It’s the film that everybody’s talking about – albeit in hushed whispers, sign language, and on lightly-tapped computer keyboards. John Krasinski’s astonishingly tense horror film A Quiet Place sees The Office US’s charming goofball Jim turn his talents to creeping dread both in front of and behind the camera, in a film with a sharp high-concept premise: humans are being attacked by creatures with super-hearing abilities, leaving the remnants of society living in near-silence. We caught up with the star, director, and co-writer to talk about the film’s most shocking and surprising turns in a Spoiler Special edition of the Empire Podcast. Here are some of the most revealing insights – and be warned, you’ll want to see the film first before reading any further.
WARNING: CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR A QUIET PLACE
1) There's a definitive solution to THAT farting problem
Don’t lie, you were thinking about it. For all the noises that pop up in A Quiet Place – smashing glass, rustling grains, apocalypse-inappropriate toys – nobody ever attracts the creatures’ attention by breaking wind. One person on set did bring it up though, and typically it was a teenage boy – Noah Jupe, who plays Marcus. “He was our sounding board for a lot of this,” said Krasinski. “He said, what happens if we need to cough? And I said, well you guys would know to pick up a pillow and cough into the pillow […] I only imagine now little Noah putting a pillow on his behind and farting into a pillow, knowing that it would save his life. Just try to crop-dust, as long as they're not loud and violent you're going to be fine.”
2) The raptors in the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park was an influence
Spielberg may not be known as an outright horror director, but his knack for incredibly tense set-pieces clearly rubbed off on Krasinski. On the family’s survival tactics, he said: "I loved the idea of your second and third chance – meaning, if you did make a sound, you go into a whole other level of survival which is, 'Now that I've made a sound, if I run I'm dead, if I stay still I may be dead'. The idea of the Jurassic Park kitchen scene – if you make a sound, you have to stay still and hope that they don't get to you – that was always in my mind."
3) Beau’s death was designed to throw audiences
A Quiet Place constantly subverts viewer expectations, right from the opening scene in which the family’s youngest son is introduced and quickly dispatched by one of the creatures. If you found that death shocking, you were supposed to. "The power of a child dying set up what I found to be a great opportunity to instill the terror of this reality,” Krasinski explains. “The movie version would say, well the child can't die because nobody can take that. […] I made the conscious decision to make it the first scene because I wanted that rule to unlock the movie for the rest of the experience."
4) Evelyn's pregnancy is a partial consequence of Beau’s death
While the family unit at the centre of A Quiet Place has plenty of clever systems for avoiding detecting from the monsters, the parents’ choice to have another baby doesn’t exactly gel with the new ‘keep quiet or die’ way of life. But Krasinski saw that development as a reaction to the death of Beau in the opening scene, based on the statistics of what happens to parents who lose children. “Some people split up,” he says. “And then the other version is you force yourself to move forward and it almost becomes this recalibration of your entire life by trying to have another child. I think it's somewhere in the middle in [A Quiet Place].”
5) The creatures are space aliens
In the film the exact nature of the marauding beasties is kept ambiguous, bar the odd hint, but Krasinski told us outright that they’re extra-terrestrial. “They're an evolutionary perfect machine. The idea is, if they grew up on a planet that had no humans and no light, then they don't need eyes, they can only hunt by sound. They also develop a way to protect themselves from everything else – that's why they're bulletproof. [...] The other idea was it's also the reason why they were able to survive […] the explosion of their planet and then survive on these meteorites. Until they open themselves up to be vulnerable, they're completely invulnerable."
6) The 'baby-in-the-box' scene was the hardest to shoot
For all the monster attacks and set-pieces that linger in the memory from A Quiet Place, one image that’s hard to shake is Evelyn’s newborn baby being placed in a small wooden box to avoid detection by the creatures. "That was the most intense thing I've ever done in my career,” Krasinski admitted. “I didn't expect how viscerally I would respond. And yes, probably because I was a father of a young baby at the time, but just as a human being.”
The baby’s parents gave permission for their child to be used in the scene (“we absolutely didn't want them to feel taken advantage of or anything like that, and we even said we can do this with a fake baby,” said Krasinski), and it was filmed in two very fast takes. “As soon as I put that box on and left, they were like 'cut'. Everyone was just like 'get the child out of the box!' It was basically a puffy bed and there was holes everywhere for the baby to breathe, obviously, but the entire crew had a nervous breakdown on that scene."
