There’s
something a trifle off about the dashing young stranger from the moment
he walks through the door. Identifying himself as “David,” a soldier who
once served with the deceased son of the Peterson family whose house he
has now politely infiltrated, this guest has a
genial demeanor that masks an inner core as cold as steel. As played by
Dan Stevens, the actor who made “Downton Abbey” fans swoon as the late
Matthew Crawley (who was killed off when Stevens left the show after
Season 3), this ominous visitor is enormously fun to watch, whether he’s
seducing the Peterson daughter, Anna (Maika Monroe), with his impossibly
sculpted midriff or making ambiguously threatening gestures with a
kitchen knife. Though “The Guest,” directed
by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett (the team behind 2013’s
home invasion pic “You’re Next”), is marketed as a thriller, it is bound
to get more genuine laughs than many of this year’s comedies.
Stevens,
Wingard and Barrett spoke with RogerEbert.com about their methods for
capturing the right tone, their lessons learned from marketing “You’re
Next,” and the appeal of intelligence as a weapon in the arsenal of a
modern action hero.
I know
many “Downton Abbey” fans who are still wondering what it was about
Matthew Crawley that you found limiting as an actor. Was it the period
dialect, the uncomfortable costumes…?
Dan Stevens (DS): [laughs] The starch was killing me!
Simon Barrett (SB): He told us he’d rather wear a leather jacket in the middle of a New Mexico summer. [laughs]
DS: No,
“Downton” was an amazing experience. It was the first time I had done a
long-running format like that. After three years, the option was up and I
was faced with the question, “Do I want to stay or should I go?” I had
an instinct that I wanted to do some other things and challenge myself a
bit more than I had previously. I felt like it was time to do that so I
came over [to America] and didn’t know what form those different
projects would take. When I did “The Heiress” on Broadway, director
Scott Frank saw me in it and gave me a role alongside Liam Neeson in “A
Walk Among the Tombstones.” It was much darker territory than I had
tried before and I underwent a physical transformation for that. Then I
met Adam who suggested a different physical transformation, beefing back
up again while staying in similarly dark territory but having a lot of
fun with it. It immediately reminded me of all those movies that I loved
while growing up. To get to connect with that sense of why I wanted to
be an actor was very important to me. I didn’t know it was going to take
this particular form.
SB: Well,
that and the fact that they were going to make Matthew Crawley a mutant
in Season 4. [laughs] One of the things that united us right away is
that none of us want to stay in our comfort zones. Adam and I are always
trying to make movies that are complete departures from our previous
work. I don’t think we’re able to do that completely yet, but we’re
still growing and evolving and that’s where we’re trying to push
ourselves. Dan is the same way. He responds incredibly well to
challenges in a way that I think only the truly great actors do and can.
That was something that we related to right away.
Dan told
“Entertainment Weekly” that he saw “Kill Bill” multiple times when it
first came out, and one thing that Adam and Simon share with Tarantino
is the ability to walk that tightrope between satire and palpable
tension without diluting either of them.
DS: That’s
right, we want to make the tension and violence real and believable and
have the stakes very high. Aesthetically the violence must be
entertaining and you want to have a sense of fun about it. That’s
something Tarantino and Adam and a number of other filmmakers have in
common is their desire to celebrate that act of being relentlessly
entertained while seated in a giant, dark movie theater with huge
speakers pumping out all sorts of crazy noises. That sort of “movie box”
experience is really worth celebrating.
Adam Wingard
(AW): Our approach to genre and action is always more based on
characters than it is on spectacle, in some ways, or at least the
spectacle is based on the characters. We try to create a consistency of
characterizations and I think that’s what makes a good horror or genre
film. You have to believe that the characters have a consistent line of
thinking that evolves as the film goes on. The action should take place
because the characters make choices based on their own intelligence that
is hopefully brought to life as the film moves forward.
One of the
delights of the film is how the audience is invited to be “in on the
joke” with Dan’s character. We know he has a secret and are able to
share that knowledge with him, which brings a great, darkly comic
tension to many scenes.
DS: We wanted
to tease the audience and be playful with them in terms of their
sympathies for the character, while not being too blatant about defining
him as a hero or villain. Audiences respond well to that approach
because we’re not patronizing them. We’re not abusing their trust. We’re
letting them know that we’ll be flipping the [tone] occasionally and
we’re not going to tell them when. It may make you laugh and it may also
shock and scare you. Predominantly, I think we’re having fun with that
sensibility.
SB: That was
the experiment. I’m a big fan of Donald E. Westlake, who recently passed
away and was a great mystery writer also known as Richard Stark. His
script for “The Stepfather” (1987) is incredibly fascinating. In the
opening scene, you see Terry O’Quinn killing an entire family. Then he
leaves [to find another family], and you know exactly what’s going to
happen. It tells you in the first five minutes what’s going to happen
next, but it’s nonetheless incredibly suspenseful to watch how it’s
going to play out. I don’t think I wanted to emulate that film in any
way, but I wanted to attempt something along those lines. The film is
called “The Guest,” so I’m not going to insult
your intelligence by revealing 50 minutes in that there’s something
shady about Dan’s character. It’s more about having Anna start to react
to him in different ways initially and then encounter the twists and
turns. You know where this is headed to a certain extent, but maybe we
can surprise you with some of the twists along the way.
