Interview with ‘Lyvia’s House’ Writer and Producer Patricia V. Davis and Lead Actor Joshua Malekos

Coming to VOD in October, Lyvia’s House is a mystery thriller film directed by Niko Volonakis and written and produced by Patricia V. Davis who is also known as a fictional author for her paranormal mystery series, “The Secret Spice Café.”

Lyvia’s House follows Tara Manning (Tara Nichol Cadwell), a young journalist, whose life radically changes when she falls in love with Johnny Beers (Joshua Malekos), an aspiring architect, and moves six hundred miles away in a house previously owned by Lyvia Ricci (Tara Nichol Cadwell), an Italian artist. In the scenic backdrop of rural California, Tara grows suspicious of the artist’s disappearance and starts thinking that it might have something to do with a murder committed twenty years before. 

Earlier this week, I sat down with Patricia and Joshua to discuss their film, the challenges of independent filmmaking, and the real-life inspiration behind the story.

Clotilde: What inspired the story of Lyvia’s House in the first place and how did you get the idea of writing it, Patricia?

Patricia: It’s interesting. Some of it is a little autobiographical because we did move up to [our own] Lyvia’s House, where my husband was born and raised. It’s a rice and orchard farming community in Northern California and it’s very rural. A lot of the things that happened to Tara in the story – like the poor cell reception, the mosquitos, or the Wi-Fi going in and out – are all things we dealt with when we first moved in. But then, in February 2020, it was the first time I was here in the spring, all the people were very nice and it was gorgeous. I had never seen it before, it was just stunning: everything was in bloom, pink blossoms, almond trees, and white blossoms from the walnut trees. I stepped outside into the backyard and one of the sailplanes – the yellow plane that appears in the film – dipped down and circled: it looked like a fairytale.

I think I got tired of the farm tropes you always see in Hollywood – you know, you always have somebody sawing up people in the backyard – and I wanted people to see what it is really like to live in a small community and to see the beauty of it. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to write, I found out that there was a serial killer up here, and that he was one of the most prolific serial killers at the time. He isn’t well-known, for some reason, but it happened right here along the Feather River. He buried all these bodies in the walnut and peach orchards. I asked my husband about it, and he remembered about Juan Corona, he was in high school when they got him. So, I put all those things together and came up with the story

Clotilde: So, there are real-life elements in the story, how did you work the real-life elements in the script?

Patricia: When I came up with different things for the film, it all came together and I decided to put some real-life elements into the story. For example, Mary Ann James works in the post office in the story, and there really is a Mary Ann who runs the post office here. She was my first friend because I didn’t know anyone at the time. When I went into the post office – it’s a tiny little house where she works by herself, just like in the movie – I told her I was trying to find the handyman and she just told me who to call! She just had all these great ideas and was super helpful.

Clotilde: This question may be more for Joshua but what drew you to the story, and your character, when you first read the script for Lyvia’s House?

Patricia: The brilliant writing!

Joshua: I will say, some of the scripts that you get are not always the most fantastic thing you have ever read. But sitting down and reading Lyvia’s House screenplay for the first time was different. I read it with my partner, Alex: we sat down and read it at the same time. And there’s just a lot of really fun twists and turns, with so many different things going on around the characters that was super exciting and interesting.

And for me, one of the biggest draws was being near the Sacramento area. I am not from there originally, but I moved there in high school and that’s where I started acting. I started in Northern California, and so even as we move across the country to different places, I’ve always tried to push to film and work on things with the Sacramento artists. I just think there is a great community there. There aren’t many movies that film around here so as soon as I saw this movie was coming, I was pushing to try and get in the audition room and win them over. I was lucky enough that it was a Greek theme, and I have a Greek last name, which helps, but we hit it off and everyone became a family pretty quickly.  That all drew me to the project and the script with a lot of fun twists and turns. My character has an incredible arc: he is very dynamic and has specific things that you don’t always get with an independent film.

Clotilde: And how was the overall casting and audition process for Lyvia’s House?

