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There will be movies where the process of making it feels like there's a sort

magic to it, and there are movies where what's on screen feels like magic, and

The Guest is the rare case where those two things were happening on the same

show. It really was a great experience to make the movie, and I think that

in the movie itself.

Well, we've made three movies with Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, you know,

starting with Your Next, then The Guest, and then they invited us into, they

were developing a sort of remake sequel to The Blair Witch Project, and they

invited us in to come produce that for Lionsgate. And that was one where we

more kind of brought in later in the process to kind of help kind of run the

show.

Mrs. Peterson?

Yes? Can I, um, help you?

My name is David.

This is Peterson. I, uh, I knew your son, Caleb.

Uh, I mean, our process as producers, you know, we do tend to get pretty

involved with creative producers in the concept stage and development and kind

of shaping what the movie, or in the case of we're now also in TV, like what

show ends up being.

And a lot of that is conversations with the key other people.

I mean, at the start, really the writer and the director, and then through the

rest of the process with the department head.

And so I think really on every project it changes.

I think that there are some films where we're very involved in the kind of

overarching creative approach to it, and there are others where we land more in

a kind of administrative, making sure all of the things are happening the way

they're supposed to happen way.

I think that with...

adam and simon we tended to be more on that creative side where we're you know

in these conversations about figuring out what the movie will be well i think

the guests came about from all of us having a mutual love for the two films

terminator and halloween so i think if you watch the movie it's pretty much

If you're obsessed with both of those films, I feel like it's pretty clear

the DNA comes from. But then on top of that, it was really important for us to

have it be at every point that you might think you're getting comfortable with

what the story is constantly.

upending the audience's expectation of what's going to happen next. I think

that's something that is really important to all of us. I think we

that we want the films to sort of feel like a roller coaster.

And I think hopefully we've achieved that with the guest.

I think so. And I think also with the guest, in the early stages before there

was a script, a lot of what we talked about was the monkey's paw short story

kind of the understanding of...

variations on the be careful what you wish for and the kind of mysterious

stranger that shows up to give solutions to these problems in your life, but the

solution's all turning out not to be what you would actually want them to be.

Damn thing is, this makes me regional manager.

Yeah. As soon as corporate found out, they called me.

Right away, they want me to start tomorrow.

And they're offering me Alan's salary.

So... Well, well, that's, uh...

Careful what you wish for.

And kind of thinking about how that would manifest in today, like with a

today going through the loss of a son.

And yeah, the early conversations are really around the type of movie you want

it to be, which we talk a lot about those 80s genre movies.

And then what you want it to be saying and kind of who these characters are.

And in this case, I think Adam also early in the process knew he wanted

wanted the music to go. So there were a lot of conversations at the script

stage, too, of, like, understanding who Anna was.

I think also, like, any time you make what I would call, like, a scrappy

independent film, a lot of times I would say, like, the ideas that

come up are sort of also forced to come up because you're trying to figure out

how to make the most out of a very limited budget. And I think the amazing

that occurred...

On that show, there's a whole set piece that takes place in a Halloween maze,

and it just happened to be that when we went location scouting in New Mexico,

that the little town that we were basing all of the school stuff over also

happened to have, like...

a standing Halloween maze.

And because of that, even though it was already in the script to begin with, it

became a much bigger set piece because we had that option.

Even though I would always love to have more days and more money, I think that

there's something that comes up when you don't have every resource available and

you guys all just need to, we all have to just do whatever we can for the

So I don't know if Micah wants me to tell on her about this, but she really

scared of clowns.

And so we found that to be really funny because we're immature.

And we hired like one of our extra actors to come.

And he basically pretended to be like an animatronic.

For most of, like, you know, we would shoot that scene where she runs across

clown room completely still. And then on one of the last takes, he lunged and

she screamed so loud.

