Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: A Prayer for the Dying
Dara Van Dusen on A Prayer for the Dying, Her Debut & Influences
Dara Van Dusen spoke to us about why Quiver’s A Prayer for the Dying was perfect for her directorial debut, her biggest influences & more.
Article Summary
- A Prayer for the Dying director Dara Van Dusen reveals why Stewart O’Nan’s novel had to become her feature debut.
- Van Dusen breaks down the film’s immersive visual style, biblical surrealism, and Jacob’s psychological unraveling.
- A Prayer for the Dying cast insights include how Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly helped build trust on set.
- Van Dusen shares production challenges, script supervisor lessons, and influences like Nicolas Winding Refn.
Sometimes the perfect story falls on your lap that becomes too good to pass up, and that’s what happened to Dara Van Dusen to make A Prayer for the Dying her directorial feature debut. It also helps to have the likes of veteran actors like Johnny Flynn (MobLand) and John C. Reilly (DreamQuil) lead your cast to tell a story of uncertainty and panic after the Civil War in Friendship, Wisconsin, as the American dream becomes a nightmare when a deadly pandemic and threatening wildfire spread chaos. Jacob (Flynn) – serving as sheriff, undertaker, and pastor – must fight to save his town, his family, and his soul. Van Dusen spoke to Bleeding Cool about what resonated with her about Stewart O’Nan‘s book and wanting to adapt it for the screen, Flynn, Reilly, her biggest influences, and more.
A Prayer for the Dying Director Dara Van Dusen on Bringing Cathartic Post-Civil War Story to Life
Bleeding Cool: What is the inspiration behind ‘A Prayer for the Dying’ and how did Stewart O’Nan’s book resonate with you?
Van Dusen: So ‘A Prayer for the Dying’ is based on Stewart O’Nan’s novel of the same title. The novel IS the inspiration in very obvious ways. I first read the book about 20 years ago, and it was this overwhelming experience. It wasn’t your normal novel in that I felt I had been kind of dragged into this other world and tossed around within it, lost in it, and then spit back out quite dramatically. It had this lasting, powerful effect on me, and it left me feeling so uneasy, uncomfortable, and questioning what I had just experienced. I thought, “How amazing if you could make a film that achieved a similar outcome?” So, I found the author’s email address online and was so fortunate that Stewart is an unbelievably kind, warm, thoughtful, and lovely human being.
I waited for the rights and eventually got them, and he has been cheering me on from the sidelines ever since we first got in contact and still now. It’s the best novel I’ve ever read, and so to have the author support my vision of it and support me through the process of making it is just beyond a gift, because it was a novel I wanted to take care of and treat appropriately. It’s been a journey, but it was a story that I couldn’t shake. I felt it was necessary to tell, because I think it brings up things that are important for everybody to think about, consider, and be thrust into. It was something I knew I had to do, and I’m very glad I did.
How did this story make it ideal for your directorial feature debut? What elements of that story really spoke to you that sparked that light in your head?
Yeah, the story is written in, I think it’s a third person singular, or second person. It’s “You stand, you walk, you think, you look out the window.” It has this strange effect on you when you get sucked in, because you start to kind of talk to yourself, but you are the character, Jacob Hansen. It’s both very distancing and uncomfortably intimate, and it somehow manages to dance between those two things for its entirety. That was something that really appealed to me filmically, because I’m somebody who’s always been really interested in visual storytelling and how the images can convey emotions. In addition to the tense he wrote in, it’s a story about a monster you cannot see, control, or understand, and that can be nature, faith, spiritual, whatever. It’s up to you what that is.
We felt between myself and the cinematographer (Kate McCullough) that we could create a camera that could represent both that tense and those outer forces that we don’t fully understand that have some kind of control over us, and that was hugely appealing to me. I knew that after the shorts I had done, my directorial debut with a feature film needed to be something that was my voice, that was much more visually inclined and quite aggressive cinematically. It felt like the right fit because it was a story that asked for that language and required some kind of biblical surreal world to be created, which I’m fascinated by and desperately wanted to do. I do feel as something that I, that that’s my interest in film. As an audience member, I seek out an experience rather than sitting down, watching, and one-to-one relating. I want to be sucked into something, and I want to be taken. This story felt so perfect for that, so I knew it had to be my first feature, despite the obstacles, the craziness of getting something of this scale, and the difficulty of getting this made.
How did the talent help you with this directing experience, and how did the casting come about to get Johnny Flynn and John C. Reilly to lead this ensemble?
Yeah, I have the best cast ever, and it’s quite a simple answer to say I have the best casting director ever, Kathleen Crawford in the UK. She’s somebody I just adore, but she’s unbelievably good at not just doing her job and getting you the best actors for the best roles, but also thinking about the personality types, because a film like this doesn’t just get made with me demanding for it to get made. It is teamwork. Everybody needs to be completely in the know about what we’re doing. Everybody needs to understand it, agree with it, feel comfortable with it, because you can’t create this kind of surreal universe without everybody actively taking part in it.