Patricia: I want to make a point about what Josh said that his Greek last name helped a little bit. To be honest, that is just him being humble. I think he knocked it out of the park. I just feel that one of the things that appealed to me about his performance was how he developed the character layer by layer. There is no overacting, which you can get sometimes with newer actors, neither with Josh nor the main character. I felt like they were very natural, both of them, as a couple as very they were very believable and sympathetic. You were just interested in what was going to happen to them. That really speaks to Josh’s acting and is one of the things that we loved.

I remember I was doing the reading at the audition, I was giving Josh’s lines while the director was filming him. I was not looking at Josh’s face, I was just looking at the page. He was delivering his lines and they sounded fine but after he left, the director turned to me and said: “We don’t have to look anymore, I want him.” And I wasn’t sure because I felt like he could have been more dramatic in some parts, so the director told me to just watch the tape. I literally got chills, like my hair stood on it, that’s how well he did. And this is Josh’s first film as a lead, the first of many in my opinion.

Joshua: It was an interesting time for me because we were coming out of Covid a little bit, so some people were doing stuff in person and some people weren’t. I was excited when I was asked to come for a call back in person and to get to work with them in a room. I did my first reading on a Zoom call while I was on vacation in Hawaii, my partner and her grandmother dropped me off at a park and I just sat there and did my reading, which was kind of fun. But getting to go in person was interesting because I got to read with them and I feel like there’s an energy in a room where you are in the same space with people you have never met.

I like what Patricia said a lot because I was trained in a very subtle, very Meisner, technique that is a lot of eyes and face. Even though I talk big with my hands and stuff, normally in my acting it is not a lot of that. So that is really fun and cool to hear for me, that watching it they saw that.  

Clotilde: Without giving too much away, your character does have a very interesting arc in Lyvia’s House. Did you expect that there was more to him than what we can imagine?

Joshua: I think that the good part about Patricia’s writing is that you do expect that something is going on with everybody. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly who is hiding what but yes, I did suspect that he had some secret he was hiding. I think that it was really fun to try and play with that and figure out what it is that he is hiding from the audience, and also from some of the characters.

Clotilde: Were there any challenges that came with portraying such a complicated character for you?

Joshua: Yes, there were quite a bit of challenges about deciding how much we were hiding or revealing at certain times about the characters, as a lot of them had secrets, that is kind of the way with thrillers. One of my favorite parts was working through deciding how much to reveal at any given time, with little moments here and there when a character does something a little bit weird, or says something in a different way, that makes you question them. That was a really fun process that ended up being very collaborative, there were moments where would all sit and agree that we wanted to hide a little bit more from the audience or tried to figure out what we wanted people to know at that time.

Patricia: There were a lot of red herrings purposely. We wanted to have the big reveal at the end, but it was very collaborative. It was very fun for me. Ann Marie Gideon, who played Mary Ann James, was the narrator of my novels when they were made into audiobooks and that is how I met her. I loved her reading so much, it was very interesting because she would say something in the story and do it her own way and I realized that I did not initially hear it like that in my mind. But I love it! That is what I loved about the screenplay, how each person brought their idea to the character and each actor had their way of portraying it. It was really fun to see.

Clotilde: Do you think there were a lot of changes from the final draft of the script to what we now see on screen? Is there something that was added or improved on set that you ended up keeping in the final version of Lyvia’s House?

Patricia: That’s a fun one! First of all, I will say that I can write pretty good dialogue but I am also going to say that I am not a 22-year-old and these characters are young. So I told the actors that anything that sounded stiff or like something that wouldn’t come out of your mouth at that change, I wanted them to change it. Some of the best changes in the dialogue came from them tweaking it. It’s interesting because at one point Josh – who was great to work with and very easy-going, patient, and professional  – noticed that some of the dialogue was too long and he was right. It was too long!

So in the middle of it, he stopped for a second and asked “What’s important here? Because I feel like this is too much for this particular scene.” I was listening and I thought: he’s right! So we had a look at what we would take out and then it sounded so much better when he delivered it. That was in a way a little mini-directing that he did there, even though he was the actor, and you have to be open to this. Of course, you are not going to say yes to everything but you do have to be open to it and trust the people you are working with that they have the talent to do this.  

