WINCHESTER (2018) Production Notes

Inspired by true events. On an isolated stretch of land 50 miles outside of San Francisco sits the most haunted house in the world. Built by Sarah Winchester (Academy Award winner Helen Mirren), heiress to the Winchester fortune, it is a house that knows no end.

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PRODUCTION NOTES

THE LEGEND

Sarah Winchester (Academy Award-winner Helen Mirren) was more than just an heiress of an enormous fortune and majority shareholder of the company that made it. She was also the architect of a macabre plan to turn an 8-room San Jose, California farmhouse into a sprawling, labyrinth of inexplicable spectral chambers...

An exorbitant work in progress - built, torn down, built again. A non-stop year-round construction, its interior lavishly dressed in the finest decor of the day, Sarah's folly was beyond anyone's comprehension. And it was built for one purpose: To be haunted. The master plan: To recreate the realms where lives were claimed by a Winchester rifle. ...It's in the walls...

Built by the dead, but for Sarah, the dead would keep it.

The bereaved widow was building it to confront the unspeakable: Victim or villain, hundreds of vengeful spirits, some good and some bad, were imprisoned in this asylum and Sarah was the warden. And the most terrifying of all had one pursuit - for Sarah's own to meet their fate. ...It's in the air... "There's a lot of mythology around Sarah Winchester," muses Mirren. "In her lifetime there was a legend, a mythology that grew around her and the creation of this house. This house was built at a time where there was nothing around. Now it's in the middle of San Jose's main street - a shopping area. But at that time, it was just empty farmland and in the middle of it was this extraordinary construction, bit by bit being built by this widow who would always wear black and who no one in the local town would ever see. She was private, always in her house. You can understand why a mythology started building about her as the house became more extraordinary, more complicated, bigger and bigger. This mythology has lasted over the years. It's very difficult to extricate the truth about her from the mythology.

"With our film, there's a span between truth and mythology. I researched the truth of her but it was very hard to get to that truth. Many different people had different ideas about her. But you try to go to the source, to the people who worked with her, to sense what she was like. I believe she was a woman with great empathy, deep feelings (for others). At the same time the fortune that she spent on building this house came from the Winchester rifle fortune. So there is an incredible contradiction between the character of the woman and the source of her income," Mirren clarifies.

"It is fascinating. Whether that is the truth of Sarah or not, no one will ever know. There are no diaries. Only second-hand knowledge."

For horror maestros Peter and Michael Spierig (Jigsaw, Predestination), seizing an opportunity to write and direct a supernatural thriller inspired by a true story weirder than anything they had ever imagined - comes along once in a lifetime. What the Australian twin brothers envisioned is a disturbing testament to a historical mystery that can never be fully explained about a creator as confounding as her creation.

More than just a name, WINCHESTER is a formidable placeholder in time.

And Sarah Lockwood Pardee, an outsider who married the Winchester Repeating Rifle inventor, taking his name, would become a 50-percent shareholder of the company and heir to a vast amount of money as his widow. Her $20 million estate then would be equal to nearly half a billion dollars today.

As legend has it, Sarah would meet with a Boston medium after the death of her husband and infant daughter Annie, who would advise her to leave her native Connecticut, head west and begin building a house that would serve as an elaborate tomb of atonement for those who had fallen from the rifle. Sarah alone would stand as architect and warden of this charnel house of spirits, a hellish portal for any living Winchester targeted by their wrath. She was to never stop building if she hoped to thwart retribution against her or any she loved.

As Mirren notes, in Sarah's time "there was a lot of experimentation and new thinking, the era of Alistair Crowley on the dark side and the Rosicrucians on the light side.

"There was a spiritual search going on and I think Sarah was a part of that," Mirren adds. "This was an extraordinary woman. She was very into spiritual development and spiritual things in general.

"She was actually kind of trained as an architect. She had a huge interest in architecture and design before she got married. It was an era of building amazing, complicated palaces. But the purpose of her building was always to expiate souls."