If one person isn’t, or if one element of costume design, makeup, production design, whatever, is not in sync with the rest, that world falls apart. I ended up with this dream cast, which is not just in terms of acting abilities. All these actors are so unbelievably good; even their worst take is borderline genius. I ended up with people who we were actually really working together. Some of the shots in this film Johnny Flynn came up with because we were so in together, and we all saw it the same way. It was really an inspiring and fun thing to have on set, and there was a lot of trust between all of us, and I’m forever grateful. In retrospect, I’m a debut director; they had no reason to trust me, and as the process went on, I realized how difficult or abnormal certain things I was asking of them were. They just trusted me and went along with it and were brave enough to try these things. I’m so grateful to them for that.
What would you say was the most difficult aspect of filming? Was there a particular scene that stood out, maybe that you struggled with?
Every day, there was something difficult. We found a field in Slovakia, and we built every location. So, to start with, the difficulty is that you don’t have anything built for you to plan around. You’ve got the DP and the production designer (Hubert Pouille) and I in really good communication, but we’re planning shots for locations that don’t exist. We just have a field, so inevitably, things go wrong. Also, you’ve got builders putting up these buildings that we’ve spent all this time working on, and it’s not always going to be exactly what you asked for, and you must adjust.
Every day is a new thing, and specifically, I can think of moments in this film, I call them “nightmares,” but it’s very much a character study of a man retreating into himself, starting to lose his mind, and grappling with that occurring. I wanted to show what was happening inside of him, and we used these red, blood-drenched nightmares or imagery to represent that. One of them was supposed to be this overhead shot of the town that then dramatically tilts down, whip-tilts to a horse carcass. Unfortunately, we were on a field, and it was night outside of Bratislava, and there was so much wind that the drone shot that we’d planned for four months, we were unable to do this as we had planned.
Also, there’s a very specific camera style in this film that meant nothing could wobble or move. Everything had to be at 90-degree angles, perfectly straight, and with wind, that doesn’t happen. Also, the balloon lights couldn’t go up because of the wind, so it was very difficult, and we were all standing on set in the middle of the night. We had to completely adjust, readjust, and shoot something completely unplanned; super happy with what we have. I think that’s the benefit of working in a space where you’ve created a universe, and you have rules for cameras, actors, and everything. Since we had a set of rules, we could sit down and go, well, within our rules and our world. What else can we do? It wasn’t that easy; it took a while. I was behind a corner crying for 10 minutes, and I felt, “Okay, now I can do it.” There were many difficulties, but we managed to get something else and said that worked and is still in the film. It feels visually and thematically appropriate.
Could you maybe talk a little bit about what your experience as a script supervisor previously, and your time working on shorts, had taught you about the directing experience?
First, I started with shorts, and I went to the Polish National Film School in Łódź, which is a very serious film school, when I was 18. You immediately divide up into groups. I only studied film directing, like a conservatory, for years. You learn Polish, you go there, and you do that. That school left me with this real feeling of: If you’re ever lucky enough to make something, you appreciate it; you better stand behind it and say something with it. That it’s not a joke, that you’re just lucky if you get to do that.
That’s something that carried through into my short films, where it was like, “Okay, but you’re lucky enough to make this, even if it’s five minutes. It better be your voice, you better mean it, and you’d better believe that there’s value to it.” That is something that translated into ‘A Prayer for the Dying,’ and then beyond that, after I finished film school, I went to New York, and then I moved to Norway. I worked as a script supervisor for almost 10 years, and it was the most…I mean, I love being a script supervisor, but not only do you get to sit next to the director and get a front-row seat to watching people make mistakes or do amazing things, where you just learn everything. You get to learn and understand a set, how it works, and what the different jobs are, which was incredibly valuable to me as a debut director.
To walk onto a big set and not feel uncomfortable, confused, scared, or needing to show myself as the powerful big director. I felt none of that, and I felt really at home. The visual language in this film is quite striking, and the coverage in the way in which we choose to tell this story, and continuity. I know the rules of classic coverage and how to tell a story more classically. It’s ingrained in me; it was my job. Since I knew those rules so well, I felt very comfortable breaking them and doing so intentionally, because I understood what I was doing. It wasn’t an accident, and I knew what that would leave me with in the editing room. It was hugely valuable to me having that experience for so many years on so many sets.
What are your biggest filmmaking influences?
I am the biggest Nicolas Winding Refn fan, like ever. I think ‘Drive’ (2011) is the best movie I’ve ever seen, and I like all his films. I really had a strong experience with ‘Her Private Hell’ (2026), which I know is not for everybody, but it gripped me. He’s a master of visual storytelling, using color as character. He is so confident in being unique and different. It’s inspiring because he goes for it. He’s a full-swing director, and sometimes that means you fail when you go big. You’re exposing yourself to make mistakes, and he doesn’t care. He does it anyway to see if he achieves it, and when he does, it’s just mind-blowing, amazing, and it’s a real cinematic experience. In addition to him, like everybody else in the world, Paul Thomas Anderson is amazing. Sirāt (2025) I saw last year, and I think it’s the best movie I’ve seen in 15 years. I’m obsessed with it. I also get a lot of inspiration from music, and I’m listening to a lot of Tyler, The Creator, whom I just love for his intensity, cleverness, and the way he deals with tone, not to mention he’s also a fantastic director. His music videos are unbelievably good.
Quiver’s A Prayer for the Dying, which also stars Kristine Kujath Thorp, Gustav Lindh, and Chris Slater, is available in select theaters.
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