When you’re the badass director behind movies like Training Day (2001), Brooklyn’s Finest (2009), The Equalizer (2014), and the remake of The Magnificent Seven (2016), you’re not going to let something like a deadly pandemic come between you and your vision. Not even if it means you need to direct your movie in quarantine, and have your director’s chair be a van parked a block away from where your star is filming, Matt Foley-style. But that’s exactly how filming went down on The Guilty, Antoine Fuqua’s upcoming psychological thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a 911 dispatch operator.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Gyllenhaal—who is both a producer on the project as well as its star—explained how The Guilty (a remake of a 2018 Danish film) was actually the perfect movie to make during COVID. Which makes sense, given what /Film reports as its official synopsis:
The film takes place over the course of a single morning in a 911 dispatch call center. Call operator Joe Baylor (Gyllenhaal) tries to save a caller in grave danger—but he soon discovers that nothing is as it seems, and facing the truth is the only way out.
Putting aside the fact that there probably aren’t a lot of 911 dispatchers who look like Gyllenhaal, that the film unfurls over just a handful of hours on one day, in mostly one location, and with Gyllenhaal largely interacting with his fellow actors via telephone (think Locke, but with Tom Hardy as a 911 dispatcher—not a philanderer who impregnated Olivia Colman), the production requirements do seem conducive to social distancing measures. And Fuqua planned to shoot it all in just 11 days. Then, as Entertainment Weekly reports, just 48 hours before he was scheduled to call “action,” Fuqua learned that he had been exposed to COVID-19 and had to quarantine, which put the project in jeopardy. As Derek Lawrence writes for EW:
“What seemed advantageous at the time ended up being a bit of a curse,” Gyllenhaal tells EW of the late 2020 shoot that was already in jeopardy due to the rise of COVID cases. “They were talking about shutting Los Angeles down almost every day. So, because Antoine subsequently tested negative for days afterwards, we decided to get a van that was outfitted with screens and park him a block away, hardwired to the stage where we were shooting. We’d FaceTime each other after these 25-minute long takes. He’d give me direction, I’d take it down, we’d do another take. We never saw each other in-person the entire shoot.”
Fortunately for both Gyllenhaal and his director, the two had previously collaborated on Southpaw, so had developed a sort of shorthand. For his part, Fuqua found the prospect of directing from afar kind of exciting, telling EW:
“I had to have eyes on set [and] our main cameras, and a way to communicate with my actors via Zoom and phone, when it needed to be private. Jake and I would only physically see each other from behind the studio wall. Jake would climb on a ladder and I would open the door to my van, and we would communicate. I definitely missed the close contact with my crew, but everyone stepped up and we found a way.”
The Guilty will premiere on Netflix on October 1, 2021.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