This was the way she found to deal with "the responsibility of so many deaths (because) she was living off of them."

In the film, to protect her life and the two people she loves most, her niece Marion (Sarah Snook) and Marion's 8-year-old son Henry (Finn Scicluna-O'Prey), Sarah has but one choice - to meet the dead at ground zero and recreate their whispered renderings of where they met their end.

But the Winchester board fears it has a grieving nut case holding the company's purse strings. It exercises its right to have her examined, hoping she will be proved insane. But Sarah chooses the examiner... Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke) of San Francisco is the only option.

"Do you believe in ghosts Doctor?" ...Sarah Winchester

LOCKING IN: THE SPIERIG BROTHERS COME ABOARD

"This is a ghost story. A scary haunted house ghost story. What's unique about it? It is based on a real person. There's a real house that still exists. A real situation. A story, a history, with a lot of modern connotations as well. These ghosts haunted Sarah Winchester because of that gun, a real invention. THIS is about the real woman," says Peter Spierig.

A woman, adds his collaborating twin brother Michael, who "always felt like a woman out of time.

"We saw her as a person that was plagued by the legacy of this gun...an intelligent, progressive thinking woman who's been misconstrued as a crazy person."

That was the lure for The Spierig Brothers to become involved in the WINCHESTER saga. To Michael's memory, their part in the project began in 2012. "What initially happened was, we read a script. It was called THE WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE written by Tom Vaughan with Producer Brett Tomberlin. There were elements to that script that we liked. We were like this house sounds incredible! So, we visited it. Peter and I fell in love with the house, did the infamous house tour - a big tourist attraction. We came on board and worked on the script for the better part of two years, developing ideas, continually researching and going back to the house. We then brought on board Tim McGahan who made a deal with our Executive Producers Benedict Carver and Daniel Diamond and we began to put the cast of the film together. Once Helen Mirren came on board that opened the floodgates: Jason Clarke and Sarah Snook, Angus Sampson, Bruce Spence, Eamon Farren - all of these wonderful actors joined and that was true joy.

"Helen solidified the film."

The Brothers had previously teamed with Producer McGahan on their film Predestination. But, Peter notes, their history together actually goes back much further. "Grade 6. We go back to grade 6! We went to him and said 'Let's figure out how to do another one together.' Tim helped propel WINCHESTER forward."

Adds McGahan, "There is a bit of a shorthand here! We've worked together on TV commercials and this is our second film together. We understand each other, almost preempt each other's decisions. Their previous films have always been about creating worlds." Lifetime friendships aside, "The Spierigs are great world creators and this story needed that...the way they do it is what really helped set the scene of Winchester 1906."

What drew McGahan to the script "was a thriller with more depth, more substance, a human being grappling with guilt and how she tries to reconcile it," he says. "I liked the idea that it was a true story and that Sarah Winchester had this incredible opportunity because of the Winchester Rifle fortune but there was a catch - the guilt that came from all of the people that died because of it. And when you're dealing with a real story and real characters you've got a responsibility to be true to (the essence) of their story. The reward is a story that's well grounded. There's honesty and truth in this one and I think audiences will pick up on it."

Producer Tomberlin's involvement actually preceded the trio. "It started about 11 years ago when we were looking for a project that was an actual supernatural thriller," he says. Being a graduate of Santa Clara University he was familiar with the Winchester Mystery House that was nearby. "It was such an iconic world brand we thought about acquiring the rights." He soon learned other producers and directors were pursuing it, including "Stephen King, who ultimately made Rose Red about the Winchester House." Once the rights were acquired in 2006, the project was in development for another seven years until "we stumbled upon the Spierig brothers who were coming off of Predestination and Daybreakers. They wanted their own take on the script, which we ultimately developed."

Working with two directors at the same time was a first for Helen Mirren, with numerous television and film productions to her credit (not to mention all of her theatre performances).