And I always think it's funny because we also obviously didn't know that her mom

was going to be visiting on that day. So her mom was, like, witness to us.

pranking her daughter, but she actually seemed to think it was really funny,

too. Yeah, her mom was most upset that we hadn't included her in the prank. She

was like, why didn't you tell us? This is hilarious.

Be part of pranking her daughter.

We had decided on New Mexico for the obvious reasons that they have an

amazing film incentive, but also because they have such a beautiful cinematic.

landscape for the film. And also logic wise, there are a lot of military bases

in New Mexico. So for the logic of the idea that David just, you know, was able

to run from a military base to a suburban home, it felt like it could

make sense.

Sort of a scrappy indie thing that we do is a lot of times we will base our

production office out of a school because we're usually shooting in the

and the schools are usually shut down then. And it's sort of cheap sort of

space.

And in this case, when we started that process of doing that, we realized that

at least in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area, what they do there, because

there's just so much space, is that instead of knocking down a building,

will just build another building right next to it. So the school that we had

our production office in, Right next to it was the old school.

And so it was completely, it still looked, I think, pretty great. You know,

classic Halloween dancing was all shot there because, you know, we had...

like I mentioned, very limited resources, but also because it was

across the street. Similar story is that like the like party house, we scoured,

I feel like every single small town and it ended up being that the party house

that actually works the best for everybody was across the field from the

production office. So it's just, it may seem like proximity comes into play, but

I also feel like it's a lot about like fate and also just being open to,

into what looks like an abandoned, shuttered structure and then opening the

doors and being like, actually, this is a beautiful space that will look awesome

when there's smoke and fog machines and neon lights and mirrors.

And so that's sort of the process.

And I would speak to location scouting.

It always feels like a frustrating, annoying part of the process, but when

you're in the van,

With Adam, the director, and with Simon, the writer, and Robbie, our

cinematographer, and Tom Hammack, our production designer, the conversations

about why all of these various places we're looking at don't work for us are

what lead to building the kind of unified vision of what the movie is.

So I do think that looking at ten houses and saying none of these houses work,

those conversations are what lead us to understand what it is about the house

that we're looking for that will work, what it is that we're actually trying to

get out of it.

And I do think that those conversations in the van in that kind of pre -pre

-production phase are where you're building a lot of the language of how

everyone's going to work together and how you're building the sort of creative

DNA of how the visual aspects of the film are going to come into play.

And really understanding where everyone's coming from in terms of what

value and what they think things should be.

For Adam or for us, we can be making slight adjustments thinking like, well,

you're saying that you feel like you need this, but what if we restructure

scene so it works this way?

Wouldn't that work better for everyone? And suddenly the script's better and the

scene's going to be better and the movie's going to be better.

The biggest problem that happened is that New Mexico at that time had gone

through, I want to say it was like a 19 -year drought.

And then, of course, when we began to shoot, it began to rain.

And so the house, the main house, our...

On the day that we shot the shirtless Dan scene, our base camp was flooded. So

it was sort of one of these, like, you know, a stressful day just in general

because, like, poor Dan had been starving himself so that he could be

beautiful light.

And he's down in the makeup trailer, and there's no way to, like, get him up to

the main house because it's flooded. And so I will say that our transportation

team at the time, like, I loved them, and they made the impossible, you know,

seem very...

because we got that scene in the end. But that's the only real big, I feel

location issue.

It's always about weather. And in New Mexico, there's a lot of unpredictable,

would say, weather that would occur.

Well, I mean, I'll say, first off, I love all of our cast and the guests. I

like there's certain movies where...

You just get it right. And I think that was the case with that movie. Both in

terms of how each actor fit the role, but also how they all gelled together as

an ensemble.

It felt like magic once we started shooting.

It was a complicated process to get there with the role of David.

Adam met with a lot of different actors and Dan just really, from the first

meeting with Adam, Adam knew that this is who he wanted to cast, which was a

really unusual choice at the time because he was mostly known for coming

Downton Abbey where he played a very, very different type of character.

