So many uncanny things happened on the set of Longlegs – and not just Nicolas Cage in full serial killer makeup staying in character between takes – that surely it seeped into the deeply unsettling feel of the film. “Like clusters of birds, eagles, showing up in unexpected ways,” says Alicia Witt. “I’m getting shivers just talking about it. A truck would go by with the name of one of the characters.”
When she and Osgood Perkins, the film’s writer and director, were having an early conversation on the phone about her role as Ruth, the mother of a young FBI agent, he asked her about working with David Lynch. (Witt made her debut aged seven filming Lynch’s Dune, and also featured in Twin Peaks.) “I started answering and he said, ‘I just have to interrupt you for a second because two school buses just went by and they both had ‘Lynch’ on them.’ Making Longlegs,” she says, “felt like a very spiritual experience.”
