“I made a fake trailer as a collage project — a remake of the shoemaker and the elves, with these evil puppets — and I think that’s when I realized I didn’t need to describe my process.” This led him to becoming a film director.

Finnegan is best known for Vivarium (Imogen Boots, Jesse Eisenberg) where “a young couple looking for the perfect home find themselves trapped in a mysterious labyrinth-like neighborhood of identical houses.”

His most recent project, Nocebo (Eva Green, Mark Strong) is about “a fashion designer suffering from a mysterious illness that puzzles her doctors and frustrates her husband, until help arrives in the form of a Filipino carer, who uses traditional folk healing to reveal a horrifying truth.”

In this interview, Finnegan talks about doing his own visual effects early in his career, why he hates “smash cuts” in screenplays, why some directors hate “over description,” how novice filmmakers can make interesting contained thrillers and how to make a good movie with the budget you have.

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