I first saw You’re Next at the Toronto Film Festival where it rocked the Midnight Madness section in 2011. I interviewed writer SImon Barrett, director Adam Wingard and stars Sharni Vinson and Barbara Crampton there, and continued to interview them at SXSW this year when the film played. The horror film shows a bickering family deal with a violent attack by masked intruders, until one of them fights back. Now the film is opening this weekend and I just can’t seem to let You’re Next go. I spoke with Wingard and Barrett again, and since I went to film school at Ithaca College with Barrett, I had to begin our interview with an obscure question about a teacher we had that no one else will get.
CraveOnline: If Nina Martin could see us now, right?
Simon Barrett: I’m sure she’d have total indifference to the role of gender in my current production, but you know, she’d I guess be happy that we’re not both starving on the street.
The plan that the intruders have in You’re Next, and we see the details in the background… but it’s not hammered in. What was the balance of explaining their plan and leaving some of it up to the audience to figure out?
Simon Barrett: Yeah, I think Adam and I, one of our mission statements that we give ourselves going into movies is that if you can only watch a movie once and you wouldn’t enjoy it a second time, then it’s probably not a great film. We’re obviously always trying to make the best films possible. At the same time I don’t like to make movies that you tell the viewer, “Oh, you have to see it three times before you can understand it.” So there is a fine line of giving them just enough information that you get that it totally makes sense, but maybe the second time you see the movie it adds up a little more.
One of the things that we can talk about is one of the things that we were trying to do to set this film apart from all the home invasion based horror films that have come out recently is we wanted the villains to have a plan. We wanted it to be a motivated attack and motivated murders that were happening that had a real actual reason behind them. So I’m dropping hints throughout the original script as to how long they’ve been planning this and how some of the original killings tie into the killings that we’re witnessing.
At the same time, you want to assume that your audience is intelligent and you don’t have to spell that stuff out for them, that they will just get it. I could have a scene where the killers sit around and talk about their plan, or one of our heroes in the family figures it out step by step, but you’ve seen those scenes a million times. I think one of the points of You’re Next was hey, you think you know what this movie’s going to do, so let’s just skip all that stuff that you’ve seen a million times and assume that you get it and move on from there.
That’s the boat I was in seeing it the second time. I caught things like the Power Bar wrappers in the closet.
Simon Barrett: Yeah, and the bottles of urine.
Lionsgate is the Saw studio and you have some great traps in You’re Next but they’re not really emphasizing the traps in the advertising. Would you guys emphasize the traps more?
Simon Barrett: No way. Among other things, as you just said Saw did that.
Adam Wingard: And also, the whole point of Saw was about traps and this movie, I think the traps are more of a surprise for the audience. They’re done in a different way. They’re more fun kind of setups and it’s more about the setup than it is necessarily the execution, like “Oh my God, I can’t believe now they’re in a pit filled with syringes.” It doesn’t have that same type of immediacy to it. That’s how a lot of the film is. It’s not about what really happens in the film. It’s about the execution of it, so you have to pick the marketing stuff carefully because obviously the masks are something that stand out without having to know anything about the tone of the movie itself.
So I think everything they’re doing completely makes sense. It’s not actually an easy film to market because a lot of it, you don’t want to give away too much. A lot of the film’s fun is not really knowing the direction it’s going to take. It’s a movie about tones and so forth, so that’s something that’s not as easy to categorize in a quick advertisement. You just have to throw in the most successful elements and I don’t think traps are that.
Simon Barrett: Yeah, we’re big fans of Saw and we’re big fans of James [Wan] and Leigh [Whannell]’s work, but like Adam said, the traps in Saw and what makes them fun is that they’re designed to torture people physically and psychologically. You’re Next was all about having a real hard-edged, tough practicality to everything. The only reason anyone uses traps in You’re Next is to maim or kill. That’s just such a different thing that I think it would probably just confuse people if we emphasize it too much in the marketing, or for example if they were to read this interview.
