How Stanley Kubrick Influenced Simone Ashley’s Harrowing New Thriller ‘This Tempting Madness’

Independent filmmaking has never been an easy feat, but in today’s industry, it’s arguably harder than ever before. Tack onto that the tremendous responsibility of telling a true story so harrowing that it’s almost unbelievable, and you’ve got the gist of what it was like for filmmakers Jennifer E. Montgomery and Andrew Davis to bring their vision to screen in the new psychological thriller, This Tempting Madness.

Starring The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Bridgerton star Simone Ashley, This Tempting Madness is inspired by a real-life incident experienced by Montgomery’s best friend and follows Mia (Ashley) as she navigates a fractured memory after waking from a coma. She discovers that the man she loves, played by Austin Stowell, is missing, and as she begins piecing her life back together, Mia’s whole perception of reality begins to crumble.

At an early special event screening, Collider’s Steven Weintraub had the pleasure of chatting with director, co-writer, and producer Montgomery and co-writer, producer, and cinematographer Davis about their journey from original script to screen. In this interview, the pair discusses how they ultimately decided to adapt this story into a feature film, casting Ashley as their lead, capturing Mia’s mind through their visual language, and creating a soundscape through an incredible and inventive method. You can watch the full exclusive conversation in the video above or transcript below.

The directors discuss the challenges they had to overcome for their indie thriller.

Image via Trent Barboza

COLLIDER: What’s the last movie or TV show you watched that you want to recommend?

ANDREW DAVIS: Oh, wow. That’s tough,

JENNIFER MONTGOMERY: We saw Obsession. We enjoyed Obsession.

DAVIS: We did indeed.

DAVIS: You may have already seen it, but if you haven’t, go check it out.

MONTGOMERY: It’s a fun ride.

I’m very enthusiastic that it did so well, and I do think that this is going to be a really good year for movies in movie theaters.

MONTGOMERY: Yes. We need that. We need that badly.

100%. Let me start by saying, and I really mean this sincerely, congratulations. Making any movie is impossible, especially an indie movie. How tough was it to get this thing actually made?

MONTGOMERY: Every step of the way was harder than we imagined, and we knew it would be hard. You go through this process of writing a script, and it’s not one draft. It’s many. You get to the point where you are taking it out into the world to see if anyone will give you money to make it. We did, and we got lucky enough that we were able to secure that, but it’s never enough. And that’s not to say that we weren’t very blessed to get what we got, but making a movie takes a lot of people, especially in Los Angeles, making a movie in these kinds of locations, with union crews. It’s really, really tough.

DAVIS: It was such an immense struggle, honestly, every step of the process, from just the conception, having lived it first, then to deciding in this crazy way, “I guess we’re going to have to make this into a film.” Then, to find the resources, the people, the collaborators that would help us bring this to life, that was another struggle. Then production, post-production…

MONTGOMERY: We wanted to do it in LA. It was really important to do it in LA, and that’s hard for independent cinema, because so often the temptation is to go out of state where the tax credits are bigger. But we did work with the California Film Commission, and they helped us.

DAVIS: Yeah. And it was just very important for us to be here with the community of artists here who make film great and who really just deliver it at every level. We’re just so grateful for that support.

Simone Ashley’s New Thriller Was Inspired by an Unbelievable Real-Life Story

“It’s also more true than I think people would believe.”

Image via Vertical

This is something that happened to a friend of yours. It’s a personal story. How challenging was it to take this, something that happened, and actually put it together into a feature script because you’re obviously not making exactly what happened?

MONTGOMERY: Yeah, it is inspired by, but it’s also more true than I think people would believe. One of the hardest things for us was determining what not to include, and so often that was because it was too unbelievable, and you just wouldn’t think it’s true. I know that we’ve done it in the subversive genre context where we’re making it a thriller, and it has this sort of punchy aesthetic, but at the end of the day, what it’s capturing is, in many ways, very much what happened.

DAVIS: Yeah, it was a difficult journey deciding first to make it as a film, and then how to make it as a film. I think that the process of first living it and then interpreting it really stretched us to the max. It was important as we were conceiving it to modulate it in a way that would hopefully take a story that is so profoundly extraordinary on so many levels, and find the human elements that people can relate to in their own ways. So, it was just a journey of humanizing something that can just seem so crazy inhuman at times.

