Film Review for A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place Movie Trailer. A family living on a farm hides from a supernatural evil attracted to sound by avoiding every noise and communicating in sign language. It’s the idea of keeping one’s kids safe from harm that initially drew Krasinski to the project.
“This is a metaphor for parenthood that explores the idea of ‘what would you really do for your kids?,'” he told IGN in a recent chat. “We’d just had our second daughter when I read the original script so I was obviously cracked open emotionally and feeling all these fears that new parents go through, which is ‘how do we keep our children safe and alive?’ I connected more personally to the plight of the family than to the fact that it was a scary movie.
Because what I learned on The Office was that comedy and drama come from the same place. So I feel the same when it comes to making people laugh, cry, or be scared. It all comes from the same place and you just place the truth of the situation and I don’t think there’s anything more harrowing than the situation they’re going through.”
After Krasinski read the original spec script, from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, he knew he wanted to re-write it and let his imagination run wild with the lengths people would have to go to in order to live sound-free. “We had a joke in our house,” he said, “when we were shooting and I was writing the script where any time there was a noise my wife and I would just quietly turn to each other and say ‘You’re dead.'”
“Silence,” he continued, “is absolutely a character in the movie, along with each family member. It is sort of the magic trick of the movie. Could we make a silent movie? One of the fears was ‘Can we pull this off?’ and I’m happy to say that we did. Silence was going to take on this very palpable discomfort in and of itself. The idea of silence can be jarring in many ways, and so off-putting, that it gives the movie a tone that other movies don’t have.”
Much like a zombie apocalypse story, where you have to keep quiet so that you don’t draw the undead to your doorstep, A Quiet Place also examines the idea of surviving vs. thriving. “That’s the core of the movie, and my favorite part,” Krasinski shared, stating that his character was a survivalist who only cared about his family surviving the day while Blunt’s character was an advocate for them all having meaningful lives and not just ones where the sole purpose was existing.
“She wants to allow our children to be fully-formed, fully-thinking people,” he said. “They have to be caring beings. Warm beings. Emily, as the mother, gives them nourishment in their brains and hearts and their world is so warm because of her. And for me it’s just about keeping them alive and I think those takes, those sides, are the battling force of the movie.”
With such a unique script and premise, Krasinski explained that things needed to be kept quiet on the set too. “I think there was a sense among the crew, at least for the first few weeks, that it was a silent move so we can just hit ‘mute’ if need be,” he said. “They thought they could talk and we’d just cut it all out of the movie. So we really had to condition everybody that we needed the exact opposite. That we needed all this production sound, all this silence. So it was an interesting experience because it was almost a mind trick to get everyone understanding that we all need to live silently, or quietly, while shooting this movie.”
Krasinski has always wanted to work alongside wife Emily, but for A Quiet Place he was acting with her and directing her. “To be really honest, it was something I was very nervous about,” he expressed. “I think there’s always a fear when it comes to collaborating with a loved one – that it could either be the best experience or the worst experience. And I was lucky enough to have it be one of the best experiences, truly, of my career. I think we were both nervous about crossing over each others’ processes. We both have our own way of doing things and they both work for us, so it can be hard to know if the way you go about things will meld well with the way your partner goes about things.”
“The night before we shot, Emily asked ‘Are you nervous?’ and I said ‘I’m terrified’ and she said ‘Oh, thank god. Me too.’ Then we got to the set and placed one foot in front of the other and it wound up being the best collaboration of my career. She not only was the best possible scene partner but she was also next to the monitors and living this movie with me. She was supportive, kind, and offered up the greatest ideas that helped the movie be as amazing as I hope it is.”
With the premise being so far-out and the cast being so small, it was important to find child actors who could work and emote without lines. “This was one of those situations where watching someone’s previous work was the most important thing,” Krasisnki shared, regarding how Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe were cast. “First, I knew I needed a girl who was deaf for the role of the daughter, who is deaf in the movie. And for many reasons, I didn’t want a non-deaf actress pretending to be deaf. Most importunely though, because a deaf actress would help my knowledge and my understanding of the situations tenfold. I wanted someone who lives it and who could teach me about it on set. We found the most wonderful actress in Millicent. She is truly something special.”
“And as far as Noah goes, I’d seen him in The Night Manager. And I’d talked to George Clooney about Suburbicon and he was the boy in it so I was able to see an early screening of that movie so I could catch his work. There’s a big difference between a kid who acts like he’s under duress and one who lives it. And Noah is so good, you think he’s living it. Both of these child actors felt like they were really there.”
As far as influences go, this was a tough movie to prepare for. But Krasinski wanted to re-watch as many classic genre films as he could in order to learn suspense techniques. “As a scaredy-cat, I hadn’t seen a lot of the newer genre movies and yet I wanted to know what devices people use for tension,” he said. “When I set out to write the script, I knew I wanted to give it more of a classic feel. There’s something about Hitchcock and Jaws and Alien and other films that weren’t so much about horror as they were suspense and psychological fear. That was really the wellspring of inspiration.”
“I remember Jaws was one of the first movies Emily and I watched together,” he explained. “We’d already seen it separately but we watched it together during the first few weeks of us dating and I think by the end of those first weeks we wound up seeing it, like, eight times. What’s weird about that is that while both of us don’t like to be scared there’s something cool about watching a movie you think is a scary movie but it’s really something else entirely.
The more you watch Jaws and the more you pay attention, it’s one of the best-written films ever with one of the best set-ups ever for exploring people’s plight. Really the movie’s about three men dealing with their own fears and what they want to accomplish in their lives and the shark is this backdrop. There’s something powerful about that idea that I hoped to bring to this movie.
A Quiet Place (2018)
Directed by: John Krasinski
Starring: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds, Evangelina Cavoli, Cade Woodward, Ezekiel Cavoli, Doris McCarthy
Screenplay by: John Krasinski, Scott Beck, Bryan Woods
Production Design by: Jeffrey Beecroft
Cinematography by: Charlotte Bruus Christensen
Film Editing by: Christopher Tellefsen
Makeup Department: Kelley Mitchell, Evelyne Noraz
Set Decoration by: Heather Loeffler
Art Direction by: Sebastian Schroeder
Music by: Marco Beltrami
Distributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: April 6, 2018
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