John Krasinski Breaks Down The Opening Scene From 'A Quiet Place Part II' | Vanity Fair

are you asking did i put a child that's under six years old and a moving car that had stuff flying at it yeah i did and i'm probably going to jail for it but before i go to jail at least we all know why and it's pretty rad hey i'm john krasinski the writer director of a quiet place part 2 and this is notes on a scene [Music] ronnie what do we got we got units headed out there now ems and fire bus i think i'll buy walkers i got into the sequel world by saying i didn't want to do it there uh there was um an immediate response from the studio that they wanted a sequel and i think i realized in the process that i am an audience member first before i was a writer director or actor in the movie and as the audience member i've always been weary of sequels why would you do another one when the first one was so good how are you going to expand the world i had all those same questions i had no intention of doing it they i told them to find another writer director and while they were sort of contemplating that i had this tiny idea my producing partner on the movie andrew form said well can you just write out an outline to give to any writer director we hire and i said yeah sure no problem and as i was writing in the outline i was halfway through it typing and i went damn it i'm directing this movie if i could continue the metaphor of the first movie if i could continue the themes and pick up right where we left off i could actually tell a continuation story of the first movie and that's what it became for me the key for me my inn as a writer and as a director for it was making millie the lead of the movie then when you make millie the lead of the movie two things happen one you engage one of the most talented actresses i've ever worked with but much more than that thematically she um opened all and unlocked all these themes and metaphors that i was dealing with in the first movie and so the beginning of our movie takes place on the day that the creatures came down to earth and how that happened so this is the family that you know and you've experienced but obviously the town that they walked through in the first movie to get supplies is now alive and well for the moment kicking my goal was to do most everything in the opening of the movie in one take so that it would actually drop the audience into the movie so you would actually be walking with my character you'd be in the car with emily and that we'd never cut and therefore never break the energy so you always felt like you were a part of it so in order to do that every single department had to be perfect that day so what's about to happen is uh this was a one take where we came from up the street and in the movie it's all in one take getting us into the truck in order to get us out of the truck and into this stun that's about to happen we obviously had to replace the cop car that's about to be hit and that takes a whole lot of reset it also takes a whole lot of stunt people and a whole lot of safety issues so i couldn't just get out of the car and have a police car fly through the air and it doesn't really go well so what we ended up doing is hiding a stitch and a stitch is actually something where you're cutting into a new shot but just hiding and this is the only stitch we did in the opening of the movie and i'm about to show it to you right here so as i'm getting out of the car you will see right here the camera and ilm break the the plane of the two shots so this is one shot here and this is another shot and you're gonna see my head go from one shot into the next shot and this shot is the shot that has the stunts and this shot is no sense just a dumb actor if you guys like hamilton oak is in hamilton the original hamilton that's hercules mulligan y'all he's in my movie that's right so what i was meaning about having to do safety right here there are massive flippers under the car all the car is secured by all these wires to make sure that when it flies through the air it won't hit any people all that has been painted out by ilm which is industrial light magic this is ilm here their creation of this uh meteor and so what you're about to see obviously is a creature coming through and this is all secured and ready to go up into the air and we just paint everything else out that made it happen a little tidbit this is brody's pizza the biggest reference for me in making quiet place i said to my wife early on when we first met she said what would you want it out of your career what's your dream i said i'd love to direct jaws so this is my jaws and so brody's pizza i named after chief brody this is technically not the town we shot in in the first movie it is actually the creation of this amazing production designer jess concher this is a real town that everything you see on the front side of it will be just sconcher and his amazing team so all these signs are are ours this signs ours this hairpins is all ours we designed the entire thing to feel like small town america units headed out there now ems and fire never bust i think i'll buy walkers this is one of my favorite parts of the opening in the first movie we did this a little bit we have now come into millie's envelope and what we do is anytime you're in a close-up shot of millie i established that you can get into her envelope and by that we mean you hear the world the way she hears the world where i got that in the first movie was actually based on something millie's mom told me about millie one day when we were first getting to know each other i said can really hear anything and her mom said she actually can it's just all dimmed down as if it's been really muffled so if there was a big sound behind her she'd hear it and she can hear laughter and things