If she didn’t have the ability to even trust herself or her own grip on reality? So I went to Jeff [Baena] and talked to him about it. I didn’t want to write it alone. I’ve never written anything before, and I just didn’t have the discipline,” she asserted.
As far as the storyline of the film is concerned, Horse Girl, according to Vulture, follows Sarah (Brie), the titular horse girl, an awkward young woman whose primary activities are grooming her childhood pony, watching supernatural crime dramas, and selling fabrics at a local crafts store. However, due to a series of inexplicable events, Sarah begins to believe she’s actually a clone of her dead grandmother, and that she’s being regularly abducted by aliens. She starts to spiral, wondering if she can trust herself or if she’s falling down the same mental black hole that her mother and grandmother once did.
The film is slated to hit Netflix on February 7, 2020
– With information from Vulture.
