Michael Pearce and Brad Ingelsby, the two visionaries behind Apple TV+’s new thriller Echo Valley, dive into the films that influenced them in making it.
How far would you go for those you love? If you’re Kate in Apple TV+’s Echo Valley, that ceiling is limitless.
If you’re looking for a creepy and crippling new watch, this one might just be for you.
Set for release globally tomorrow (13th June), the film follows Oscar Winner Julianne Moore’s Kate in her struggle to cover up a crime committed by her troubled daughter Claire — played by Euphoria internet fave Sydney Sweeney. Edge-of-your-seat drama with twists and turns at every checkpoint, there’s a seriously sinister turn from the underrated Domhnall Gleeson, and appearances from quiet heavyweights like Killing Eve’s Fiona Shaw and Twin Peaks legend Kyle MacLachlan.
The minds behind the new opus? BAFTA-winning director Michael Pearce and Emmy-nominated writer Brad Ingelsby. It’s British filmmaker Pearce’s third feature-length spectacle after his 2017 mesmerising award-winning debut Beast and sci-fi sophomore Encounter.
In scale and story-telling, Echo Valley is arguably his most ambitious offering, and the acquisition of Ingelsby for the script is a sure-fire sign of such. The writer has been on a superb run of features across the last decade, from his work in the Christian Bale-starring 2013 noir Out of the Furnace to 2020 sports biopic Finding the Way Back, and most recently creating the excellent whodunnit HBO limited series, Mare of Easttown, which saw Kate Winslet take home Outstanding Lead Actress at the 2021 Emmys.
Pearce and Ingelsby are a seamless, searing collaborative force on Echo Valley. But what provoked them to make such a film? What movies made them make this movie? Below, the pair tell Wonderland about the pieces of work that inspired them.
Watch the Echo Valley trailer…
Pearce’s picks…
In The Bedroom (2001) by Todd Field
First choice is In the Bedroom, which is Todd Field’s first film. And that was a bit of a north star for me across many departments. I mean, it is one of my favourite films — it feels almost perfectly crafted. I can’t believe it’s a debut feature. I don’t think there’s really a shot out of place in it. It feels like it’s made by a seasoned director who’s made ten movies and has the confidence to be incredibly un-showy in the way he’s directed it, and is really focused on the characters and the journey that they are going on.
It’s a film that’s driven by its performances, and it’s full of very human moments that are credibly affecting. It’s relatively a quiet thriller, but there are a few really extreme and shocking moments in the film that take your breath away.
And to some degree, the attitude of the filmmaking is something that I had in mind, which is that you can keep things restrained aesthetically and have a pared-back, almost matter-of-fact style. And then it becomes less about how fancy an individual shot or sequence is — it’s just about using the right shot at the right time, which will have a cumulative effect. And that’s one of the main lessons I took from that movie.
A Simple Plan (1999) by Sam Raimi
Similar to [Echo Valley], it has an ethical dilemma at the heart of it. And after the character makes a morally questionable decision, it leads to so many awful outcomes, but you’re with them the whole way. There’s enough justification for you to understand why they’re making these decisions.
So when you’re watching it for the first time, you kind of watch it through your fingers, because you’re secretly hoping that they’ll do the right thing—but they just keep getting in over their heads. It’s sort of ordinary people living in a raw landscape. It’s a small set of characters, a handful of locations.
It really felt like a follow-me-along kind of movie—when you watch it, it’s suspenseful, moving, and it’s got some adult themes. It’s actually made from very few ingredients. And I read somewhere that Sam Raimi said at the time that the goal for him when he was directing it was to let the screenplay and the actors tell the story, and for him to sit back and be invisible.
And you know, I think he’s being modest with that, because there were some really smart choices in the way he directed it. There’s still a lot that speaks to — like the confidence to observe a situation and not get in the way of the story. And when you’re dealing with a story where there are so many twists and turns, you don’t need to add too much cinematic engineering on top of that.
So even though it was quite early in his career, I felt like there was a lot of wisdom in his approach to how he shot that film.
