Welcome back to Deep Focus. In this week’s episode, host Rodrigo Perez, also the Editor-in-Chief of The Playlist, talks to Michael Sarnoski, the writer and director of “A Quiet Place: Day One,” which is now available to rent or buy digitally from Paramount Home Entertainment. The film will also hit Paramount+ on August 27.
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As you probably know, Sarnoski launched his career with the quiet and delicate indie “Pig,” which featured a beautifully nuanced performance from Nicolas Cage. For his “A Quiet Place” spinoff prequel, when John Krasinski, the writer/director of the previous two franchise installments, called Sarnoski to pitch him the project, he wondered if the filmmaker would want to bring that “Pig” touch to the franchise.
Sarnoski went away, thought about it a bit, and pitched his take on the movie, something epic in a scale set in New York, but in many ways, deeply human, character-driven, and subverting many blockbuster tropes in the meantime. And when Krasinski said he wanted some of that “Pig” touch, well, he got exactly that and maybe more.
As you may already know, ‘Day One’ flashes back to the first day of the invasion by deadly creatures who hunt by sound in one of the loudest places on Earth: New York City. Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn give emotionally devastating and riveting performances as strangers who embark on a harrowing journey through the eerily quiet streets of Manhattan in order just to get a slice of pizza (read our review).
Saronski said when he made his pitch to Krasinski, he acknowledged it might be unusual, but the “A Quiet Place” director was all for it. “I think my pitch was, I’m not exaggerating, 30 seconds, and I did not have some detailed story,” he explained. “It was just like, ‘I want to follow a hospice patient who just wants to get pizza; that’s the gist of what I could go for,’ and I literally said before that, ‘I don’t know if this is most marketable version,’ but his response was, in not so many words, ‘Heck yeah, let’s do it.’”
Sarnoski and Krasinski took it to Paramount, and he knew it would feature baked-in elements like New York as a setting and, therefore, be connected to Djimon Hounsou’s character in “A Quiet Place Part II,” but he decided not to make any of the connections overt.
“I just kind of wanted to use it as a little bit of a reference point,” he explained his intentions of connecting things to ‘Part II.’ “That was the initial idea they presented, “Djimon Hounsou’s character in the second one talks about day one in New York City, and he tells his particular story of what it was like there… so that’s in the back of our minds somewhere, but I didn’t want to do the story. There’s a version of this film where you could say, ‘OK, let’s tell that story.’ And it’s very tempting in some ways because Djimon is an incredible actor…but you kind of already know what that’s going to be; he explained it… but I wanted to use it more as something happening in the background.”
Sarnoski’s M.O. was really to subvert as much as possible from the earlier films and make his movie unique, going as far as rather than a survival film, a film about a dying character that had already accepted their fate. So, if Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” movies were essentially about how far you would go to protect your loved ones, Sarnoski’s take eventually became more akin to how far you would go to protect total strangers. This felt reminiscent of 9/11 and how New Yorkers really rallied behind each other, and the best came out of everyone in the city, and Sarnoski acknowledged that 9/11 was on his mind.
“It’s not impossible, but I couldn’t make a movie like this without having 9/11 somewhere,” he said. “I don’t think you can make a New York disaster movie without that being somewhere in there.”
Sarnoski even talked to Jeff Nichols, the original/writer and director of “A Quiet Place: Day One,” who eventually left the project and said he was nothing but supportive of him taking it in any direction.
“I read his version—and I think Jeff Nichols is extremely talented, an incredible writer and director— so I read his script, I did speak to him, he gave me a very supportive, kind call of like, ‘Hey, this is yours. I took it as far as I wanted to; I’m good; you have at it. And I really appreciated that, but for me, I kind of just went back to square one and said, ‘OK, there’s plenty of stuff in that script that’s awesome, for my own sanity and my own focus, I just kind of need to pretend that doesn’t exist and start from a blank slate, which was really helpful. It was really gracious of him to be—he wasn’t protective or upset or anything like that, he was like, ‘Have fun with this and make it your own.”
Up next for Sarnoski is “The Death of Robin Hood,” which he spoke about at length and said he hoped would be a bridge between his first film, “Pig,” and his latest film, “A Day One.”
“I’m doing the ‘The Death of Robin Hood’ with Hugh Jackman and Jodie Comer. And this is a script I wrote just before writing ‘Quiet Place,’ it was a little bit of a deal I made with myself,” he explained. “I was like, ‘If I’m going to make a big studio movie, I wanna have a smaller movie that is all mine that I can be working on in the background. So, we’ve been piecing that together while working on this, and I’m really excited about it. ‘Pig’ was a very tiny movie, ‘Quiet Place’ was a very big movie, and ‘Death Of Robin Hood’ is right in between there, so it’ll be fun to use what I learned on both sides and—it’s only my third movie so, I still have tons to learn, but hopefully I’ll be able to take the best of both worlds and make something that I really love. I think Hugh is going to be incredible in it and Jodie is amazing. “
Sarnoski also suggested that the idea scared him a bit, like all his films so far, which was a good sign.
“I like movies where you’re like initially, ‘Are you sure you wanna do that? ‘Are you sure you want to make a movie about a dying person getting pizza?’ ‘Are you sure you want to make a movie about a guy looking for his truffle pig?’” he recalled of this thinking. “And Robin Hood movies kind of have a legacy of being like, ‘I dunno, maybe we should take a break from Robin Hood movies,’ and so it was kind of a challenge to myself like, ‘Can I write a version of a Robin Hood movie that I would have to make, and when you do that, you almost want to fail, to be like, ‘Oh, thank god, I was right, it was a bad idea, I shouldn’t have done Robin Hood,’ but I wrote this version, and I was like, ‘Oh no, I have to make this movie. This is the version of the story I need to make. So, unfortunately, I think it’s going to be really good, and I’m really excited about it [laughs].”
When asked if he would consider doing another ‘Quiet Place’ film or if he would stick around as an exec producer to weigh in on ideas, he basically said, to the first question, not really; however, you never know, and to the second, if they wanted my input, sure.
“I’ve heard bits and pieces of [where the next spin-off idea could go], but I tried very hard to be as focused on a stand-alone movie,” he explained. “You could watch this without knowing anything else about the other ‘Quiet Place’ movies. So I see this as something that can stand on its own two feet, it’s not trying to set up a sequel, you don’t need the other movies to appreciate these characters. And sure, I would be happy to give my two cents on something, but I don’t think I would do another ‘Quiet Place’ unless I could find something similarly, like ‘This is a character story that I need to follow, but thankfully, I think the ‘Quiet Place’ world kinds of lends itself to those kinds of stories because it forces you to lean in and be hushed and tense with these characters…, but I would have to find something where it was like, ‘I haven’t seen this character in this kind of movie before.’”
“A Quiet Place: Day One” is available now to rent or buy digitally. A three-movie collection including “A Quiet Place,” “A Quiet Place: Part II,” and “A Quiet Place: Day One” is also available now for digital purchase. The film will also debut on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, and in a collectible 4K Ultra HD SteelBook on October 8.
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