MONTGOMERY: It’s just such a surreal experience, and I think that if you were just to show it in sort of a docu-style, that would be so hard to actually deliver the feeling of how bizarre it also is. It was important to us to create something that would make it an opportunity to talk about really difficult subject matter in a more subversive way, that opens the door to something people would often sweep under the rug or feel like they can’t talk about. Here it is in this wild psychological thriller, very, very intensely from the perspective of Mia, to try to understand what she’s going through, because the trauma of going through this initial incident and then also the resilience she had to have to come back from it, and the choices she had to make every day, were so hard, and we are just so proud of that, and we really wanted to show that. But we didn’t want to hide from how hard it is for her to make those choices every day.

‘This Tempting Madness’ Uses Fractured Memories to Tell a True Story

“How do we get inside her head?”

Image via Vertical Entertainment

Do you remember when you decided to take something that was a private thing, like, “Wait, I think we want to make a movie out of this?”

DAVIS: Wow. I can’t remember the precise moment. It was more of a process of recognition, because so much about the genesis of the film, after living the experience, was that it was created out of this mental dodge, really, to get her to open up about her experiences.

MONTGOMERY: She had amnesia, so she couldn’t remember so many things that had happened in her life. She had this whole six-month period where she was blacked out — could not remember. She didn’t, at first, have short-term memory. She would only be able to remember things for 60 seconds, and then she’d start over, and you’d have the same conversation with her over and over again for an hour. Then it got to the point where she had built up her short-term memory, but she still just had this block of the last six months of her life, and that last six months is obviously crucial when you’re trying to understand how you got to this place.

So, I had encouraged her to keep a journal, and I encouraged her to keep a journal not because we wanted to make a film, just because I wanted her to be able to remember and reference the journal. She didn’t want to do a journal at first. She’s like, “I don’t need that.” I’m like, “No, no. You should really keep a journal.” She’s like, “Well, do you need it?” Because she’s the kind of person who doesn’t like to do stuff for herself, but she’ll do it for other people, and I’m like, “What do you mean?” She’s like, “Well, do you want to write about it?” And I said, “Oh, sure. Yeah,” which, no intention. I did not want to write about this. I was living this with her. That was the furthest thing from my mind.

But then once she actually got to a place where she was better, like about nine months to a year later, she came to me and, in a private conversation, she was like, “So are you going to write it?” And I had to go home, and I had to talk to Andrew and be like, “What are we doing here?”

DAVIS: That was when another whole series of discussions, debates, negotiations, arguments, all the things, us determining whether that was something we wanted to take on [happened], because it had been so traumatic for us, as well, experiencing it with her and observing — not nearly in the degree that her family and she personally went through, but just in our own small way. So then it was very difficult to decide.

MONTGOMERY: It’s a tremendous responsibility, and it’s not something we took lightly. It was something that we wanted to make sure that she was aware of every step of the way, that there was transparency. We kept our autonomy as artists, but we wanted to make sure she was informed every step of the way.

Image via Trent Barboza

DAVIS: I think at the point that we made that decision, it was: how can we, not watch from a distance, but how can we participate, and how can we bring everybody into that experience? So then that was the translation process, was: okay, so first, at a scripting level, how do we write this in a way that when you’re reading, it feels like you’re with her? Then, as we were trying to translate all those things we wrote on the page into something that felt that way, how do we do that at a technical level? How do we do that at all the visual levels?

MONTGOMERY: At an editing level. At a VFX level.

DAVIS: At a sound, score. The mantra was: How do we get inside her head? How do we get you closer to Mia? How do we make this your experience along with hers?

Because the film deals with trauma, fractured memory, and perception, how did you decide what the audience should know versus what Mia should know in each scene?

MONTGOMERY: That’s tough, because in many ways we were the audience to this, right? And there are many times where we were in this circumstance with Mia, and where her family was in this circumstance, where the things that she was doing didn’t make sense to us, and so then there’s this enormous thirst and hunger and curiosity that we have when making this film to put ourselves in her mind to understand that, because it becomes so important to understand that.

