GRACE revolves around Madeline Matheson, an eight months pregnant woman who is determined to deliver her unborn child, Grace, naturally. When an accident leaves Grace dead inside her, Madeline insists on carrying the baby to term. Weeks later, when Madeline delivers naturally, the child miraculously returns to life...

Bloody-Disgusting: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Paul Solet: Fuckin’ A, man.

BD: How has your festival been so far?

PS: Unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like this. This is my first time at Sundance. Unbelievable.

BD: Have you had a chance to see any movies?

PS: Absolutely not, but it’s still been unbelievable. You know, we’ve been running around like crazy, but it’s been so fucking wild, these people passing out at the fucking premiere, what the fuck? We never expected this. You know enough about the film to know, it’s more of an atmospheric, cerebral thing. I know the reports were that it was “gore-related”. But it wasn’t. People are fainting from the subject matter. Which is so cool. And men. Men! Not women.

BD: So you didn’t set out to provoke that kind of reaction?

PS: Not even remotely. This film is much more in the vein of REPULSION or something like that, you know what I mean? It IS a horror film. But it aims to not just be a film that hits you viscerally. It’s not just a gut punch. We aim to do something that works as effectively as for the head as it does for the gut, as it does for the heart, as it does for the soul, you know? I don’t want to get pretentious about it, but we really did try to do something very different here, and I think we have. It’s not like there’s a torture scene people are freaking out at, so it’s really, really surprising, you know? But it’s cool. It’s got everybody talking. Everywhere I go, people are like, “Oh shit, you did the movie that’s making people pass out.” As long as they’re talking, as long as it gets them in there, I believe in enough in the film to…I know it speaks for itself, so much better than I ever could.

BD: Not a whole lot of filmmakers get to debut their film in front of a Sundance audience at a midnight screening on opening weekend. What’s that like?

PS: So cool. Unbelievable. It’s like…have you ever been to the Egyptian, have ever you been up here? This is my first time here.

BD: Yeah, I was there for that midnight screening.

PS: Oh, that’s right, of course you were, dude.

BD: You got a really, really strong reaction from that audience. I mean, there were actual screams.

PS: So cool. The third act…it’s funny, because it’s a real slow-burn film. The goal is, you know, the art of disarming the audience, kind of cutting the knees out, and then sort of slowly ramping it up, and before you know it, when that third act hits, they’re really getting hit, you know.

BD: It definitely has an impact. You experienced a lot of success with your short, Means to and End, which a lot of people thought was the highlight of Fangoria’s Blood Drive II, so I’m assuming you’ve gone the film festival route before.

PS: Yeah, I’ve definitely been around the film festival circuit a little bit, but I’ve never seen anything like this. This is just ridiculous.

BD: Is it that there’s more people or a different type of people? How is the vibe different?

PS: There’s definitely this industry, celebrity thing going on, but underneath that is a genuine respect for filmmaking and filmmakers. And it’s like, people in this town right now, there’s this collective of people who get how fucking hard this is, and how much passion and love go into it. I wish you could have been at that screening last night [in Kimball Junction], and it was a regular theater, so we just packed them in, and we had people bringing in chairs and putting them in the aisles and shit, and you could hear a fucking pin drop. It was very, very different from that midnight audience. For me, my expectations of an audience’s reaction were much more like last night’s audience, as opposed to the midnight audience. The midnight audience was full of people like you and me, and we laugh at that shit, but normal people, you could hear a fucking pin drop, and then the third act, it was so awesome to watch.

BD: If you were giving advice to young filmmakers, do you recommend that they hone their craft on short films and go the film festival route, or dive right into a low-budget feature film as soon as they can secure some money?

PS: I would say, go for the short. What allowed me to get Grace made was a pitch film of the same name. I had the script. I wrote Grace as a feature. I wrote it years ago, three and a half years ago or something. It got interest as soon as I started showing it to people, and people were like, “yeah, this is cool, I wanna buy it.” And I said, “That’s cool. I want to direct it.” And they were like, “Well, what have you done?” I’d done a bunch of shorts, but I didn’t have anything on 35 to show them, and it became clear, if someone’s going to give me a million dollars to make a movie, they’re going to need proof that I can do it. I took the first act of the feature and distilled it down to a four or five minute short. And we tried to really give it the studio film treatment, you know, we cast it right, we crewed up properly, and we really made a nice short, and it did the film festival circuit and got attention that way, but it also got the attention of Adam Green, and that got the feature to him, and from there, once he started rounding up the money people, and they said, “Well, who is this first time director kid?” I had that to show them, and they were impressed. It had won all these awards and stuff and done some festivals and stuff, and it was proof that I had chops. So basically, that’s a long way of saying, I got the same amount of attention from that short film, or more attention, than my friends have gotten from doing micro-budget features. There’s just such a glut of digital micro-budget features, you know, and people don’t want to sit through them. If you have the money for a five minute short film, you’re spreading yourself so thin if you try to stretch whatever your budget is over 90 minutes. But if you’re able to put it into five, you can do something amazing. You really can. That’s a much better calling card, and people are much more likely to watch it. And it’s also much easier to program into a festival.