"I think with any directing teams you do need that deep psychological understanding of the other person, which obviously, in the case of twins it becomes much stronger and it's fascinating seeing how that plays out," she says. "It is really like speaking with one person and it comes out of two different mouths. They do fulfill different roles as well. That's very clear."

As for achieving that shared vision between twins co-writing and co-directing such a twisted supernatural thriller, Michael Spierig summed up the process for both he and his brother Peter: "Weird."

As filmmakers, "we get asked that a lot - how the dual directing thing plays out?" he muses. "I guess because we grew up together and sort of fell in love with the same movies, we really do have a shared vision.

"Because we also write, we collaborate so early in the process, throwing ideas back and forth, there's never two different thoughts going in different directions. We plan so carefully, we storyboard everything, discuss everything in such detail, there's never any sort of confusion. It's very much a 50-50 collaboration. Occasionally we split up and shoot separate units at the same time, which can be helpful. But yeah...it's weird."

"I do not believe in anything I cannot see or study." ...Dr. Eric Price

THE CAST THAT WINCHESTER BUILT

While casting fell into place after Helen Mirren signed on as Sarah, McGahan says it was another key role that proved a game changer for the film.

"Jason Clarke's character Dr. Eric Price is our way into the Winchester Mystery House and to Sarah Winchester. His role is pivotal," McGahan explains.

Price is addicted to Laudanum - a preferred drug to cure many ills for its day, among them depression. He became a user after his wife Ruby's suicide, and had his own brush with death.

"Price is a psychiatrist who is trying to overcome a horrific tragedy," says Peter Spierig. "He thinks he's being hired by the Winchester Board to determine whether Sarah Winchester is crazy. If they can eject her from the company they can take over her share and do what they want, which is create more weapons. At the time, Sarah was also looking at alternative products, trying to branch out and do other things like building roller skates, all kinds of tools. This really did happen. Price, a skeptic who doesn't believe in ghosts, goes to the house to assess her state of mind with the intention of pushing Sarah out of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. But it is Sarah who actually has ulterior motives to bring him to the house.

"We had met Jason a few times but didn't really have a relationship with him. He's a fellow Aussie and had been wanting to do a movie in Australia for a while and so it all worked out perfectly. We couldn't have found a better Eric Price."

Clarke delved into Sarah's choice for Price a bit deeper.

"Sarah's having a problem," he explains. "She can't identify what a certain spirit or spirits are doing, why they're there and what's she's supposed to do to deal with them. She's hoping that a man who has crossed over into the afterlife, however short that time was, has some gift that she doesn't have. That's why out of all the shrinks she chose Eric Price of San Francisco."

Clarke believes Price would have been a psychiatrist inspired by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the most well-known psychiatrists of that day. Familiar with their work, Clarke says he had read several books on psychotherapy that helped him prepare for the part, including "When Nietzsche Wept," by Psychotherapist and Author Irvin D. Yalom. He believes Price would have been somebody who traveled to Europe and probably studied there.

"Basically, he is a psychiatrist living in San Francisco 1906 on sabbatical. He really tried to be a pioneer in the field, explore more, but then he loses the great love of his life and he was partly responsible so he really suffered. He's a little lost, gone down the road of hedonism and doesn't believe in much anymore. It's a sad place to be particularly for a doctor who has taken an oath to help people and then starts to believe he can't help anybody at all."

But then he is made an offer by the Winchester Board's lawyer that he financially can't refuse.

"When he arrives at the Winchester house he sees this fantastical place. He's been hired to do a job and he imagines it's going to be pretty straightforward and simple," says Clarke. "But he goes down the rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland. He arrives as a non-believer and ends up seeing and doing things he didn't think possible."

Clarke perceives Price's coping addiction to Laudanum as a narrative device. "It gives time to get him to see these things that are real. In his own mind, he is semi seeing things," he adds. "He's a man that does like to distort his reality and sit in that for a while rather than just see the clear, harsh light of day."