But at the same time, when we’re talking about how much we’re giving and how much we’re taking, the reality is that for Mia, her brain was only giving her as much as she could handle at any given minute, so we were trying to parse it out the way that she remembered, because she doesn’t get every memory at every time. That’s not how trauma comes back. If you think about when you’ve had circumstances in your life and you think back, one day, you’ll remember them one way, and then you’ll get a new tiny bit of information, and you’re like, “Oh, wait, does that reframe everything?” And I think that’s what she’s going through to a very extreme degree.

The Directors Reveal the Kubrick Movies That Influenced Their Psychological Thriller

They also share their personal favorites.

Image via Warner Bros.

What films did you watch before filming began, and did you ask the cast and crew to watch anything prior to filming?

DAVIS: We actually watched a lot of [Stanley] Kubrick beforehand, which is probably not surprising. But specifically, there were elements of Full Metal Jacket, actually, that were very inspiring to us, and Eyes Wide Shut. And obviously also The Shining. We did ask Simone [Ashley] specifically to watch these.

MONTGOMERY: Eyes Wide Shut, Girl Interrupted. A lot of movies that deal with characters who are in different time periods and going between them. Also, Black Swan and Memento, but they’re both very much dealing with mental awareness and amnesia and things like that.

Do you have a favorite Stanley Kubrick?

MONTGOMERY: I really love A Clockwork Orange.

There’s no wrong answer. All of his films are amazing.

DAVIS: Just because I’m a huge history nerd, I’m obsessed with Barry Lyndon. But honestly, I just watched it again after having had some distance from it, Full Metal Jacket, and I feel like it’s a little underappreciated at times. It’s a wild movie.

MONTGOMERY: But also, you have to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey because we are here.

DAVIS: It’s happening.

MONTGOMERY: HAL, where are you?

The rest of the Q&A could just be about Kubrick. When you think about what he accomplished with 2001 back in the ‘60s, when AI was just an idea rather than something put into a physical form, the guy’s a genius. Straight up.

DAVIS: Absolutely.

How do you build audience trust in a story where trust itself is constantly shifting?

MONTGOMERY: How do you trust yourself ever? At the end of the day, all we’re ever trying to do is understand what our own realities are. When we were constructing this film, we wanted to face people with that because I think anybody could find themselves in this situation, and I think that’s hard to digest in many ways. I don’t think anyone is immune to what the characters in this go through, unfortunately.

DAVIS: Maybe the title rather obviously alludes to the fact that so much of our perspective is just about how we all can be pulled into that. But I think at a more technical or cinematic level, to your point of your question, that was actually something that was so much done with our brilliant editor, Kiran [Pallegadda], because it is very much a modulation. Especially in the early part of the film, it’s both introducing people to the language and the narrative devices that we’re going to be using to both communicate where she’s at mentally but also to ground them in the reality of the space, and it was very difficult.

We especially reworked the beginning of the film a considerable amount, trying to modulate between kind of the mania and the grounded realities of her experiences with her family, and it was tough. I think that was one of the hardest things to balance, actually.

MONTGOMERY: Huge credit to the editor.

Why Simone Ashley Was the Perfect Choice for Mia

Image via Vertical Entertainment

What made you pick Simone, and did you warn her before filming began, “We’re going to put you through it?”

MONTGOMERY: You have to. I mean, this role is so demanding both psychologically and physically. A lot of the stunts that she had to do were so physically demanding, a lot of the vocal work she had to do was so physically demanding, and then obviously, at a psychological level, it puts you in really uncomfortable places. So, we did talk to her about that.

But I think what was so obvious of a cast about Simone is that when we sat down with her, the first thing that she said to us was how important it was to her to show the strength Mia had and how Mia could be strong. To us, that was, I think, not necessarily the most traditional approach, but the approach that we really wanted to take, and that she seemed to understand and intuit at an intimate level, and it made it clear from that moment that she had the energy we were looking for for Mia.

