CraveOnline: Was the dinner scene improvised?
Simon Barrett: A lot of it was. All the ingredients are kind of there in the script which at a certain point, you know just to fill out a scene like that, you have to let the actors run a little bit. It’s hard to describe. It’s a lot shorter in the script. All the lines in the script are still there in the film but then Joe [Swanberg] and Ti [West] especially really expanded on that stuff. Then when Joe’s getting into it with AJ [Bowen] in that scene, a lot of that was improvised. The scene is probably 90% improvisation, which is I think kind of how we realized that’s the best way to work sometimes. At the same time, everything they’re riffing on was in the script. It was just much shorter and much simpler.
Adam Wingard: We don’t bring Joe Swanberg in the movie and not have him improvise.
Simon Barrett: We always knew that that was going to be one of the big improvisation moments and that’s why we felt specifically confident working with people we worked before, like Joe and AJ and Amy [Seimetz] and Ti who are not only really good at doing that as actors but they direct films.
Adam Wingard: And also there’s an element to it, I feel like with a scene with a lot of people sitting at a dinner table, in the script you have to concentrate on one thing at a time but in reality, there’s conversations and different little islands of activity happening on different parts of the table in a real environment like that. The way that I structured it to try to get that reality of it was whenever we did the first two or three takes, I just had all the actors on both sides of the table just talking at once. You guys are chattering over here about this. You guys are chattering here about this while the main dialogue’s happening over here.
Then after we got everyone comfortable with what they would be doing at the table at the same time all at once, then we just concentrated on one side at a time. Now everybody’s sitting on the right side of the table, everybody’s going to be quiet over there and we’re just going to concentrate on hearing the left side, then vice versa. What it did was it helped us establish the reality of what that would be of them all having a dinner table conversation amongst themselves and then we were able to put it back in the movie world and start focusing our attention.
Simon Barrett: And writers are crazy if they don’t encourage improvisation. It’s so easy to write in the script “Felix and Zee continue talking,” but what are the actors going to do when they get to set if you’re like, “No, you have to stick to the script?” It’s so ridiculous and I think it’s why a lot of films feel really fake now. The good thing about that is people like Joe and Amy and Ti are good at improvisations but they also understand on a director level that they need to be moving the scene forward. So they’re not just going to get totally bogged down in something that doesn’t lead to the escalation of that scene. That ended up working out very well but that was the number one scene that Adam was dreading when he read the script because it was half a page long, like “Everyone talks at the same time.”
Was it important that they continue being a dysfunctional family while the crisis is happening?
Simon Barrett: Oh, that’s kind of the entire point of the film in a way. We wanted our characters to be fun and funny but we also wanted them to all exist in the same reality. There’s a lot of themes to You’re Next if you bother to find them. One of the more obvious ones is people aren’t always what you expect them to be. Kind of the whole point was to take a family, show their dynamic when there are no stakes and then show the way that dynamic can change when the stakes are raised. Drake, the Joe Swanberg character, is kind of the perfect example of that, the way he kind of transforms as the situation gets more and more serious.
Adam Wingard: A lot of the sense of the humor of the film really comes from continuing that family dynamic even whenever the shit hits the fan. The movie doesn’t really have gags and jokes in a normal comedy kind of way. The humor actually comes from the way the characters are reacting to an outlandish situation. They’re still yelling at each other about their little squabbles and everything while people are dying around them and stuff. Maintaining that and having the actors do it without necessarily winking at the audience is what I think makes the film funny to people.
They never do cauterize Drake, do they?
Simon Barrett: No, no. There’s something to be said for if you have a stab wound and the weapon is left in the wound, you’re not supposed to take it out until you get to a hospital, because the blade itself is actually depressing the bleeding at that point. So if you get stabbed anywhere and you’re like, “Fuck, this knife is sticking out of me. I don’t want that. I need to move around” and you pull the knife out, there’s a chance that you’re just going to open up an artery and bleed to death. Movies get that wrong probably 100% of the time. If you’re stabbed with something in real life, unless it’s really going to be an obstacle to you, you’re not supposed to take it out until you get to the ER.
That’s the issue there. Wherever that is, if they moved it, there’s a chance it could nick something or rupture something and he’d bleed out or asphyxiate on his own blood within a minute. Again, we’re obviously making a very fun movie that tries to be very silly and ridiculous at times and let the audience have fun with it, but I think the way to do that is to play fair with some of the practicality. That’s actually really real stuff and that’s why the character who tells them to not do what they’re thinking of doing ends up being the character that has the most strength and ability to deal with the situation and that’s one of the first ways she shows it. Nobody gets that but whatever.
Well, guys, that’s our time.
Simon Barrett: Oh, okay, I guess we’ll end on that. Is there anything that we haven’t said in our previous twelve interviews with you?
That’s my challenge. If they offer me an interview with SImon and Adam and I say I’m out of questions, then I’ve failed. So I hope I still had good questions for you.
Adam Wingard: So far so good.
Simon Barrett: It’s going great. Eventually you’re just going to be like, “So what do you guys think of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil?”
Wow, good one, Simon. That’s actually come back across my path a few times since Ithaca.
Simon Barrett: Oh really? I still love La Jetée. That’s one of the best films I ever saw in film school.
That one, obviously, but Sans Soleil has a Criterion Collection for it.
Simon Barrett: I know, I own it because it has La Jetée on it and it’s the best transfer of La Jetée.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