A psychiatrist confronting Sarah's bizarre coping mechanism with death and guilt while trying to deal with his own made his character's dilemma even more problematic. "She's lost her husband, the love of her life" and now she is left to deal with his invention's mind-boggling success. "That's the thriller they chose to tell about her building this house. Some people wash their hands fastidiously, develop a lot of different little habits, idiosyncrasies, defense mechanisms. Sarah's? Build for ghosts. That's her world - the undead, ghosts, spirits that need to pass through, to find some way to let things go."

Of Price, Mirren describes Sarah's relationship with the doctor as a "bit of a fencing match, a battle between the two." Clarke's portrayal of Price for Mirren proved a seamless collaboration. "Well Jason is the most adorable person, just a gorgeous Aussie. What can I say? He's got all those qualities humor, down-to-earth, hardworking, commitment. Just lovely."

Clarke came aboard because he saw The Spierig Brothers' take on WINCHESTER as "an intelligent thriller. I liked the character of Eric. Helen Mirren. The period - 1906 is a really fascinating time. The fact that it's a scary, thriller drama, not a slasher horror film where everybody gets killed. And, of course, the Brothers had a deep connection to it." He had met the Spierigs at a party and seen their film Predestination. "They've got ambition, like to challenge the status quo, bring something to the screen rather than just playing it safe in the middle (of a genre) and I liked that a lot." Plus, it was a chance for the Queensland native to make a film on home turf, Australia.

As for Mirren, he relished the 1906 earthquake scenes with his co-star. "When the quake hits, things are smashing down all around us. That was really good. I remember thinking I'm down in the dirt, in the muck and grime, with a Dame. She is one of my mother's two favorite actors. If Mum found out I didn't do a film with Helen Mirren she wouldn't have forgiven me. Helen is fantastic. She's done it all. Witty. Intelligent. She played Cleopatra three times! And Phaedra (of Greek mythology - she kills herself, as did Cleopatra) which, probably helps you play parts like Sarah where you are having to summon ghosts. It's very primal, very Shakespearean in a basic kind of way. There are demons all around us and Helen was great, always with a sense of humor and just class. She is very, very funny."

Sarah Snook, who previously teamed with The Spierig Brothers on Predestination, plays Sarah Winchester's niece Marion and mother of young Henry (Finn Scicluna-O'Prey). She says The Spierig Brothers casting of Mirren as Sarah was "a no-brainer. This is a woman who can command such respect, she's so generous and a talent of such amazing strength."

A second chance to work with The Spierig Brothers and their crew was the key reason Snook took the part of Marion. "They're quite good at using the same people and that creates a certain tone and atmosphere on set. I really love working in that way so in the initial stage, that's what drew me to the role." She also reteamed with Scicluna-O'Prey, who played her son on the ABC Miniseries The Secret River, and Angus Sampson who plays Winchester House Foreman John Hanson (the two previously costarred in the TV series Spirited).

Of her character, Snook reveals "Marion and Henry arrive at the Winchester House after the recent death of her husband Frederick. He died very suddenly and Sarah believes it's because of the Winchester curse now spreading through the family. Marion is probably a little on the fence about that. She has her own beliefs of why her husband died. When Eric Price enters the Winchester House, Marion is still in a state of grief. When Eric comes into the house Marion doesn't really want anything to do with him. She believes he's there to declare her aunt insane.

"I would say Sarah Winchester represents the illogical, supernatural, fantasy side and Jason's character, Eric, represents the rational, tangible, realistic side. Marion? She has experienced spirituality throughout her life in connection with Sarah but once it starts to impinge upon her son, well her feelings towards her son are obviously very strong. The consequences for her son are quite severe." The character of Henry is fictionalized, though it is believed that Marion had an adopted daughter.

Mirren was "thrilled" to learn that Snook would play Sarah's niece. "I'd seen Sarah in The Spierig Brothers' earlier film, Predestination. She was spectacular. I'd never seen her work before. I was so blown away by her. And Finn, the young man who plays my grandnephew in the film, is a wonderful actor. I think there's a director in there. It's going to be fascinating to see what happens to him in 10 years' time."