And the other thing that Josh added to the story was this scene when the character steps on a rap trap that was his idea, it wasn’t in the script at all. It was a little bit of a comedy moment, and we put it together in an hour. We had to make sure there were no logos or anything that wasn’t approved, so we had to set the whole thing up with this rat trap and cover up the logos. And we even got it on the first take! There are a couple of things throughout the process where people just chime in.

Joshua: And shooting on indie, it’s really quick and you are really pressed for time in every moment. There are a lot of moments where a better idea came about that was easier, or we were getting low on time, and you have to choose how to best use your time. That is something Niko is fantastic at taking the scene and knowing what to do with the time and what the crew has ready or has to adjust to without losing the story or the script too much. That’s the thing with indie films: you don’t have a lot of time, you have to be on your toes and ready to go. As an actor, you have to nail it because you can’t ask for more time. There are moments that you can do it and people are very comfortable accommodating you, but you have to be ready to go, and that is one of the fun parts of it.

Patricia: I am glad you had that experience. But I found it a little stressful because I felt like my actors were under a lot of pressure. We didn’t have a lot of money to shoot this and if you have to reshoot something, it takes longer and you are talking overtime, your insurance can run out: every minute that you waste is money spent. This is probably true for Indie, but we were only shooting with one camera as well. For example, there were some really emotional moments in this film and you would see the actors have to get in that headspace again and again as they move the camera again and switch the lighting, I don’t know how they did it, it is a lot harder than people realize. It looks glamorous, but it is hard work. We were working under very tough conditions because we were filming in the summer and it was over 100 degrees almost every day, and it was mosquito season.

That is a change that I love: the mosquitos worked their way into the script because there were just too many, so we had to write them in. Luckily for us, they always seemed to show up when the bad guys were around. It was like we hired them, or called their agent or something. Since they showed up on screen, we just emphasized it and made it part of the story. The line about “there is no Wi-Fi, there’s no cell phone, there are a million mosquitoes” was added later, so you really have to think on your feet when you don’t have money and you don’t have time. And we worked for the most part with people who could really think on their feet, from the DP to the director and actors, everybody was always ready to go. You have to tell the story of when you got stung by a bee, Josh! We had to change the whole thing.

Joshua: We were shooting in a little historic church, and it was very beautiful, there are bee boxes all around. It’s kind of become a place where some local farmers keep all their bees and we were shooting there. And I asked the director if we were good to shoot there, because we were walking around the bees, and he said yeh we are fine! So, he would walk up and down through all the beehives and they wouldn’t bother him. But that is because he was just making them angry, so when it was my turn to get up there, I was actually filming on my phone, and a bee immediately came up and stung me right on the temple, just straight for me! The bees wouldn’t even let me go back, once I went back to the director and crew, there was a bee hovering around wherever I would kind of move. It was really weird! And we had to completely change locations but already had shot the first half at this location. Luckily the team was fantastic at adjusting. I was really worried because my forehand was swelling up a little bit and we still had a lot more days of the shoot and they were all back to back, so if I was swollen it going to look weird. And Patricia put a lemon on it and sure enough it went down!

Patricia: That is a Greek-Italian thing: you put a lemon on stings. The bees were calm as long as we weren’t making a noise and once we started making a noise, they got agitated. I remember the director yelled at me because I was thinking like a producer when he told me we had to change locations. He told me, “We are not shooting here. This was a really bad idea,” and at first I didn’t know how we could do this, but we figured it out. We were able to use the footage but had to come up with another adjustment for everything. I remember driving there after he told me the lead actor just got stung and I was worried about what would happen with everything. But he was just so good about it. Apart from his acting, I would work with him just because he was so cool to work with. He could have gotten about that but it became a joke, Josh even posted it on his Instagram! I realized how lucky we were with him.

Clotilde: That must have been really stressful for both of you. And I am thinking of you, Patricia, because you had to balance being a producer and being the writer for this, was it tricky for you and how did you achieve that balance?

