Original subtitles

I'd done a horror film called All the Boys Love Mandy Lane with friends from

AFI and Adam, he and I had been on a couple of panels together for

micro budget horror films because You know, Mandy Lane was under 200 ,000. He

was on sort of the festival circuit for Popskull.

And we became friends and then, you know, just hit it off.

And then one day he asked me, you know, he said, doing this movie called You're

Next, would you be interested?

I said yes, and here we are.

Adam just has this really easygoing way about him and this very calm demeanor

that just allows him to get these great performances out of actors.

And he just puts in the time and the planning in that he can be so specific

about what he wants and needs to tell the story that he can chisel away all

other stuff and that allows us to be really ambitious for those, you know,

really focus our money.

for a production designer that's great because you know what to concentrate it

on and that what you're concentrating on is going to make the movie and will

make the movie better you want

to try sure

the um i mean the first time the guest came

up is Adam told me he and Simon were thinking about this

Halloween movie, but they'd just seen Terminator.

And they wanted to somehow combine the two, but they had no idea how to do it.

But they were thinking about it.

Really, it's when you've got it, you've broken it down, and then

Adam and I will generally...

go out to lunch and we'll just start talking about whatever really inspired

about that script. And honestly, in the case of the guest, it was color.

Like we really started talking about Halloween.

What are the colors of Halloween?

What makes it so special? And what can we kind of take from that as a base and

then keep adding to it? And can we make this horror film that's really

wonderfully colorful?

we knew at that point it was going to be shot in new mexico we're talking about

embracing kind of the new mexico of it all the the colors the light the

big skies and then we were getting you know really excited about what could we

do in camera as far as the shootouts and how big could we make them if we were

really really careful with it and that's when you know you start thinking about

things in a practical sense and figuring out how to make it happen and that's

just when it all started coming together well there's a lot more logistics

involved because you're moving places constantly you have multiple crews

up striking taking things down getting you place to place but you're just

to find all those little pieces that build that very, in this case, odd world

and just building out that world as a single sort of cohesive entity.

I don't blame you.

The vibe really was that so before we even did our first location scout, Adam

already had like a mix put together and was already composing music.

So is he and I driving around New Mexico scouting. He's like playing this mix

constantly, which really Adam does a lot. It's how he works.

And so very much you're in the vibe early on, and then the thing is it

right? All of a sudden the location manager who's there is hearing it, and

the location assistant.

And then it's playing in the background as you're interviewing people because

Adam's blaring it in his office that's next door to you.

Everybody gets the vibe of a Wingard film.

We set it ahead of time and part of that is all those things came from such a

wide variety of places that they had to be gotten.

way in advance to be able to put that room together.

But I do, I love that room. It's one of the favorite sets I've ever done, even

though it's such a small, small thing. But something about the colors and the

lighting and the detail, you know, like the butterfly lampshades and the odd

hand -hammered, you know, metal end tables from India.

And a comic artist friend of mine, Megan Hutchison, did all of the original art

and etchings for that room.

We had a lot of antique Japanese paper masks in there, just tons of fun

You know, you have it all set up and Maike came in and we kind of ran through

all and she moved stuff around, you know, took some stuff off the shelf, put

in her purse, like...

put things in her pockets and even if it never made the movie it it all helps it

all helps with the character so that that room was a blast

Terminator

and Halloween are way up there also Lady from Shanghai in terms of figuring out

you know reflections are really difficult to do well like to get that

-layered part of the maze.

So we really studied Lady from Shanghai.

And then we also spent some time looking at In the Mood for Love for colors,

patterns, that kind of thing.

And so those, I know it's a bit of an odd group of references, but it all sort

of slams together in the end. You know that weird scarecrow from it that Adam

and I built that on a Sunday weekend just for fun for the shootout you're

oh man if we could make it with wooden arms I bet special effects could just

explosives on it just blow it to hell at the end of the shootout sequence it's

what happened you know the big point obviously is color and lighting and both

Susan and Robbie are great and what it would do is we because Practical lights

are so important to Robbie.

