Borderline: Jimmy Warden & Samara Weaving on stalkers, Celine Dion and chaos

What happens when the writer of Cocaine Bear makes his directorial debut, ropes in his real-life partner Samara Weaving, and throws in a stalker, a pop diva, and a Celine Dion piano singalong? You get Borderline — a darkly funny, dangerously stylish thriller about obsession, fame, and survival.

The film follows Sofia (Weaving), a ’90s pop superstar whose life takes a terrifying turn when a delusional stalker Duerson (Ray Nicholson) breaks into her home with plans of a wedding she definitely didn’t RSVP to. With her loyal bodyguard at her side, Sofia must fight back before she’s forced down the aisle.

Alongside Weaving and Nicholson, the cast includes Eric Dane (Grey’s Anatomy), Jimmie Fails (Nickel Boys), Alba Baptista (Warrior Nun) and Patrick Cox (Aquaman).

We sat down with Warden and Weaving to talk stalkers, soundtracks, and why you should never question Celine Dion…

How did everything begin with Borderline?

Jimmy Warden: I was inspired by a couple of things that I had watched. One was Madonna: Truth or Dare, which I’ve always loved. I’ve also been a huge Chicago Bulls fan since I was a little kid and a Dennis Rodman fan, so I was thinking, what if her first date with Dennis Rodman coincided with Madonna’s stalker breaking out of a mental institution and stabbing her bodyguard and getting shot in a pool? I was like, if those are on the same night, then maybe this is a movie. And then I forced Sam to do it at knifepoint…

We’re guessing the movie’s title was also inspired by Madonna?

Jimmy Warden: Yeah, it was. Actually, the true source of inspiration was the Flaming Lips cover of the song that’s in the movie. I sort of reoriented what that song was about.

I was like, ‘oh, maybe this is from the perspective of someone who has mal-intent towards Sofia or Madonna and is sung from a male perspective’. It just changed everything for me. So a lot of the movie was written to the beats of that song.

Ray Nicholson plays a stalker in Borderline who invades the home of a superstar with the idea of an upcoming wedding…

The Borderline soundtrack plays a big role, packed with pop songs. Was that always important to you?

Jimmy Warden: Yeah, it was very important. We’re a lower-budget film, so everybody was telling me what I wanted to hear until we got to the point where it’s like, oh, we actually have to afford this. This is my first movie and I was like, ‘Oh, this is what they cost?!’

But I would say 75% of those songs were written into the script and shot to those songs as well. Crimson and Clover, the Donovan song Atlantis, obviously Borderline — those needle drops were important to me, just in terms of the movement of the movie… which makes no sense haha!

We had a killer music supervisor, Sue Jacobs, who had my back the entire way, and she’s like, ‘we’ll sort it out in the end’. Now the producers are broke, but we got Crimson and Clover so…

Sofia is such a sharp, layered character. Did the two of you work together to bring her to life?

Samara Weaving: Jimmy wrote her so well, and she was a character I really wanted to play. We collaborated a little bit. There was a moment in the script where Sofia finds out that Duerson has escaped and initially it was written that she has this very traumatic response, which makes sense…

Jimmy Warden: And Sam was like, no.

Samara Weaving: I had an idea that, what if she just is the kind of person that…

Jimmy Warden: Takes it on the chin.

Samara Weaving: Right! She’s so solution-based.

Jimmy Warden: If you’re someone like Madonna or Sofia, then you have an armour on you already, and this type of thing isn’t necessarily out of the ordinary. We always talked about how this has happened before. She knew that this guy was at her doorstep months earlier.

Samara Weaving: So that really informed the rest of how I played it.

Jimmy Warden: It’s not a Scream movie where you’re running away and shouting, “Please help me. Please save me.” You’re like, “Get the fuck out of my house.”

Samara Weaving: Which made it funnier too. But yeah, we were very collaborative in that sense, but it definitely was on the page.

Sofia (Samara Weaving) is less ‘help me!’ and more ‘get the fuck out of my house’ in *Borderline*.

We have to talk about the scene with you and Alba Baptista singing Celine Dion at the piano — while fighting.

Samara Weaving: It was so fun. I’m not a singer by any means, but Alba and I just were like, ‘We have to go for it. We just have to freaking go for it.’ Otherwise, it’s not gonna work.

So I was like, ‘Jimmy, what if I sweep all the papers off the piano and, like, tilt my head back, and just go full insane?’ It was so fun. I was really looking forward to it and a lot of the crew came out that day, and we’re all watching,

Jimmy Warden: It was one of those scenes where everybody, including myself, was like, ‘this is never gonna work’. So it created a mythos behind it. Even on our off days, some of the cast were like, ‘We’re gonna watch this, it’s either going to be amazing or crash and burn. Either way, it’s gonna be entertaining.’ The energy that day was awesome and the two of them were just letting loose.

They learned the song on the piano and I just thought, ‘I don’t necessarily want to see a cat fight’. It just wasn’t as interesting to me to shoot. So breaking it up with this duet was the answer to me.

Samara Weaving: It’s so smart and weird and wonderful.

Jimmy Warden: You have to give the producers credit, because anytime you start to cut things for budget, or for time, you’re like, ‘What do you not need to tell the story?’ You just want to tell the story at a certain point, when you get later in the schedule. I even questioned it. I was like, this is probably something that people are going to tell me to cut. Do we cut it? And everybody was just like, ‘Absolutely not. We’re shooting it.’

Never question Celine…

Jimmy Warden: Haha, never question Celine Dion. She always hits.

[Psst, you can watch that very scene below]

Would you two like to work together again?

Samara Weaving: Yeah! We had the best time working together.

Jimmy Warden: Yeah, I think that we would do just anything! We probably want to cross genres a little bit at this point but we had a lot of fun. We definitely want to do it again.

Samara Weaving: Sign me up!

Borderline is out now on digital platforms.

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