Interview: Neil Burger on ‘Inheritance’
Whether it’s exploring ambition, like he did 2011’s Limitless, or adapting dystopia, like he did with beloved YA novel Divergent, Neil Burger has a knack for transforming genres into personal, visceral stories. With his latest film, Inheritance, Burger ventures into espionage, crafting an international thriller with a uniquely scrappy, almost guerilla-style approach to filmmaking.
Starring Phoebe Dynevor as Maya, a young woman who discovers her father (Rhys Ifans) was a spy, the film sees her unraveling an intricate web of secrets while becoming a target herself. According to Burger, the inspiration for Inheritance was sparked by the eerie stillness of the early pandemic era.
“Well, strangely enough, I had the idea during COVID,” Burger recalls. “Right in the beginning of COVID, I read a New York Times article about a journalist who was making his way from Serbia to France, crossing these borders, which normally is easy and open, but now had guards and nobody on the street. And I was like, ‘I want to see what that looks like.’ But I didn’t want to make a documentary. I wanted to create a story that worked in that world.”
The story itself may have been born in lockdown, but its execution became an experiment all on its own. With scenes shot in bustling markets in Cairo, crowded streets in Seoul, and even mid-flight on airplanes, Inheritance uses the iPhone as its primary camera—not as a gimmick but as a means of immersion.
“I thought, ‘Well, but if you go into that world with a film crew, you blow it,’ you know? Everybody looks at you, and you can’t really see the world for what it is,” he explains. “So I was like, ‘Okay, you would have to shoot it, I would say, on an iPhone.’ Eventually, the world changed and we didn’t get going as quickly as I’d like to go. But I still had this story, and I still wanted to see the world in the new normal. The idea of an iPhone was not a gimmick… it was to give us access so that we could look at the world rather than the world looking at us.”
The result is a globe-trotting thriller that feels at once both intimate and immediate. “We could shoot on airplanes. We could shoot in a crowded Cairo market, and nobody would look at us,” says Burger. “The same in Delhi and Seoul. We really took this trip. And there’s been a few other major motion pictures shot on iPhones, but we are truly the first one that is an international thriller of this scope that goes around the world, that has this huge scope to it, that’s a grand, international movie, which is great, fun, and exciting.”
Dynevor’s Maya mirrors the film’s renegade spirit. A kleptomaniac and troubled soul, she finds herself navigating danger while embracing her father’s shadowy skillset. As Burger reveals, some of the most thrilling moments in the film came from the unconventional shooting style.
“That’s something that actually happened. It was scripted too,” he says of one scene in an airport. “The movie has a stolen aesthetic; we stole a lot of our shots, which is very appropriate because Phoebe herself is a thief. She’s a kleptomaniac. We were a very small crew, and we took the same trip that Phoebe took. If she was going to the airport, we went to the airport. If she was going on a plane to fly to Egypt, we were on that same plane filming her. So at JFK, she walks into a store that’s sort of high-end, this accessories and jewelry store, and she stole a pair of sunglasses and walked away with them. We filmed it and then we just quietly put them back at the end, and they never knew that anything had happened.”
The minimal crew and stripped-down setup also created opportunities for candid authenticity. “There’s a scene where she’s drinking on the street because her character is troubled, lost, and self-destructive,” Burger recalls. “When we were filming, it was just her and a guy with an iPhone. And then I’m a few feet away just looking at an iPad, the sound guys were even further away. No boom mics, no lights. And suddenly, I’m looking at my iPad, and then here come the three biggest New York policemen I’ve ever seen like, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ And she stayed completely in character until I had to say, ‘Okay, hold on, we’re good,’ so she wouldn’t get arrested.”
Moments like these, Burger says, contributed to the raw, unpredictable energy of the film. “The whole movie is full of things like that,” he explains. “It makes the movie feel very real because we were pushing up against the edge of all of these things and just shooting it in a very different way.” Ultimately, Inheritance isn’t just the story of a spy’s daughter—it’s about breaking the rules of how stories within the genre are told. By leaning into the chaos and discomfort of this “new normal,” Neil Burger has crafted a film that’s as much an act of reinvention as it is espionage.
Inheritance is now playing in theaters.
