I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Rosemarie DeWitt, and she said that you have a very precise way of making an actor perform the “Smile.” Could you maybe walk us through that?

Yes, absolutely. You know, when I cast these movies, I always cast for the dramatic performance and then I know I can coach the ‘Smile’ on the other side. Instead of the other way around! Of course, one of the things we do with the ‘Smile’ is… it’s a smile with two wide faces, but for me the trick is all about the eyes. It is these eyes that have a kind of distant, dead look. This stare that breaks the fourth wall. When you combine that with some head positioning that harkens back to Kubrick’s gaze, along with the way we frame it and use sound design and everything else, it can create a really disturbing recipe.

We see more of the Entity in this film and it’s an incredible moment. How did you work on bringing that to life and developing the look of what we saw in the first film?

I always intended to be cautious about how much we would show the Entity again. It appears at the very end of the film for a few shots and we made sure it’s not just something. We feel its presence all the time, but we don’t see it all the time. Often the unknown is scarier than anything. In re-approaching it, I wanted to take it bigger and bolder and make sure its emergence happens in a different, unexpected way than the first film. Taking that horrific scene from the first film and trying to make it tenfold, I worked with Alec Gillis and his studio to bring it back to life. Alec was also working on the first one and we were talking about going bigger, so Alec basically said this was the biggest thing he and his team had built since they created the Alien Queen all the way back in Aliens. It meant a lot of designing and testing how we were going to make this work. There are multiple artists in it, puppeteers around it, and working with them and my VFX team at Rodeo to ultimately create this hybrid thing really makes it come alive. It was really exciting to do.

On the other side of the film we have a fantastic opening with Kyle Gallner’s character Joel who really sets the tone. Was it important for you going into this sequel to have that connective tissue?

Yes, I knew the second film would always have its own unique identity, but I wanted to have that connective tissue and keep Smile flowing through its DNA. Furthermore, we finished the first film on Joel’s face and so it felt right to start the second film on his face a few days later. I mean, I love working with Kyle and will always try to include him in what I make because he’s the best and I love that man. I wanted to make sure that while it’s connective tissue, it’s different than anything we did in the first Smile. So it felt very exciting to create this tense, claustrophobic action thriller scene with the black cloud of the Smile curse hanging over it. And to perform it in one uninterrupted take was a very exciting challenge I set for myself and my team. It took a lot of prep work to make that happen, but I’m really excited about how it came together and I feel like it launches us straight into the sequel and announces that Smile is back and meaner than ever.

Something we don’t see in many horror films is Skye Riley, a character brilliantly brought to life by Naomi. Was there a bit of a Taylor Swift influence in tapping into that pop stardom and how fun was it combining those elements?

It was really fun and that was part of my attempt to do something very unexpected for this film. I love pop music and it felt like the world of a pop star was so far removed from the first film. I wanted to see if I could make something that felt glitzy and glamorous, and if fun felt cold, menacing, and menacing. And almost alien. That was a fun challenge and Naomi was the perfect storm to bring this character to life. I mean, she’s a remarkable actress who has incredible magnetism and is also capable of truly human, raw emotion. She sings all the original songs, performs the choreography and is a true triple threat and a great partner in crime. The Swiftie fandom was definitely… it’s one of the biggest in the world, so of course it was on our minds. We looked to a lot of different artists for inspiration and took different things, but we also wanted to make sure Skye felt like a unique creation that was truly her own.

Smile 2 arrives on Digital on November 19 and will be released on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD on January 21, 2025.