DAVIS: But at the same time, whatever warnings were given or even the challenges we could have possibly perceived in advance, they were a fraction of what all of us, I think, went through. You may have noticed Simone is in literally every scene of this movie, and so being on set and having to be there every single day for literally every single scene, to, on a day, go from one scene where you’re in full facial prosthetic, and then that has to be removed, and then you have to…

MONTGOMERY: Be a glamazon.

DAVIS: Yeah. It all happens, and she was just willing to throw herself into it in a way that is just truly extraordinary. Honestly, I don’t know how she did it, but somehow she pulled it off.

I thought she did a great job. With a lot of directors, I’ve heard, you’re confident you have the right person, but in the back of your mind, you have to wonder a little bit until you really start filming. What was the first thing that you saw her do on set that both of you were like, “Oh my God, we did this right?”

MONTGOMERY: I think, honestly, it was in that scene in the prison when she is modulating her emotions when coming face to face with Jake after the incident, because the reality is, her emotions in that scene have to go from this intimate, tragic place to also this very upsetting emotional state that she’s hiding from herself in so many ways.

DAVIS: Yeah, I think that was definitely that moment, and that was very early on in the shoot. So it was like day one or day two, honestly. We would have preferred to shoot it later because it’s so emotionally complicated and dense, but when we saw both her and Austin [Stowell] together in that moment, there was just really something that they were able to bring to life in that moment where we could really see, “Wow, they’re going to be able to go on this journey where you see them in so many forms, and you both feel like you can understand and empathize but also weary and confused and trying to piece it together.”

‘This Tempting Madness’ Uses Camera Lenses to Bring Audiences Inside Mia’s Mind

Panavision was crucial to capturing the movie’s visual language.

Image via Smoke Jumper Films and CatchLight Studios

I thought you did a great job with the cinematography, especially because you’re not working with a huge schedule, you’re on a tight budget, and I’m sure you have a tight filming schedule. Talk a little bit about the visual language that you were looking to accomplish and what you pulled off.

DAVIS: So much of that I give credit to my incredible crew that I had around me, but a lot of that was just also, as we talked about before, the conversations we had in approaching the narrative, and then the decisions that were made for “How do we translate that at a visual level?” So, it was determining in advance how we were going to piece it together, which it really was very much a puzzle.

We spent a long time trying to modulate the approach to fit the moment we were in. The film starts more grounded, and so we try to be more restrained. There’s sort of a temptation to make every shot really sexy, but it also requires a lot of restraint because if it’s too crazy all the time, there’s no impact for it. So we really wanted to save a lot of that for the end of the film.

MONTGOMERY: It’s constructed as a slow burn at a narrative level that then gets more and more wild as we get deeper into it, and that’s also mirrored in the cinematography in a very intense way.

DAVIS: Yeah. So I guess to circle back in a more specific way to answer your question, it really was about being judicious with our resources and focusing in on the moments that were essential to use the tools that were needed to capture that. So, a lot of the film we were working with a very stripped-down camera package.

I’m so grateful to Panavision. They customized some lenses for us, some vintage 8 series lenses, which were incredible, and those were the workhorses. They did a lot of the work. So it was really just lens choice. We had this lens, this 12 mil we like to call the Madness Lens — maybe a bit of a crude name for it, but it was our shorthand — and that’s what helped transition us in and out of her mental states. I think without Panavision support, finding the right optics for those moments, it would have been much harder to communicate that at a visual level. So, just a huge shout-out to that. So a lot of it was just making those early choices and then finding a way to stitch that in as we were just hustling to make it every day.

MONTGOMERY: And of course, there were so many things along the way where you think you’re going to get one thing, and then there’s a twist on the day where, “Oh no, this was supposed to be a night shoot, but it’s actually a day shoot now. That’s fine, right?” And being able to find a way to pivot and make that transition work, and just remain agile.

That’s what so many people don’t realize. They think every decision was deliberate in the movie or in a show, and sometimes you’re against a scheduling challenge or a location challenge or the weather challenge, whatever it is, and you have to adapt.

Image via Trent Barboza

You talk about the lenses, and a lot of people don’t realize the importance of the lens choices on what you’re going to shoot with. How crazy were you going in the days leading up to finally picking what lenses you wanted, debating between the 12 and others, because it’s a huge stylistic choice that dictates what people are going to see?