But Dan was looking to really stretch what he was known for and what he could

and take on something that was a little bit darker and had more of an edge to

it. And Jess and I also had a follow -up meeting with Dan and kind of talked

through. and like how serious he was about reinventing himself in terms of

performance, but also in terms of his physicality and kind of getting into

sort of action star type body, but also action star physicality, like being able

to kind of do these acting scenes.

And he really impressed us just like he did with Adam and we cast him off of

that. With Micah for the inner role, we read

dozens of actors, maybe hundreds of actors for that role.

And Micah came back, I think, multiple times.

I feel like it's going to sound like an odd.

reason to why we initially loved her but she came in and I remember that like

she had had a cold and she was just sort of like you know she was very much just

herself like unapologetically her and I think that's what we always thought Anna

was and so it became clear you know from the beginning that

that she already embodied that, and then we did a lot of chemistry reads with

her and Brendan, who ended up playing her brother, too, because we felt like

brother -sister relationship at the end of the day is the heart of the film, and

we just wanted to make sure that that felt right.

I did want to just say as a shout -out to our amazing stunt choreographer who

trained Dan for, I want to say, two months.

and put him on an insane, we call it the John Wick training thing, because Clay

was very tied into the 87 -11 guys and managed to get Dan

training time whenever. I think Keanu Reeves was also training at that same

for John Wick, and they came up with this arrangement that basically

Keanu had a break, and then Dan could, like, train. So it was a very, like,

unorthodox way of getting that training done. But just wanted to shout out Clay

and also Dan for also being willing to do, you know, really grueling physical

work for eight weeks.

On a crazy special diet that he had to stick to. I mean, it was very intense.

physical profits. The roles of the parents for Leland Orser and Sheila

the role that Lance Reddick ended up playing, those were all straight offers

based off of kind of our prior experience with their work and

We hadn't worked with any of the three of them before that, but we've gone on

work with Leland and Lance I think three or four times each at this point as

actors, brilliant actors, and I'm sure we'd work again with Sheila if the right

role came up.

But that was really more based on kind of familiarity with their other work and

understanding that, okay, we know what they would bring to people.

We had a long search to find the right DP for the film, and I think that the

thing that was challenging is that it's a low -budget movie with very big, not

just big ambitions, because I feel like every low -budget movie has big

ambitions, but like actual...

challenges that that need to be solved not just in terms of it needs to look

beautiful but knowing how to shoot action knowing how to shoot um set

knowing how to how to light pretty much every you know day spheres night spheres

like it's a it's the wide variety of everything you could possibly do and

with very limited resources and um yeah sure and i and i think that you know

We're just always looking for people who want to sort of like grow with us, if

that makes sense. And I think that when I had looked through all of, you know, I

started thinking like, you know, like a lot of people wouldn't initially think

that we would be ready to like do an action film based off of our prior work.

And I was sure that other DPs probably also felt that way. And when you look

through his credits, I saw his incredible...

career as a chief lighting technician and then also as a camera operator on

these bigger films, but I saw that he hadn't had that chance yet to show what

could do.

So when we brought him in for an interview and he just had such depth of

whenever he talked about what the script was and what it meant to him, I think

it was a really easy choice.

It was a surprisingly smooth shoot for how tight the budget was and how tight

the schedule was. And I think that, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I think

that one of the strengths that we had is that we were working with a lot of

people we'd worked with before, like Tom Hammack, our production designer.

We'd done, I think, maybe five or six movies with at that point. And I think

that we'd already made another movie with Adam and with Simon.

And I think that when challenges came up, we trusted in each other in figuring

out solutions to the problems.

And I think we were able to turn all of the normal production challenges into

better creative versions of the movie.

When Lance Reddick's character arrives with this whole, you know, team.

Initially, there were supposed to be helicopters, which we couldn't afford.

Then there were supposed to be trucks and tanks and things that we couldn't

afford. And then there were supposed to be three SUVs, which we couldn't afford,

so it became two SUVs.

