(upbeat music)
- It's so much to me that you wrote a movie about silence.
What prompted you to that,
and is it a different writing a screenplay
that really has almost no dialogue?
- Very different and terrifying, but it was--
- [Peter] It's only four pages long.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was easy.
(writers laughs)
I basically cheated. - Yeah, but you did it
in a couple hours. - Exactly.
No, it was one of those things that came as a spec script
to me as an actor first, and the spec script had the idea.
The idea was fantastic, this idea of a family
living silently to protect themselves from creatures.
But we had just had our second daughter,
and so I was legitimately holding
a three week old baby, reading about a family
of what would you do to protect your kids?
And so, I don't know, I've never had this before,
I connected to this material
more than anything I've ever connected to before
because I was living it.
I was living those days that anybody with kids knows
that you're actually checking their breathing,
and you're checking to make sure they're alive
and healthy and happy and all those things.
And I said, "If I could rewrite the script,
"I could bring this to be the best metaphor
"for parenthood," that I had experienced, at least.
And I went down and I pitched my wife, I said,
I think I can rewrite this script
and make it about our kids.
It's a love letter to our kids.
And she's like,
"The one about the creatures killing everybody,"
and I was like, "Yes, it's perfect."
(writers laughs)
And she was actually the one who said,
"Then, you have to direct it,"
because I pitched her in about three hours and she said,
"You have to go direct the movie, too,"
which turned out to be a good idea thanks to my wife.
- Were you scared of screwing up your own screenplay?
- Absolutely, yeah, because I mean, to me,
it was a high wire act,
and I'm sure everybody can agree there's something
about the high wire act that's so much more appealing
than the easy one, and so I was terrified
of sound being not only a main character,
but the main character.
But I was also so excited by it,
and it was really nice to be apart of a movie, for me,
that on set, it was unraveling its ability
to be successful everyday.
So what I mean by that is the first time we shot the scene
of the family walking to the bridge,
I could actually hear crew members saying,
"Wow, the woods sound so amazing!"
And you realize that they hadn't listened
to their environment in years.
(energetic music)
I wrote the whole backstory,
I know where the creatures came from,
how they all ended up in this place,
and you were talking about advice, or something like that,
and it wasn't note, but my first script was Promise Land
that I wrote, and Focus Features did it.
And we went into this marketing meeting,
and I was super new to the whole business,
but certainly the aspect of writing.
And at the end of the marketing meeting,
there was this amazing guy, Jack Foley,
still also one of the best accents I've ever heard,
and I remember just leaving the room, I turned to Jack,
and I said, "What's the biggest misconception
"in the movie business?"
And he didn't even hesitate,
he said that audiences are stupid.
He seemed very frustrated by it,
and he said nobody wants anything delivered to them,
sugarcoated on a spoon, they actually really want to work.
They're frustrated that you're not making them work.
And without a doubt, when I was writing the script,
I literally thought of that story and said,
"All right Jack, you better be right."
And so, I basically took out all the backstory,
and what I thought was if I could pull off the magic trick
of having the entire backstory in one set,
which is my office downstairs, my workspace,
the entire backstory is on that board,
and my whole idea for it was I don't want the audience
to be ahead of the family.
The family doesn't know what's going on,
and if you're ahead of them, you won't care about them.
And so, you can only get this information
as the characters are getting this information.
And it was really, really fun to do.
(energetic music)
I don't even know if this was a young age to read it,
but I remember feeling in sixth grade,
I remember the visual
of our teacher dropping To Kill a Mockingbird on our desks.
And I remember thinking this is thick!
(writers laugh)
I was just reading Clifford the Big Red Dog,
and now it's To Kill a Mockingbird.
And I actually specifically remember having,
probably I'd had some before,
but a seminal conversation with my dad
about To Kill a Mockingbird,
and he revealed that it was his favorite book.
And there was something about his admiration
of the teacher, his interest in the fact
that I was connecting to this story as a sixth grader,
and I really wanted to talk about it.
And I remember that opened a whole door.
Truly, it changed my life.
I mean, my dad was always so open and amazing,
but my dad was the type of person
who would ask you your opinion about everything
and make sure that you always had your own opinion
and that book really started that, and it was huge.
(upbeat music)