And then there's the character of Ben Block (Eamon Farren), a key reason why Sarah Winchester builds. To play the role, the filmmakers found actor Eamon Farren. Farren was immediately attracted to the script, the chance to work with The Spierigs and the cast, and to the role itself.

"(Ben) can mysteriously exist wherever he wants inside the house," says Farren. "But I think in the mind of Sarah Winchester, there's a part of me that likes to think she evokes some sort of his spirit from her own paranoia and guilt. And that is fed through the image of Ben Block. What interests me is that perhaps Ben Block was a real person, his intentions and his motivations are his own. But perhaps, just maybe, it's also channeled through her paranoia, guilt and hurt."

Ben Block was also a Confederate soldier. Once.

He learned firsthand the awesome power of the Winchester Repeating Rifle. Through a three-hour daily process of prosthetics, Farren would reveal just what that power did to Block.

"He blames the Winchester family and Sarah Winchester herself for taking away everything that he loved and therefore he's going to do the same to her," says Farren. The entire film builds to an encounter between Sarah, Block and Price.

"One of the most powerful things we have in our world is the power to affect people and be affected by people, for good and bad, to destroy each other or to build each other up. This is a supernatural thriller that explores that. Why do people like films with supernatural elements? Escapism, the human condition to wonder about the unknown - the things we don't know, that there is something out there and of course, the endless possibilities of how "they" can get us, something we can't stop, something coming for You! To have no idea of what's coming, well that's the joy of it.

"But whatever it is that's really out to get you, maybe it's demons already too close...the ones inside." While a rigorous prosthetic process helped inform Farren's character, the costumes, say Mirren and Clarke, were critical tools used to inform theirs.

"Our costumes were absolutely designed for us," Mirren says. "With mine it was just repeating the photographs of Sarah and, like the set of the house, they were reproduced as accurately as possible. But is never fun to wear a corset all day long!"

Clarke's costume was tailor made by Melbourne's Adriano Carbone. "It is a bespoke handmade suit, herringbone, blue within blue flannel," recalls Clarke. "I loved the attention to detail." Turns out Clarke needed five of the same suit because playing Price was a very physical role. "I got cuts, scratches. Maybe I throw myself a little bit too much, but it was in the house of horrors. Then the earthquake of '06. We trashed a lot of things, the suits included. It was pretty rough trashing. They're beautiful suits with really wonderful fabrics. I just ripped my pants."

With ghosts killed over many decades, in different places and in many ways, Costume Designer Wendy Cork and her team experienced a panoply of costume creations in one film as never before.

"You know the 1906 silhouette can be a little bit alienating to a modern audience," she quips. "It's those pigeon-chested, slim-waist, S-bend corsets and strange hats. This is a thriller not a historical document. Our aim was to find a balance between historical accuracy and a relevance to a modern eye so audiences can engage the characters, run with the story and enjoy the film."

To do that Cork merged 1905, 1910 and 1895 silhouettes and came up with a compromise, sans pigeon chest. Think Victorian slim with a soft bustle at the back and a bit of authentic Edwardian embellishment for Mirren's Sarah and Snook's Marion.

"Since her husband died in her early twenties and she's nearly 70 in the film, Sarah has worn black mourning all her life," Cork says. "It was a bit of a challenge (dressing Mirren in) black on a very dark set. To see the details of her black silhouette, we had to embellish it with textures and shine from the period." She created an Edwardian mourning cape for Mirren with real Edwardian and Victorian embellishments. The evening dinner dress, in fact all Sarah's costume pieces, were detailed with original Edwardian laces, jet beading, gelatin sequins, and glass buttons. The inspiration for Sarah's mourning veil came from an Edward Steichen photograph of a woman with lace over her face, Cork notes. That element of Edwardian lace gave "not only interest to the camera but softness to Sarah as well."

Cork actually had to dress two widows for the film. Marion, who also lost her husband, would have also been in mourning dress. To differentiate between the two widows, Cork limited the black of Snook's costume to a jacket and veil. Most of her clothing was purple and green, the color of suffragettes for the time.

