There was a bit of a directorial hot potato on the latest film in the “Quiet Place” franchise universe before it landed in the hands of Michael Sarnoski. John Krasinski, who helmed the first two films, couldn’t take the spinoff “A Quiet Place: Day One” on due to scheduling conflicts; then, “The Bikeriders” director Jeff Nichols was set to write and direct the prequel. But Nichols had creative differences with studio Paramount Pictures, parting ways with the project in early 2022.
This musical chairs surrounding a bankable IP ($630 million worldwide, combining the first movies) about bloodthirsty aliens among us with supersonic hearing finally brought Sarnoski into view. Krasinski (here on as a producer) had seen Sarnoski’s 2021 debut feature, the mystical revenge drama “Pig” starring Nicolas Cage as a truffle hunter with damage, and felt the young, Yale-trained filmmaker from Milwaukee was the man for the job.
An indie director coming in on a background of original movies of their own, who then must twist themselves into a pretzel to fit their vision into a preestablished one, is nothing new, and can produce misfires or runaway surprise successes. Sarnoski’s “A Quiet Place: Day One,” set over the course of 24 hours in Manhattan as an alien invasion terrorizes the lives of cancer patient Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) and the mystery man Eric (Joseph Quinn) who joins her on her quest for safe haven, anchors a survival thriller in the same elements of humanity and apocalyptic emotion as Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” and “A Quiet Place Part II.” How well the movie does will depend on viewers’ willingness to let go of the Emily Blunt-led ensemble that made the last two movies such smash hits. Here, we are on the ground of an alien attack as it happens, no longer drifting in the still-scary aftermath. And with new characters with their own stories.
“Thankfully, John Krasinski set me up really well in this in that he wanted to bring someone on who could bring a new tone to this movie,” Sarnoski told IndieWire during an interview in New York City, “and asked to bring some of the ‘Pig’ touch to this movie. He was really generous in saying, ‘This is your movie. Make it how you want to make it.’”
Sarnoski has the sole screenwriting credit on “A Quiet Place: Day One” which, after being scouted, he pitched to story co-writer Krasinski and the producers, including Michael Bay. Sarnoski was a fan of the originals, which starred Krasinski and Emily Blunt as heads of a family eking out a bleak living long after the alien attack. “Day One” blows open the backstory of extraterrestrial creatures dispatched to Earth who walk as if on stilts, and move at the speed of sound when anyone makes a noise, devouring helpless victims just as fast. Sarnoski said he hasn’t talked to producer and master of global destruction movies Michael Bay much, “but I hope he’s really happy” with the finished product.
As for the Jeff Nichols-intended version of this prequel, Sarnoski said, “I did see that script, and I spoke to Jeff. He was really gracious in just being like, ‘Hey, here was my experience. Don’t feel any pressure to do this or that.’ I was pretty clear [with Jeff Nichols and John Krasinski] that I needed to find my own way into this story. It was a really beautiful script … he loved it, he cared about it, he did a beautiful job with it, but he just didn’t feel like doing a studio job at that point.” (Nichols’ “The Bikeriders” opened from Focus Features on June 21, and he recently told The Wrap that he left “Day One” because it was “never going” to be his film.)
The breakout star of “Day One” is not Nyong’o, whose Academy Award-winning work we all know, nor “Stranger Things” star Joseph Quinn, both playing some of the last survivors in New York City after the aliens create an apocalypse. It’s a cat named, in the movie, Frodo, which Nyong’o’s character carries with her on her journey out of the cancer ward and through the big, rubbling city. This adorable sort of reverse-tuxedo cat, bravely traversing a bombed-out and flooded New York from Chinatown subways to a Harlem apartment where Sam once lived, sees all and becomes the character you most root for. (And no, the cat does not die, just FYI.)
“Frodo was played by two cats, Schnitzel and Nico. Early on, a lot of people assumed, ‘OK, it’s a big movie, we’ll CG the cat, and it will make everything a lot easier.’ It was important to me to have a real cat that you could feel connected to,” Sarnoski said. The team worked with a London-based animal training company and met “a lot of different cats … we just had a couple days where we would sit in the office, they’d bring in a dozen cats. We’d meet them and get a sense of their personality, and Schnitzel and Nico were clear choices of ‘thank God, they’ve got a sort of soul behind their eyes.’”
