John Krasinski starred in, directed and co-wrote one of the most terrifying films of the year in A Quiet Place. But you know what’s even scarier than monsters that feast on noise (and, uh, people)? Politics. Am I right? The Office star, who’s penning the sequel to A Quiet Place (which earned a surprising $340 million at the box office), took place in a roundtable interview with fellow screenwriters Paul Schrader (First Reformed), Tamara Jenkins (Private Life), Bo Burnham (Eighth Grade), Peter Farrelly (Green Book), and Eric Roth (A Star Is Born), to discuss, among other topics, what his Donald Trump movie would look like.
“I’d be interested in the circle of people around him,” Krasinski responded. “I always like movies that are about a person you never see.” It’s Schrader (if you haven’t seen First Reformed, you really should) who had the best response, though: “You immediately ask for 10 times as much money as they’ve offered.”
Krasinski was also asked about writing a script with very little dialogue:
I basically cheated. It came in as a spec script to me as an actor. The idea was fantastic — a family living silently to protect themselves from creatures. We [Krasinski and his wife, actress Emily Blunt] had just had our second daughter, so I was holding a 3-week-old baby, reading about what a family would do to protect their kids. I connected to this material more than anything I’ve ever connected to because I was living it. And I said, “If I could rewrite this script, I could bring this to be the best metaphor for [family].” So I pitched my wife. I said, “It’s a love letter to our kids.” And she’s like, “The one about creatures killing everybody?”
He also confessed that he originally hated the ending of the movie. “It was our producer’s idea. He said, ‘Emily needs to shoot the monster.’ And I remember thinking, that’s insane. I was so against it,” Krasinski said. “And bizarrely, I was driving to work the next day and was listening to an old podcast, an interview with Steven Spielberg from the early ’80s, and someone said: ‘Why is your generation of directors moving away from making art?’ And he said, ‘Why can’t we make art films that you can also eat popcorn to? I’m not going to shy away from making people enjoy really exciting movie moments, too.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ That was my wake-up moment to this idea that shooting the creature at the end wasn’t abusing my artistic take.”
Depriving the world of Emily Blunt: monster killer? Classic Jim Halpert move.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