And then that's how you figure out how to make it work. And then you make it

exciting in how you're making it, not in terms of the tons of resources you're

throwing at it, but kind of how you're shooting it, how you're covering it, how

you're handling the violence within it.

You have to solve problems with creativity and take rather than with

sure that if you were interviewing us during production, we'd have a lot more.

just want to say that it was a super smooth shoot that there weren't any

I think the thing that we all keep talking about is that like any time an

came up, it felt like we were all just working together to find a solution to

make something even better occur. And I think that's.

I think when everyone talks about it feeling like a magical shoot, I think

they were feeling is the fact that it felt like a safe space for us all to

do whatever creatively felt best in the moment that we could afford.

Yeah.

So there's this concept of fun, where there's three different types of fun.

There's the fun where it's fun while you're doing the thing.

There's the fun where it's not fun while you're doing it, but later when you

think about it, you're like, oh, that was fun.

And then there's the fun where you think it's going to be fun and it never is

fun, even later when you think back on it. I think most movies fall into

category three or category two.

And The Guest was a case where it really was fun making it. And looking back on

it, it still has that.

Yeah, there were definitely challenges, but every movie has challenges. That's

the whole process of making something is facing.

you know, a set of things that are trying to stop you from making the thing

you're trying to make. And then hopefully you and your team around you

off those challenges and making the best thing you can.

I think Adam actually had the flu for, like, during the, like...

I do think that a lot of productions and a lot of films, when

you're making it, what unfortunately happens is that feels like it's people

fighting against each other in the production for what they want it to be

think in the guest because there were so many weird external things like the

constant thunderstorms and the kind of um the challenge of just getting all

action done on a tight budget while we're still honoring the scenes that are

about character like we didn't we weren't willing to sacrifice either one

other so we're trying to make it all work and i think that um

Luckily, there never was that sense of creative versus production or actor

versus crew.

It just really felt like everyone was in it together and trying to bring

everything they can to making it a positive experience.

But even something as... We talk about the

weather with the thunderstorms, but that actually ended up in the film in the

fact that there's...

a couple of scenes where you could hear the rumble of thunder under one of Dan's

lines. And our sound team actually got really inspired and started adding it

here and there.

And so it became sort of like, I don't think you would notice it necessarily

unless you were looking for it. But it did make it seem like every time that he

spoke that there was an ominous kind of feeling.

And a lot of that was because of the fact that one of the days that we were

shooting, it was just...

Thundering and we couldn't get clean audio, but that became a motif that I

really worked From

that first cut

it was clear that there was something here that worked the chemistry of all

cast together And I mean it was a mad scramble to get the film finished in

for Sundance We were luckily got an amazing slot at the festival but the

that people don't really talk about a lot with Sundance is that The point that

you find out if you got in or not is usually over Thanksgiving.

And so you basically have from Thanksgiving until early January to

movie.

And that's the time of year no one is around because they're going on

and they're doing other things. So it's really challenging to get movies

finished to a professional level in time for Sundays.

And this was definitely one of those cases where it was right up to the wire.

We were definitely bringing the movie later than the Sundance deadline of when

you're supposed to bring the movie, because we were still working on it

to the premiere.

We got married on the mixing stage for the guest.

We had our sort of family ceremony in South Africa, but

that doesn't count in America.

So we were finishing the mix for the guest to get it ready for Sundance, and

Simon, the writer and one of our producers on the guest,

knew that we hadn't had the official ceremony. We were talking about going to

town hall or whatever it is. He's like, oh, I think I can get an

officiator to show up and do it here while we're finishing

the movie. And we were like, well, okay, that's kind of a funny way to do it.

And we had an officiator in and did the official ceremony on our lunch break

on the mixing stage.

And Simon did a ceremonial sword dance for us for our wedding.

And yeah, that was kind of our version of the town hall legal ceremony.

And that mixing stage is no longer around anymore, which is too bad.

We can never go back.