Interview with Jordan Graham
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Jordan Graham
American filmmaker from Santa Cruz, California. He wrote, directed, shot, edited and scored the horror film Sator, drawn from his grandmother's story.
Source: LRM Online on YouTube
These answers are taken from Filmmaker Jordan Graham Interview on his Upcoming Indie Horror Film "Sator" on LRM Online's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was a great moment for you as a filmmaker?
That [award] was a surprise. That was pretty cool. That was the first award I've ever received in my life.
The Variety review really helped. It definitely opened up some doors for me. Nothing's guaranteed, and I'm always cautious. I never expect anything to happen, so if things do, then I'll be very happy.
I was out there shooting the snow at the end. I wanted there to be snow on the trees, and the first day it was supposed to be snowing and it never snowed. We waited a couple of months, and now we're getting into March and the snow is starting to go away. I found a day that said it was going to be maybe 20 percent snow. We drove up at six o'clock in the morning, the sun's not even out yet, and it's just snowing and snowing, and I'm like, please stay like this until it's light enough to shoot. The snow was building up on the trees and collapsing, and it stayed like that the entire day. It was just nonstop luck like that.
Who is your favorite filmmaker, and why?
Since this project took a long time, I started off with inspirations and then moved on to other inspirations. The biggest one at the beginning was Blue Ruin from Jeremy Saulnier. Through his Kickstarter he raised like $40,000, and it's like, this is what he was able to do with $40,000, I can do that. But then I learned that he ended up selling his house, and the budget was a lot higher than that. The first season of True Detective was also a major one.
While I was shooting, I got really into Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer, and then Only God Forgives. David Lynch would come in, and I get a lot of Kubrick inspirations. In post-production, I had The Witch right next to my film as a reference for coloring, because the film's really dark, and if The Witch can go that dark visually, then I can get away with that here.
Ari Aster, and the Safdie brothers, that's my inspiration now, I guess. I'm obsessed with Yorgos Lanthimos. I like The Killing of a Sacred Deer. And Gaspar Noé. I go through obsessions with certain directors.
Describe your filmmaking style.
One of the inspirations was The Blair Witch Project, and what I loved with The Blair Witch Project is that you don't see the witch. I was like, how can I do that same thing with this film? But if I don't show a creature, I feel like I'd be kind of cheating my audience, because the film is kind of slow. So [the creature] was supposed to be like a costume that they're wearing, animals from the forest. I bought like 60 different animal carcasses and created a costume out of that. I only built one costume, and I did camera trickery to make it look like there were multiple ones.
I was going to have scenes where he's out in open valleys, and as we were shooting the film I was like, I'm really liking being within the trees. For his portion of the story I never really went above the tree line. And one major rule is that I didn't want any evidence of sun in the film. The light's all soft. That probably adds to making it claustrophobic.
Tell me about a production that was hard to pull off. What was it and why was it challenging?
It took me seven years. I shot 120 days on this film, two of those days in Yosemite, and the rest in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I had two stories that I was trying to combine, and that was probably the most tedious part of the whole film: trying to connect her story with my story. While shooting, I would have to take week breaks to figure out how to make it work.
My mom gave me permission to construct a cabin in her backyard, about six blocks away from the ocean, so we're not in the forest at all. I built the cabin for about $1,500. The day that I started building, the neighbor decided to tear up his deck, so he gave me all that wood to build the floor. It took me about two months to build the cabin. The exterior was just photos I took of other cabins in the area, combined together and photoshopped in.
Sound was such a pain in this film. I couldn't capture the sound on the day except for when my grandmother speaks. We were in a suburban area, and the neighbors are in their hot tub as we're shooting. Every little crunch, every little piece of cloth, I did in post-production. It took me a year and four months to do just that process alone.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
My grandmother was pretty much the biggest inspiration of this film. She is one of the main characters, and she was not even supposed to be a part of it. I was using her house as a location. In real life, in 1968, she brought home a Ouija board and summoned an entity named Sator, and Sator became a huge part of her life. She ended up speaking to him through something called automatic writing: she just allowed him to speak through her, and she would write down everything that he said. Within three months she ended up in a psychiatric hospital. I didn't know anything about this before I started shooting the movie.
I was like, let's just get a quick cameo of her in the film, an improvisational thing, and I told one of the actors to talk about spirits, because that'll get her talking. She started bringing up the automatic writings, and she's never really shared it with the family. So that was a very lucky thing that happened. After that day I went home and watched the footage, started doing research on my family's history, and went back and did more interviews with my grandmother.
I'm not a musician at all, so [the score] is just sound effects. I put a microphone under a pot and rubbed the top. I took nuts and bolts and would drop them. I had a bass guitar and a violin bow. That's all I used.
In which area would you like to improve as a filmmaker?
I want to be a better storyteller, more than anything, and of course I want things to look beautiful.
I would love to work with a real cinematographer. I don't consider myself a cinematographer. I know I can make things look pretty, but I would definitely like to work with a cinematographer that can get what I'm trying to get across visually.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
One of the main reasons of doing this myself was to show how much I really care about the art of this, and that I can make something of quality. That's why I wanted everything to be as much from myself as possible. With the sound, I didn't want to use any sound libraries. I wanted everything to be created by me, so I could possibly get other projects made in the future.
I would love to get the next projects going. I'll never make a film by myself again. I still want my projects for a while to remain small. But I think the biggest benefit is that I can start writing for other actors that aren't my friends, because I kind of write to their capabilities. The last couple of years of writing new projects, it's been nice to not think about that.
Jordan Graham's Full Biography
Jordan Graham was born on 10 July 1986 in Santa Cruz, California, USA. He is an editor and producer, known for Sator (2019), Specter (2012) and Midground (2009).