Kevin Bacon Returns in YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT

Like a familiar friend, Kevin Bacon is talking directly out of my screen. How’s it going, Friday the 13th ’n’ Footloose guy? But this is not exactly a personal call. Hot on the virtual PR trail for his first feature film in four years, You Should Have Left, actor-producer Bacon has dropped in for an expertly hosted live Q&A session accessible to the USC SCA community (that’s the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts — if the world’s greatest film school needs an introduction).

Freely adapted from the short novella by Daniel Kehlmann, You Should Have Left reunites writer-director David Koepp with Bacon, the two last having worked together on 1999’s psychological thriller Stir of Echoes (which could be called The Other Sixth Sense, as this could be called The Shining Lite). Similar in tone but not in setting, You Should Have Left features Bacon as a retired banker (mysteriously tweaked from a screenwriter in the book) haunted by peculiar perceptions, which seem to emanate from the incongruously modern house he rents in the Welsh countryside as an escape — whoops — for his Boomer-do-over second family. Amanda Seyfried (like Bacon, a Pennsylvania kid done good) plays his actress wife, with newcomer Avery Essex as their concerned little daughter. The stripped-down Blumhouse-Universal production is currently streaming on all major platforms.

“Life is a performance to a certain extent, right?” Bacon reveals. “Because I’m performing right now. If I go into the grocery store — maybe not for everybody, but for me, I feel like I’m always kind of like a little bit performing. But if I’m truly alone, I’m not. And so who is that person? And what can you learn about a person in the course of a film? When you look at something like You Should Have Left, these are all kind of scary moments, so you’re very emotionally dialed up.”

In the movie, Bacon plays Theo, a man with much emotional baggage to unpack, whose sanity, and indeed whose life, may hinge on his relationships with his young second wife, Susanna (Seyfried), and their younger daughter, Ella (Essex). As their expected domestic bliss is increasingly beset by freakish lapses in time and space (to say the least), and fear escalates, Bacon describes Theo’s process of working it out, especially with Ella.

“‘I’m gonna be doing some stuff,’” he recalls in preparing his dewy onscreen daughter for some histrionics. “‘I’m gonna be making some faces, I’ll be yelling, I’ll be jumping around. I’m a professional pretender, and so are you. And we’re gonna get together, and we’re colleagues, and we’re just gonna kind of pretend together.’

“She had such a hunger for acting, and for understanding acting. I’ll never forget — there’s a scene where I’m talking to her, and I knew it was going to be an emotional scene, but I didn’t know it was a scene that was going to make me want to, you know, cry. And neither did she. I hadn’t said anything to her about that, and then in the middle of the scene, we’re shooting it, I got really emotional, and I was crying. I looked down at her little face, and she’s looking up at me like What the hell is going on? And at the end of the scene, David said ‘Cut,’ and she said, ‘How’d you do that?! How’d you do that?! You have to tell me how you did that!’ And so I realized that she really was looking at this from an actor’s perspective.”

The seasoned actor turned director and producer contemplates his business: “I don’t even like to say this, because in a lot of ways I don’t believe it, but sometimes there’s a magic that the camera just sees. I think it has to do with the ability — this could be natural, or it could be nurtured, or it could be learned — it has to do with how you can take whatever’s going on inside, and have it come out through your eyes.

“The camera sees things that are much more specific than we even see. You can sit in a room with somebody, and you can watch a performance, but as you’re watching that performance, you’re also peripherally listening and hearing a whole bunch of other stuff — and sometimes you miss things. I’ve done this a million times in directing and in the casting process. And then you go back and you look at the tape, and you go, Look at that moment. Look at those eyes. Look at that thing that she did in between the lines. Avery had that stuff.”

Acknowledging the teamwork that goes into making most films, Bacon adds (with a bit of a laugh), “As much as I wanna connect with somebody that’s playing my child, and that obviously I have a deep, deep feeling for, I’m also — first of all, I’m old, and second, I’m busy, because I’m trying to produce the movie, too. Amanda was a great, great help, because she was really willing to hang out with Avery, and engage with her. And Amanda’s daughter was on the set as well, so it was good.”

Mr. Bacon’s comments have been edited for space and clarity.