Hi, Scott. How are you? Hi, Scott.
I'm good, thanks.
And what we want to make a joke about is just
All right?
Yeah.
I was like, oh, my.
It was meant to be
congratulations on the film.
Thank you.
I really, really enjoyed this one.
I was I was pleasantly surprised it didn't go where I thought
it was going to go, which I kind of was kind of kind of good I enjoyed that.
That's always good.
That's always good. That's always.
I know this is adapted from a from a short story.
So what was the initial love for you of that short story
and how difficult is it bring in someone else's material
but a short story into into the feature that you've made?
I had read the short story like 15 years ago when it was first
published, you know, and I always I always liked the idea
of the black phone because it was a short story.
But that and that combined a serial killer with a ghost story.
I just thought that was a great idea for a movie, and but I never could find
a way to expand it into something that was a good feature.
And, and then I, I had been in therapy for almost three years, talking
mostly about the trauma of my childhood, the violence in my childhood, and,
and just things that happened to me growing up and coming out of that period.
I felt like I had a lot of interesting perspective on
what it's like to grow up in a working class, violent dangerous
blue collar neighborhood in North Denver in 1978.
And the idea was simply, well, what if I take all that and I combine it
with the black phone and that's what the movie is.
It's synergy.
I think it was I think it's been said that it's it's a very synergistic thing
because they all the the two things seem to merge really well.
Yeah.
And of course when you got someone like that
grab this kind of malevolent presence, who else are you going to think of
but Ethan Hawke. Of course.
Of course he was.
He's the only person that brought the script to
what was that about him.
So I just spoke to him and he was telling me about the kind of
let me change in his discipline as an actor because you take his face away
way, you know, he's doing different things than maybe he's done before.
So I know you worked for him before.
So what made him right for you to, to, to play this?
My starting point after I wrote the script was it
was the first thing I thought was I need somebody with a really distinctive voice
because we're going to hear this character from behind the mask the whole time.
And, you know, I've always thought that Ethan had one of the best
voices of any actor I'd ever seen.
I don't feel like people have taken enough advantage of what
an amazing voice he has and how distinctive it is.
He can speak very high very fluidly.
He can speak very low and gravelly.
There's a lot of range to it.
His voice doesn't you know, it's his voice.
When you hear it.
And so I started with that.
I just thought, Oh,
Ethan could really perform from behind a mask because of his voice.
And then and then, you know, I gave it to him.
And I think he really took the mask as a challenge.
I think he he thought that as an actor,
it was going to put an obstacle in his path that might enable him
to perform in a way he had never performed before, which is exactly what he did.
And the brilliance of his performance is this and this isn't my direction.
This is Ethan. Ethan figure this out.
What he figured out was that he needed to let the mask do what the mask
was going to do so that each time, as the character at the Grabber
has three different masks, all that split in half,
he picks different masks for a reason to intimidate Finny,
to scare up any, to make Finny feel a little more at ease, whatever.
And each piece of the mask he's wearing.
Ethan understood. Let the mask do that work.
And then he would do something different.
He would do something that was very, very complementary or additional
or sometimes even different than the mask.
And the result is a kind of brilliant performance because he gets all this power
from a typical horror, iconic thing to do, which is put a killer in a mask.
But then he gets to bring this very complex, very interesting
character to life with voice and gesture and movement
and and change of tone, change of mood.
The grabber goes through a lot of different moods, sometimes
without explanation.
And all of that is is what I think a really nuanced, brilliant performance.
Absolutely is. Scott, thank you so, so much for your time.
Absolute pleasure.
Thanks so much.