I mean, he was a fantastic gaffer in addition to being a great

So we'd lay out all the practical lights, the paint chips of all the

then we'd worry about how do you make those practical lights as good and

as possible.

And that's where lots of the collaboration really came from.

And then also figuring out What do you do with the window treatments? Because

the light is so bright in New Mexico.

So you're sort of constantly trying to cut stuff down. And Susan is really

about understanding the shooting needs and just what has to happen to get a

great image.

Silks were handmade to go inside lampshades to like take the lamps down.

lot's going into those, you know, little tiny rooms.

I think we shot for four weeks.

pretty fast considering it's a film with car crashes and the big shootouts and

frankly doing that on practical locations is pretty complicated from my

things so it's like for instance the front of the house for the shootout like

the whole front of that house is coated in steel and then a whole fake front of

the house is built on top of the steel that's fitted with charges so that's how

we're able to blow the hell out of a real location that's a family's house is

you have that thick steel that protects the house the charges go off and just

blow the hell out of the front of the house so all of that it's all real

similarly you're taking out their real windows you're putting in breakaways

building a fake front of the diner so that can be blown up so Again, tons of

fun. It's made out of balsa wood. It's a very soft breakaway wood.

And then it's covered with plaster.

And so that's what's blowing out. And then similarly, when you're inside the

house, there's both shootouts in practical rooms and a stage set.

But so when David first jumps through the window, he's jumping into a

room. So the whole back wall of the room, again, is covered with steel.

And then the closet doors or breakaway doors that are set with charges, but the

back wall is also covered with steel with fake drywall over the top. So all

that's blowing out for real in camera.

But then when the machine gun opens up and David's leaping into the hallway and

crawling along, that's... That's all a set, and you can tell from the slightly

stylized choice where instead of the wall blowing out and there being black,

it's light behind every bullet hole, so you can see it really well.

But that's fun. That's part of the world of the guest.

You know, I should say one of the things that's really going part of the way all

of that looks so incredible is the construction coordinator, Bill Holmquist

his team. All you really need to know is Bill did There Will Be Blood.

He built...

all that in -camera oil Derek blowing up and blowing apart, and here he is

coming out to do this little tiny movie.

But man, he's great at what he does.

What are you doing?

I'm going to a bar.

That time of year we were shooting, the weather was really rough, so we had to

shut down for a lot of lightning storms.

And crazily enough, we had huge dust storms that blew down parts of sets.

That was trying.

And one of the strangest oddities is just that

we had to have pumpkins for a Halloween movie.

pumpkins are not available out of season there you plant them one at the last

frost and they're barely ready for halloween and we couldn't do it with

pumpkins so we literally called every agricultural university in the southern

u .s and paid people to walk greenhouses anyone who had a pumpkin research

project going on searching for pumpkins for us. And we ended up getting like

eight pumpkins sent to us.

And that's why those pumpkins are so precious in the carving scene.

The two pumpkins in the background, those are like carved foam.

But you know, David's really ripping through those things with his butterfly

knife. So when we ran out of pumpkins, we ran out of pumpkins.

The car wreck was actually really hard to do in camera, and part of it was that

even though the road looks dry, there had been these crazy flash floods.

And so the road was absolutely slick and muddy, and we'd use torches to just,

like, dry out the top of it for camera.

But the cars were speeding toward each other, hit the mud, slid, and, like,

scraped down the sides.

And they were the only two.

cars we had, and so body work, repaint, start from scratch

on a whole new, that was a little trying, but you know, you get through it

in the end the car crash is great.

We really scaled down the number of days we got to shoot to really,

really focus, and there was just, everything you're seeing, there aren't

on the cutting room floor.

like everything you're seeing is what was shot and what made the movie so it

to be razor sharp basically to free up the money to do everything in camera

was that was the goal something just hits with this one and audiences love it

it's all the other movies you know they're great it's so much fun seeing

with an audience but something about this one

The humor just lands, the action just lands, the scares just land.

It's the best live film experience I've ever been a part of.