Original subtitles

When you're designing any creature, everyone's like, "I've seen it before."

That is really hard to do.

So, I said, "These are all my ideas, but let's do it together."

John has put together a movie where the audience can scream together,

giggle with nervous tension.

The whole idea, that's a new spin on things.

- Lock it up. - All right, settle down.

Getting a visual effects company like ILM was going to be a huge win for us.

That was one of the best experiences of the whole process.

When you get somebody like ILM, that is a magic moment

because they're as good as it gets in this business.

One of the best bits of advice my dad gave me was,

"One of the most confident things you can say as a person is, 'I don't know. "'

Certainly, with a movie like this,

I'd never done horror, I'd never had visual effects before.

There were a lot of "I don't knows".

Wait for it, and action.

Scott Farrar who had done all the Transformers movies jumped on the movie.

He was on the set with us and really helping with this creature,

which was incredible to have.

Everybody thinks, "Well, you have to have great visual effects."

They're not gonna be successful

unless you have a great story with interesting characters,

and this had that.

I was quite impressed.

The first meeting I had with John was basically,

"How are we gonna do this movie?

"What do we need to do on set if we have a creature?

"What are the technical issues?"

But the first thing he said that I really liked was,

"Don't show too much. Be kind of cryptic.

"Keep 'em in the dark. Tell as little as possible until you have to

"because then, your imagination takes over."

We all know in our business,

right off when we're tasked with putting as much as possible in the shot,

and I love the idea of, "Just hold back.

"Build the tension and build the scare."

"When is it gonna jump?

"Do I... Should I look? Is there something...

"Is there something behind me now?"

We kind of came up with this whole backstory and mystery together,

and it was all this really fun stuff of,

"How did they evolve? Where are they from?

"Why do they look the way they do?"

It was a conscious decision not to let the audience in on it

because the family doesn't have a lot of information.

They're living in a world where they're trying to figure things out.

The creature design originated with Beecroft and his team.

It's not just designing sets,

it's also if creatures or certain important pieces are involved,

there might be a thing that, on the set, has to be made.

You have a story about people who can't speak.

We decided to make him blind.

Creating the creature, we started seeing,

"What kind of environment did he come from?"

An awesome mentor of mine is Drew Goddard

who wrote and directed The Cabin in the Woods.

I remember his advice to me on the creatures was,

"Start your creature now.

"Long before pre-production, start thinking about him now. "

At the end of the day, you're lucky

if it's the third of fourth creature you use.

It's usually the 12th or 13th or 20th creature design

that you come up with that you'll use in the movie.

I'd written stuff, I'd drawn stuff,

I even got on the floor and video-taped myself

crawling like I thought they would.

Where I came up with all this stuff, to be really honest,

is David Attenborough documentaries and all that stuff

that I nerded out on for all these years.

I started remembering all these creatures that he talked about,

and I kind of stole from a bunch of real life creatures,

a lot of prehistoric fish and stuff like that,

that just look so crazy, they don't look like they could be from this planet.

I took it from a nautilus shell.

A nautilus shell cavitates.

Sound affects them in such a way that

they will destroy anything that makes noise.

What was cool about working with John is he had a lot of specific reference.

He had a very clear idea, but he was very open

to letting us explore what that was gonna look like.

Even though we're working within a box, he let us jump out of it here and there.

First, it was, "What if we make it move around kind of like a bird?"

Got these weird sharp movements.

Pose, pose, pose, opposed to smooth motions.

"Yeah, let's try that." "Well, that's..."

It didn't work so well because this is a big hulking creature.

We have all these flaps all over the head

for how it listens to where things are.

John always had this idea that those flaps would flow.

Like school of fish, and how they all behave together,

and how the ear works in general,

how it captures sounds,

how our ears are curved, we try to mimic that in the platings.

The audience is gonna think the ears are here.

Let's just start here, and we had flaps on the head that open

so that the sensitive area of hearing is just the head.

We boil it down to that, and then, it worked.

For the functionality, "What would it look like

underneath these plates or whatever?"

We were playing around with a lot of inner ear stuff,

and it was weird creepy design to that.

So, that lent itself really well to this.

It was really hard to crack what that creature was going to look like.

You don't have a creature on set,

so you have a guy in a motion capture suit, or you have nothing.

The time was ticking and all that sort of thing.

Sometimes, the work itself guides you into what you should be doing.

Unreal.

- Two things. Look back more. - Yeah. "Look back more."

Keep that light up and look back more.

John, he loves classic films.

He loves Jaws, and he loves Hitchcock films,

so, we'd be doing things...

Emily's in the bathtub, creature's coming up the stairway,

and it's, so often, not the technology.

It's portraying something that really creates a mood.

So, at first, there wasn't going to be much monster at all,

but then, the monster started looking so cool,

we're like, "Yeah, yeah, it's a good idea.

"Let's show more of it at the end."

There's a sequence where the creature goes into the water,

which is one of the most effective moments of the film

because the creature could be anywhere under the surface

It's like a shark in the water.

That was one of our first really good finished shots.

We had a guy on set. He really went under water.

All the objects on the water, they moved away from him.

I talked to the animator, Alberto,

I said, "We can interact with any of the props that are already here.

"We don't want to add CG props,

"so make sure that the creature gets in the water

"the same way that the actor does, but make it look creepy."

The actor's head came out of the water and caused the ripples.

We had the creature's head come out of the water, the same timing.

Come on. That's scary stuff.

It's a subtle performance from these creatures.

People are developing a keener eye for what they're seeing on the screen.

We have become more disciplined in trying to

create something that appears real or believable.

That can be a bit of a challenge.

It's a very unique take on a creature, and it's unique take on a movie,

and it's really fun to be a part of something like that.

I've been doing this for 20 years,

and I absolutely love scary movies.

ILM doesn't get a chance to work on them very often.

A Quiet Place is it's own thing.

Working on this film was a real treat.

They ended up delivering us a creature I couldn't be more happy with.

It really hit a home run for us.