A Quiet Placehas now been out in theaters for a whole month and still came in #3 at the box office this weekend. You could also say it entered full culture iconic status over the weekend when Saturday Night Live spoofed it with their A Kanye Placeskit.
And also over the weekend, Scott Myers at Go Into the Story concluded a six-part interview with A Quiet Place screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Here’s an excerpt that touches on the great opening of that movie without really spoiling it for those of you who haven’t seen it yet.
Very early on, the idea that attracted us was opening with a completely idyllic farmscape and what appears to be the perfect family living out the perfect life. Little by little, as this family starts to move about their farmhouse, we start to realize that there are weird things going on.
They’re putting padding on the walls. They’re wearing shoe covers on their feet. They don’t seem to be speaking very much. Everything is really quiet. It all builds up to that Monopoly scene where there’s a noise and we realize, ‘Oh, there’s creatures out there. If they make a noise, then they’re in danger.’
“John Krasinski is not the name you’d think of like ‘Can’t wait to see a horror movie by that guy.’ And the reason why is I wouldn’t think that either. Until I read this script originally by these amazing writers Beck & Woods (Scott Beck & Bryan Woods), and they had this incredible idea of a family that had to live quietly or else they would die. And to me, this whole movie is about family. It’s not a horror movie—I mean it is a horror movie, but to me the theme of family and what would you really do for your kids is the reason why I did the movie.”
Director, writer, actor John Krasinski (A Quiet Place)
Box Office Mojo had A Quiet Place stepping back into the top of the box office over the weekend and crossing the $200 million mark worldwide. Pretty amazing for a non-franchise that cost $17 million to make.
Congrats to both Scott Beck and Bryan Woods who originally wrote the script, and to John Kransinki who directed the film and honed the script.
Because Beck and Woods are from Bettendorf, Iowa (and are familiar with this blog) this is as good a time as any to make them the poster boys for “Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places” (even if they’re in their 30s now). They join Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody who I named years ago as the poster girl for the blog.
It just so happens that Beck, Woods, and Cody are all graduates of the University of Iowa. I’ve been asked if I teach at U-Iowa (or was when I lived in Iowa) or was a student there and the answer is no and no. I have no connection at all to the University of Iowa.
I simply started this little blog in 2008 after seeing Juno and here we are a decade later. It just so happens that the University of Iowa turns out some talented people.
On Wednesday A Quiet Place was back at the number one position for the day. And Box Office Mojo expects A Quiet Place to finish this weekend in the number #1 slot. Pretty remarkable given its a non-franchise film going into its third week in theaters.
How do you create something these days that rises above all the noise competing for our entertainment time? All the broadcast and cable TV shows and Internet options? How do you get people to put down their video game controllers and actually go to a movie theater?
To use an old expression, “sometimes when people are shouting you have to whisper to be heard.” That’s what John Krasinski, Bryan Woods and Scott Beck did with A Quiet Place.
In a WGA Q&A here’s how Woods and Beck explain how they developed A Quiet Place before Krasinski came on board to bring his sensibilities to the script and direction. (This is a lightly edited version of the Beck/Woods exchange.)
Scott Beck: We wrote a 15-page proof of concept just to see if this would work. Maybe this will read really boring but let’s try it.
Bryan Woods: It was a proof of concept in two ways. On some level, we thought we could make a short film out of it. But it ended up being more as writers, “What’s this thing going to look like on the page? How do you communicate motivation? How do you communicate backstory, intent, and what characters want without using dialogue? Is it going to be readable?”
Scott: One of the scripts that we studied was Walter Hill and David Giler had written a draft of Alien—it’s incredibly sparse. The writing is very specific and economical. Another recent example is Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler script. It’s like line of description, line of description. It doesn’t really have traditional location slugs, it’s very visual how it’s written. So we were kind of like, let’s screw all the rules of screenwriting and start putting images in this. And we knew because this film would be very sound heavy we were like how do we convey that on the page? And there were pages where we’d literally have one word that was conveying how loud a sound would be. And we were playing with the font sizes. For instance, the quieter that a sound got or the quieter that character had to be we’d shrink the font size.
Bryan: So we were gimmicky and we kind of hated ourselves for doing it. But we really wanted to make sure that producers, and eventually the studio, understood that this was going to be unlike any movie you’ve ever seen. We really wanted to communicate the silent film experience.
Scott: The very first draft that we’d written actually only had one line of dialogue. Like three words [of dialogue] in it entirely. It played really, really silently.But it was like 67 pages. So even when we had the script finalized, we were like what are people going to think of this? We’ve written a pilot script or something, right?
We now know audiences and critics think quite highly of the finished version.
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 The Quiet Place. It’s like The 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 senerio 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
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.
