WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for A Ghost Waits, now available on ARROW.

If there's one thing pop culture has taught us about ghosts, it's that they have a tendency to haunt houses. But what happens if the inhabitant of the house they're haunting isn't scared away by their tried and true ghostly shenanigans? And what if that inhabitant and the ghost are both lonely lost souls looking for connection? The indie horror rom-com A Ghost Waits asks those questions and more, and director Adam Stovall and star MacLeod Andrews, who also co-wrote the script, bring it to life with smart, touching originality. The film centers on Andrews' Jack, who's been hired to prepare a recently abandoned house for a new tenant, only to encounter a ghost, Muriel (Natalie Walker), whose job is quite literally to drive out anyone who tries to live there. As the two collide, the movie deconstructs the haunted-house genre while expertly balancing the mundane with the existential.

In an interview with CBR, Stovall and Andrews shared all the details about how the story for A Ghost Waits came to be and the making of the movie, including the inspiration for its ghostly bureaucracy, how Andrews came to film a hilarious conversation with a toilet and their thoughts on the film's challenging, controversial ending.

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CBR: How did you come up with the story for A Ghost Waits?

Adam Stovall: It's based on a true story. [Laughs]

No, so we had tried to make another movie and we got really close, or at least it felt really close in comparison to all the other times I tried to make a movie, and so when it didn't happen, I was kind of crushed. And I went home to northern Kentucky, which is where I grew up, and I was visiting my friends [...], and they had me play this video game called P.T., which is a first-person haunted house puzzle game. And I had them cracking up laughing because I was reacting to a haunted house in the way that I would. So a creepy noise happens and I'm just like, "Nope, not going over there. I'm fine."

MacLeod Andrews: But that's the point! You're supposed to go over there.

Stovall: Yeah, I'm not always good at doing what I'm supposed to do, it turns out. And they were cracking up laughing. And I kind of got the idea like, "Oh, I don't know that I've seen a movie where a character similar to me reacts to a haunted house the way I would." The joke is always, you watch, it's like, "Don't go in there." And if you make the movie, you can just not go in there. And I thought, how confounding that would be for the ghost, where it's just rattling the thing, like "You know, normally they investigate by now. What's going on up there?" [Laughs]

And the second part is a webcomic called Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. A man asks a woman, "What do you think is the most American movie?" And she says, "Ghostbusters. Because here's a movie where you have demonstrable proof of an afterlife, but the whole thing is about growing a small business and navigating government bureaucracy." And I thought, "That's hilarious," but also, "Oh, yeah, that's right. If there's ghosts, that means there's an afterlife. I have so many questions." And that kind of formed the spine of what this became. And then, it was just like, "Yeah, what have we not seen?" Both MacLeod and I are kind of tinkerers. We like to interrogate things and pull something apart and see how it works. And so it's fun to do that with a genre of cinema sometimes.

Why did you cast yourselves in the movie?

Andrews: Well, I think, as Adam said, we had been trying to make a movie together for years based on other scripts that Adam had written, and that kept falling through. And so really at the inception, Adam wrote this with me in mind to play Jack. And so I was very excited to get to go do it.

Stovall: And the idea behind me playing Neil is that I knew I could afford myself and that I would be there on the day. [...]

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How did you come to cast Natalie Walker as the ghost Muriel?

Stovall: Natalie's the best. That part was written for a friend of ours who got cast on a TV show and was thus unavailable. And so I went back to the drawing board. And I'd been following Natalie on Twitter for a while. She had done this synopsis of The Phantom of the Opera that was just hilarious […]. So I was thinking about who to approach, how to cast this, and I remembered, "Oh, wait. Natalie isn't just a writer. She's an actor." […] So I just emailed her, just cold-called her and was like, "Hey. My name's Adam. I'm making a movie in Cincinnati, Ohio. I think you'd be really cool for this part. I'd like to send you the script if you're down for that."

And she was, so I sent her the script. She liked it. She did a self-tape. And just the second it starts, it's like, "Well, that's Muriel. Cool. Hey, how you doing, Muriel?" And […] not long after, we were flying her into Cincinnati to join the gang.

Speaking of Cincinnati, how did you decide on that as the setting for the movie?

