When Nahnatchka Khan initiated a video call with and The Haunting of Bly Manor—encouraged her to watch The Conjuring and other hits of the genre. In Khan’s typical way, she finds scary movies relaxing, largely because they’re so removed from what she normally writes. (Totally Killer is, admittedly, more funny than spooky.) Despite a sizable budget that required visual effects and a lot of night shoots, Khan was unflappable on the Vancouver set, where early sunrises posed lighting issues if things ran behind schedule. One night, torrential rain left her crew in hysterics.
“I was just like, ‘It’s gonna be fine. We’re going to get it. If we have to redo the audio, we have to redo the audio,'” she recalls. “We can’t control the rain. We can either stand here and panic or we can go over and start rolling. It’s just refusing to not get it done. And we got it done. On the call sheet one day, it said, ‘Beware of bugs, mud, and snow.’ But unless it’s part of the scene, you would never know.”
Photo by Amazon Studios
Maybe that’s the key to Khan’s success: a level head. The odds have been stacked against her since the day she set foot in Los Angeles, and yet here she is, humble and steadfast.
“I’m an optimist at heart,” she says. “You always feel like you’re struggling to put forward the projects that you care about, but you just keep grinding and hope that other people respond.”
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