Whether you found yourself scared stiff and suffering sleepless nights or simply bored to tears – Longlegs is the film that everyone is talking about right now.
Oz Perkins ’ new horror features Maika Monroe as an FBI agent assigned to a mysterious case involving mass murders with satanic undertones, with Nicolas Cage dialling the Nicolas Cage up to 11 to play the titular serial killer.
Much has been made about the film’s distinct feel, not to mention its Oscar-winning star’s wild character choices, which have led to plenty of discussion among those who’ve already seen it.
So, for those who want to know more about the making of Longlegs, here are 16 behind-the-scenes facts about the film you probably didn’t know…
“It’s a deliberate one-for-one relationship,” director Osgood Perkins told Gizmodo.
“When I sat down to write the movie, the question in my mind was: what’s the invitation to the audience that I can make early on that sort of gets people in the roller coaster car. What gains them admission to the world?”
“The Silence of the Lambs stuff, it’s like your admission ticket. It gets you through the door,” he also told IGN, adding to Gizmodo: “I just cheated. I just used it as a crib, as a way to soften or tenderise the audience, to say, ’You know, it’s this! You remember this’. And then, of course, take a pretty hard left turn to make it not that at all.”
Asked about why the title character appears in the film as little as he does, Oz told Variety: “As many times we could crib or steal a move from one of the great serial killer movies, we wanted to do it. That’s just Se7en. I think Kevin Spacey has three or four scenes, right?”
He added: “We wanted to sort of – ‘rip off’ is not the right word – ‘borrow’ is more close to what we were doing.”
“The ’90s was a formative time for me,” the filmmaker recalled to Deadline. “I was graduating high school, these great movies were coming out, my father died, shit was happening, like a lot of stuff was very much coming together.
“It was that transition from childhood to stupid young adulthood, where you don’t know anything and you’re out in the world. So those elements just made it a good time to be in.”
“It looks good, too,” he added.
When Longlegs was originally written, Oz told IndieWire he’d set the film in 1992, but ultimately decided to push it forward a couple of years when he realised what an FBI movie set in that year would require.
“I realised that if it was 1992, all the presidential photographs would be of George Bush, so I just tweaked it up by a year so it would at least be Bill Clinton. Not that he’s any better,” he remarked.
“Longlegs was this entity that kept surfacing in things that I was trying to write,” the director told RogerEbert.com.
“There would be moments where I’d have written a scene or an act of something, and he was this shadowy figure who was in the fringes of those moments, peeking around and trying to fit into the story.”
Oz continued: “From the start, I knew that he was this weird and uneasy guy who had performance anxiety. I thought he could be a birthday clown or a birthday performer … that kind of person who comes to your house and talks to your kids when he’s not there.”
Speaking to Variety, he recalled: “When I decided that I was going to try for a serial killer procedural that was going to be something else, I needed a bad guy. Longlegs was like, ‘I’ll do it.’ In your drawer of ideas, one of them says, ‘Put me in, coach’. And in goes Longlegs.”
During his Variety interview, Oz shared: “We writers just like words. We like how certain words sound and look and shape and feel.
“Yeah, [the name] has daddy longlegs and a creepy-crawly aspect to it, but it also feels ’70s to me – almost like a Led Zeppelin song or someone would have on the side of their van, something groovy like that. It feels like a vintage word that people wouldn’t toss around much today.
“It positioned the movie in a weird place. You don’t get to fully understand it. It doesn’t fully fit, which is more alluring to me and creates a curiosity that I think is important.”
While the Oscar winner has done only a handful of interviews to promote Longlegs – adding to the mystery around his character – he did tell the Hollywood Reporter about his personal inspiration.
“It’s the voices, it’s not really him,” he said of his character’s motivations, pointing out Longlegs has actually been “hijacked by something else”.
“I’ve often thought what was it that happened to my mum,” he shared. “If I’m any good in this movie, it’s because of my mother.”
Nicolas’ mother had a number of mental health conditions, including schizophrenia and severe depression, which she lived with over the course of her life until she died in 2021.
“That also gave me a bit of empathy for the character, as crazy as what his situation is and what he’s getting up to with these effigies,” he shared.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the Leaving Las Vegas star also said: “It was a deeply personal kind of performance for me because I grew up trying to cope with what she was going through.”
“The pale makeup is Bob Dylan,” Oz told IndieWire. “Bob Dylan’s my god, and so I’m always looking for ways to use Bob’s stuff, and that white makeup that he uses on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour is this weird sort of performative thing.
