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half-light
“We investigated a variety of possible locations,” says Rosenberg. “We even looked at Nova Scotia at one point. We had a specific look that we were after but we also had very specific location requirements in terms of the plot: a lighthouse plays a key role in the film, and we needed certain other locations to be available close to the lighthouse. It was difficult to find all the things we needed. Above all, though, I was looking for a place that has a bleak beauty to it. I suppose that’s the best way I can describe it: very stark, but with an eerie kind of beauty.”
‘Eerie’ is obviously the key word for Half-Light, which Rosenberg originally wrote a few years ago, then put on hold while he handled a number of other writing assignments, including the English-language version of one of the eeriest of all recent movies, the Korean supernatural thriller A Tale of Two Sisters, which he did for Dreamworks.
“I have always enjoyed ghost stories and thrillers,” he says, “and also those kinds of films like The Wicker Man, where someone travels to an isolated village and begins to succumb to feelings of paranoia and fear. So I kind of put all those together and came up with the idea for Half-Light.
“Without giving too much away about the story, Demi Moore plays a successful mystery novelist living in London. At the beginning of the film, her son drowns in the canal in Primrose Hill where she’s living. Her marriage comes under great strain and she finds that she’s unable to write. She travels to a cottage which is near a remote village in Scotland and begins to try and write again.
“While she’s there, she begins to immerse herself in the life of the village and the local people and, in particular, with the keeper of a lighthouse which is on an island a couple of miles off-shore from her cottage. Whilst all this is happening, she may or may not be receiving messages from her dead son warning her about something. And that’s all I am going to say!”
Half-Light’s star came aboard about four or five months before production began, and suffered as much from the weather as anyone.
“What interested me is the career trajectory that she’s had,” says Rosenberg of his leading actress. “She took a few years away from Hollywood to raise her three girls in Idaho. She’s very devoted to them, and that part of her life interested me because she was playing a mother in Half-Light, and the mother’s connection to her child is an essential component to the story.
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