‘Influencers’ Director On How ‘Lizzie McGuire’ Inspired The Sequel, Rise Of ‘Malicious’ AI, That Bonkers Ending, And More

Cassandra Naud in Kurtis David Harder’s INFLUENCERS.Courtesy of Shudder. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more timely film franchise than director Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer duology, whose harsh spotlight exposes the inimical omnipresence of social media and the nefarious ways to which rapidly expanding AI can be used against us by unsavory parties.In many ways, 2022’s Influencer and its new sequel, the aptly-titled Influencers (exclusively streaming on Shudder as of today), are cautionary indictments of our present-day society cleverly disguised as engaging psychological thrillers that get under the skin and stay there.“I don’t necessarily have any answers,” Harder, who co-created the IP alongside Tesh Guttikonda, recently admitted over Zoom. “For me, it’s about asking questions about where we’re going. With pushing so quickly ahead, we’ve seen the pitfalls of what social media has done to to youth and the anxieties that it’s building."The sequel, which Harder wrote solo, brings back our favorite con artist, CW (Cassandra Naud), who seemingly can’t escape her dark nature—one that compels her to murder internet personalities and steal their identities. After ruining what could have been a long and prosperous relationship in France, CW attempts to lie low in the mountains of Bali. The character’s solace is short-lived, however, when her only surviving victim, ex-influencer Madison (Emily Tennant), shows up with a score to settle. Head below to read my complete, spoiler-filled discussion with the filmmaker. I strongly recommend watching the sequel before reading the interview…***WARNING! The following interview contains spoilers for the film!***MORE FOR YOUJosh Weiss: I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but how did CW get off the island?Kurtis Davis Harder: There’s an answer hidden in there somewhere [laughs].Weiss: Do you plan to give us the answer at some point?Harder: Yeah, if we do a third one, it’ll all be explained. I don’t know. We’ll see. She’s crafty.Weiss: Take me back to the start. Where did the idea for the Influencer series come from?Harder: Tesh Guttikonda, who co-wrote and produced the first one, and I were having lunch one day. I had a trip planned to go to Asia, and we just started joking about how we travel all the way around the world and the first thing we do is go to a McDonald’s. We look for familiarity when we’re in unfamiliar places. So, if you meet another American overseas, you have this natural tendency to trust them—whereas you would never trust this person back home. That was the real seed of the idea. The first draft didn’t actually involve any influencers. It was all just about the idea of traveling and trusting someone that comes across as familiar, and then them using that against you. It slowly evolved over a couple of years, because Covid obviously happened and we were trying to do an international travel movie in the middle of a pandemic. It pushed us back a little bit and gave us more time to evolve. But that was the core tenant: Trusting familiarity when that's probably not the best idea.Weiss: These movies hinge on the character of CW. They wouldn’t work if you didn’t have the right person in the role, and Cassandra absolutely crushes it. How long did it take to find her?Harder: We were casting for quite a while, testing a few different actors. She was recommended to us and we watched a short film that she did. She’d never been the lead of a feature, she’d been in some TV, but it was really her first foray into a leading role. It was definitely a bit of a gamble, because it was her first time, but she just nailed it. Within the first few minutes of her reading, we were like, “Okay, we’ve found our girl.”Weiss: Did you already have a fleshed-out backstory for the character?Harder: We had ideas. I gave a lot to Cass as in terms of the the history and allowed her to flesh a lot of that out. With the first movie, we were purposely trying to keep her a bit more enigmatic and not diving too much into the why or how. We placed some seeds of where she might have come from and then with this one, we’re expanding on that—who she is and a different side of her, so-to-speak.Weiss: What do you hope these films say about where we are as a society today?Harder: I don’t necessarily have any answers. For me, it’s about asking questions about where we’re going. With pushing so quickly ahead, we’ve seen the pitfalls of what social media has done to to youth and the anxieties