DAVIS: I mean, it was a big swing. There are the best intentions and the great ideas of when you’re at the rental house or when you’re in lens testing, and we did slowly narrow it down. We were fortunate to be able to do a small amount of testing in advance. But then there were those early days of shooting where we had decided, “Well, we’re going to use this particular lens,” but we’d put it in there, and then we realized that in our little set, we’re actually seeing off the top of it now. So, “What are we going to do to both achieve what we’re hoping to do at an optical level, but also not see off the edge of the set?” So, those were curveballs. It’s like where the rubber meets the road. How do you decide that?

But I think ultimately this is something I really give a huge credit to Jennifer, is she always was pushing me and always pushing everybody on set to just be daring. I think that’s what was so freeing and so exciting. So often, I’d be like, “Is this lens a little too crazy?” And she’s like, “No, let’s go for it.” So, it was just such a beautiful manifestation of the partnership that we have together.

I’m fascinated by the editing process because that’s where it all comes together.

MONTGOMERY: Shout out Kiran.

How did the film change in the editing room in ways you didn’t expect going in? Did you do any early screenings for friends and family that impacted what you ultimately released?

MONTGOMERY: As we talked about a little bit, this is an incredibly ambitious film for the budget and the schedule that we had, and that is to say, by the time I got to the edit room, I wasn’t convinced I had the movie in the can. It’s not to say that I didn’t know what we had and that I didn’t know what we were, that we weren’t very intentional in what we chose to capture in the limited schedule that we had. It’s just that it was so, so challenging and so wild.

So to then come into the room and have to put it together when, as a director, you’re thinking so often, particularly because you start [editing] right after you wrap, basically the next day, and so your brain is still thinking about all those shots you didn’t get, and you’re thinking, “Oh, can I make it work without that?” And Kiran was just so daring and pushing through, being like, “No, no, no, no, no, we got this. We got this.” And he was so emotionally sensitive to test it over and over to know, “I just want to add a frame here and pull back a frame here.” And he could do that over and over. There’s only one person in the world who has seen this movie more than I have, and it’s him. And he would probably still watch it again tomorrow and be able to do the same because he’s that good.

DAVIS: I would say so much of it was being able to have somebody else with a new perspective on the material, and so a lot of it through testing was kind of just modulating your perception of various characters, of the pacing, and how much information you’re getting, how much your perception of her mental state is changing or their relationship is changing. So, it was very much always like a house of cards because of how non-linear the structure of it was.

So, what would happen is we would do a test screening, and you would get some sort of feedback about the emotional resonance of a particular scene or the pace of a scene. “It’s too slow, it’s too fast,” or “I need more of this information.” And you would make that little adjustment.

Image via Trent Barboza

MONTGOMERY: Really just one small adjustment.

DAVIS: Yeah, one small adjustment, and it would just have this incredible ripple effect. So, it was a long process of trying to modulate and put all those things together. Again, huge shout-out to Kiran. I think he was always able to bring it back to the emotional core of Mia and what she is going through, and that lodestar really guided us, I think, ultimately, to where we landed in the end.

MONTGOMERY: And we talked a lot about memory and how you really remember things. Like, I just remember there was one point when we just sat in the edit room for three hours talking through, like, “Think back on a memory. How do you remember it? What does that look like?” And it’s very rarely that you remember something in a such a clean, easy scene and sequence. You remember just fragments, and so we really played with that.

Talk a little bit about the color palette because I was writing down that Mia’s palette leans warm, like reds, oranges, and yellows, while Jake’s skews cool.

MONTGOMERY: So it was always something that we had done to design the dress to be orange, in the orange spectrum. It could have been red, depending on who we cast, but ultimately in the orange, red, yellow spectrum, because we wanted Mia to represent a phoenix falling and rising from the ashes. So, that color palette was very intentional, and with the orange, it was just such a beautiful, vibrant color for that goal, and also on Simone. We wanted to keep her in that color palette throughout because, as we’re going between past and present, we wanted to make sure that we were still sometimes able to disorient you, where, as you’re moving between past and present, you can’t necessarily tell unless you’re paying really close attention, because that’s how it could be for Mia at times.