"I love that Helen was really particular and very practical in understanding what she needed on camera and what she could get away with," Cork remembers. "She really understood the value of where to put the attention on camera and where not to. She understood how to make the best of her silhouette. She was quite extraordinary to work with, very efficient and very professional. She came in three days earlier than scheduled and the extra time meant the costume department could really achieve what they needed to achieve. I find this with actors that have gone through the British system. They really respect the costume department and what it takes to get period costumes on set."

Aside from the key cast, Cork's team made costumes for all the ghosts - "cowboys, Native Americans, Texas Rangers, Confederate soldiers, Union soldiers, farmers and their wives, Mexican workers and Mexican women - ghosts across a 30-to-40-year period. It was incredible to actually try and represent those periods and silhouettes." But her team felt genuine sadness at the end of their part in the production, repeatedly telling Cork, "I don't want to stop making this film."

At the end of the day the tale belonged to the lady in black.

It is Sarah Winchester's story and it took an actor the caliber of Mirren to capture the power of Sarah's psychosis and ferocious effort of an elderly, crestfallen widow coming to terms with her life. "This role was written for Helen," says McGahan. "There are so many parallels between Helen Mirren and Sarah Winchester. What I really loved about Helen is that she's got this strength and this vulnerability as Sarah."

Michael Spierig says Mirren was "fascinated by Sarah's inventive mind and that she was such a progressive thinker. I think Helen could relate to her. Helen had never done a haunted house or horror movie before. We initially thought, 'Gee, wouldn't it be great to get Helen Mirren tied into this film'." Who knew she would say "Yes."

"It's a gargantuan 7-storied structure with no apparent rhyme or reason..."

24 HOUR CONSTRUCTION

Winchester House picked up where The Spierig Brothers' and Production Designer Matt Putland's imagination left off.

"It truly doesn't have a lot of rhyme or reason," says Peter Spierig. "A room is built on top of a room, next to a room and they are not even on the same level. There are strange architectural oddities, different

shapes and sizes to the rooms. Strange stairs that go to ceilings and doors that open to two-story drops."

"At a time when women weren't allowed to be architects," adds Michael Spierig, "this came from the mind of Sarah Winchester." The rifle fortune "allowed her to build whatever she wanted. She was always into interior design, architecture and building. She was a pioneer when it came to technology, inventing an intercom system that was a series of pipes traveling throughout the house to communicate from one room to the next. She had an irrigation system for gardening and was the first person in San Jose to have a telephone: Her phone number was 1234! She was always looking to the future, very inventive. I think that's where her architectural passion came from and why she always wanted to build something new."

Production Designer Putland had the daunting task of recreating several key rooms in the house on sets in Melbourne, Australia. There were then three days of filming at the actual house in San Jose. Despite having visited and thoroughly researched the house for duplication purposes, since the film is set in 1906 much of the original house was destroyed after the earthquake that year. That meant expanding on period research and anything they could find that existed before the devastating incident. For that reason, many of the rooms seen in the film are those that remained intact in the house.

One of the first rooms replicated was the entrance hall. Putland says a few tweaks had to be made in dimensions of that space including the ceiling heights.

"The front part of the house I think was part of the original 8-room farmhouse but as you go deeper into the actual Winchester House you can see Sarah's influence such as some of the stair banisters being a lot lower as well as stair risers that were very short because of her arthritis," he explains. "There are some very small doors in the house. I don't know whether it was because of her height, she was very petite, or because of what was stored behind them."

One of the most peculiar aspects of the house is the switchback staircase. It has seven flights of stairs which rise to one level. The production team only created four flights (on set) as that is all that was needed for shooting the scene. "It was quite a complicated pattern because the staircase sort of folds in on itself," he notes. "Unique, it is one of the architectural elements of the house built specifically for Sarah. With her arthritis, she had trouble walking up stairs and standard-sized stairs were too large and would cause her pain. She built risers that were only a few inches high. Recreating that on a set was quite a struggle since we needed to get a film crew, three actors, cameras and everything onto the set. A lot of the pieces had to be dismantled for camera access but still hold their integrity."