that it’s building. [There are] positives and negatives. With both these films, [we’re] exploring AI in a different way—more of the social consequences and seeing how this could potentially be used in malicious ways. We’re exploring [AI being used for] identity theft and how you could use this against someone who’s very publicly online and hijack their life. When we did the first film, ChatGPT wasn’t out. Everyone kind of felt it coming but it was like, “What is this stuff?” Coming into this one, I was looking at the new things. Now that it’s so ubiquitous within our culture, what’s around the corner? We’re looking into … ways that it’s evolving. That is so interesting to me. And then just looking at the potential personal and emotional potential problems we’re facing in terms of meaning and those kind of things. But that’s all under the surface. On the surface level, we’re just having a lot of fun with it and seeing how this could be used.Kurtis David Harder on the set of 'Influencers.'Courtesy of Influencers/ShudderWeiss: Was it particularly difficult breaking the story for a sequel?Harder: It was a big question of, “How can you expand? Is there a new thing that you can explore? Is there more to pull from these characters?” The idea clicked with this perfect, cultivated life that gets totally sidelined by CW in southern France. You don’t entirely know exactly where it takes place in the grand schemes of the timeline. When that clicked, I think I wrote the first 30 pages in a couple days. I sent them out to the core team—the cast and and the producers—and everybody was game. I was like, “Should I go finish the rest of the script?” It came together very quickly once the pieces were there, but it took a while for the idea to click. When you’re coming into a sequel, you obviously want to raise the stakes and take the scope to new levels. In the first film, we had a small group of people that traveled to Thailand. We just made this thing very under the radar. There were a lot of sequences that we really wanted to do, but just couldn't with what we had in terms of budget and everything. [It was great] to come back and be able to do a fight sequence we really wanted to do in the first one, but couldn’t because of logistics and weather. But then, also on the character side, we’re diving deeper into CW and seeing a little more of a different side of her. That was what really attracted me to do another one.Weiss: Can you expound on the scene or scenes you weren’t able to pull off in the original that found their way into the sequel?Harder: At the very end of the first one, we have the face-off between the two characters. We had this whole fight choreographed and just due to timing and typhoon season—the weather was changing rapidly every five minutes—it ended up getting cut down to a very short moment. And so, coming back into this one, we were able to work with the stunt coordinator. We had a had five days just work on the fight sequence. To be able to come back and actually plan out something in advance, as opposed to being kiboshed at the very end, was very special. But also, the big thing was expanding the scope. I was really excited to be able to shoot on three continents. We expanded the length of the shoot significantly. We were on the road for almost five months.Weiss: These movies really excel at turning specific locations into characters in and of themselves. They feel so vibrant and alive—to the point where you want to jump through the screen and lounge on the beach or by the pool…Harder: With the first film, the main house location was was a place I saw on Airbnb. I would never stay there myself, just because it’s so lavish, but it was something that stood out to me visually. Coming into this one, we were really trying to find the best locations we could find in Thailand. [We asked ourselves], “What are some of those places we don’t necessarily get to go that we always see photos of?” We’re getting to see the vacation lifestyle at its most extreme, one that very few people get to experience. It’s fun to have a character like CW, who essentially forces her way into these places.Cassandra Naud in Kurtis David Harder’s INFLUENCERS.Courtesy of Shudder.Weiss: Do you have any favorite thrillers that influenced these movies?Harder: I’m hugely inspired by Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock. With the sequel, we’re coming into this idea that CW has cultivated this French New Wave lifestyle, and we’re not sure if that’s just another mask that she’s wearing. Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief would be probably one of CW’s favorite movies.

