‘Holland’ Director on Working With Nicole Kidman, Hiding Twists from Audience

Mimi Cave was only in post-production on her debut feature — the 2022 horror film “Fresh,” with Sebastian Stan and Daisy Edgar-Jones — when she was approached about directing Nicole Kidman in “Holland,” a screenplay by Andrew Sodorski that had been bouncing around the industry since it first appeared on the Black List in 2013. (Naomi Watts and Bryan Cranston were initially attached to the film, but it fell apart.) Having grown up in a suburb of Chicago, she was familiar with the film’s setting of Holland, Michigan, and she felt like she knew the film’s characters from her time there.

“The town I grew up in was not too dissimilar from Holland, so I just felt a real kinship with them,” she says.

Kidman, who also produced the film through her company Blossom Films, plays Nancy Vandergroot, a high school home economics teacher in Holland who suspects her optometrist husband, Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) is having an affair. So she conscripts the school’s shop teacher, Dave Delgado (Gael García Bernal), to help her investigate him, even though she doesn’t really have much proof beyond her intuition — so the audience is left unsure about what is really driving her certainty that Fred is being unfaithful.

In advance of the film’s premiere at the SXSW Film & Television Festival (it debuts on Prime Video on March 27), Cave discusses her connection to the material, why she chose to set the film in 2000, the importance of staying ahead of the audience, and her experiences working with Kidman.

How did this project first come to your attention? 

I was in the middle of editing “Fresh,” and it was sent to me through my agent. I knew a little bit about the history of it and how it had tried to have a couple of different lives. And, for some reason I couldn’t…