Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett are no strangers to quality filmmaking. The director/writer combo are the brains behind the 2013 hit home-invasion flick “You’re Next” and are currently gearing up to release their newest film, the action/thriller “The Guest.”
(Photo Courtesy of Picturehouse)“The Guest” stars "Downton Abbey’s" Dan Stevens as David, an ex-soldier who shows up at the Peterson family’s doorstep one day to fulfill the final wishes of their son Caleb, with whom he served. However, things are not as they appear to be and soon the family starts to wonder just who David really is and what his intentions are.
Wingard says the idea for the film came to him one day after watching old '80s movies; their influences can be found throughout the movie.
“I watched the original ‘Terminator’ and the original ‘Halloween’ and thought about how much fun it would be to make a movie that sort of melded the two genres together,” Wingard said. “So I called Simon to tell him the idea and things went from there.”
Fortunately, Barrett already had a script that he was working on that seemed to fit with Wingard’s idea of where he wanted to go.
“I had a script about a soldier visiting the family of someone he served with, but the tone just wasn’t right,” Barrett said. “Then when Adam told me his idea, it seemed like a logical merge, and this was the result of that.”
After the success of “You’re Next,” Wingard said producers were willing to hear the pair out on what ideas they had with regards to their next film. Originally, the duo thought their next project was going to be a big action film set in Korea, but they scrapped that idea in favor of “The Guest.”
“It wasn’t so much a matter of ‘What could we do next?’ rather one of ‘What should we do next?’” Wingard said. “After the success of 'You’re Next,' we found that producers were a little bit more trusting. So we decided to shake things up and go in an entirely different direction than what we had previously done.”
Barrett said doing something different was the logical decision in order to avoid being tagged as “horror guys.”
“We wanted to do something different because we didn’t want to just be known as those guys who did ‘You’re Next.’ We wanted to show that we’re capable of working in more than one genre.”
In an independent film market full of trademark styles, Wingard and Barrett have found theirs in breaking down genre clichés. “You’re Next” did this perfectly by avoiding the final, helpless girl trope so commonly found in horror films today, while “The Guest” manages to do so in sexualizing its male lead.
“Today, so many horror films fail to land, because they’re busy objectifying their female leads,” Wingard said. “The recent 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' with Jessica Biel was super guilty of this. Her character was a total badass, but because her jeans rode so low and everything was hanging out, it took away from the character.
"So we wanted to make sure that we stayed away from that in 'You’re Next.' In 'The Guest,' it was very much intentional. One review I saw said we shot Dan like ‘a sexy new car,’ and I think that’s super accurate.”
Barrett agrees with the sentiment of elevating different elements of characters to break stereotypes.
“That was very much intentional,” Barrett said. “We wanted to take familiar genre tropes and sort of flip them on their head and make them feel new and fresh.”
Another way Wingard adds a signature style to his films is by reveling in the films that inspired him rather than shying away from it. “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch” clearly inspired the film’s climactic sequence, as well as the score.
“It’s my favorite 'Halloween' movie,” Wingard said. “And I think people would be a lot more forgiving of it if it didn’t have the 'Halloween' moniker at the front of it. I love the '80s synthesizer score, and in fact it’s one of the few movies that John Carpenter did the score for, but didn’t direct. I really wanted to channel that sound and actually, Stephen (Moore, who did the film’s score) actually had the same synthesizer Carpenter used. I don’t think the guy owns anything newer than 1990.”
Fans of Wingard’s films will often notice recurring faces, including those of fellow filmmakers Joe Swanberg (director of “Drinking Buddies”) and Ti West (director of “House of the Devil”). In fact, the three helped bring the “mumblecore” movement to popularity.
Mumblecore films are those with small budgets and naturalistic dialogue. Wingard says that the genre was an incredibly helpful tool in helping to get films made while keeping the budget low.
“The whole mumblecore thing really stemmed from having a small budget and not using SAG (Screen Actor’s Guild) actors. I met Joe at the Birmingham Film Festival, and he recommended Amy (Seimetz, who starred in “You’re Next) so it just turned into all of us recommending other people,” Wingard said. “And because those relationships were already there the dialogue came really naturally because it was like they were just playing characterized versions of themselves. But we’ve all sort of grown from that I think. Ti’s doing a western, Joe’s doing films with Anna Kendrick, so I think we’ve all sort of graduated from the mumblecore school of filmmaking. Not to say we’ll never work together again, but we’ve just all got our own things going.”
Barrett says he feels the same way.
“If I could make movies with Anna Kendrick instead of us, I’d go for it too,” Barrett joked.
“The Guest” opens Sept. 17.
Reach the reporter at seweinst@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @S_Weinstein95
Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter.