BD: I don’t have any kids, and GRACE made me not want to have any in the future. You seemed to tap into fears that a lot of new parents might have. Was this a matter of personal experience, or did you do research by talking to new parents?

PS: I don’t have kids. My brother has two young kids. I love my nieces. So I’ve watched my brother go through that project , but really the way I think we achieved the authenticity that we did was just by rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, and just being willing to take people’s notes. To just listen to people, to listen to women. I’ve always been surrounded by strong, independent women. You saw my mom at the Q&A. She’s always been my role model. And if you look at our crew, if you look at the people behind GRACE, like our supervising producer, Rhonda Baker, these are the sort of women that have always been in my life, but at the same time, I know there are fundamental differences between men and women that I will never be able to understand at a cellular level, so it was about just trying to take the ego out of the process and just be humble enough to accept that I’m not an expert on these things, nor can I ever be, so just being willing to go out and solicit feedback and opinions from people, and just incorporate it. Authenticity was really important. I had a midwife on set. Jordan and Samantha Farris, they both spent a lot of time working with midwives, learning how to groan, learning how to deliver a child.

BD: You named the cat in the movie “Jonesy”, which was a reference to ALIEN, right?

PS: Yeah…maybe.

BD: Some writers have postulated that the plot of ALIEN was inspired by the Thaladomide debacle that took place in the late 50s, when a heavily-prescribed sedative caused massive birth defects in Europe.

PS: Oh yeah, the flipper babies.

BD: Exactly. In GRACE you seem to lightly mock Madeline’s health-food obsessed life-style. Are you trying to make a statement alluding that health food fanaticism can result in mutant babies?

PS: No, not even remotely. One thing I tried to take care not to do, was to take any sort of specific stance. GRACE is not about any political or social message. What it’s about is telling a human story that you cannot escape. That’s what I want to do, I want to put the viewer inside the story, and I don’t want to allow you to leave. If we’ve done our job, it’s a hypnotic film. We pull you in and we will not let you out, that’s the goal. I wasn’t trying to make a statement one way or the other about the medical establishment, the natural birthing community, a vegan lifestyle, it’s just sort of exploring these things. They both are shown to have their merits. But they’re both also shown to have their shortcomings. It’s a sort of backdrop, really, for the story. If we did our job man…hey, you know this works, we’ll get people upset from the gay community, people will be upset from the pro-life community, people will be upset from the pro-choice community, every single person who you could possible offend will be offended. You know? Someone from every group will be offended. And that’s great, that means that you did your job. You were objective, but you were working with provocative subject matter. That’s the job. To me, if your movie is not getting people thinking, you suck. That’s my goal, to get people thinking. I’m not trying to tell anybody anything.

BD: What are you working on next?

PS: I’m always writing, because if I don’t write, I get sick, you know? So I’ve got a couple of scripts that I’m really jazzed to do. And that’s sort of where my concentration is. I still want to be able to tell personal stories. I want to continue to make movies that don’t compromise. We had a lot of hurdles on this movie. We started with a 24-day shoot, then it was a 20-day shoot, and the it was 18, and then 9 days in, it was a 17-day shoot because of something-or-other. You know, because of some tax incentive or something like that. So we had to shoot 192 scenes in 17 days. We were shooting in Saskatchewan, we actually ended up with an amazing crew there. We ended up with the aesthetic that is unrecognizable, because it’s like, are we in the U.S.? What is this, you know, like the badlands? Just alien enough to put you out of your familiarity. But it’s not so alien that it becomes, like, a distraction. It’s just unnerving in the right way, you know? Did I answer the question, or did I digress?

BD: No, you did. You’re awesome, Paul. Congratulations, and enjoy the festival. Thanks for your time.

PS: No doubt, brother.

BD: Take it easy.