Romola Garai

Actor, and now writer-director Romola Garai has worked with the likes of Sarah Gavron, Francois Ozon and most recently Lucile Hadzihalilovic over the course of her prolific career. Following her 2012 short film, Scrubber, Garai made a splash at Sundance and Sitges in 2021 with debut feature and daring feminist revenge horror Amulet, starring Carla Juri, Alec Secareanu, Angeliki Papoulia and Imelda Staunton.

Garai: I saw at a very young age, so it was imperative that the creature was SFX. I didn’t want a visual effect – though we did add some in post – but it was important to me that the creature existed in that tradition. It definitely has that sense of too, and the designer did a great job of making it horrible and disgusting. The goddess is all prosthetics and a woman in a suit. I wanted the suit to be shaped like a uterus, so they made a physical suit which had these attached fallopian-like tubes. With the background of that scene, I wanted it to feel like you’d entered the inside of a woman’s body.