‘Opus’: A24’s Horror Movie Has Ayo Edebiri Battling a Pop Star – Variety

By

William Earl

A pair of platform boots made writer-director Mark Anthony Green’s thriller “Opus” possible.
Always detail oriented, Green needed John Malkovich, who portrays a legendary pop star named Alfred Moretti, to get into the mindset of an outrageous musical icon. He knew the boots would be the key totem that would help Malkovich conjure the character.
“I made him wear these big-heeled boots that I had — John and I are the same size shoe — and get into the studio and really fucking go for it, do it, be that guy, not just a presentation of somebody,” Green says. “And he nailed it. He was so fearless.”

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Green, formerly a journalist who was most recently the special projects editor at GQ, is bringing his directorial debut to Sundance on Monday night. The film, hitting theaters nationwide on Mar. 14 via A24, is filled with little moments one would attribute to a writer’s keen eye.

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“We’re trained to walk into a room and notice everything,” Green says. “I can tell ‘That shirt is old, so you’ve owned it for a long time,’ and I can tell, ‘That’s brand new and the fold wrinkle is still in it.’ ‘The lipstick on his collar doesn’t match the person he came in with.’ It’s, dare I say, a sickness, but I do think that’s the thing about film that’s so rewarding, and why it feels so good to submit and give yourself 100% into a project.”
The story of “Opus” concerns a young magazine writer, Ariel (Ayo Edebiri), who is unexpectedly summoned to join a small group of journalists and influencers to travel to Moretti’s mysterious compound and be the first to hear his new album. Yet Ariel soon grows concerned that Moretti’s servants and sycophants on his massive swath of remote land act more like cult members than superfans and, of course, dark secrets await.
Moretti’s music and lifestyle are so over the top — and the cornerstone of the story — so Green knew that a bedrock would be music that could live up to the film’s in-world hype. He was able to secure Nile Rodgers, the legendary co-founder of Chic, and The-Dream, who has written smash hits for artists like Rihanna, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber, to pen original songs for the project, and Malkovich brought his vocals to the studio.
“The biggest challenge is making pop records that really sound like they could chart,” Green says. “If it didn’t feel that way, we sent it back. I firmly believe that when Nile Rodgers plays the guitar, God is present. There’s no one else that sounds like him. And Dream … I don’t know if you could find a more accomplished songwriter and producer. So you’re working with the Michael Jordans of this thing, and they took this challenge very seriously, and they never rested until it was great.”

Malkovich proving himself as a pop star was more of an unknown factor. Green had long appreciated his chameleonic work, from stage performances to films ranging from 1988’s “Dangerous Liaisons” to 2008’s “Burn After Reading.” But Moretti required more than just pop-star-ready boots.
“I demanded that we record the songs before we went into pre-production,” Green says. “I wanted the very first thing that he did officially as Moretti was to go to the studio with Nile Rodgers, with The-Dream, with all these people, the engineers and all that. We recorded in Boston, and I’m exhausted because we’re about to start preproduction. Five or six minutes into recording I look over, and John hits a note and it sounds really good. Everybody in the room sat up straight. He can do anything, but that song, those lyrics, this moment, those people. That felt so deeply personal to me.”
Moretti’s unlikely foil comes in the form of Ariel, who, compared to the grandiose pop singer, is quiet and attentive, always studying the room. Early in the film, she has a tone-setting conversation with her boyfriend (Young Mazino) about her dreams to be a great journalist and write books. He tells her plainly that her biggest hurdle is that she’s “middle”: A well-adjusted young woman with great parents who doesn’t necessarily have the life experience or unique perspective needed to draw people into her work.
“Some of my favorite films in the last five or six years deal with trauma and how you’re getting over your trauma, especially in the horror space,” Green says. “I thought, ‘How cool and subversive would it be if her problem is that she doesn’t have enough trauma?’ That’s the paradox of being an artist: The thing you’re trying to get over is the thing that makes the lyric interesting, or the painting visually striking. To see a well-dressed, beautiful Black woman have that be her story … I was honored that I got to do that. She feels like a lot of Black women that I know.”
Green was also determined to avoid one tired trope in horror films.
“It was very, very important to me that Ariel was a young Black woman who didn’t do anything stupid,” he says. “It’s really hard to make a horror film and not have somebody fall when they’re running. There’s a reason why you do that. It isn’t so much that people want characters to be dumb, but if they’re intelligent, it’s very hard to travel. But I look at this character, I look at the Black women in my life, and I just thought, ‘Man, how cool would it be if we landed the plane and she never made a dumb decision?’ She’s young, she’s flawed, but she never in this moment does something that you’re like, ‘Oh, that was stupid,’ and takes you out of it. That was a really important thing to me.”

Despite the grind of helming his first feature, Green says he’s already excited to sink his teeth into upcoming projects.
“My biggest hope with ‘Opus’ is that I get to make another movie, and I’m sure my hope with that movie will be that I get to make another movie,” he says. “I feel inspired by the process, as hard as it is. As arduous and demoralizing and heartbreaking and late and unhealthy as it is to make a film, there was never a second where I was not dying to make the next one. To me, that’s the best reward.”

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Source: https://variety.com/2025/film/news/opus-a24-horror-movie-ayo-edebiri-pop-star-1236285676/