Bella Thorne, the star of “Shake It Up” and “Amityville Horror,” and Rebecca De Mornay, best known for “Risky Business” and “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” are at the Taormina Film Festival this week with Mitzi Peirone’s horror-thriller “Saint Clare,” which opened the Sicilian event. The actors and director spoke to Variety about how the film was inspired by Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who led the French army against the English invaders, and was burned to death at the stake.
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“Saint Clare” tells the story of Clare Bleeker, a Catholic college student who has a knack of killing sexual predators. Peirone said: “Clare’s role model is Joan of Arc because she literally gave everything, herself included, to her mission. She says: The fire that burns inside of me is stronger than the fire around me, which is a great message. I think that having moral integrity is something that isn’t… I don’t know if it’s valued anymore in our society.”
Peirone added that she took visual inspiration from Artemisia Gentileschi, the Renaissance painter, who’s often called the female Caravaggio.
De Mornay was happy to lend her experience to the project. “I have two daughters, who are 23 and 26, and I really enjoyed being part of a film giving the females in the audience, young girls particularly, the message that you don’t have to fucking take it. You are strong enough to fight back at these guys. If an 18-year-old girl can lead an army, you can fucking fight off an aggressor. You can win as a woman against the patriarchy.”
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Thorne spoke about how the project, which is based on Don Roff’s novel “Clare at Six,” got started. “I really dug the book, and I thought that there were a lot of interesting elements to the script,” she said. “But it wasn’t quite what I wanted and so I spoke to Mitzi about coming on board and taking a stab at the script, which she did and brought a completely new life to the entire movie.”
Thorne also premiered at the festival a short film that she directed, “Unsettled,” which tells a true story about a gay man’s abduction from a nightclub. Thorne is planning on filming a feature-length treatment of the same subject, “Color Your Hurt,” in early 2025.
As an actor, Thorne expressed a particular desire to work with writers like “The White Lotus” creator Mike White, and directors such as Greta Gerwig and Guillermo del Toro. “He’s definitely my favorite filmmaker of all time. His work has inspired all of my work. It’s in everything I do,” she said.
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