or garlic, it becomes really campy and no longer scary," he continued. "So the idea was really to do something sort of film noir-like with a female protagonist and introduce the concept of vampires into that. As a result, we have a movie that is basically a thriller about a cult—it happens to be a cult of vampires," Writer/Director Sebastian Gutierrez explained. Lucy Liu immediately agreed to play the lead character of ‘Sadie.’ She admitted, "I first read the script at 3:00am in the morning and so I understood the project from that perspective, what it needed and what the character was about. It wasn’t strictly horror—it has an incredible emotional undercurrent, that and it had a thriller, noir quality about it." She continued, "I met Sebastian a couple of days later and we hit it off. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes you just connect with things; this script and Sebastian were things that I connected with." Gutierrez stated it was not a film just about revenge, "Rise is a serial killer movie in which our protagonist is the serial killer, and we, the audience, want her to commit the killings. If it was just a straight revenge tale, it becomes more of an action movie—I am interested in the emotional moments." He added, "At the heart of the story there is this emotional core. It’s very sad—Sadie’s been killed. It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. She is trying to understand it, put an end to those that wronged her, and die again. There is this sense of dread, of the wrong that has already happened and you can’t correct it—you just learn to understand it—or not." "Sadie has become something that she doesn’t want to be and she struggles with that for the entire film and tries to do the right thing under those circumstances which you know is a pretty tough thing for her to go through." Liu continued, "Sadie wants to be alive again, but she can’t have that. What is her option? What is her choice? She tries to kill herself — but no, that’s not going to work, so she chooses this path. It’s a story where people die for a reason." As ‘Sadie,’ a reporter who transforms herself into a killer once she realizes it's the only way she can avenge her murderers, Liu revealed, "She’s a normal person