like that but very very low so i thought wow what if i tried to put that in the movie actually as millie heard and one of the greatest moments of my career as a director was when millie's mom saw the movie she burst into tears because she said that i gave her something that she never thought she'd be able to do was to actually experience the world like her daughter does and i still to this day get choked up talking about it so erase this before i cry millie's insanely smart and insanely talented so she had a lot of ideas going through i personally being an actor know that actors have a lot to say about the scripts they read so i um i am willing to throw the script out the window if it means that the the scene sort of shifts and changes as it goes along kelly murphy actually had a bunch of lines put into the movie that he had notes on and he thought would be better for the movie and they worked we fired him quickly after that but he did have ideas we definitely shot this entire sequence first so this sequence is pretty much shot in chronological order something like this we had to do at certain times of the day so our incredible dp poly morgan the sun would have been right here in the morning so she wanted the sun behind us very smart it's still incredibly hot in the the sun sort of above us but we got bumped around due to rain so we were trying to do this earlier and then it rained and so we had to push this to another day which threw the whole schedule out of whack it's one of those things where weirdly making movies and this just sounds so pretentious but making movies is a little bit like jazz and the best work i think comes from when people are asked to do things a day before they were supposed to do things again working on pure instinct i'm hearing something on the radio that is now uh transmitting to emily's radio and now we're into this car shot so this is a crazy thing there is a giant camera and a weird robotic arm that's doing this so this robotic arm is in the back of the car and it has a camera basically right here that can shoot at all angles problem with this is you have to program it so there is no changing the shot midway so we had to rehearse this shot for about three weeks with stunts extras set design props everything and what happened was you have to program the camera exactly where it's going to be so no one can improv or change anything on the day that was extremely terrifying because the one thing you want is for a scene like this to feel alive the great news is we blew up a car right in front of them and then had my wife racing through the street at top speed um basically avoiding traffic and avoiding getting hit and then have a bus fly at her at 40 miles an hour so i got a pretty organic performance from her so the camera got to do its thing this was a group called mokos from germany and they i guess use this uh camera and this arm on movies like transformers and things like that but it never been used like what is this [Music] it's okay we're okay we're okay my inspiration for shots like this was children men which if you've seen it is it does an incredible job of putting you right in the moment where terrifying things happen and so i wanted to take that and push it a little farther the roof was taken off the car there's a stunt driver on top of the car it's called a pod car so it just looks like a little dune buggy in a roll cage and he's actually driving the car emily is not driving the car they uh disengage all the steering wheel and everything so emily can make it look like she's driving but instead she's on the best roller coaster ride of her life i remember her favorite quote in this scene was she looked up at the driver and said your life is quite literally in my hands and this guy leaned forward the nicest guy in the world he leaned forward and went i'm the best and that's kind of what you want to hear before you do a shot like this one of my favorite parts about what happened today the camera broke and started to slide forward and perfectly went into a close-up of my wife this is a mistake it's the best mistake i've ever made in my career there's a lot of me that loves being an actor in the movies um i am not just because i'm conceited but also because it's super helpful for me to direct there's there's this weird magic that you can do when you're on set with your actors because you could sort of shape the energy of the scene as you went whether it was whispering to someone to do it again just like that or something like that or weirdly if you wanted someone to be emotional and you're on the other side of their scene you can actually get emotional and they will learn that they should go more emotional in the scene because you're getting emotional so you can weirdly direct through your acting which is really fun that said i would say it should have been less stressed to just direct but i very stupidly wrote a much bigger movie um which had a lot bigger sets and a lot more special effects and stuff like that so it was a brand new learning experience for me and i was sort of living by the edge of my seat which um i now hope people watch the movie at the edge of their seats that creature is real don't let anybody tell you otherwise we had to train it i'm just kidding

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: a quiet place, a quiet place 2, a quiet place part ii, john krasinski, john krasinski a quiet place, john krasinski a quiet place part ii, john krasinski breaks down, john krasinski interview, john krasinski notes on a scene, john krasinski quiet place, john krasinski quiet place 2, john krasinski vanity fair, notes on a scene, notes on a scene vanity fair, quiet place, quiet place 2, quiet place ii, vanity fair

Id: M57NmccfZxA

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021