AW: That’s a
good point because you really do have to be thinking about how the movie
is going to be marketed and how that’s going to effect people’s
expectations. I really enjoyed “Hostel,” but that movie had a bit of a
misguided approach. The movie has this assumption that the audience is
unaware that it’s a horror film, though the filmmakers had to have known
that the movie would be advertised that way. So you’re sitting there
for about 50 minutes until the first guy gets killed off, and you’ve
spent all that time simply waiting for that to happen. I enjoyed the
humor of it, but nowadays you can’t approach a movie in that misleading
way. “Psycho” did it when it was fresh and you can only do it once.
SB: But at
the same time, “Psycho” had a very ambiguous trailer and the marketing
strategy was to make audiences promise not to reveal the ending.
AW: I’ve
wondered if the initial idea for “Hostel” was that they were going to
advertise it as a comedy, but then the distributors lost their nerve.
SB: We even
learned a little bit about this firsthand when we were premiering
“You’re Next.” No one knew anything about it and that was very
intentional. If you didn’t know of Sharni Vinson’s work from “Step Up
3D,” it was supposed to be surprising that her character becomes the
protagonist. The script was certainly written that way. Out of all the
characters, she talks the least until a certain point. Then we realized
after the premiere that the surprise wouldn’t be able to be preserved.
AW: That made
it difficult for Lionsgate to advertise the movie because the whole way
the movie stands out is based on its twist. So we kind of screwed
ourselves over in that sense.
SB: It was a
fascinating lesson and I’m still proud of that experiment. I also like
the way that Andrew [Droz Palermo] shot it. Sharni isn’t any more
prominently featured than the other actors until she takes charge, and
then he features her in a much different way, in terms of how she’s
portrayed visually. We realized that the experience of the twist was for
festival audiences only, and in today’s social media world, that wasn’t
a smart way to make a movie.
The surprise for audiences who’ve seen the trailer for “The Guest”
will be just how funny the film is. The advertising makes the film look
like an alternate, blood-spattered version of Nicholas Sparks’ “The
Lucky One.”
SB: We watched the first half of “The Lucky One” before we made “The Guest”
as part of our research. Whenever I’ve written a script and something
comes out that seems remotely similar, I immediately go see it just to
make sure that I don’t have to completely rewrite the movie. At the
halfway mark of “The Lucky One,” I figured that I was okay.
You must’ve walked out just before Blythe Danner becomes a sociopath—
SB: [laughs] Yeah, and murders everyone.
My
favorite scene in the film occurs in the principle’s office when David
stands up for Anna’s brother, Luke, warning that suspending him would be
considered a “hate crime.” That’s very tricky subject matter to tackle
in a film like this, but you somehow manage to find the right tone.
DS: One of
the delights of that scene is that it shows an ultra masculine character
defending this young man’s sexual rights. It was such a joyous
[combination] of those two things—this ultra-badass Special Ops soldier
standing up for gay rights. It was awesome.
SB: The humor
in that scene never comes from a place of mockery regarding the people
with the least power. It comes from mocking the people of authority,
which are the principle and the bullies, and I think that’s generally a
pretty good guideline when you’re looking at a joke. Who is this joke
on? If the joke is on the person with less power, then maybe the joke is
mean. I never really thought about any of that stuff until after the
fact, but we wanted it to be a funny scene that also felt realistic in
light of the recent [climate] of bullying. We wanted to treat those
elements seriously. That scene was never rewritten. The first draft is
what ended up getting shot.
AW: When I
read the script for the first time, it was that scene and the scene that
takes place in the bar that I was most excited to shoot. They just
escalate in such a beautiful way, and in a different way than we had
ever done before. We never had structured scenes in the way that Simon
had structured them here, where they have a real escalation to them. Our
films prior to “The Guest” were more focused on the collective trajectory of the story rather than individual scenes.
DS: The other
delightful thing about that scene is that the audience has already seen
my character deal with a number of conflicts with extreme violence. He
enters this situation and, I guess, as an audience member, our
anticipation is that he’s going to the kick the s—t out of this guy,
slam his head into the desk or grab a knife or something horrendous.
Instead, he gets at a principle’s worst fears by bringing up things like
“the board,” and utterly destroys this man with logic and a great line
of argument.
All of the violence in the scene is verbal.
DS: Exactly,
you don’t just want to see a meathead badass kicking ass the whole time.
It’s kind of wonderful to see that this person has a brain and is able
to construct an argument that can floor a principle.
AW: That’s
why we cast Dan for the film in the first place. In the case of movies
like “The Expendables 3,” you can see that audiences are sick of the 80s
notion that you can become an action hero through martial arts skills
or muscles…
Or steroid injections.
AW: [laughs] Yeah, it’s not really about that anymore. It’s about having a fully rounded character.
DS: These things aren’t mutually exclusive.
AW: Intelligence is an important key to a character’s believability, and it shouldn’t limit what they can do physically.
Did you
[Dan] draw at all on the comedy you performed with the Footlights at
Cambridge back in college when approaching this character?
DS: Yeah,
it’s been nice to be able to reconnect with that because that’s where I
started out. I happened to do straight plays in college that led to my
first professional engagements that got me on a straighter path than I
had anticipated. Bringing that black comedy element into “The Guest”
was great. There aren’t any out-and-out jokes and gags in the way that
there are in “Night at the Museum 3,” but to infuse a film like this
with a bit of fun and a sense of humor is delightful. You only have to
spend five minutes in the presence of Adam and Simon to realize that
they have a great shared sense of humor, and also a warped one. I’m glad
you found it funny.