“The key advice I’d give [any filmmaker] is when you’re starting out make things as cheaply as possible. There is a path for making things so cheaply that the minimal value that most independent films get can still help you to recoup your budget. And that’s a path that the Duplass brothers took really well, and I think it will always be a path. There’s always going to be an appetite for movies of a certain sort and if you can achieve quality with a very low budget you can find a path with an independent film.” Indie film producer Keith Calder
Interview with John August onScriptnotes, Episode #342
Note: The keyword in the title of today’s post is “a.” This is a path, not the only path. But, as I mentioned yesterday, before Scott Beck and Bryan Woods had their names attached to the current #1 box office Hollywood hit (The Quiet Place), they made a bunch of low-budget films in Iowa.
“Throughout high school and our college years we just keep making movies and feature films for practically no budget.” Writer/director Scott Beck #AlwaysAHawkeye video
P.S. Yesterday I went to see the documentary film Long Time Coming at the Florida Film Festival. It’s the debut feature film of Orlando-based filmmaker Jon Strong. It was the second showing of the festival because the first one sold out hours after tickets went on sale.
I don’t know the budget of the film and Strong did say during the Q&A that the film was in the works for two years. But my guess is it’s an example of a film that was made without a large budget and one that will find a distribution path at ESPN or Netflix. Production-wise Long Time Coming reminded me of another baseball-centered film No, No: A Dockumentary (on picture Dock Ellis) which I saw at the Florida Film Festival a few years ago.
No, No was also very heavy on interviews of past players. And if my memory is correct, the director said the bulk of the interviews with former Pittsburgh Pirates players was shot over a reunion weekend. Shaping those interviews into a story, finding archival photos and videos (and securing rights and funding to use them) is what can take months and years.
But No, No is a good example of a film that had a niche audience and found distribution. It’s not a bad idea to find a film in your genre that you like and find out as much as you can about how it got funded and found distribution.
“Growing up in Ohio was just planning to get out.”
Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (who grew up in Akron)
At the end of Ted Hope’s book Hope for Film he has an appendix that lists 141 Problems and Opportunities for the Independent World. The list flowed from a blog post he wrote back in 2010. You can find the entire list here, but I’m just going to highlight one problem today.
124. Artists cannot afford to live in our cultural centers. It’s a real Catch-22. Artists make cultural centers, but these places become too pricey for their creators to live in. If you are in the middle class, you can only afford 14 percent of the currently available homes in San Francisco. The number drops to only 2.5 percent in New York City. I love both cities, but can’t see my future in either of them as a result. And I don’t really want to move to Akron, Ohio, either (no offense intended, Akron!). Ted Hope Hope for Film: From the Frontline of the Independent Cinema Revolutions (p. 285)
If you don’t have wealthy parents or a trust fund to support you for a few years until you get some traction in New York or L.A. what is one to do? Many articles over the years have talked about the struggle of creative people trying to pay their bills in the big cities. And if you tack on a large film school debt, forgetaboutit.
It makes me wonder where people like Jim Jarmusch (Stranger than Paradise) would go today if they were starting out in 2018 instead of the 1970s.
I started writing this blog in 2008 after seeing Diablo Cody’s Juno and learning that she went to school in Iowa City and wrote the Juno screenplay in the suburbs of Minneapolis. She went on to move to L.A. and win an Oscar for that script. A Midwest success story.
As of this weekend, we have another Midwest success story. And, yes, one also with Iowa roots.
‘A Quiet Place’ Delivers a Not So Quiet $50 Million Opening Box Office Mojo headline
April 8, 2018
The original screenplay for The Quiet Place was written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. After the script sold to Paramount in 2016, John Kraninski came on board to further develop the script, and direct and star in the finished version that this past weekend finished at top of the box office.
So which “cultural center” did these guys develop their filmmaking chops? I’m glad you asked.
“Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are two screenwriters you may not have heard of yet but surely will very soon. Scott and Bryan first met as sixth-graders in their hometown of Bettendorf, Iowa. After discovering a shared interest in cinema, the duo began making stop-motion movies together with their Star Wars action figures. This collaboration continued into high school, where they directed numerous shorts and their first feature films.” Mike Sargent Script mag
Like Diablo Cody they also attended the University of Iowa, which is where they first came up with the idea for The Quiet Place. Just this morning both Woods and Beck were back in Iowa City giving a talk on “Exploring Careers in Cinema.”
They’re based in L.A. now but made their first short films and Nightlight (2015) back in Iowa.
Of course, this doesn’t exactly address Ted Hope’s question that I started off this blog addressing. But the drum I’ve been hitting for the past decade is there are filmmakers rising up all over the world finding support and inspiration from their communities.
“There’s power in love. There’s power in love to help and heal when nothing else can.” Rev. Michael B. Curry I went to see A Quiet Place a second time in this weekend. Actually, on the same day of the royal wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Merkle and I think there’s a connection between […]