I grew up there. If I'd grown up in Minneapolis, this movie would happen in Minneapolis, probably. I've wanted to make a movie my entire life, and because of that, people who know me know that I want to make a movie. So when it came time to make one, there was this really great kind of collective. There was this feeling of esprit de corps and people who weren't even working on it got excited, because not only was a movie being shot in Cincinnati, but it was by somebody who's a native of Cincinnati. Who knows the area and loves the area.

Cincinnati's an amazing city. People are kind of sleeping on it. It's this crazy kind of European town in the middle of America. The art scene is robust. This is my only movie so I don't know what it's like to make a movie anywhere else, but it was really cool to make one there. And people were so generous. […]

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MacLeod, even before the haunting in the film starts, you have some great scenes that show the dailiness of Jack's job where he's repairing things in the house and talking to the toilet he's cleaning. How did you get into character for that?

Andrews: The short answer is, I let the character get into me. [Laughs] Actually, my goal going into this whole thing was to do a very transparent performance. So in essence, Jack is not me putting on a character. It's me trying to perform as close to self as I could through the conduit of the script. But most of my work was trying to strip away defensive mechanisms and any vain attempts to appear a certain way and just meet the script on its own terms as honestly and sincerely as I could.

And the toilet, I have no idea where that idea came from. That was an improv. We had been shooting this scene so many times that I had just been getting to know that toilet intimately and well. I was staring at it for maybe an hour, hour and a half, two hours, and I was just like, "You know what? I think it has something to say."

Stovall: He's a good toilet.

Andrews: He's a good toilet. Yeah. And we had become buds, and I could feel it radiating from deep in its pipes that it needed to express itself, and so I let it. [Laughs]

And […] it got to a place where I was like, "Wow. I'm really touched by what this toilet has to say. I really feel like I've got a good friend here. Does it matter that it's me? I don't know." [Laughs] So what's more supportive and willing to deal with your shit than a toilet? ...Boom! [Laughs]

The scenes of the ghostly bureaucracy behind haunted houses were really funny. What was the inspiration for digging into that idea?

Stovall: That's a really good question. I'm not totally sure I have an answer. So one thing about this is, I wrote this movie by the seat of my pants. […] So in terms of the ghost bureaucracy. Part of it, when you're writing a horror film, it's about what scares you. In my case, profound loneliness and alienation is terrifying because it's something that I've lived with and that has almost killed me on a few occasions. Bureaucracy not ending in death? We all kind of have this like, "Oh, when I die and I go to heaven, all of my friends are there, and I don't have to worry about bills." […]

It was just like, "Well, ghosts haunt. That's their job." At our jobs, we have managers and bosses and coworkers that we don't like and all that stuff. And it's like, "Why would that end at death? If we're going to have an afterlife, isn't it going to be just like life but later?" It's terrifying. I got to do Zoom calls in death? What's going on here? [Laughs]

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In the final act of the film, Jack makes a very specific choice that could be considered controversial. What made you decide on this particular conclusion?

Stovall: Oh, man, I am so glad we get to talk about this with both of us here. Originally, there was a different ending, but I knew it didn't work. It never even got to script stage. […] I struggle with depression and anxiety and suicidal ideation and I have my entire life. I wanted to talk about it in a way that I had never seen it talked about before. Depression gets discussed in film, in culture, but it's usually very dramatic interpretations or the more dramatic iterations of it -- bipolar disorder, manic depression, that kind of thing. But for me, depression's just kind of wallpaper. It's just always there, and you're constantly trying to hack your own brain to get around it. But then, you're also kind of working to not let anyone else know it's there. […] I can't tell you about it, because then I'm just ruining your day as well.

[…] And so [I was] out one night just having some drinks and talking and suddenly in my head, […] I saw [that final] scene. And I was like, "Oh, my god. I know how the movie ends." And I ran and wrote it down. And I may never get to make a second movie, and I never get to talk about this stuff, because any time you start to talk about suicide, people just shut it down. They're like, "Not that that should ever happen, and we've got to get rid of it." And it's like, "Well, yeah, your car shouldn't break down, but it's going to. Maybe we should talk about maintenance."

