The boogeyman is real in Dust Bunny.
For young Aurora (Sophie Sloan), he lives under the bed and takes the shape of a giant fanged rabbit that has a habit of bursting through the floorboards with hungry ferocity. For Aurora, this predicament is not only terrifying but cataclysmic, since it soon leaves her alone and in desperate need of help.
Thus, she turns to her next-door neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen), a hitman whom she believes has a very particular set of monster-hunting skills. Unfortunately, though, the lethal stranger isn’t quite convinced that the little girl across the hall is telling the truth—thereby instigating a partnership that transforms, sweetly and crazily, into an unlikely friendship.
Dust Bunny, which hits theaters Dec. 12, has a wild premise, but its truly unique spirit comes from its bountiful aesthetic and narrative imagination, both of which are the handiwork of Bryan Fuller.
The acclaimed writer and showrunner of TV hits such as Deep Space Nine, Pushing Daisies, and Hannibal, Fuller, in his directorial debut, crafts a bonkers fantasia indebted to, among others, the works of Joe Dante, Steven Spielberg, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Luc Besson. Yet for all its artistic ancestors, the film—part horror thriller, part coming-of-age story, part dreamy fantasy—is like nothing else, blending tones and ideas with enlivening go-for-broke audacity.
Eventually involving weirdo assassins, iron hippos, child welfare counselors, FBI agents, and a ruthless handler played by the incomparable Sigourney Weaver, it’s a genre-bender that, unsurprisingly, made a big splash when it premiered at this fall’s Toronto International Film Festival in its Midnight Madness program.
For Fuller, it’s a maiden behind-the-camera feature that reunites him with his Hannibal star Mikkelsen and radiates a bountiful creativity, suggesting he has a grand future on the big screen. Ahead of its theatrical debut, we spoke with him about transitioning from TV to film, his cinematic influences, his tight-knit relationship with Mikkelsen, and whether there’s any hope for a revival of his Hannibal Lecter-centered cult hit.
Dust Bunny is your feature directorial debut, and it’s a big swing. Were you nervous about going all-out for your first film, or was that precisely the point?
It honestly didn’t occur to me as a big swing because I grew up on Amblin movies, so I love these high-concept stories about kids in danger that have an emotional angle. I think the big swing of it all was buried in the fantasy and the fairy tale—the dark, remote personal elements of the story. I thought, if you speak that language, you’re going to pick up the vocabulary, and if you don’t, you’ll just see a fun movie about a little girl who believes there’s a monster under her bed, without it becoming medicinal. I’m amused that people think it’s a big swing because I just thought I was stepping up to the plate, as opposed to doing something out of the ordinary.
Whether it’s Pushing Daisies or Hannibal, it’s less about strategizing an approach and more about hearing what the story is telling me and just following what the story is wanting, in terms of a visual style. There’s something I’m working on in television right now where I’m like, this is a big swing. But this didn’t feel like that because the heart of it is this lovely little actress who just pulls you in with those big saucer eyes.
How did you find Sophie Sloan?
I work with a fantastic casting director named Margie Simpkins, and she and her team cast a wide net. They got like 4,000 submissions, and they did like 900 auditions. They kept on narrowing it down and narrowing it down until they got to 12. Of the 12, Sophie was the one where I was like, “It’s going to be her.”
Why is that?
You just feel it. Her face is so communicative, and it recalls a little Drew Barrymore, a little Chloë Grace Moretz, and a little Fairuza Balk in Return to Oz. The smartest thing I did on the production was to hire Line Kruse, who played the mom in the movie, briefly, because she had a big job being Sophie’s acting coach. Not just an acting coach; a concierge for her.
What was the thinking behind that?
We talk a lot about intimacy coordinators for adult situations, but I think we need to talk about youth ambassadors and coordinators to create safe spaces for young people on film sets, because it is such an adult world.
When I was telling Line about this movie, as a former child actor, she said here are all the things you need to be savvy about when working with kids. You also need somebody like Line who will allow you to do the rest of your job, because if you’re a director and you’re doing your job for a child actor, there’s no time to do anything else, because you need to create a safe space for a kid to have a positive experience as opposed to just getting lost in the shuffle.
You’ve worked in television for nearly three decades. Why was now the time to gravitate to the big screen?
