‘Echo Valley’: Brad Ingelsby Compares Julianne Moore & Sydney Sweeney Movie to ‘Mare of Easttown’

Writer Brad Ingelsby‘s gritty crime series Mare of Easttown was appointment viewing and won Emmy gold for Kate Winslet as a Pennsylvania detective. The scribe’s new project, Echo Valley (premiering on June 13 on Apple TV+), is a character-driven thriller film anchored by another A-lister, Julianne Moore. She’s a grieving PA horse farm owner and riding instructor, Kate, whose life takes an unimaginable twist when her manipulative daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney), an addict, arrives at their isolated home covered in blood that’s not hers.

“Kate is faced with, ‘Am I going to protect my daughter? Call the police?’ She protects her daughter [leading to] incidents testing the boundaries of unconditional love,” says Ingelsby, who delivers twists until the last frame. He shares some insights into the gripping story.

Is Kate at all like Mare?

Brad Ingelsby: Their lives have taken different paths. Mare is in the same small-town gritty community she grew up in, still dealing with the people that she grew up with. This is an isolated horse farm. I always imagined Kate having come from a working-class upbringing, a tumultuous home life, having to fend for herself. With [her lawyer ex-husband] Richard [Kyle MacLachlan], she was never comfortable at the club, at events. She felt less-than around those people. Mare and Kate have a resilience that comes from having weathered storms as kids. It’s what Kate is able to tap into at the end when she’s backed into a corner. 

There are such intense physical and emotional scenes between Kate and Claire. What was it like shooting those?

Julianne and Sydney really loved each other and got along so well. But when you have the performers on camera, going to such extremes, it gets heavy. Addiction is some of the hardest stuff I’ve seen just with friends and people. It’s heartbreaking. I won’t go down the road, but it is really, really, really, difficult stuff. Sad. There was such a calmness about [director] Michael Pearce. He made sure the actors had the space to test limits when cameras were rolling but afterwards were able to come down, have a laugh, have a joke, hang out. It helped the set and the movie.

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Things escalate with the arrival of a drug dealer, Jackie, played by Domhnall Gleeson.

The tension is we don’t know what he’s capable of or just how awful he can be. So, whenever he’s in the presence of Kate or Claire, the audience tightens up a little bit because we’re afraid for these characters. Domhnall is a guy that ask a lot of questions, wants to dig into a character and backstory. [For the accent] we got him early in the process to work with some of the tech advisors we worked with on Mare. He did a wonderful job of being this oily, scary guy.

When Jackie corners Kate, Julianne Moore delivers some action movie moves.

She does some incredible stuff. But she can never be a superhero. It was always a tightrope, making it believable. This is a mom who’s going through something extraordinary and is mining some last reserve of energy or tapping into something that’s awakened in her that gets her to do these incredible things.

One of those incredible things leads to a huge “you didn’t see it coming” twist.

I hope we were able to pull it off! You want it to be a thriller, but grounded, to have the twist feel earned and not fake. Hopefully the audience is thrown at times and questioning what’s the truth and what isn’t. Mare, in a similar way, subverted expectations.

Echo Valley, Movie Premiere, Friday, June 13, Apple TV+

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