So part of the privilege of making a movie is that you get an uninterrupted 80 minutes, 90 minutes, 120 minutes, whatever it is, you get time to lay out a case. You make your opening argument, you make your closing argument and hopefully the jury finds in your favor. So this was, "All right, if I never get to do this again, what's the thing that I just have to say? What is the thing that I think the world needs in it?" […] But this was a thing of, "Oh, this is a very specific experience. And I can say something about it that I haven't heard said elsewhere." And then, it's just a matter of sticking to your principles. And we were very fortunate that none of the investors ever said, "Maybe don't end the movie that way." No one ever said not to do it.

And this is where I'm going to throw to MacLeod, because I am not a provocateur, I did not think this would be controversial at all, but MacLeod saw that coming. [Laughs] So I hand it to you, sir.

Andrews: Well, I mean, I don't suffer from depression, at least not chronically. I've been depressed, and I've been very depressed and for a period of time, but it was acute and I don't have suicidal ideation. I think I danced up to it once in my life, maybe, but it's not a thing I deal with. So part of doing the role of Jack for me was listening and hearing Adam's experience of this. I'm used to those more typical portrayals of depression where it's written on the wall and it's a very outward expression of sadness. And so, for me, a big part [of making the movie] was trusting Adam and his experience.

I was concerned of like, "[Jack]'s such a charismatic guy. He's so happy in it." But I think that's a lot of people's experience. There's lots of charismatic, friendly, affable people who are suffering deeply internally. They don't show you. They don't want you to see it. In some ways, those are connected. Like Adam was saying, you don't want to burden somebody with it.

So when it comes to the ending, yeah, I was aware of the possibility of it rubbing people the wrong way, people possibly thinking it romanticizes suicide. I don't feel it does. I think it's very, very complicated, the ending, from my perspective, from the perspective of a person who doesn't suffer from this. I think given the movie Adam wanted to make, though, it's an inevitable ending. It's kind of the ending that it had to be to talk about the things that Adam wanted to get at. And, for me, I don't think it's happy, and I hope people don't watch the movie and be like, "Yeah, suicide's great." That certainly wasn't our intent. I don't think the movie does that, but it's complicated, and it still leaves very complicated feelings with me when we get to the end.

Stovall: It's also a story about the afterlife.

Andrews: Yeah. It's also a story about the afterlife.

Stovall: If the afterlife exists, then he's basically just moving to Denver for a girl.

Andrews: Yeah, that's true. [Laughs] Yes. It is a movie where there is a ghost with a painted face who is saying, "This is where you will go. If you do this, you will have your face painted and scream at people with me." [Laughs]

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One of the things that makes the movie so powerful is the music. The song selections seem very deliberate, and both Natalie and MacLeod sing. How did you choose the music?

Stovall: Music looms very large in my life. I love music; I've always loved music. And when you want to make a movie, when you're an aspiring filmmaker, you think a lot about like, "[What songs] would my movie have?" And I love soundtracks. I love when a movie uses a song perfectly. [...] So [all the songs] were specifically chosen.

And to the extent that the song that opens the movie, that used to not be the opening. We used to have a much more traditionally horror soundscape. And the problem that we ran into was that people didn't know they were allowed to laugh, and it's a comedy. So if you open a comedy saying, "It's scary and nobody can laugh," then everyone is just like, "Is this movie bad because I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to laugh, but I want to." And [people didn't know] that's on purpose. So we added that song to widen the emotional experience of it and say, ''There's going to be a lot more stuff." And it's such a fun subversion of what's happening on screen that it's just like, "Yes, you're allowed to laugh, please do." [Laughs]

What's next for both of you?

Stovall: A nap, probably. [Laughs]

We're working on something now. It's a really fun time travel, road movie that we're hoping to make.

Andrews: Slash disaster film. [Laughs]

Stovall: Right. I always forget that part.

You never really know. I mean, we didn't think this would be our first movie. We tried a couple others. […] So you never really know. But the really strange thing about momentum is that […] you're hoping for it so much that you just start projecting it. And the second anything happens that you didn't make happen, you're like, "Momentum!" And it's like, "No, that's just the thing that happened." So it seems like we have momentum, but you never know. But we'll do something else. I mean, that seems to be fairly certain at this point.

A Ghost Waits, starring MacLeod Andrews, Natalie Walker, Sydney Vollmer, Amanda Miller and Adam Stovall, is available now on ARROW in the US, Canada and the UK.

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