Hi. I'm Antoine Fuqua, the director of The Guilty.
911. Emergency operator 625.
What is the address of the emergency?
-Hi, sweetie. -Sorry, you called 911.
One of my favourite scenes to film
would probably be when Riley calls in, the actress.
It's the first time she says:
"I want to talk, sweetie."
While he's dealing with
a woman that's obviously been kidnapped
and is in danger,
his phone is ringing.
And his little girl's on the phone.
And he's trying to make a decision
to talk to his little girl, who he's very close to,
but he's divorced.
And, at the same time, a reporter calls in.
This is Joe.
Joe, hey.
Do you have time to answer a couple of questions
about tomorrow?
Who is this?
Are you a journalist?
All this is kind of happening
while he's dealing with
a kidnapped woman that's come in.
How do you desperately help someone that's in need?
How do you have the discipline
not to pick up the phone when your little girl,
when you've been trying to call her all day,
your ex-wife won't let you speak to her…
And then you have a reporter calling you
wanting to know your side of the story
of something you did wrong.
To me, that's a complex scene.
And, in filming that scene,
I had to restrain myself
because there's a tendency to want to do
a lot of things with the camera.
The discipline for me was not to move the camera.
To just be there with him
and let the actor do it.
I told Jake: "I'm going to stay wide for a lot of it."
"And then I'm just going to march in."
"Closer, closer, closer."
To make the audience, sort of,
have some distance from what's happening.
Until she calls.
And, once she calls, I go really close.
Right in here
and you can see his eyes darting back and forth
as he's trying to process what the woman's saying.
Who is that?
-Yes, I understand. -Is there someone with you?
As he's trying to register in his brain visually
what's happening to her,
the audience starts to do the same
and it makes you lean in more to listen
to what's being said.
They're not in the room with me.
They're on Zoom.
They're in whatever world they're in, right?
So, they would call in. We had specific times.
For actors, we're going to do 20 minutes today.
And I can see them in their homes
and wherever they were.
Jake could never see them.
And so, they would get their cue from me
and then they would go into their performance
as he answered the call.
But the actors that called in were amazing:
Ethan Hawke and Peter Sarsgaard
and Riley and Da'Vine.
It's just, like,
a blessing to have those kinds of actors.
Paul Dano…
Their performance makes Jake's performance better
because, if he doesn't believe them,
we don't believe them.
Most of us have been there before in some way
where you can't get people to do
what you want over the phone
and you can't do anything about it.
An emotional person like Joe who doesn't really do this,
he's a street cop, is not used to that rhythm.
Shit.
He doesn't know how to deal with all these emotions.
-Fuck me? -Fuck you! Go to hell.
Alright, yeah. Fuck you!
And he's expecting everybody to move
when he wants them to move
and get helicopters in there and do all these things
and that's just not the way it works.
So that builds tension.
It's frustrating, a bit, as a director
because, you know, you're a slave to the technology.
You know, so, if the Zoom glitches, which it did,
if someone down the street is making noise…
In New York City,
while someone's doing their side of things,
you can't control any of that.
Glitches happening…
So, anything that you were feeling,
especially Jake,
would wind up on the screen.
He would get…
his own voice in his ear.
And he would just sometimes, just:
"I can't… This is driving me crazy."
And I would keep the camera rolling
and he'd kind of get back into it again
and some of that's in the cut because it was real.
You know,
I always use lighting as another character.
The city itself is a character, you know.
The first shot of the sunset
with L.A. on fire,
for me, is Dante's Inferno
and it sets off an urgency.
The lighting on the inside when we first meet Joe…
It's daytime. It's sort of a soft glow light.
Sort of like purgatory.
It's a non-lighting.
It sort of just floats there, right?
Later, as it gets darker,
when you see the Alka-Seltzer
glass
when he comes from calling his daughter,
it's darker when he goes back in.
So, subconsciously when you see that way
towards the blinds,
it's now darker than what you saw before.
But, at the same time,
the subject matter's getting darker
because she's now called in.
911. Emergency operator 625.
What is the address of the emergency?
And, every time an audience sees the red light,
red is violence.
That just feels urgent.
So, those big close-ups of the red light were
to make you feel that urgency.
When he goes into the other room,
that whole room is dark
except for the little pin light
because his character's getting darker.
Right?
The beginning of the movie when he's in the bathroom is
all white because it's the beginning of purgatory.
You're in the clouds.
He's not quite anywhere.
But he's suffering.
When he goes back in the bathroom,
he's kind of green.
The concept is like a snake
just getting tighter and tighter and tighter
and we're watching a man dying, right?
Because he's guilty
and he's hiding it.
But it's coming out of his body
and he's coughing and it's starting to ooze out of him.
He can't escape it.
And, if you look at the man, he's very sweaty
and he looks pale.
And a little green.
He looks like death.
I had a list of things I was going to possibly shoot
to take you to some of the worlds that you're hearing.
And then, when I cut it together,
it would completely go against what the film is.
The audience imagination is way stronger
than anything that I designed to shoot.
People created that story.
I learnt to trust that more,
to trust an audience imagination more.
Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing.
Thank you for watching The Guilty.
Only on Netflix.