Interview (Written): Fede Alvarez (“Don’t Breathe”)
A /film interview with Fede Alvarez, writer-director of the thriller movie Don’t Breathe. IMDb plot summary:
A group of friends break into the house of a wealthy blind man, thinking they’ll get away with the perfect heist. They’re very wrong.
Excerpts from the interview:
When you’re making a movie as tight as this, how do you go about whittling it down to find that lean story?
Some of it is in the editing, because there was a lot more in the script. As you’ll get to see in the extras on the DVD, there were three scenes that were deleted from the beginning. It’s always a mystery, how to…you’re making this film for the entire fucking planet, right? We’re spending $10 million, which isn’t huge, but it’s still a lot of money. I have to make it for the globe. It has to be an international story. And I like to do that. I always try to talk to everybody and not make it for one audience. That means a more sophisticated audience might take thirty minutes of slow burn and enjoy that version, because when people read the script, nobody complained about it being too slow. It had more story for Alex [Dylan Minnette] and why he decided to rob. He has a scene with his dad where we learn that he wanted [Alex] to become a cop and put a lot of pressure on him to go to the police academy. But he doesn’t want to do that. He just wants to leave town. He wants to be a lawyer. That’s why he knows about the law and all those things. That’s what leads him to make the decision to say “Fuck it, I’m just going to do it.”
In the script, there were other things with Money [Daniel Zovatto] and his family, but we didn’t shoot a lot of those things. We shot a couple of those scenes that were pretty good, but in the editing, it felt like it dragged. There’s another audience, not the film connoisseurs, that I call the savages! [Laughs] They want to get to the scares. “I’m not scared! I’m not scared!” and it’s only five minutes into the movie! They’re going to start throwing shit at the screen. So have to make everyone happy and that’s the goal with these movies and the catch 22 situation. When I watch the movie, I usually feel…when the night arrives and the sun sets and the music starts and you say “Here we go”, it’s the right moment to do that.
Stephen Lang in Don’t Breathe
Was there every any pressure to make a less harsh movie? To be less cruel?
No. I’ve been super lucky in Hollywood so far that the two movies I’ve made, obviously because I made them for a budget, I get the freedom to do what I want. Having Sam Raimi as a producer and him being a director and him knowing that a director wants freedom to really deliver a movie…I’ve been very lucky with both movies to get away with exactly what I wanted to do. Movies can alway be better and I’m sure my movies can be better and I try to learn on each movie I do and make my next movie better than the previous one, before I start declining in my career! [Laughs]
There was something I realized lately. On Evil Dead, they said to do whatever I wanted and to go crazy as long as I had a house and a book. It’s like going to a friend’s house and they tell you to feel like you’re at home and take whatever you want from the fridge. You don’t take your pants off and grab a beer. You don’t do that! On this movie, I did that! This movie was my home. It’s my script. Me and my co-writer wrote it from scratch and took it to the producers when it was ready: this is the movie we want to shoot. We wrote it on spec, we didn’t pre-sell anything, which we could have done, but we decided to keep it for ourselves. It was us doing exactly the movie we wanted to do. I’ve been lucky so far that Sony has empowered my and financed my movies and have taken a lot of risks. That’s a lot of credit to them. There might be an instinct at some point to making something more…what’s the word? It’s not even more Americanized, just more down-the-middle. This could have been a PG-13 movie if you wanted. You’d have to kill a lot of things, but you could turn it into a PG-13 movie.
I’m definitely not in this for the money. Otherwise, my second movie would be one of those franchises I was offered after Evil Dead. I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to do my films. To try to keep making my films. This one is really a display of all my obsessions and the things I channel in all of my movies and everything I like about the genre and everything I think a good genre thriller should have. That big twist scene in the cellar that divides audiences…I know that because I hear people talk about that. Some say “It didn’t need that!” and others say “Thank you so much for that!” That’s my kind of audience. I think this movie should be provocative and should push boundaries. All of the classics have at least one scene, one moment, that was completely fucked up. We’ve gotten used to them and they’re not so shocking anymore. Watch those classic movies. Go back to Psycho and The Exorcist. People were losing their minds, running out of the theater, fainting…it was all kinds of madness! And that’s what made those movies as big as they were and so polarizing.
Here is a trailer for Don’t Breathe:
For the rest of the interview, go here.