The Housemaid director Paul Feig on how he relates to his female-centric movies

If you can avoid it, don’t watch the trailer for The Housemaid, the new thriller starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried.

Its director, Paul Feig, said the best way to see his film is to go in blind because there are twists and turns designed to catch you off guard.

That might be a big ask for a huge chunk of the audience for The Housemaid because it was based on a best-selling novel by Frieda McFadden, a pseudonym for its semi-mysterious author.

The book has sold millions of copies, its peacock blue cover with an eye starring through a keyhole inviting you to share in the secrets in its pages. That means a lot of viewers who already have ideas of how a movie version might look, and who might play the characters.

Feig was aware of that existing fanbase, but he was adamant that you can’t be controlled by them.

“Everyone has a different opinion, so if you chase around trying to get consensus, you’ll just go out of your mind,” he told The Nightly. “At some point, you have to absorb the source material a love it. You can’t do it if you love it.”

But the way he approached it is to be a fan, not all the fans, and make a movie that he wanted to watch, and hopefully that will sync up with what others are looking for.

Feig was sent the project with star Sydney Sweeney already attached. Sweeney actually found the book and took it to the studio, Lionsgate, and Feig was approached because he’s known for working with women.

Among his best-known works include Bridesmaids and the two A Simple Favour films, as well as three-picture streak with Melissa McCarthy in the leads, The Heat, Spy and Ghostbusters.

You might think there’s a disconnect between these female-centric stories and Feig’s golden rule that no matter what he’s working on, he has to personally connect with it, but when he found himself leaning in more and more when he started to read The Housemaid.

The story is mostly told from the perspective of Millie Calloway (Sweeney), a young woman who hustles her into a live-in maid job with the Winchesters, a rich family whose Long Island manor is the stuff of interior magazine dreams, all lush cream palettes and marble benchtops.

Her boss is Nina (Amanda Seyfried), the erratic wife who is sugar and spice on minute and Miranda Priestly on a bad day the next. Millie doesn’t know what to make of it, but her alternative is going back to sleeping in her car.

She feels a connection to Nina’s husband, Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), who appears to be understanding and trying to appease his wife’s sometimes violent mood swings.

Feig immediately related to Millie. “I love the idea of somebody who is kind of down,” he said. “Everything I do is about outsiders and the underdog, and to me, Millie is a real underdog character.

“Just looking to improve her life, and getting pulled into something that seems perfect, and then you can’t understand how you got yourself into that situation, and how you extract yourself from it, is very relatable.

“I am never a fan of making movies where the lead character is really cool and they’re really smart. I can’t relate to that. We all feel like underdogs in our lives and we are smart people, but we just haven’t broken through a lot of times in certain stages of our lives.”

The Housemaid may be an arch thriller with an impossibly attractive ensemble (“I’ve got a good-looking cast,” Feig admitted. “I’m like Quasimodo walking around behind the cameras.”), but it’s grounded in a story about a scrappy fightback from a dark horse.

When you look back at Feig’s filmography, that is the running theme, even when some of those films have been set in impossibly beautiful spaces, such as Another Simple Favour’s sojourn in Capri. It’s about what the audience can hook into.

“I learnt early on, don’t try to make movies to win awards,” he said. “I really thought (first film indie drama I Am David) was going to be my Oscar movie, and it’s ridiculous.”

Instead, Feig wants to make movies people want to see, and preferably, in a cinema. The Housemaid is not a comedy although it has comedic moments. He wants an audience to collectively share in the laughs, the cheers, the gasps and the screams.

“The only thing I care about is did I give you a fun two hours, whether you were gasping, whether you were shading your eyes, whether you were falling in love, if you had a good time.

“That’s all I care about.”

The Housemaid is in cinemas on Boxing Day