It was the story. It was developed as an Amazing Stories story, and when it didn’t make it through that process, I decided I should do it as my first movie. It’s a contained story, it feels small enough, it’s mostly set in this apartment building, there are flourishes, and it felt like something I could have a lot of fun with. As a first-time director, you’re putting on so many hats and you’ve seen so many other directors. So when I look at the movie, I’m like, that’s a Barry Sonnenfeld shot, that’s a John Carpenter shot, that’s a David Fincher shot, because we consume all this information and digest it and poop it out and it’s our art, with a little bit of our influences and what we want to say.
The idea of a monster movie with a little girl brought me the excitement of going to see summer movies in the ’80s, and especially going to see Gremlins, which was a touchstone for this film. We were very conscious in the editing process to make sure we told the story with the same amount of real estate as Gremlins, so we’re the same running time. That film got in and told the story efficiently and emotionally and got out, and it was a fun ride. I wanted this, first and foremost, to be a fun ride, and if people saw themselves in Aurora, to be able to start a conversation with themselves about believing their inner child.
Did you have a monster under the bed phobia as a kid? Or a boogeyman?
I did, but it was my dad. There’s a line in the movie that someone said to me as a kid that blew my mind, because I think kids who grow up in tricky homes are not aware of how dissimilar it is from a more traditional family environment. A friend of mine’s mom said to me at one point, “They’re not very nice to you, are they?” That blew my mind. It was so validating.
That must be powerful to hear at a young age.
When Aurora says that in the movie, I want it to be about, if someone was not being nice to you as a child, what does that mean? It could mean so many different things. It could mean no cha cha heels at Christmas. Or it could mean other things that are less pleasant that we don’t want to talk about in the movie, because we want it to be fun first.
But we also want people to be able to see themselves, however they wind up projecting onto Aurora. I’ve had so many great conversations with people who worked on the movie say, “How are you Aurora?” And I was like, ”How are you Aurora?" And we would get into it. We would have these meaty trauma-bonding conversations that were of varying levels of complexity. It’s kind of a litmus test of how much you see yourself in Aurora, and how much you’re looking for that intriguing neighbor to pull you out. Sometimes, that intriguing neighbor who’s going to be your help is just simply an adult saying, “I see you in some variety.”
Those are the medicinal boogeyman angles of the real monsters that, hopefully, people who can relate will see. And if you don’t, you’ll perhaps have a lighter, fluffier experience. I want people to have light, fluffy fun, and to exit with a click in their heel, saying, yay, we ended with ABBA. [laughs]
Obviously, you’ve worked before with Mads, and when I was writing about his other fall movie, The Last Viking…
I think they’re like siblings! Because they’re both about kids who wish ill on their parents. [Anders] Thomas [Jensen] is a very good friend, and we talked about both of our movies, and his wife Line is the child coordinator [on Dust Bunny]. We were moving these movies along at the same time and having conversations because they were living in Los Angeles.
One of my favorite Mads performances is in Men & Chicken, which is similar to The Last Viking. There’s something about when Mads is vulnerable. A lot of people want to see him as a Bond or Indiana Jones villain…
Was there a desire on your part to use him in a way he’s not normally used, at least in American films?
Yes. I think his best comedic work is in Thomas’ movies. When I was doing Dust Bunny for Amazing Stories, I pitched it to Mads, and he was like, “I’m in. This sounds great.” When it became a movie, I sent him the script, and he was like, “I love it, I’m in.” I was in the position of, he would be doing me a favor to do this movie. And he was in the position of, you’re doing me a favor to offer me this movie. We have so much mutual respect and a brotherhood.
Is there any chance you two reunite for more Hannibal?
Right now, the rights are complicated because Martha De Laurentiis has passed. She was holding a big chunk of the rights, and now Thomas Harris is trying to get them all back beneath the same roof.
My fantasy is to do The Silence of the Lambs with Mads [as Lecter] and Zendaya as Clarice Starling. That’s my fantasy, and I’m putting it out into the universe. Mads wants to come back, Hugh [Dancy] wants to come back, Laurence Fishburne wants to come back, and so do Katharine Isabelle and Caroline Dhavernas, because the story has as much to do with the murder wives as the murder husbands. Well, maybe not as much, but they have a pretty significant role because, well, I f---ing love the hot lesbians getting on the helicopter and saying, “We’re out! We’re taking our little sperm baby and hitting the road because we’re smarter than everybody else!”
I want to see all of it continue, and everybody wants to come back. It’s just a matter of getting the rights back in one place.