DAVIS: Then, as you keyed on so adroitly, Jake in blue was very much a color contrast choice, which I think is something that’s important to me at a cinematographer level, but I think to us, as well, is introducing visual contrast, like I was talking about, whether it’s with camera movement or color palette. I think all those things work together to create the overall palette of the film that helps guide you where you are at in the narrative.

MONTGOMERY: And to that end, our production designer, [Kevin Bird], was very aware of it. One of the first questions he asked me was what we wanted to do with the color palette, knowing certain things had been written in, but also knowing that he wanted to lean in. He was so amazing at just bringing ideas to me and saying, “Is this going to work? It’s okay if it doesn’t, but will it?” And sometimes it wouldn’t, but sometimes it really did, down to that red circle.

Simone Ashley’s Voice Secretly Powers the Score of Her New Thriller

Composer Rebekka Karijord utilizes her own invention, a “voice organ,” for the film.

Image via Vertical Entertainment

The movie opens with a pretty stark shot. Talk a little bit about, especially with a limited budget, filming her falling.

DAVIS: Yeah, that was tough. It was many, many discussions. It was many sleepless nights trying to figure out, “How are we going to pull this off?”

MONTGOMERY: But it was also so important because it’s where the story starts, right? Like if we don’t have that in the movie and if we don’t see what that actually looked like in its full egregious form, then we don’t really ever understand the film. So it was important that we put resources there.

DAVIS: Yeah. So, as I mentioned before, that was one of those places that we knew we were going to have to put resources into, and so we compromised in other places to be able to put the resources into that. But it was still a puzzle. It was still complicated. It was still very difficult to pull off.

A lot of it was wirework that we were doing on a stage with green screen, which is very technical and it’s very complicated, and we really benefited from having incredible people who were able to pull off the physicality of that. Simone is very, very physical. All that swimming in the pool was very physical, all the wire work. I mean, when you’re sitting in a harness like that, it’s very taxing, and she really just pulled it off.

We shot elements in a stage and we also shot some in real environments. It was just having a very clear sense of, like, “We need this shot. We need this shot. We need to be able to stitch it all together.” And just knowing the bare minimum that we needed to pull that off, but also in a way that really set the tone for the film.

Image via Vertical Entertainment

I’m fascinated by learning the behind-the-scenes of making movies and television shows. What would soon-to-be fans of the movie be surprised to learn about the making of the film that they wouldn’t read in press notes or on Wikipedia? Is there anything you can share?

DAVIS: Wow, that is a tough question.

MONTGOMERY: Gosh, I have so many moments to share, but I’m like, “Will they find it on Wikipedia?” The internet is a magical thing.

Something that I just think is a fun story to share is that we really wanted this to be immersive in every way possible, and that comes down to the sound design and the score. We put a lot of effort into making sure that we immersively felt like we were in Mia’s head, and to do that, we worked with our composer, [Rebekka Karijord], because our composer came to us with this idea. She said she’d been working on inventing a voice organ, where she could attribute the human voice to different notes on a keyboard so she could play it like an organ. So she said, “I don’t know if your actress can sing at all, but if she can just even get something that’s not totally out of pitch, then there’s a lot we can do with making her voice the instrument.”

DAVIS: Yeah. So Simone actually has a beautiful voice, is a classically trained singer, and she has perfect pitch. So, we kind of just took a swing, and in the ADR booth, asked her to hum two octaves, and she just nailed it perfectly.

MONTGOMERY: And whisper two octaves.

DAVIS: Yeah, do a lot of different vocal tones and exercises that then both our composer and our sound designer were able to seamlessly use. The final piece that you hear, the finale, actually is Simone’s voice in the tones of it. It’s basically our composer playing her with their voice organ.

MONTGOMERY: All throughout the movie, her voice is the soundscape and the actual music of the film, grounded by a beautiful cello from Julia Kent. But really just largely Simone’s voice.

This Tempting Madness is available to watch on VOD now.

Release Date

June 12, 2026

Runtime

92 minutes

Director

Jennifer E. Montgomery