7) Krasinski has his own take on the man in the woods' story
Abbott family aside, the only other character encountered in A Quiet Place is the man who commits suicide in the woods by screaming. There are already plenty of interpretations for what happened to him, and Krasinski has his own version. "Very clearly from the way he looks he doesn't have an infrastructure like the father has [...] They probably had a much, much, much smaller microcosm of a safety routine, and the woman had gone out to forage for some version of food and then ended up making a noise and being killed, and so he arrived and found her dead. And once he did that there was no other reason to live.”
He added: “I thought, what a horrible feeling it would be to live that long and then have this be your final moment. The reason why the scream came up was, it's not just that he wants to die because she's gone. It's this idea that I can't process this anymore, of how horrible this is to me. No-one can survive through this mentally, let alone physically.”
8) The nail scene brought out Krasinski’s inner Hitchcock
Thought Home Alone had the worst person-stands-on-an-up-turned-nail scene? Think again – A Quiet Place does it more slowly and excruciatingly, with added pressure for Evelyn not to scream and the fact that she’s in labour. “That [scene] to me is just [...] the beauty of what Hitchcock used to do. He would set up tension and suspense better than anyone,” said Krasinski. “I remember [writer and director] Christopher McQuarrie telling me his favourite Hitchcock quote […] when he read the script was, 'When you have an audience screaming their head off, grab them by the neck and don't let go.' That was the Hitchcock motto.”
9) The hearing-aid-as-weapon was part of Krasinski’s re-write
Sound was always intended as the creatures’ weakness, as well as their hunting super-power, but Krasinski tweaked the source of the offending sound in his script re-write to tie thematically back in to the father-daughter relationship. “I needed something that the father did to be the thing that defeated the creatures,” he explained. “I needed the girl who thought she was the black sheep and the reason for all the horror to be the reason they survived. I needed her biggest weakness to be her superpower […] I love the idea of her not realising it until the end.”
10) It intentionally subverts disaster movie tropes
The film plunges viewers straight into a bleak new reality on the 89th day of the post-apocalypse, skipping the actual invasion. “I wanted to break all the rules or the conventions that I had seen in alien movies, which is a speech from the President, people deciding how to survive. There was no deciding, it just happened so fast that you either survived or you didn't. It puts these people in a very tense place.”
11) The New York Post approved that 'It's Sound!' headline
Part of the silent storytelling in A Quiet Place comes from newspaper clippings – including a not-so-subtle headline on the New York Post, reading: ‘IT’S SOUND!’ Not only was it intentionally matter-of-fact, but it got the thumbs-up from the publication’s editor. “The New York Post wasn’t going to OK any of the [covers], understandably they didn't know what the movie was going to turn out to be,” explained Krasinski. “On that one – this is an amazing compliment – the editor of the New York Post said, 'Well that's actually what we would have written, so...'”
12) Emily Blunt loved the final shotgun-cocking ending
For all the bleakness, the film ends on a moment of slight triumph – daughter Regan recognises that her hearing aids make the aliens vulnerable, and Evelyn blasts one in the head with a shotgun, cocking it once again as other creatures in the area flock towards the farm. It turns out Emily Blunt was a big fan of that closing scene too, giving her on-screen and real-life husband an instant thumbs-up. “It was one of the only ideas she didn't need time to process,” he revealed. “I said, 'I'm going to end the movie, it's going to go black after you cock the gun', and she went, 'YES!' I had an immediate feedback test audience, and I thought alright, that's how I'm ending my movie then.”
13) Paramount could be looking at more than just sequels
When small horror movies do well, studios tend to immediately start branching out into sequels and spin-offs – and that could be the ultimate fate of A Quiet Place. “[The studio] wanted to potentially build a world,” Krasinski said, alluding to the man in the woods. “If these people are living through it poorly, are there other people living through it well? Is there some other way to survive? It's interesting."
A Quiet Place is out in UK cinemas now. Hear the full John Krasinski interview in our Empire Podcast Spoiler Special episode.