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (2008) by Sidney Lumet
I think it was [Lumet’s] last film, so he ended on a clear high, and it’s a very twisty thriller. But it’s grounded in very powerful performances by the lead cast, which includes Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
And I love this combination of having a very tense and propulsive thriller narrative — where every 20 minutes there’s a big surprise or shocking turn — but at the very heart of it is a raw, intimate story of a family that’s tearing itself apart.
It’s a heart-wrenching watch, because you’re seeing people who should be caring for each other — they’re family members — and they end up doing the most cruel things to one another. And one or two wrong decisions can lead to a cataclysm of awful outcomes.
And so there’s a similarity: a few locations, a few key actors, but there’s so much that he gets out of that. I mean, we watched it recently, and I think it’s one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s best performances—and that’s saying a lot, because he’s an actor who had a whole career of best performances. He’s easily one of the most consistent actors of his generation.
I don’t know if the film would totally work if he and the other actors weren’t so completely committed to their roles. It really needs that combination of deeply committed performances, and for it to be directed by a master storyteller at that point in his career.
Animal Kingdom (2011) by David Michôd
One of the best debuts I’ve seen. It’s up there with Ratcatcher and Badlands. It’s just a kind of flawless first feature. And it’s much more action-oriented than Echo Valley — it’s about cops and robbers, there are guns in it and SWAT teams. But it was a touchstone for me and Domhnall when we talked about Jackie. Not because we wanted to do the same thing as Ben Mendelsohn’s portrayal of Pope, but because it was indicative of how you can humanise your lead antagonist. And the more human qualities or vulnerabilities you give them, it doesn’t detract from them being intimidating — or make them less scary. If anything, it makes them more scary, because they feel real.
They don’t feel like an archetype. So there were certain things and choices that Ben Mendelsohn, David Michôd, and the creative team made in that film that I really appreciated — the naff Hawaiian shirt that Ben Mendelsohn’s character wears, or how he’s sometimes the comic relief of the movie, with the funniest one-liners. He’s someone who’s lost, and there’s some weakness in him compared to the other characters.
And actually, all of those things — cumulatively — they only serve to make him feel more fundamental and like a truly unique character. So he was a good reminder of how to circumvent some of the clichés of what a movie villain can sometimes be, especially if you’re only working with the tropes or imagery you have in your head. You have to find specific details to get away from that—things that ground the character in human choices.
Red Road (2006) by Andrea Arnold
This is a very aesthetically different film from the others—I don’t believe there’s any score to it. But it has a very localised point of view, tethered to Kate Dickie’s character’s perspective.
And in a thriller, sometimes there can be a temptation to follow the bad guy, or follow the detective. But actually, you can sometimes elicit so much more suspense by keeping the point of view tethered just to your lead protagonist, and discovering what’s happening through their eyes.
And you know, since watching that film when it came out, I was just so stunned by the ending. Immediately, Andrea Arnold became one of my favourite filmmakers. I really appreciated the commitment to those choices.
There’s also a twist in the film that you don’t see coming, and I still love it when I watch it years later. It felt like an arthouse movie, but it’s very carefully plotted with the audience in mind.
I love that combination of an arthouse aesthetic and sensibility, but I can imagine in the edit they were very conscious of what the audience knows—or doesn’t know—and when we’ll find things out at different moments in the film. It’s like if Lynne Ramsay had directed a Hitchcock script or something.
Ingelsby’s picks…
Gone Girl (2014) by David Fincher
What I really took from that film was the skilful layering of details — the play-by-play of how and why something was done — and the way, if you were to flash back in time, you’d see those details laid out in a very specific way.
It’s something me and Michael talked about at length, especially regarding the end of the film: just being able to figure out, you know, what’s the line — when are you showing the audience too much, and when are you not showing them enough, where it feels like they’ve been cheated in some way?
So we were always talking about how to allow the audience to feel that the surprises at the end were earned and not cheap. And I felt like Gone Girl was a movie that carefully and strategically laid out a plan — one that dovetails easily into the second movie choice, which is The Usual Suspects, a film that did something similar, but in an even more detailed way.
The Usual Suspects (1995) by Bryan Singer
The movie is really a depository of hundreds of little details. But what was so appealing about the twist is that, if you were to rewatch the film, the surprise ending feels completely earned. It’s all those things you missed at first glance — but if you go back and watch, they were all very carefully and neatly planted.
