Take Elisabeth Moss as a down-on-her-luck actress and Kate Hudson as the ultra-glamorous CEO of a wellness company who might be protecting a monstrous secret and have them trade crisp banter. Add a long-haired henchman. Top it all off with retro energy courtesy of the likes of Kaia Gerber (Saturday night, Royal Palm), Ariano Moayed (Succession), This Haim (Licorice Pizza), and Elizabeth Berkley (Show Girls, Saved by the Bell). And then have director Max Minghella mix it all up in a 100-minute genre- and genre-conscious mashup of scary, thrilling, funny, and wild. What you get is Shellworld premiered in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto Film Festival.
Described as a “dark comedy and body horror about society's obsession with youth and good looks,” Moss and Minghella hope his second feature as a director will be a rollercoaster ride for audiences. “One of Max's and my goals was just to make something that was fun, to make something funny,” says the star DAY during a brief break from his work on the final season of THE The Handmaid's Tale in Toronto. “Sometimes people need a little break and just want to go to the movies and have a good time. But it's really well-made entertainment.”
The director echoes this. “I was really excited to make something that was audience-oriented and a real popcorn movie,” Minghella says. DAYrecounting that his mother used to tell him bedtime stories that consisted of the plots of films she had seen in her work for the British Board of Film Classification. “It was a period when they were making a very specific type of film,” he says. “So this film is a love letter to that period of studio filmmaking.”
Both creatives, who have acted opposite each other in The Handmaid's Tale For years, I have enjoyed the change in work dynamics on Shell“We are so used to collaborating, because on The Handmaid's Taleeven though I'm the director and executive producer, I feel very collaborative,” Moss says. “We're used to talking about scenes, script and shooting.” With Minghella ultimately responsible for Shell“There was definitely a lot of trust there,” she adds. “And he gave me a lot of confidence to try different things. I could step outside of my comfort zone a little bit. We transitioned into this different relationship really easily.”
Minghella says the experience was “very energizing for both of us,” calling Moss and her “innate” talent “a director's dream.” He notes, “We had an incredibly demanding schedule for this film, and she was able to deliver these extraordinary performances so quickly and with such precision.”
Both are enthusiastic about the formation of the other names that appear in Shellwith Moss talking about “a murderers' row” of talent. “Working with Kate [Hudson] it was so beautiful. This is someone I’ve admired for so many years,” she explains, praising her co-star for her “really nuanced and deeply funny, but also deeply complicated and interesting” performance. “There was a way of playing her that would have been super camp and super obvious.”
Meanwhile, Gerber “has talent coming out of her ears,” Moss says. DAYstating that “it was really nice to be in front of someone who is exploring this other part of his skill set and is executing it really well.”
Plus, there were all these other names. “I'm a producer on the movie, and sometimes I'd show up and say, 'How did you get this and that?!' I think it was just this script and working with Max and everything. It's, 'You come for the people on the poster, but then you get surprised with 20 people you didn't know were going to be in the movie.'”
Kate Hudson and Elisabeth Moss in 'Shell' by Max Minghella
Courtesy of the Toronto International Film Festival
Shell shows a lighter side of her that's “different from the stuff I've been doing lately,” Moss acknowledges. “The closest I've come to that recently was working with Ruben Östlund on The square.” But she says she never picks up projects just to do something new. “I’m just drawn to the material and I thought this script was so unique,” she explains. “I think it ended up being a lot funnier than we thought it would be. It was really fun, because obviously Max and I’s day job is not necessarily the comedy of the year.”
But the two appreciated the opportunity for Moss to break out of her comic shell… well, maybe she wouldn't mind that bad pun on the film's title, either. “We're both people who really enjoy comedy, and we really enjoy that kind of movie, so we laugh a lot together as friends,” Moss says. “So it was really fun to do that. Shell together and they don't have to be super serious.”
That said, the film does address issues of aging, body image, and expectations. “We’re still angry about anti-aging and whatever the body ideal is,” Moss says. “There’s a lot more inclusivity, obviously, but at the same time there’s still an idea of what you should look like, and that’s often not achievable in our industry. As a woman in this industry, that’s not something I’m unfamiliar with.”
Its director sees the subject matter as something that audiences around the world can also relate to. “We all have a relationship with mortality and we all have a relationship with our vanity, and that’s universal,” Minghella notes. “So it’s wonderful to have a point of entry or a theme in a story that we can all find a way into. It’s about something that affects us regardless of age, race, or gender.”
ShellProduced by Range, Blank Tape, Love & Squalor and Dark Castle Entertainment, it is sold in the United States by WME and CAA, while for international markets it is available only by Black Bear.
Buyers can expect the director and his cast to have fun playing with old movie tropes, like the henchman or the Haim character who “basically functions purely as a sounding board for the movie and kind of shows up at the most opportune moments,” he shares with THR. “And this is largely a satire of some slightly underrated characters” found in past films he’s long enjoyed. “I love a movie called Look Who's Talking. It was a very influential film for me as a kid. There's actually quite a bit of Look Who's Talking in this movie, and Lydia seems like a character from Look Who's Talking.”
Moss and Minghella clearly see an opportunity for nostalgic audiences to get some good old-fashioned escapism. “I don't think there's been a lot of movies like this made recently,” he says. Minghella shares that he wanted to make Shell a film that is “maybe old-fashioned entertainment.” Calling itself a product of a different era, when big studio films were “very character-driven and genre-driven,” the director explains. “We don't see a lot of that anymore, and I really missed it. As a viewer, I longed to see a film like this.”