Working with the animals became a case of “just sitting quietly on set and not riling the cats up.” Indeed, the cats seen onscreen are very adroit in behind held and harnessed through all manner of onscreen terrors during the film’s shoot on the Warner Bros. Leavesden lot in London. (Also to shoot in the past year at the 200-acre Leavesden were Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” sequel and “Venom: The Last Dance.”)
“A lot of it was Lupita and Joe having a relationship with these cats and getting to know them so they feel safe when they’re being held,” Sarnoski said. “Running through the city, a cat could really start scratching and freaking out, but they really grew to trust those actors. That was a big thing for Lupita, because she started the project terrified of cats, and she didn’t even want to touch them, and she really forced herself to get close to those cats. Now, she has a cat of her own. She really had quite a journey.”
For “Day One,” the film’s budget was upped from the 2017 original’s $17 million price tag, and the level of CGI and post-production effects on the new movie reflects a heightened investment from Paramount. We get a closer look than ever at these aliens, whose head opens like a blooming flower, but beneath them are jaws of death akin to H.R. Giger’s work on the biomechanical xenomorph in the “Alien” movies. But one of Sarnoski’s non-negotiables was bringing practical effects and some location shooting into a movie that inherently must rely on a great deal of VFX, here courtesy of ILM. While the level of volition indie filmmakers get on a project of this scale is never a given, Sarnoski also got his way with a few other asks: working again with “Pig” cinematographer Pat Scola and “Pig” star Alex Wolff, who has a brief role in this movie’s tense opening, before his grim fate is sealed up without ceremony.
“I love practical effects. I’ve always just adored that. With a movie like this, you know you have to lean into VFX for set extensions and creature work and things like that,” Sarnoski said. “It was really just a constant conversation with the visual effects people … a big thing for me was feeling like we were present in New York City, and that this was a constant, boots-on-the-ground thing, and a lot of that was this constant dialogue between special effects and production design and visual effects, so that you constantly feel like you’re in this destroyed New York City that you haven’t seen before.”
As for how our window into the nature of the creatures’ physiognomy deepens this time around, especially when “A Quiet Place: Day One” shows us how they subsist on human flesh and lurk in packs, Sarnoski said, “I liked in the early movies that they didn’t overshow them. One of the scariest things about these creatures is this whole ‘you make a sound, you die.’ There is something simple and fundamental about that that everyone can relate to. I didn’t want to overshare to the point where they just became these scary, clawy creatures, but at the same time we wanted to hit that scope and scale of ‘this is a large invasion, and there are herds of these things in this very loud city.’ A lot of it was about how we pieced that out and started by not showing too much and by the end, you build up to it being a little more in your face.”
For a movie intended as a prequel setup to the already macerated world we saw in John Krasinski’s prior entries, “A Quiet Place: Day One” still doesn’t tell us too much about the exact particulars of the alien invasion. In the opening, as Nyong’o’s character heads into Manhattan for a movie and a slice of her favorite pizza, planes are seen careening overhead in the sky. And then, boom, blackout and ruination reign as humans are picked off en masse by blind, sound-chasing monsters.
“I feel like I can say this because he’s said this in interviews before, [but John is] pretty upfront about, ‘hey, these creatures were from another planet. That planet got destroyed, and they were kind of cast across the cosmos as little meteorites, and they landed on our planet.’ It’s sort of this idea of introducing a new species into an ecosystem and seeing what happens,” Sarnoski said. “I like the simplicity of that. I didn’t feel the need to overly point that out. I like this idea that these are just a force of nature and, on their home planet, and they probably had a different ecosystem and environment, but now on our planet, we become the prey for this apex predator.”
Next up, Sarnoski has “The Death of Robin Hood” set up at A24 with Jodie Comer and Hugh Jackman, indicating a filmmaker who wants to follow his own strange star rather than be swallowed up by preestablished studio movie universes. Would he make another “Quiet Place” movie?
“I’m definitely going to do something original next, [but] one of the great things about the ‘Quiet Place’ universe is that you have this sort of fundamental creature, and beyond that, you can explore any human story you want to in that world,” Sarnoski said. “I would definitely be open to that if I found that kind of in again, but you can tell a thousand different stories in this world because it’s just about the characters. But I’m going to do something a little different next.”
A Paramount Pictures release, “A Quiet Place: Day One” opens in theaters on Friday, June 28.
