you know joe hill's short story was interesting to me because it combined a serial killer story with
a ghost story which i'd never seen done before but i also thought it was an interesting opportunity
to make a scary horror film that still had a lot of empathy and heart and almost
inspiration because it's a true coming-of-age story and and when i thought about combining that
with my own memories growing up in north denver in 1978 um i thought there was an interesting
film to be made and that's that's how this movie came about scott uh about a decade ago brought me
after we had written sinister he brought me joe hill's the black phone which is one of
his favorite stories and i loved it but it just wasn't right for us at the time it just wasn't it
there was a whole lot that needed to be added it was a very small compact story we saw that it
could be a movie but it needed a lot of building out and we didn't know exactly how to do that yet
uh and then fast forward years later scott and i are having a night where we're just talking about
things and he asks me he pitches to me the idea of doing a film about his childhood about doing
something about the resiliency of youth and how um you know how we as children kind of deal with some
really awful things and that forges us into who we are as adults and asked me if i'd wanted to work
on something like that and i was like of course i would and then through that conversation the black
phone came up and we were like oh what if we took this concept of your childhood and put it onto the
black phone that would fill in all the blanks that we needed and it just seemed like a no-brainer
ethan does have a no bad guy rule and i'm really glad he broke it for us scott called ethan to talk
to him about the role and ethan was very polite he listened but basically ended their conversation
saying that he promised to read the script but it was unlikely he would do the role because he
doesn't like playing bad guys ethan was working in europe when he read the script and he left scott a
voicemail really late one night in the voice of the grabber telling him yes he'd play the role
i'm a part-time magician would you like to see a magic trick
well you know the grabber's very mysterious you know we don't we don't get into his backstory
um to me the best villains like uh you know heath ledger's the joker or hannibal lecter
you know these are characters who you know very little about you know bits and pieces but
you certainly don't ever get any scene or any story that explains why they are so monstrous
so i think there's an element of mystery to them but i think in the case of the grabber his actions
are so important what it is that we know he does i think his uh need to wear a mask his
need to hide himself but also to have collected these masks or built these masks that allow for
partial reveals at times is really interesting and and i think that most importantly this ritualistic
pattern that he has for abducting his victims and putting them through a period of time
of breaking them down with these things that he does is really harrowing and that
allowed ethan i think to create a manner of speaking a manner of expressing um a manner
of emoting that's very very unique um and i felt like he took the story on wholeheartedly and came
to set with an understanding of the grabber that certainly superseded my understanding
of him i mean i wrote the words and i gave him the masks but how he speaks how he gesticulates
you know how he moves where he stands um all of these things were were things that ethan uh knew
how to do and and the result is i think a pretty pretty memorable villain we wanted to tell a story
that was about the resiliency of youth meaning that finney's childhood had to not be great
there had to be a lot of stuff being picked on by bullies having a drunken abusive father
you know not a lot of hope in his life but he still has hope so why does he still have hope
well we created this relationship with him and his sister that is this very loving affectionate
relationship of two kids coming up in a bad home they're you know single father he's an alcoholic
he's working a lot how how do these kids cope and how they cope is by being there for each other
yeah they're both remarkable um the bond between the two of them is the soul of the movie they
that you you learn very quickly in the film in the first half hour how and why they're so connected
because they they live in a dangerous world they live in a world where there's a lot of fighting
there's a lot of bullying they live in a violent household where their alcoholic father is is
abusive but they've got each other and they really look out for each other and and so when
the separation occurs because of this uh abduction uh by this monstrous figure the bond still exists
between them and uh and that becomes the sort of the source of hope that that uh sustains the film
scott has a very singular mind when he's shooting he very much is in tune with the scene in a way
that i don't see out of a lot of folks i've worked with other directors i've worked with a lot of
people and he just he looks at each scene and he's he's looking for what's missing and looking
for how pieces work together and he has a very very visual understanding of storytelling and a
very visual mind like he creates these incredibly bizarre fantastic psychedelic landscapes in his
imagination that very much um he sees and knows how to bring to life and in a very tactile way he
wants he wants you to feel like you can reach through the screen and touch the scene there
yeah you know he he he made sinister um that was pretty early on in the blumhouse uh history but
he made sinister and and he let me do exactly what
i wanted to do you know he's very protective of me as a director in both sinister and black phone he
never made me do anything i didn't want to do he always got me what i needed for the films
and and i think his attitude at least my in my experience on both movies was whatever it is
that you need as a filmmaker i'm going to trust you and i'm going to make sure that you have it
and in both cases i delivered a film that that he was very happy with very proud of and and
i'll also say this jason's just a great guy you know he's my closest friend in this business and
cargill and ethan back together on on another movie um
as collaborators we all have a short hand and there and we all trust each other a lot
i have such confidence in the talent of this group and i was excited about producing the film because
i knew they'd deliver and based on the reactions thus far they delivered it's pretty interesting
how they're able to take this kind of genre and turn it on its head um adding some more uh
emotion into uh the horror genre so let me know what you learned from the black phone down the
comments down below don't forget to hit the like subscribe and i'll see you here next time later