A Quiet Place hit $150 million at the worldwide box office over the weekend. Not bad for a movie that just cost $17 million to produce and has only been in theaters 10 days. You may be surprised to learn that it started as an idea that could be made on a micro-budget.
We started thinking what can we write that could be made. Again, this was almost ten years ago—it’s been a long journey. But we started pivoting our point of view to what films that could be producible?
Kind of a lesson we learned growing up in Iowa, we would write things for resources that we had in front of us. Something that could be produced, could be made, and hopefully be an interesting story, too. That’s a long way of saying that’s somewhat the genesis of A Quiet Place. It’s like A Quiet Place was written for us to shoot back in Iowa for $50,000 if everyone passed on it. It would have been a very, very different version without Emily Blunt and John Kraninski. But it was something we just had a passion for, and we knew worst case scenario that could be plan B.
Scott Beck on writing the original script for A Quiet Place with Bryan Woods
H/T Christopher Lockhart via a Q&A video at the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills
I saw the film over the weekend and could see the DNA of their Iowa roots in the movie (even though the film was shot in rural New York):
Farm/farmhouse
Cornfield
Silo full of corn
Old truck
Pitchfork and hatchet
Bridge
Woods
Small town Main Street.
And I also saw the DNA of some popular movies scattered throughout A Quiet Place:
Alien
Birds
Signs
Jaws
Them! (1954)
P.S. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are originally from Bettendorf, Iowa and graduated from the University of Iowa in 2007, both less than 2 hours from where I lived in Cedar Falls, Iowa when I started this blog. (Our only connection that I know of is we both used Iowa-based gaffer/jib-operator Jon Van Allen on our films and other productions.) I don’t know if Beck or Woods ever read a single post of Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places—but they’re example A of what’s possible if you have a movie idea and live in an unlikely place.
Related post:
The Best Film School
I thought of you right away when I heard they were from Iowa, Scott! 🙂