There were the stairs to nowhere that ended at a ceiling. "Again, we had to recreate them on a stage in Australia and like the door that opens to nowhere, all of these fun, quirky, Sarah Winchester add-ons were great to reconstruct."

Although there is much speculation as to whether Sarah actually insisted on the number 13 being present everywhere in the house, for the film's purposes it was crucial to the narrative. "We did build a couple of references to 13 because that is quite an important part of the tour at the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose," adds Putland. "We made a stained-glass window with 13 gems. As for the rest of our stained-glass windows, they referenced the designs directly from the house. The spider web design will pop up in a few places and the stained-glass patterns on the doors are patterned straight from the Winchester House."

In the ballroom, obscure quotes from two Shakespeare plays rarely, if ever, performed filled the panels of the Tiffany glass windows: One is from the prison soliloquy of the king in Richard II, "These same thoughts people this little world." The other is from Troilus and Cressida, "Wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts." Why Sarah chose those quotes is but another mystery of her creative process.

The gun display room that appears in the film is also key to the narrative. It is one that gets dismantled at the end of the film. There is no display room in the Winchester House today.

To recreate Sarah's Library, a space Putland found most enjoyable because it was also the heiress' work space, the team chose to shoot those scenes in a National Trust building in Australia. They had to work with the existing wallpaper and size of the room.

In the ballroom hallway scene, "our actors walk down this hall and through the doorway on the set in Melbourne. They will peek through a curtain. What they see is the actual house in San Jose. That means we will bring the elements and tones of the ballroom, lighting style, drapes, candles here and then through the curtain you see the real Winchester House."

One of the characters dies in the garden room and later speaks to Sarah who then recreates that room as part of the house. "It's a spooky set and a great scene," Putland says.

For scenes involving arrival at the house "we couldn't shoot any at the real house because it's right next to a freeway and a shopping center. That's not 1906," quips Putland. "So, we built the first level of the house in a paddock. We found some great trees that matched the trees that were in San Jose and we basically built a garden, a driveway, the veranda, the front door and a few other areas as part of an exterior set on a property just outside of Melbourne."

When Putland's team began to dress the walls, they had to find a match for the Lincrusta wallpaper running throughout the San Jose mansion. "Sarah had one of the largest collections of Lincrusta wallpaper that exists and it is still at the house. Those original wallpapers date from the late 1800's. We had to find an Anaglypta wallpaper that we could source in Australia. We couldn't match the exact pattern but found something which we feel is similar and altered the color. The color that is in the house today, which we believe was the original color, was a very pale green, almost white. For filming it wouldn't quite work with the tone we wanted so we chose a warmer tannish yellow and gave it a texture over the top to bring out the 3D effect of the wallpaper."

It was tough to determine the right color palette for some rooms since the only photo references for 1906 were in black and white. The solution was simple: The color scheme would suit the genre of the film being made more than what the house is currently painted today. "Sarah Winchester built the most talked about, expensive mansion of 1906, when it was at its peak in size and grandeur. We wanted to really represent Sarah's aesthetic - that lush richness we feel would have been her style of the time. She was importing chandeliers from Germany. The parquet floors in the ballroom have eight different timbers in them. As a designer, to be given the task of recreating that aesthetic and that level of opulence has been a lot of fun and a massive challenge. We had to make those three different scenarios look as if we are in the same house at all times.

"I was so very fortunate to go to the Winchester House and see as it is today. When I first saw it, I was blown away by the scale of this great big Victorian mansion. But it's not the extravagance and layers of opulence that blow you away. It is the layout and attention to detail. You could almost see the progression of the house as it grew and grew and grew, consuming parts of the original farmhouse. We were shown the water tower and instead of pulling the water tower down, it was just built into the house. I was there for three days looking through every doorway, every cupboard and I could still not find my own way around inside the house. It is such a rabbit warren of staircases and corridors and rooms and anterooms and verandas - quite an amazing complex that little farmhouse."