Patricia: I am not going to say that I wasn’t attuned to the way a like was said or changed from how I had written in. Sometimes when I write, I do it very carefully and everything usually pays off in the end. If something was changed without being discussed first, it was irritating and, in fact, at one point caused a plot hole that we were luckily able to fix. Apart from those instances, I pretty much let the director do it the way he felt he should do it, and I totally focused on the producing end because there were just not enough people to do things. We were extremely lucky that our actors were able to pull it off in only a couple of takes, that is the time we had.

For me, the focus was mostly on producing, it was crazy! I wouldn’t do it again looking back on it but I did all the cooking for the whole crew. The SAG requires two hot meals a day, so putting catering in your budget would have taken us way out of what we were able to afford. I didn’t want to serve crappy food – that’s my Italian and Greek upbringing – the fact that everybody was working on the scale was already enough of a sacrifice, so I wanted to provide food. In hindsight, that was a mistake because I was just doing way too many things and it was a challenge for me.

Even now it’s a challenge to wear all those hats because there are things that I am still doing to get this to streaming, to deal with SAG-AFTRA, and all the paperwork, all of that falls to me. I realize now that there are many people involved because there is only so much one person can do. Most of the time during filming I left it up to them and sometimes this was to the detriment of the film because we didn’t have a script supervisor. At one point, they changed something, and I realized that it created a plot hole, so we had to figure it out. And everything worked out, but that was because of who we were working with, they were very open.

Joshua: The team was surprisingly good. It’s hard because we are trying to help Sacramento grow but it is not there yet. So, I am surprised that some of the people that were out there, it was just a really professional team

Clotilde: You talked about filming in California for Lyvia’s House and it is obviously very important to the setting of the film too. Can you talk a little bit about the setting and how important it is for the overall movie?

Joshua: The area that we filmed in is very important: it is this quiet, beautiful town. Whenever I drive there now – I visit a little bit and am also there to work on some more things that we have coming up – it reminds me of all the fun stuff that we did in these fun locations. It is such a beautiful area and I think they did a very good job of capturing the wildlife and the gorgeous fields and everything just looks pretty. You wouldn’t imagine for something sinister to be happening. You don’t always get that: a lot of times, the horror movies or thrillers that I watch make the environment itself feel very ominous. This doesn’t feel that way until they start to develop it and you realize that there is some more ominous stuff going on in this beautiful little town.

Patricia: If you watch it carefully, you will see that the colors and everything actually change as it gets scarier and scarier, it is a really subtle thing.

Clotilde: What can we expect from you both, if there is anything you can say, in the future of your respective careers?

Patricia: I am honored to say that I was invited on as a producer for Josh and Niko. They have a new film coming up that is going to be filmed in Hawaii but I am going to let him tell you a little bit more about that. And we have one coming up partially filmed in the Philippines and partially filmed in California again, that one is a little further along at the moment. We are doing negotiations with one of the actors already. It is folklore horror but also has a lot of historical horror as well, so I am excited about it because of the opportunity to shoot in the Philippines as well.

Joshua: As Patricia said, we invited her to be part of our team. We are in the development of a movie called Isle of Boar. It is an art-house horror movie in the style of A24 and Neon. It takes place for the majority on the island. It does star a Hawaiian cast and crew. My partner grew up on the Hawaiian Islands and that is kind of where it stemmed from. And she’s also an archaeologist and anthropologist which is what our main characters are. So it follows a group of scientists as they embark on a journey: they are grad students under a professor who is cutting corners they don’t know about and they end up on this remote island in the middle of nowhere, and things start to go a little wrong. We are really excited about that! Niko, the director of Lyvia’s House, is brought on to help direct this with me. We have some really talented actors that I have kind of met and we started doing the casting. We are missing a few actors but I am excited about that.  And then, I was also on the drive up to New York and I was offered the lead role in my first New York movie. It is a horror slasher movie that will be filmed here in New York. I am excited, it is going to be my first New York movie and it’s the lead.

Interview Courtesy of Clotilde Chinnici

Image Credit Lyvia’s House LLC – © Graffi Media Inc to via Imbd