And again, I think that was another great example of how to layer in an ending where the audience feels surprised and satisfied, but never cheated. I think those two movies did a wonderful job of being extremely detailed about how a crime — or in this case, how the suspects — were presented, without ever making the audience feel manipulated or misled.
And I think that’s always a tightrope walk in a thriller: making the twist extremely satisfying, but also making sure that if someone had the time to go back and rewatch the film, they’d realise the breadcrumbs were there all along—they just weren’t looking in the right direction, or at the right breadcrumb.
So I think these are two movies that really spoke to the specifics of a crime.
In The Bedroom (2001) by Todd Field
I think a movie that I always come back to is In the Bedroom, so that was one I talked to Michael about quite a bit at the beginning.
What I love about In the Bedroom is that it’s a heartbreaking story of a marriage, a heartbreaking story of parents — but it’s so grounded. Even the thriller aspect that creeps in toward the end of the film is so grounded that it feels like it could happen to any of us.
That movie is rooted in the relationship between Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek, and it creates such a beautifully honest portrait of a family. You really believe in these people, so when the disaster arrives, it’s all the more heartbreaking. And when the thriller element kicks in, because you’ve believed in the emotions and the tragedy of the family, you fully believe that Tom Wilkinson would go out and do what he ultimately decides to do.
What we always talked about with In the Bedroom was how grounded it was — in the family, in the relationships, in the dynamics. And by anchoring the film in those relationships, it made the tension and the scares so much more powerful.
Also, the sense of place. In the Bedroom has this delicate sense of place — it’s rural, kind of quiet — and we saw those similarities in our own film as well.
Leon: The Professional (1995) by Luc Besson
Another film I always come back to — in a different way. I’ve always loved that it had such an iconic villain. It’s a great movie all around, in many ways, but what always stands out to me when I rewatch it is just how incredible the villain is.
It’s so important to have someone the audience can really hate, because it makes the triumph that much more rewarding. And what we wanted to do with Jackie was to create an adversary who, at first, felt like someone Kate couldn’t possibly match. He had the goods on her, he had the information, and it felt like there was no way she could overcome him.
We wanted to create that scary presence, to have the audience genuinely wondering how Kate is ever going to get out of this. He’s a criminal, he has leverage, he seems smarter than her. As he says in the film: “I’m lightyears ahead of you.”
And yet, as an audience, we despise him enough that when he finally gets what’s coming to him, it feels incredibly satisfying. I think Leon: The Professional is a film where Gary Oldman does such a wonderful job creating a villain you desperately want to see get taken down.
So that’s a movie I leaned on while writing — not so much for the story, which is very different — but as a kind of voice in my head reminding me how to craft a villain the audience would truly despise. That way, when Kate ultimately outsmarts him, it feels really palpable.
Prisoners (2013) by Denis Villeneuve
Another film that I leaned on and rewatched was Prisoners. And again, I think Prisoners really falls into the same category as In the Bedroom, in the way it presents a thriller that feels incredibly grounded in real people — people you wouldn’t expect to be caught up in something like that. People who feel like your neighbour, your friend, your brother.
That movie does such a wonderful job of establishing a sense of place and creating a grounded set of characters. So when the thriller element starts to emerge, you’ve already formed a connection with these people and their world. You know them — and you can’t believe something like this is happening to them.
It’s that feeling, like it could happen to someone you know, that makes the story hit so hard. So for me, Prisoners was another great example of a film that felt incredibly grounded. It had a strong sense of place, a strong sense of community, and a real authenticity throughout.
When Michael and I were talking — especially about the first act of our film — we really wanted to focus on grounding it in a sense of place. In our case, it was a different kind of environment, but the goal was the same: to immerse the audience in Kate’s world, show her daily routine, and let them understand just how mundane her life is before everything unravels.
I’ve always admired how In the Bedroom and Prisoners manage to root their thrillers in relatable, human dynamics — in In the Bedroom, it’s a marriage; in Prisoners, it’s a father. And I think those films were real inspirations for us in trying to establish a grounded, character-driven thriller.
