Put yourself in the shoes of a successful studio executive and imagine you’ve just been approached by a couple of screenwriters who tell you that John Krasinski – director of two quickly-forgotten indie films, though you probably know him better as Jim from The Office – is looking to make a horror movie that’s almost completely devoid of spoken dialogue. Something tells me that you wouldn’t be itching to whip out your chequebook for this project, and yet Krasinski’s A Quiet Place has turned out to be one of the biggest financial successes of the year.
Writer Bryan Woods recently recalled the difficulties they faced in getting anyone to believe in their unique and compelling sci-fi pic though, which is set in a world where people must live in near silence to avoid detection from sound-sensitive predators:
We would pitch it to studio executives that were fans of ours, producers that we had worked with, even close friends, and people would just look at us and their eyes would glaze over. They’d just be like, ‘What are you guys talking about? A movie with no dialogue? I don’t see how that’s a movie. That doesn’t sound very commercial. You should just move past it.
Indeed, even producer Andrew Form, whose studio Platinum Dunes would eventually take on the project, knew they were taking a gamble when they chose to put their faith in Krasinski:
The movie was risky on every level; You start reading [the script] and go, ‘Oh, there’s no dialogue.’ The idea was so original. And here we are coming to the studio with John: ‘This is the guy we’re betting on to star, write and direct this movie for us. And we’re all in on him! You have to trust us. We’re not going to let you down.’
No doubt Form and the rest of the Platinum Dunes staff are glad that they gave the actor/director a chance, since A Quiet Place has so far grossed $314.5 million worldwide against a production budget of just $17 million dollars, and even has a sequel in the works. Between this and the success of last year’s Get Out, it’s clear that originality in horror cinema needn’t come at the expense of profit.
