Interview: ‘Night Nurse’ writer/director Georgia Bernstein on erotic thrillers and the serendipity of indie filmmaking
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Georgia Bernstein is a director, producer, and screenwriter whose feature directorial debut Night Nurse is out in theaters on July 10. (Read our review.)
In this interview with our chief critic James Podrasky, Georgia talks about what inspired the story of Night Nurse, casting the two leads, what she’s learned from producing micro-budget movies, her favorite erotic thrillers, and more!
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
1. What is the 30-second origin story of Night Nurse?
Night Nurse is based off of a scam that my grandmother nearly fell for. It’s called the classic Grandparent Scam, where someone called her pretending to be my brother and saying that he had been in a horrible car accident and that he needed help and money. She went all the way to the bank, and the tellers told her that it was a scam. So she didn’t go through with it, but I became obsessed with the idea of these scammers out there doing what I thought to be super performative crimes, like performance art, so I wanted to use this idea and twisted it into an erotic thriller.
2. The film’s Chicago premiere is at Music Box Theatre, and I know you lived in Chicago for a bit. Do you have a favorite screening or memory at Music Box?
There are so many that I couldn’t even name one. I’m so honored to be playing at the Music Box. I think it’s such a special theater. I would frequent it when I was in Chicago, and I think it’s a really special space.
3. Are we as a society missing out by no longer having landline phones?
Yes. We shot the film in my real grandmother’s house, and what’s funny about her landline is the phone will just ring randomly, all the time. We all get a million spam calls on our phones, but when you get them on a landline, there’s something more eerie about it. She was hard of hearing, so the phone was incredibly loud, and it would be blasting through the house. I think we are missing out, and we should all have them on the hard-of-hearing setting like my grandmother had.
4. I understand you met Cemre in college, but how did Bruce McKenzie come into the picture?
Bruce and I have an amazing mutual friend, and he was the only part that I didn’t write for a person specifically, and so casting him was so fun. He brought so much specificity to the part. I was really, really lucky to meet him. He’s such a wonderful performer.
5. Did Cemre and Bruce have instant chemistry, or what was the process of developing that?
I wrote the part for Cemre, so she was always part of the development and then the casting process. When I connected with Bruce, he read the script, he was into it, and kindly put himself on tape. Then we did some calls, and immediately from the tape, it was so obvious that he embodied something really exciting. We moved very quickly from there. He came to Chicago, and we did some rehearsals with him, Cemre, and me in my grandmother’s house. We blocked all the scenes and did days of rehearsal. I think a lot of the chemistry came from those days that we had, and that we were lucky to have before we started filming.
6. You worked as a producer on a couple of local Chicago director Alex Phillips’s films, including All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. What was the most important lesson you learned from producing that helped you prepare for Night Nurse?
Mainly, I learned how to be a really practical filmmaker. I never would write something into the script that I didn’t know how to put together myself. So I felt like the film was super makeable, and that definitely came from years of producing and problem-solving with that brain. And just wanting to set us up to succeed, there were lots of practical decisions that were made. It was very serendipitous, I guess. Some practicality and some magic.
7. What was something from the Night Nurse experience that you weren’t prepared for or that you had to learn?
The thing I learned is that every single part is challenging. It never, ever becomes not challenging. I was really lucky to be supported by such a great team. That’s another thing I learned from working on those other films and producing them is meeting great collaborators who I then brought in to help with Night Nurse. We had a kind of shared language around what we were doing and a group of people we could reach out to for help. So there was a mixture of some people I’d worked with for some time and then some new people we brought in.
8. What’s a part of the film you’re most proud of or would want audiences to notice that they might miss?
One thing I’m super proud of is the opening scene. We shot that in Chicago on a Robo Arm with a probe lens in a garage, and it was such a beautiful way that it came together. We shot it after the fact—we made the whole film, and then I was thinking the film needs to open with an epic title sequence and something to reference the calls and set the tone. We had this placeholder we had built in the edit that was just flashes of phones, but I wanted to follow a phone cord around her body. But there’s only like three Robo Arms in Chicago that I could find, and they’re so expensive. So we put this together, and it was just so perfect. I thought it was gonna be special, and I think a lot of people really responded to it.
“Every single part of filmmaking is challenging. It never, ever becomes not challenging. But I was really lucky to be supported by such a great team.”
9. Between the careful camera framing, the out-of-time locations (including your grandma’s house), the slinky, noirish score, every cinematic aspect of the film creates this really unique, realized world. Was the Night Nurse “world” what you envisioned it to be when you were writing or something that came together during the production process?
This is a really specific world where we don’t know exactly what time period we’re in, and that makes us feel disoriented and unmoored. I wanted the score to have a repeating theme that made us feel like we weren’t progressing and just coming back to the same song. So there were all sorts of elements that were baked into what I knew I wanted it to be, and then my incredible team elevated all my ideas to make the world what it was. So many things would take me by surprise. I think back on shooting the phone call scenes, and I just remember thinking it’s amazing that Bruce and Cemre understood the tone of this almost better than me. It really just came out of them so naturally. It’s amazing that I could put this down, and people could just keep adding to it. That’s the fun of making movies.
10. Your story is built around subverting and perverting common stereotypes like the sexy nurse, the age-gap relationship, the “daddy” figure, and even phone sex to a degree. Is there another stereotypical aspect of our culture that you think is ripe for twisting into an erotic thriller format?
I’m super interested in erotic thrillers, and I hope to continue to work in this genre, because I do think there’s a lot of room to work in a new way. I am working on some new ideas. The thing I love about Night Nurse and its take on the erotic thriller is how much it plays with restraint. That’s a very contemporary take on a neurotic thriller in my mind, because in our culture, where everything is permissible, what is transgressive now? I’m super interested in restraint, so that to me is the most fun thing to play with.
11. What’s your favorite erotic thriller?
David Cronenberg’s Crash. I love it because it eroticizes something that’s not typically eroticized, like car crashes. I think that’s just obviously brilliant. So that’s probably my favorite erotic thriller, and one of my favorite films in general. I also love Jane Campion’s In the Cut.
12. If you could run a phone scam on someone and get away with it, who would it be?
I’m thinking of someone that I obviously can’t mention here, but I would target people that I personally once knew.
+1. What’s your question for us?
What is your favorite erotic thriller?
James: It’s probably not my favorite, but the one I keep thinking about recently is the Bruce Willis one Color of Night. It’s bonkers. It’s kind of like an Italian giallo sort of, but it is just so weird and out there. It’s such a fun, trashy genre, and I hope with movies like this, Pillion, and Babygirl, that we’re headed into a renaissance.