There were two areas of the house that Putland says speaks to the haunting.

One is the Witch's Cap where Sarah would go alone every night to get her building instructions from the ghosts for the next day. "It is a real room in that house and it is an amazing space," he says. "The hallway that leads to the Witch's Cap was something that really stood out to me as an architectural feat. That area spoke to me of a presence. It's in the attic space of the house. Reference images from the time show us that there was a chimney that led up to the outside of the building, which is no longer there so we reinstated the fireplace and chimney in the witch's cap which fell down in the 1906 earthquake."

Recreated on set, "I find it fascinating this woman would build this room as a vessel to communicate with the dead," adds Michael Spierig. "Because a lot of people sought out mediums back then, going to a spiritualist wasn't seen as a fringe thing. I mean people actually saw it as science back then. She strongly believed she could communicate with the dead, communicate with her deceased husband and daughter as well. And so, she embraced this."

Then there is the basement.

"It was quite spooky, but I don't know if that's because it was just deep down in the earth and it was dark," says Putland. "The basement and the Witch's Cap were very cool spaces to be in." Both, as noted on the Winchester House Tour, are the most active areas of paranormal activity in the house today with many tourists reporting sightings of ghosts.

"That house," says Putland, "really feels alive."

THE LOOK OF WINCHESTER

"This spirit has a power we have not seen before... It has found us." ...Sarah Winchester

Director of Photography Ben Nott ACS marks his fourth collaboration with The Spierig Brothers on WINCHESTER.

Nott and The Spierig brothers believe they can take skeptics on a ride that might convince them otherwise. And it has everything to do with the power of perception, lighting - the whole metamorphosis of the genre's traits played out before their eyes.

"WINCHESTER has its own unique feel and texture that is delivered by the lavish production design, beautiful costuming, Melbourne's Victorian Architecture and a simple lighting philosophy that is underpinned by deep blacks that are punctuated by burning highlights and rich colors," says Nott. "The core creative team have collaborated on several films and hence has a wonderful short hand when it comes to building a cohesive look. In starting our look development, we drew the greatest inspiration from the wonderful eclectic madness that is the Winchester House in San Jose CA."

There were specific filming choices Nott made: Shooting with Alexi Ari XT on E series anamorphics. "They're an older series of lens that are a little softer at the edges and, to my taste, fit the palette, the genre and the era in which the film is set. We are rolling two cameras, A and B all the time, with a C that comes and goes. My skill is to coordinate the photography to provide mood that is sympathetic to the narrative but allows the actors the freedom to move through the spaces as they deliver their performances. This film is very much defined by what the audience does not see so I have taken great care with the depth and detail in the shadow area of the frame."

Shadows, mysteries, diffused light - all hallmarks of shaping terror through the lens of Nott and company.

"The hardest thing about doing a film like this is how do you make it scary? To keep it grounded in reality," informs Peter Spierig. "When you have truth, a real story about a real place and a real person, that makes it really terrifying. Michael and I like to misdirect with scares - where you think it's going to happen on this beat or at this moment and then it happens later or earlier, or goes in some other direction. That makes it a little scarier. But when the people are real, some part of you has to care and that is what makes it more terrifying. You want them to get out of that situation. You want them to survive.

"But the hope for Michael and I is that the audience experiences a very scary, terrifying, haunted house movie."

As to whether the brothers believe in ghosts?

"I do believe that there is an energy source in all of us that may float around after we leave our bodies," concedes Michael.

"I've never met a ghost. We've never chatted or hung out," adds Peter. "I can't say I've ever experienced anything. But I know people who have. Maybe it's real. Maybe not."

Regardless, one question remains:

If Sarah built the house to confront those vengeful ghosts in life and she died in that house...is history really doomed to repeat itself?

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