The Lizzie McGuire Movie was a huge inspiration [in terms] of identity theft and girls riding mopeds around Europe. Obviously, The Beach was a big one for the first film. These movies that really lean into the travel/adventure [aspect where] you're not sure what's around the corner.Weiss: How would the formula evolve in a potential third installment?Harder: There’s no plans right now, but I definitely subscribe to the Tarantino logic of, “If you’re going to make a second one, it needs to take everything that worked about the first one and just taken up a notch.” You need to do a bunch of subversions and play with the characters in new ways that gives the sequel a purpose, as opposed to it just being a retread. It’s a little intimidating to try to go do that again. There are no plans at this point, but to be able to wrap it up [as a trilogy] would be a fun.Weiss: Both movies basically start in medias res. Is that another Tarantino-esque flourish?Harder: Yeah, he has fun with structure. Modern audiences are just very, very smart. They’ve seen everything, they know what’s coming. If you place something, they’re going to pick up on it and see a twist coming. So, both films are really exercises in trying to surprise the modern audience, finding ways to have fun with their expectations. At the core, they really are just fun rides and we’re trying to take people on an adventure around the world. But then we’re able to layer in some of my social worries about where we’re going as a culture. At the end of the day, [however], they really are just about having fun characters doing crazy things in really wild places.Weiss: We haven’t discussed Madison yet. What conversations did you have with Emily about the character’s trauma following her time on the island?Harder: The internet can be a terrible place. When something controversial happens, people are always looking to prove others wrong. We made jokes about the very end of the first movie and where she was going. [It seems like] a happy ending, but when you start to think about the repercussions of what would happen in real life, it would probably be similar to the foils she’s facing in this film. So, we really dug into what that would do to a person. In a positive way, her character has grown so much, but she’s now facing these different issues and has to go on this adventure herself to solve these new problems with newfound stock that she built up and learned through the first film.Jon Whitesell in Kurtis David Harder’s INFLUENCERS.Courtesy of ShudderWeiss: Let’s talk about the ending. CW has just been exposed via livestream and starts killing people with a meat cleaver. What’s going through her mind in that moment?Harder: Her arc is definitely coming to terms of who she really is. We see a very different side of her in the beginning and we’re not sure if this is truly who she wants to be or if that other itch [still exists, meaning] the full nature of who she really is and what’s going to make her happy. I think at the end of the film, we just get to see the full unhinged and untethered CW. She’s able to be exactly who she is, she doesn’t have anyone judging her, she’s out in the open. It was really fun to see her lose it and have this big finale that we had a lot of fun shooting.Weiss: You have these extreme moments of violence throughout. The sequel literally opens with a woman (Veronica Long) slitting her own throat. Did you use a lot of fake blood on set?Harder: Yeah, we tried to do everything as practically as possible. That was a pretty wild day where we had blood all over that villa by the end, because we shot it in chronological order in terms of all the deaths that take place in this location. It was pretty covered in blood by the end of it and we were cleaning up for awhile.Weiss: Both films have been Shudder exclusives. What’s it been like working with them?Harder: Having a streaming service purely for horror is such a godsend for audiences. Seeing how much they support artists has been really special.Weiss: Have any real-world influencers shared their thoughts on these movies with you?Harder: I think influencers get a lot of flack. In media, they end up being portrayed as caricatures. They’re real people in both films, [but] I think the idea that the biggest career goal for a young person is YouTuber or influencer is pretty depressing. [With that said], the ones that succeed are some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met. It is not an easy job to do, so there is a lot of respect for who these people are beneath the facade they throw online. Both films were really showcasing a first impression that is kind of an extreme version of where they’ve ended up. Then we’re slowly pulling back the layers and figuring out who these people are beneath the character they play. What are the influences on top of them? Not in the internet way, but the influences that have gotten them to this point? I think we see that a lot with Madison, with her boyfriend, and the pressure to chronically be online. And with this one, we have some new characters like Jacob [John Whitesell], who portrays a very loud opinion online, but we slowly start to figure out what this guy actually believes. To me, it’s really fun to play with characters for whom you have these very extreme introductions and then the rest of the film is like, “Oh, did you judge them, or is this actually who they are underneath it all?”Influencers is now streaming exclusively on Shudder