Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett have been a staple of the horror genre for years. Their first collaboration, “A Horrible Way To Die,” won the Best Screenplay award at Fantastic Fest, while their next film “You’re Next” won the same award in addition to Best Film and Best Director for Wingard. Their most recent collaboration, “The Guest,” deviates away from their horror roots, making for an entertaining psychological thriller that’s both funny and dark. The DePaulia sat down with Wingard, Barrett, and star Dan Stevens to learn a bit more about their film.
The DePaulia: Dan, what drew you to this role? It’s very different from you playing Matthew Crowley on “Downton Abbey.”
Dan Stevens: Yeah, I left that show, it was the first time I’d done a long running format like TV, and I was looking to do something different. I didn’t know what form that would take, and after that the first thing that came along was A Walk Among The Tombstones, with Liam Neeson, a little bit darker, sort of a noir-ish thriller, and that sort of gave me an appetite for something a little darker anyway. I didn’t realize anything like “The Guest” could exist there, and along came this dark, but very, very funny script; I was just grinning ear to ear when I read it, and leapt on a plane, sat with Adam, and just refused to leave Los Angeles until he let me do it.
DP: Simon and Adam, you’re both known for making horror films. What made you choose to make this sort of film?
Simon Barrett: Well first off, let me just say that filmmakers that stay in one genre tend to stagnate, and even some of my favorite horror film directors have made bad films. I think we’re just trying to improve as filmmakers, both in our own genre, and in other movies. I feel all our stories come from not a genre perspective, but a story perspective. There was this realization after You’re Next that we could make something on a much larger scale, and because we love action films that was the direction we were going in. But this was what felt like the right story to tell, and it just so happens that it’s not a straight horror movie. I don’t think we ever want to be confined by anything like that.
AW: It’s interesting coming from a no budget background, because we worked our way up through the years by essentially focusing on sub-genres we knew we could get budgets for; they were financially viable no matter who made them. So our idea was taking that methodology and applying it to the serial killer genre but then doing our own spin on it with A Horrible Way To Die, and then with You’re Next we got a little more money, but not enough to go out there and do whatever we wanted. So we picked the sub-genre of home invasion because we wanted to try our hand at something more mainstream. And that was our first success and we firmly teamed up with our producers and were able to branch out and do something different. We could finally think like filmmakers and not like, you know, street bums.
DP: Simon, your scripts are known for having a tongue-in-cheek humor to them, mixed with elements of horror. Why employ multiple genres rather than just focus on one?
SB: It’s not really so much a conscious choice, that’s just more my personal sensibility, as well as Adam’s and Dan’s. One of the main reasons we were excited about working with Dan was that he understood that the script was supposed to be funny, which not everyone did. So in terms of writing stuff with humor, there’s some projects I’ll do with Adam that’ll have less humor, and some that’ll have quite a bit more. It’s about finding the right tone for the story, but I personally have a bit of the sense of the absurd. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, which I think lends itself to that appreciation of ridiculousness, and now it inadvertently infects everything I hope to create, and I don’t think I could stop that even if I wanted to, but hopefully, it seems like it’s working out for the best.
DP: Adam, what’s it like to work with Simon’s scripts?
AW: Yeah, with Simon’s humor, it kind of manifests itself in a natural way. It’s never something I approach and say, “I want this scene to be funny”, I like to work with Dan and the actors, and watch it evolve in front of me. With this film, when I read the script I found it very funny, but I also realized that you could’ve taken a different approach to it in many ways, and made it more of a serious, darker film. But to me it seemed like the strengths of it were essentially playing up the absurdity of it; grounding it in reality, but also show that we knew the situation was absurd, that’s the fun of it. And it came from me seeing the rehearsal phase, and the humor kind of solidified itself. So that was the direction I wanted to take, and the cinematography ended up going in that direction, it became less of a dark contrast, to more a vibrant and colorful kind of thing. That was one of the pitfalls of You’re Next, some people don’t get the humor of it, and I think it’s because it has the veneer of a serious horror film.
SB: And I’ll just add that if you’re making a film without any humor, then what you’re really making is a film with a very monotonous tone. Particularly in a genre film that can be quite tedious, I think the best horror films have that tension release, so they can scare you again. If the movie just tries to scare you from start to finish, eventually the audience is going to get exhausted. Even classic dramas like Unforgiven have quite a bit of humor in them, it gives you those moments to kind of vacillate in what the audience is experiencing, and I feel like we’re all attracted to that.
DS: It’s also worth noting that it’s a classic response to horror for us to be shocked, but there’s also quite a lot of people who like horror for its comedy value. I know my first instinct reaction to most scares in horror films is to just laugh out loud, and I feel our natural response now is to just laugh it off.
DP: What is your collaborative creative process like?
Simon Barrett: We do have sort of a unique partnership in that when I’m working on my scripts, I’ll generally go a couple months without seeing Adam much. He doesn’t see any script pages until I have a polished rough draft, with the idea that he can approach it fresh like a viewer would, and just kind of experience the story and enjoy it hopefully.
Adam Wingard: And in the early stages the only conversation we really have is agreeing on what type of movie we want to make. With “A Horrible Way To Die,” we approached it sort of as a Mumblecore oriented serial killer movie.
SB: And then I had to figure out what that story would be, and what those characters would be, so that Adam, when he reads it, gets to experience those horror twists fresh. Similarly I stay out of the editing room, you know, I’m on set during production in case Adam needs me for anything, but once we’re done I completely let Adam work, and he tends to deliver very polished first cuts. So I actually get to watch a movie of what we’ve done.
AW: Yeah. Our process can be summed up in general, it would be trying to create objectivity, and sustain that because that’s one of the most difficult things as a filmmaker to have. You always want to live in the reality of what you shot, not what you expected to shoot, and that means removing your ego and accepting if something didn’t work, and being able to address that, or cut things out, or reshoot things. Having a partnership with Simon and our producers, we’re able to do that because we can be honest about what works and what doesn’t, and then take the appropriate measures to fix it.
SB: It’s about being on the same page creatively, but also giving each other a lot of space and respect, to create things on our own.
DP: Dan, how did you prepare for the role of David. He’s very sinister and almost Terminator-esque.
DS: Yeah, Terminator was always a big influence, but yeah the physical transformation was always a big draw for me in the role, I was very intrigued by that, and the physical regime really fed into the psychology of the character. I guess it’s worth mentioning, I once worked with William Hurt, who has played a lot of the darkest screen roles we’ve seen, and we got stuck in a big concrete room in Slovakia once for a couple of hours in between set-ups. We had a really, crazily intense conversation, I was 22 at the time, and eventually got on the subject of “how the hell do you prepare or step into the mind of a psychopath or worse?” and he just left this long pause and looked at me as only William Hurt can and said “it’s inside all of us”. I’ve never really forgotten that, although I never really got to employ any of that William Hurt wisdom in “Downton Abbey.” For “The Guest,” that was definitely a huge influence.
The Guest opens in theaters Sept. 17.