“It’s like, ‘I’m here to perform for you, and I put on this white makeup, so I’m more visible to you in a way, but at the same time, I’m also more invisible,’ which I find fascinating.”
Polygon reported that the director initially had a “glam rock vibe in his head” when putting together the character, before deciding the character should look as though he’s had several botched facial surgeries.
“His jam is really that he’s trying to make himself beautiful for the devil,” special effects makeup artist Harlow MacFarlane claimed.
“He’s in love with the Devil, and he’s trying to impress the Devil, so he’s gone through all these plastic surgery botch jobs to make himself look as pretty as he can for the Devil. Everything he does is for this evil force that he’s trying to impress.”
Harlow also pointed out that Nicolas’ prosthetics were created with the idea that Longlegs would have undergone facial work with a “hack job of a doctor in a strip mall somewhere”.
Oz also told Deadline he wanted the character to have what he’s done for the Devil to weigh on him sometimes, to the point he thinks: “I’ve lost the colour in my hair, and I ruined myself with plastic surgery, and I’m fucking sad, and I’m just trying to be nice to this little girl at a hardware store, and she thinks I’m a fucking creep, because I am a creep, and I’m gross, and I’m lonely, and I’m sad, and I’m the monster, but I’m also lonely and sad’.”
The teenager working in the hardware store was played by Oz’s daughter, Bea.
Oz actually got his own start in the entertainment industry as a child actor, playing the younger version of his dad Anthony Perkins’ character in the sequel Psycho II.
“Before Maika came in that day, we had Nick doing his intake interview, which you see in the movie when he sings Happy Birthday to Lee,” Oz recalled to IGN, later disclosing that – as is mentioned in the film – the sequence actually went on a whole lot longer.
“We were all just in this captivated, petrified – not in a scared way – but just still [in a] frozen state of ’This is really happening, really in this room,” he added.
“‘That’s really Nicolas Cage. Did you know that he’s in this movie?’ It’s a really good time. It’s what you want to be doing if you’re us.”
That’s because leading actor Maika Monroe was deliberately kept away from Nicolas Cage on set to help add to the drama of the moment.
In fact, her heart rate was monitored on set, and when she clapped eyes on Nicolas’ transformation for the first time, it more than doubled.
“I’ve sort of likened it to the old cartoon of the lion tamer that goes into the cage with the stool and the whip,” Oz told IndieWire.
“That lion tamer doesn’t do an awful lot. He’s kind of there, and sometimes you’ve got to move the lion over a bit, and sometimes you have to remind it not to fucking eat me. But beyond that, it’s a lion, right?”
He continued: “The reverence I feel and felt for Cage and his ability, his power, his energy, his accomplishment, you’ve got to lean into that. You don’t get Nic Cage in your movie to then tell him what to do. He’s an extremely collaborative guy. He’s insanely smart, and he knows everything about every movie ever made. He can quote everything, he knows every detail.
“We had a real shorthand, very easy, on a lot of that stuff. He’s just in command. He’s a perfectly tuned instrument, like a lion is a perfectly tuned instrument.”
In fact, Oz Perkins apparently received a phone call from Nicolas Cage at four in the morning on Christmas Day, “giving him soundbites of [the actor] rehearsing the dialogue”.
“We talked about what was the opposite of being aggressive? Was there sort of a feminine aspect that would be interesting?” Oz told The Hollywood Reporter, while Nicolas Cage agreed that Longlegs being “androgynous” was important when it came to his portrayal.
“Everything that I do starts with it, sounds like something, or it feels like a lyric or it has some kind of vibe to it, a certain warmth to it or a coldness or a rhythm or a cadence,” Oz told IGN. “You start to feel all that stuff.
“With T. Rex, [they were] not something that I really knew very much about and [they] just came into my world at a certain time when I was breaking the story. It was just the soundtrack that life gave me. I didn’t seek it out. It just sort of happened.”
Oz Perkins had originally wanted Longlegs to open with Lee undergoing tests at the FBI, but his producers urged him to add in “one extra thing of her being special”.
Speaking to Deadline about that moment viewers first learn something is different about Lee, Oz added: “I wrote it, we shot it, and it really works, and people really dig it, and it gives an additional kind of like, ‘Oh, shit, we’re in this now,’ that I didn’t see.
“That’s why a movie is a collaborative experience; you’ve got to listen because other people know better than you often.”
Longlegs is in cinemas now. Watch the trailer below:
