Go Into The Story Interview: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods

My 2018 in-depth conversation with the writing duo whose breakout film A Quiet Place turned into a horror franchise, spawning two sequels: A Quiet Place Part II (2020) and A Quiet Place: Day One (2024). The three movies have grossed $900M in global box office revenues.

The writing-directing team has gone on to make multiple movies including Haunt (2019), 65 (2023), and the upcoming Heretic (2024). In addition, they wrote the screenplay for The Boogeyman (2023).

I can’t remember how Bryan, Scott, and I crossed paths, but in 2019, I invited them to speak to film school students at DePaul University in Chicago (you can see the video of that Q&A below). They are not only talented filmmakers, but also authentically good guys.

Here is my entire 2018 interview with Bryan and Scott.

Scott Myers: Let’s start in Iowa, Bettendorf Middle School where I believe you two met and discovered you shared a mutual interest in Star Wars. Could you take us back in time and tell us about how you began your cinematic journey together?

Scott Beck: Bryan and I first met when we were 11 years old. At the time, neither of us knew we had an interest in making movies. We just had a mutual friend that introduced us and, over talking, discovered that we both used our action figures to make stop motion movies. Because we had that interest, we joined forces because nobody else we knew was making movies.

It progressed quickly from there where we started talking about screenplays at a very early age and writing short scripts. One of our first films we produced, we were probably 12 or 13 years old. It was about friends that hang out, have a sleepover, and then aliens invade.

It’s an absolutely terrible, terrible film that Bryan and I also acted in, but that was our first go at things. After that point, when we were in high school, that’s when we started thinking about writing for a career, directing for a career. We just took our ambitions to the next level.

It was the year of, let’s see, 1999, so it was the year of The Sixth Sense, American Beauty…

Bryan Woods: Magnolia. One of the best years in cinema as far as the years we’ve been alive and digesting movies. It was incredibly inspiring to be watching movies. Then we would try to replicate that by making micro‑budget feature films.

At the time, our heroes ‑‑ like Paul Thomas Anderson or Martin Scorsese ‑‑ we were making these really ambitious, a lot of characters, like big ensemble dramas and making them on a micro‑budget level, and just doing our damnedest to emulate our heroes, and failing miserably, of course.

Making the movies from beginning to end, learning how to shoot, learning how to record audio, doing audition sessions with local actors, and learning how to screen a movie in front of a local audience, and hand out test cards. Basically, the whole process of filmmaking in our own young, high school naive type of way.

Scott Myers: These are some of the titles I’ve seen, like Amber, Shades, The Bride Wore Blood?

Bryan: Yeah.

Scott Beck: Those were all movies that we made basically for no budget. Just using our friends or doing casting calls in Iowa where we grew up. That, for us, was very much our film school, those years in high school, just immersing ourselves in the process.

Scott Myers: M. Night Shyamalan, evidently, is a big influence for each of you. Particularly, I think, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. What specifically is it about Shyamalan that inspires you?

Bryan: A couple of things. Since we have the time, I guess I’ll start at the beginning. When we saw The Sixth Sense for the first time, it really got us excited about films as an art form. Being a writer, that script is so beautifully crafted. That ending, it just hits you out of nowhere.

It really blew our minds and it made us feel like, “Oh wow, we would love to do that for an audience someday. We would love to write a movie.” Then his follow‑up Unbreakable is a great… it’s so beautifully directed. You really feel the directing of the screenplay. That inspired us to make films. There’s that.

I think, on a global level, what we love about his films is that they are often very flashy, high concepts that feel at home in a summer blockbuster market place, but they’re executed with the craft, and detail, and love of any film that you would find at the art house.

For us, Shyamalan’s movies are articulated in such a way that impresses us as much as a Francois Truffaut film.

Scott Beck: I think what we respond to the most is just how layered his stories can be. If you want to watch his films just for entertainment sake, they will deliver, but if you want to dig underneath there and find metaphors, the thematic levels, and the allegories, they’re all there.

You can unpack it and go seven layers deep with his films. That’s what we always appreciate about genre storytelling, when you can do more than just scare the audience, you can tell a story that has intelligence.

Scott Myers: You do your ‘film school education’ in high school. Then you two decide to go to college at the University of Iowa. Did you do much honing of your screenwriting and filmmaking skills there?

Scott Beck: Certainly like at University of Iowa, we took various writing classes. We weren’t in the formal writers workshops. The fiction writing classes there were certainly informative. I think, for the most part, to get critiqued and get feedback, what’s working or not working, rather in your writing, which I look back on and I laugh.

In college, when you open it up for discussion, people were very reticent to offer constructive criticism. Yet, that’s the most important thing that I think anybody can have in their young writing career and also throughout life. You should always be able to learn from your current work.

I think that’s what we always were honing in on during our years at University of Iowa, in just making these films in general. It’s not just resting on our laurels, but figuring out, why didn’t this work? Why isn’t this making an audience laugh, or why aren’t they terrified? Certainly, those years were very important to us at Iowa.

Scott Myers: In fact, in December 2005 you win the MTV’s Best Film on Campus competition. I think you got a development deal with MTV out of that. Is that right?

Scott Beck: [laughs] That’s a funny story in and of itself actually.

Bryan: We had won a development deal as the prize for this nationwide filmmaking competition to basically develop a movie with MTV Films. The problem [laughs] that we found ourselves in was that MTV Films’ company was collapsing at that time. By the time we had gone through the work of negotiating a deal, they didn’t even really exist anymore.

We found ourselves more or less without anything. The prize was null and void ostensibly. What we did is we tried to turn that into an opportunity by introducing ourselves to David Gale who, at the time, was the president of MTV Films. He was transitioning into the head of their new media division. We just introduced ourselves.

We said, “Hey. Here’s who we are. Here’s our interest in film. Here’s what we love about your career and all the amazing movies you’ve made.” He’d presided over a lot of terrific films. One of our favorites being Alexander Payne’s “Election.” We were very aware of David’s filmography, and we’re big fans. We just kept bugging him.

We basically kept saying like, “We have this thing. The deal’s not…It’s gone, but would you be open to hearing some ideas for some projects? Can we pitch you some ideas?” He was very generous with his time, and we were able to pitch this idea for this project called “Spread.”

It’s about a sexually transmitted disease that takes over this campus. It was kind of like It Follows meets Contagion before both of those things existed. He was able to help us get a very, very, very tiny budget to go back to our home state of Iowa and shoot a little pilot presentation for it.

We’ve always looked at David as a great mentor in our careers and somebody who helped us out when he really didn’t have to.

Scott Myers: When you’re at the University of Iowa, as I understand it, you had the genesis of this idea for A Quiet Place. There was a simple premise ‑‑ there was a quote I saw in one of your interviews ‑‑ “If you make a sound, you die.” How did you come up with that story conceit?

Scott Beck: When we were at University of Iowa, there were two things that really led us to this idea. One, we were exposed to a lot of great silent films, or films without much dialogue. It was Charlie Chaplin, it was Buster Keaton, and this French filmmaker named Jacques Tati who worked in the post sound era.

His movies really activated sound as a storytelling device, but there was a lack of dialogue in his films. What we found so brilliant about that was he was able to convey so much about character, about emotion, intent, and humanity through simple visual storytelling devices, and we found that super fascinating.

At the same time, we were taking this nonverbal communication course at the University of Iowa, and that just led us to witnessing how often people communicate without saying a single word.

We found that to be very powerful and beautiful, and thought, “What if we took that knowledge, combine it with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and then additionally combine that with our love of genre filmmaking, such as Alien or Jaws, or Hitchcock. That felt like that was the formation of a very interesting type of film.

Scott Myers: If that’s the case, basically you hatch that idea at the University of Iowa, I think it’s safe to say you’ve amortized the cost of your education in a huge way.

[laughter]

Scott Beck: Certainly. Certainly.

Bryan: It was weird because it wasn’t like we were like, “Eureka! Here’s a movie idea.” It was just like, “Oh, someday it would be very cool to make our silent film.” That’s what we kept calling it, our silent film, but it always felt like a gimmick. We didn’t have a story. We didn’t have characters. We didn’t really have even a core idea. It was just that concept.

It wasn’t until many, many years later where we started crafting the story of what A Quiet Place eventually became.

Scott Beck: I think it was around like 2013. We were in post‑production on a film we had just written and directed called Nightlight. We were trying to figure out what the next project could be and, additionally, what the next project could be that, if everybody passed on the script, we could just go off to Iowa and make that movie on a very scalable level that didn’t require much in the way of budget. That’s when we came back to the silent film idea.

We thought about our home state of Iowa, how, “Oh, we could base this on a farm.” Then we thought about our inspirations of Alien and Jaws, and those are pure monster movies. That really started the genesis of the idea of having this genre bend into it where it is a monster that’s hunting based on sound.

All these ideas started congealing, and we had pages and pages written on this idea. We loosely started pitching it to friends, to various producers that we had relationships with. Just on a very nascent level we would tell them the conceit of the idea. What was really discouraging was nobody really saw the vision of the film.

They thought that a script that has no dialogue would be very tedious to read. They didn’t think it was more than a gimmick. That challenged us to really think about how we can elevate the material. Immediately we thought, “Oh, it needs to be about characters. It needs to be about family. It needs to be about something on a very thematic level.”

Even then, we put the idea away for a couple years just because we got inundated with other projects and things that hit a dead end, but the passion for A Quiet Place just stuck around. Eventually, we pulled it back out and started writing the script.

Scott Myers: I read where you did a 15‑page proof‑of‑concept to kind of test it out a bit.

Bryan: Yeah, exactly. It was a proof‑of‑concept in two different ways. In one way, we thought, “Oh, hell, maybe we’ll just go shoot this as a short in Iowa so that people can understand why we’re so excited about it,” because, again, it was falling on deaf ears.

Two, it was a proof‑of‑concept for ourselves as writers to experiment and see how challenging would it be…These are the questions we’re asking ourselves. How challenging would it be to convey backstory, to convey motivation, to convey concept without dialogue, without the usual crutch of being able to just have a character say something or exposit something?

We wrote those 15 pages and did nothing with them. We put them in a drawer. We were just like, “Eh, this is interesting. Maybe we’ll do something with this. We don’t really know what.”

We put it in a drawer and then we’re working on all these other…We had television pitches, feature things that we’re working on that are…Of course, the agent and manager are like, “Screen Gems really wants to buy this idea. You guys gotta write this thing over here, and you gotta write this thing over here. It’s like really hot. There’s a window for it blah, blah, blah.”

They were just directing our attention to these other things. It wasn’t until we had a tiny, little window months and months after we had written these 15 pages, a tiny little window where we were just in between projects, and we sent the 15 pages to my fiancée and Scott’s wife.

They read the 15 pages, and they were like, “Why are you guys wasting your time on all these other things. Drop everything you’re doing and write A Quiet Place. This is the cool idea. This is something you guys are clearly passionate about. Go write that.” That’s what got us off our asses.

Scott Beck: Yeah, and also what’s worth noting about the 15 pages is that we wrote that as very much like the short version of the feature version. It sets up the farmstead. It sets up the threat. It sets up the pregnancy. Pays off the pregnancy. There’s all the tension and then has the whole emotional beat that’s in the final film.

Going back to those 15 pages, it was very clear what the expanded story would be. It was just more about how do we get these character depths even more explosive on screen, and how do we ratchet up this family dynamic. Then the fun and games of it with all the set pieces and imagining where we could really play up to the strength of the high concept.

Scott Myers: Proving that in a world of no’s ‑‑ Hollywood, where everybody, basically the default mode is to say ‘no’ ‑‑ and you had all these people looking at you with these blank faces like, “Seriously? A movie with almost no dialogue?” Yet you managed to find one person to say ‘yes’, and, in this case, it was Michael Bay and his production company Platinum Dunes. He basically said to Paramount, “You got to make this movie,” and they stepped up and bought the thing.

Scott Beck: Yeah.

Bryan: I think as soon as people saw it on the page and it wasn’t just us pitching it, and they could see where our heads were at, it clicked. Platinum Dunes were the most unlikely partner for this project. The last thing we were thinking of is, “Let’s make a quiet, subtle movie with Michael Bay.”

[laughter]

Bryan: That was like a bizarre marriage, but I have to say, when we met with them, they completely got the vision. They completely got what we wanted to do with it. They completely echoed and contributed a lot of enthusiasm and vision for the project that was just eye to eye with what we wanted to do.

Michael, with his company, Platinum Dunes, they work a lot in the horror space, but they also take a lot of chances with young filmmakers. Being young writers ourselves we felt like we would be protected there after speaking with them. Yes, exactly as you said. They brought it directly into Paramount.

Paramount was very excited. Michael and the guys at Platinum Dunes ‑‑ Brad Fuller and Drew Form ‑‑ were able to push that enthusiasm over the edge by just calling up the president of the studio and just being like, “Why have you guys not made a deal on this movie yet? Why are we not making this movie yet? Why are we not filming it?”

They just were super aggressive, and Paramount made a really aggressive offer after that and bought up the script.

Scott Myers: That speaks to the synergy between what’s on the printed page, people connecting to it, then having a passion to carry the ball forward. So let’s dig into the story for A Quiet Place. Here’s how the plot’s described on the movie’s official website.

“A family of four must navigate their lives in silence after mysterious creatures that hunt by sound threaten their survival. If they hear you, they hunt you.”

Of course, that tagline echoes almost exactly this intricate seed you began the whole process with: “You make a sound, you die.”

[laughter]

Scott Myers: Talk about a pure story concept.

Scott Beck: Yeah, it’s funny. When we saw the official logline from Paramount, we had to dig back into our files, just out of curiosity of how we described… We always write out the loglines for our films very early in the process, just to figure out what the simple story is.

It’s amazing to see how relatively unscathed all these original ideas were, considering you’re partnering with a big producer, you’re partnering with a major studio. Usually, things get mixed up quite a bit in the process. It’s been fun to be a part of something that feels entirely faithful to the original conceit.

Scott Myers: It’s interesting because John Krasinski comes on as director, actor, and, eventually, co‑writer. I read the script and watched the movie. There are some changes, but it is substantially very much the same story as what you all wrote.

Scott Beck: Yeah. It’s been a fun process to see how things evolve. Certainly, the core conceit, the family, a lot of the set pieces are there. John, when he came on board as a filmmaker, we always say he was also coming on board as a father, too.

When he first got the script, he had his second daughter. I think it was only three weeks after she was born that he picked up the script. It hit him in a place of vulnerability, where he really responded to the idea of fatherhood and parents that are unable to protect their children.

His process on doing a pass on the script was very much injecting that into the characters and trying to bring all those themes as much to the surface as possible. Part of that is there’s a couple of scenes that he contributed that actually have dialog there.

I think they were there to really speak to the idea of how scary it is to be in a world where your children are even more vulnerable than ever. How can you really rise to the occasion and protect them? His lens, from being a father, was a very important lens, I think, to have on the film as a director and co‑writer.

Scott Myers: I’d like to take a look at the evolution of the story. In your original script, the mother and father were Mia and John. The children were Will who’s ten, and April, eight. In the movie, the names were changed ‑‑ Evelyn, Lee, Regan, and Marcus. I’m guessing that the name of Regan, that was a nod to the girl in The Exorcist. That’s her name.

Scott Beck: You might be right.

Scott Myers: In your iteration, how did that family of characters emerge into being, those four particular characters?

Bryan: Man, that’s such a good question. I’m getting into a time machine right now and going back to it. I think it was just pretty organic. We knew we wanted to have a family. We knew we wanted them all to have their various issues. We knew the younger boy was the one who was afraid.

We knew that the young daughter, who is deaf, was facing challenges in trying to step up and be a bigger part of the family. The father couldn’t see that because he’s this classic patriarch of the family who’s trying to keep them safe. We knew we wanted to upend some of those conventions or stereotypes by the end of the story.

Scott Beck: Yeah, and I think with the mother, too. She was always a character that we felt could be the beacon of hope that’s keeping this family together. Obviously, she’s pregnant in the film. You can read that one of two ways. You can read that as, “Oh, that’s a terrible decision to make in this post‑apocalyptic world,” or it is an eye towards the future.

That was super‑important to us from a storytelling perspective, especially when you’re doing a story that’s set in the post‑apocalyptic genre. Too often, in films like that, they have this hopelessness that permeates every single step of the way, including the ending.

For us, we wanted to make sure that there was always that beacon of promise that the family could move past their issues if they were able to finally communicate.

Scott Myers: I’d like to talk about that pregnancy thing because you can completely see the narrative value of that idea. It’s like a ticking bomb. We know at some point, she’s going to have to deliver the baby and do it quietly, which seems like an almost impossible task. How early in the gestation of the story did you hit on that idea? Was that something that came pretty early on?

Bryan: Yeah, it was something that came in the proof‑of‑concept stage. We were sitting around, talking about, “What is the worst thing that could possibly happen in a world where you can’t make a noise?” and very quickly came to the notion of, “There’s nothing you can do to stop a baby from crying.” That is going to be absolutely terrifying.

It was also an opportunity to comment on a theme and what the story was about. Ultimately, for us, the story was about this family that suffered a tragedy. They lost one of their own. They lost a family member and, as a result of that, that tragedy has fractured their ability to communicate with each other.

In particular, it’s damaged the ability of the daughter, the youngest, Regan, and the father to communicate. We wanted the whole movie to drive towards this resolution where he finally says what he needs to say to her. It’s character, but it’s also theme.

It’s theme, and we wanted them to live in a world where we are literally not able to talk to each other as a family, but we’re also metaphorically [laughs] not able to talk to each other. We felt like even if this post‑apocalyptic event wasn’t happening, they still wouldn’t be talking properly.

Scott Myers: Of course, it’s ironic because they can’t talk. It looks like a metaphor for their problem with communicating, right?

Scott Beck: Exactly.

Scott Myers: This idea that the girl is deaf and wears a hearing aid, was that also early on in the process that you came up with that?

Scott Beck: Yeah. It actually was something we poached from one of our other screenplays that we were working at the time and never finished. It was an adaptation of the Pied Piper story. We had written a character in that story that was deaf.

In that incarnation, the tale of the Pied Piper, he lures children away based on a sound. We felt that if somebody is impervious to that sound, then what if it’s a deaf character? We used that same idea, used that and reappropriated it in A Quiet Place.

It felt like an interesting opportunity to us from the standpoint that, at first in the story, you’re perceiving a hearing impairment as a potential weakness. By the end, you’re able to learn what the weaknesses of the creatures are and use your own abilities as a strength.

Scott Myers: One thing about your script ‑‑ and the movie does, too ‑‑ it drops us in to the situation in media res. No crawl upfront that explains the post-apocalyptic scenario, you’re just… boom! Right into it. It creates questions and curiosity, so we participate in the story process as it unfolds. Did you always envision that? Start us right in the middle of the story?

Bryan: Absolutely. We wanted to keep the mystery alive. Part of the fun of the movie is just figuring out what’s going on. In the very, very early draft ‑‑ I think you have the spec draft that sold ‑‑ then, obviously, we did some revisions after that.

Very early on, the idea that attracted us was opening with a completely idyllic farmscape and what appears to be the perfect family living out the perfect life. Little by little, as this family starts to move about their farmhouse, we start to realize that there are weird things going on.

They’re putting padding on the walls. They’re wearing shoe covers on their feet. They don’t seem to be speaking very much. Everything is really quiet. It all builds up to that Monopoly scene where there’s a noise and we realize, “Oh, there’s creatures out there. If they make a noise, then they’re in danger.”

That’s how it started. Then it started to evolve more into this Jaws opening, where we set the stakes up immediately. We would pay full credit to John for going this dark this early, but we love it. The finished form of the movie is more just like… We’re going to see the monster actually kill their family member in the opening moments.

To your question, more on point, we talked a lot about how we love the movie Prometheus, but seeing Prometheus did not enhance our viewing of the movie Alien. Having all that back story, we love how mysterious, simple, clean, weird, and unusual Alien is, and we love taking that journey and not really knowing exactly what’s going on.

We wanted to capture some of that magic for A Quiet Place and let the audience try to figure it out as they go along, and not answer too many of their questions throughout the process.

Scott Myers: I have a Facebook group called Zero Draft Thirty. I said I was interviewing you and everybody went crazy. I got a couple of questions. One of them from Adam Skelter: “How much of the mythology or origin was developed behind the story in terms of the aliens and that kind of thing?”

I know in the script, you referred to them as aliens. Did you have that all figured out or did you just go with it’s mysterious in your mind, too?

Scott Beck: There’s two answers to that. One, we definitely did our homework. Even if it’s not going to be on the final form on the page, you need to still understand the rules that you’re setting for yourself or the rules that you build for yourself.

We certainly had the idea of where the origin is, how they operate, what’s happened to the rest of the world, but, again, that all lives behind the scenes. For us, what we felt most important is to feel the immediate fear and feel like you’re in the characters’ shoes.

Obviously, the characters have been living in this world for quite some time. It was like, “If you’re going to catch the audience up to speed, do it elegantly and don’t shove it down their throats.”

Bryan: I guess the only thing I would add to that is we talked a lot about the monster in terms of the logistics and the origin. How did they get here? What is it doing? We talked about all that stuff.

Just as much as talking about that stuff, we talked about it as a metaphor of sorts for the tragedy they suffered, coming in and infringing on their ability to communicate with each other.

Scott Beck: I would say the mythology even evolved into us when we were doing rewrites for Paramount, too. There were just interesting conversations that provoked new angles. Again, it doesn’t really exist in a hard‑hitting way in the film or even in our script, but it was very much a conversation piece.

Scott Myers: I’d like to go back to that family tragedy, to that event because it is handled differently in the movie. In my mind, I could see how both of them would work. In the movie, it’s still dropping us in media res. We’re in the middle of this post‑apocalyptic environment.

There we are, and these people are tiptoeing around, but unlike your script, the movie visualizes the tragedy. You actually see it, as opposed to it being referred to in backstory. In your minds, thinking about that, how do you… I guess that’s actually an interesting question from a screenwriting standpoint. You have those two choices. What was the argument for doing it the way that’s in the movie versus how you originally scripted it?

Scott Beck: In the movie, what helps is that it keeps things very contained. It keeps things in a relatively contained time period, but it also shows the stakes of the world. Whereas the intent behind the original spec draft…We’ll use it as an example since the backstory evolved over time.

That original spec draft, it was about showing the family suffering a tragedy before this cataclysmic event happened around the world and showing that the family problems were deep‑rooted in addition to having the origin story behind our issues of father and daughter as well as her hearing impairment.

It’s trying to bite off several different elements, but, again, what I think the final form of the film does is it just keeps things very simple, very clean. From an audience perspective, certainly gives you the expectations that all bets are off in terms of who these characters are and their survival possibilities throughout the course of the film.

Scott Myers: I think it also does something else, too, which you mentioned, that some people might say, “Well, why in the world would they get pregnant in this post‑apocalyptic environment? Particularly where noise is a big deal because babies make noises and childbirth and all that.”

The fact that we do experience that visceral way the loss of a child, you could see why the couple would say, “You know what? Let’s try again. Let’s fill that void.”

Scott Beck: Yeah, that makes sense. Again, for us, it comes down to the idea of hope and trying to rebuild from something that’s terrible, that we personally feel is a very inspiring message and certainly something that, hopefully, helps the narrative thrust behind these characters move toward a more thoughtful place than just everybody being in a very dark place, considering the circumstances.

Scott Myers: I have this theory about stories that, at the core of the protagonists’ journey, there’s this existential question, “Who am I?” It stands to reason that, if the whole point of a story, in some respects, is to service a character’s transformation, then, because they’re changing, that question of identity becomes a key one. Sure enough, in the movie, the wife asks the husband twice, “Who are we?” I’m curious as to your thoughts.

Bryan: Of course, absolutely. You hit the nail on the head and beautifully said. I don’t know that I could say it any better, but that’s always a big part of it, is “Who am I?”

Scott Beck: Yeah. I think great stories have arcs because you want to see how the character is reacting to what’s happening in the story. Sometimes some of the best films show that characters don’t change, but that has its own poignancy and power to it as well.

I think, yeah, you’re always rooting for some sort of transformation to see, in a self‑reflexive way, how would you actually react to these circumstances? Would you actually change and evolve in those circumstances?

Scott Myers: Yeah, that’s what Joseph Campbell said about “The Hero’s Journey.” The whole point is transformation.

Scott Beck: Exactly, yeah.

Scott Myers: Another one of the Zero Draft Thirty Facebook group members, Dee Chilton, asked, “Would Scott and Bryan have had the confidence to have written that original script in that way, which I loved reading, given it breaks so many, cough, screenwriting rules?”

Of course, you had an agent and a manager at that time. Were you aware of these so‑called screenwriting rules and that you were going against convention in a lot of ways that you do in the script?

Scott Beck: Of course. I think, to answer that specifically, for this script we knew there was no other way to do it. I would say even if this was a few years ago, before we were repped, we probably would’ve written it the same way just by virtue of it’s a silent film. What we thought was most important is to convey the visual experience on the page as much as possible.

Bryan: You could say it was born actually out of a lack of confidence.

[laughter]

Bryan: We wanted to make sure that producers and studio heads would read the script. Normally, dialogue is the easiest thing to turn the pages because it takes up the least amount of space, it’s blocked down, it’s easy to turn the page and read dialogue. Producers and studios hate reading blocks, and blocks, and blocks of description.

Scott Beck: We were looking at the Walter Hill and David Giler draft of Alien, and Dan Gilroy’s draft of Nightcrawler, and were just really in awe of how they were able to use words and spaces on the page to really just convey a mood, a tone, and a pace as well. That was always super important for us to crib from them.

Scott Myers: Yeah, that ‘haiku style of screenwriting, that’s what Walter Hill calls it.

Scott Beck: Exactly.

Scott Myers: As a response to people reading this script, I thought it was great that you do this because I can’t, in my mind, wrap my head around where this idea of screenwriting rules comes from. There’s no rule book, but people keep popping up. This is why these flame wars happen online on the most stupidest things.

I saw a Reddit thread and one of the commenters said, “I guess my point is, why can’t you be different? Why can’t you try doing your own thing? If a 68‑page spec horror by two relative unknowns, filled with Photoshopped pictures of buildings, buttons and Monopoly boards can get bought by Paramount, then surely anything is possible.” Do you think that’s a good lesson there for writers?

Scott Beck: Yeah, I think it certainly is. I believe the reason that we were able to forge ahead with that notion was because we had a backup plan. We knew if nobody cares about this, the two of us are so passionate about this idea that we’ll go off and make this.

Again, we wrote it for a certain degree of production where it could have been shot for 50 thousand dollars.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the exact same movie and maybe the set pieces would’ve been pulled back a little bit, but we were trying to design things on a page that we could totally foresee how those could be created on the cheap.

Bryan: I would also add to that that we were doing it for a reason. It’s funny because some of the stuff we’re doing on the page is incredibly gimmicky. That we would not be caught dead writing that way in certain other scripts.

It’s not a style that we have used in hardly anything else we’ve done, but it was true to the vision of this particular movie, which is a bizarre silent film that is, we felt, unlike anything people had seen in theaters. We just wanted to make sure that was captured on the page. It’s not necessarily something we’d do for anything.

I think you can break all the rules you want. If you have a darn good reason to do so, why not?

Scott Myers: That’s probably the safe takeaway for people. If it services the story, you can do it. If not, then it’s a gimmick. I’m a teacher and the script goes into my small category of scripts where the writers brazenly break these so‑called rules. Another one, and quite a contrast in tone, is (500) Days of Summer, where Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber said, “Screw it. Let’s go crazy and break every rule.”

In both cases what they did, what you guys did, it serviced the story. Again, as long as you’re doing that and what you write is clear to the reader, I think you can feel free to do anything you want.

Scott Beck: Exactly.

Scott Myers: I have one last question before I move into talking about the movie itself and production and all that. In your version of it, the micro‑budget version you would have in Iowa if you went back and did it, were you planning on having any soundtrack music at all?

Bryan: Not necessarily, although we did love the idea of keeping it sparse and quiet. We always knew that… In the areas where we failed as writers in terms of intent, emotion, backstory, etc., we knew that music and score would be an amazing piece of storytelling. That score can indicate so much more than words sometimes. We knew that would be something we’d have to lean on quite a bit.

Scott Beck: I think we also recognize that a lot of that heavy lifting could be achieved through sound design as well, which was one of the big reasons that we even wanted to write this. As fans of great movies and as filmmakers, sound is one of your greatest tools.

We felt that in a perfect world, A Quiet Place could be an incredible showcase for simply just the sonic atmosphere that accompanies the story.

Scott Myers: Yeah, well the soundtrack is great. That one theme is really [makes eerie sound] .

[laughter]

Scott Myers: It really does highlight the importance of sound even in the theater experience because you’re hearing people with their hands in the popcorn box…

Scott Beck: Yeah, our biggest fear with this film is that somebody’s going to get in a huge fight over chewing popcorn too loudly in the movie theater and annoying everybody.

Scott Myers: I honestly did cast a nasty look at the woman seated next to me who was chomping on popcorn.

[laughter]

Bryan: You’re not alone. You’re not alone. We have many stories of this. This is so funny.

Scott Myers: Let’s talk about the movie itself. It’s a small cast by virtue of the story conceit and, basically, a contained thriller, but what a cast. That Millicent Simmonds, terrific job as the daughter.

Bryan: Amazing.

Scott Myers: I thought that was phenomenal. Of course, she herself is deaf. As I understand it, Krasinski insisted on that, is that right?

Bryan: Yeah.

Scott Beck: Yeah, it was one of those situations where, by virtue of it being a deaf character, that if you cast somebody that actually had a hearing impairment, it would not only lend more credibility to that role, but, more importantly, it would inform that role in a way that I don’t think we could do as writers.

I think it really helped John as a director to simply have somebody that has lived this life and form who this character really should be and what those life experiences really are like. It’s certainly a really incredible story for us to see how Millicent Simmonds has taken that role and really achieved something that is better than the sum of its parts.

Scott Myers: Both of you were executive producers on it. Were you on set for the entire shoot?

Bryan: I was about to say “unfortunately” we weren’t and, yet, this is the greatest gift we could possibly have. We were directing another movie that we wrote at the exact same time that A Quiet Place was shooting.

It’s this movie called Haunt. We were deep into pre‑production and then eventually production while A Quiet Place was shooting, so we weren’t able to pull away from our production base on Haunt in Kentucky.

Scott Myers: Yeah, I’m going to talk about Haunt in just a second. So A Quiet Place had a great response at South By Southwest. I remember reading the reviews when it first was there. Of course, it’s a monster hit, pun intended there.

[laughter]

Scott Myers: With film critics, it’s got a 95 rating currently on Rotten Tomatoes. Commercially, 160 million dollars worldwide. Why do you think this movie has resonated so much with film critics and audiences?

Scott Beck: If I had to guess, I would suppose because it’s relatively unassuming. It poses itself as a monster movie, but with a concept that we feel hasn’t really been done in films, especially in this context. Beyond that, I’d like to think it’s the characters as well.

Many times you go into horror films with certain expectations, but if you can deliver something a little deeper in terms of character work and thematic layers that resonate with an audience ‑‑ in this instance it would be about family and be about parents trying to protect their children ‑‑ that can have a lasting effect that really subverts what your expectations are.

Bryan: Another thing that Scott and I talked about early on what we had hoped the final movie would be was something that was pure cinema, something that does what cinema does better than any other art form in the way that it uses visuals, and sound, and music.

By doing so, by not having dialogue in a traditional sense, by not having a language barrier, our hope was that it would play just as well in every other country on planet earth as it does here domestically.

That was always our pipe dream, is that it could travel, and play, and just work as cinema. Perhaps there’s something there. I don’t know.

Scott Myers: I think that’s right. It’s doing very well overseas. The international audience, visual storytelling is even more important because a dialogue can be culturally specific. You’re dealing with universal themes here ‑‑ communication, protecting your family, the lizard brain, just fear and survival.

If all that isn’t enough, there’s a tweet from an author of some repute who called the movie, “An extraordinary piece of work.” That was Stephen King. What was your reaction to that?

Scott Beck: Could not believe it. That, for us, is probably the pinnacle of this whole process. As lifelong Stephen King fans, that meant the world to us.

Scott Myers: I retweeted a Variety article talking about how the movie was far exceeding box office projections. I tweeted something like, “Huh, a movie that’s not a prequel, not a sequel, not a remake, not a reboot. It’s almost like people want to see original films.”

[laughter]

Scott Myers: That got picked up and was retweeted more than anything else I’ve ever done.

Bryan: No way.

Scott Beck: That’s funny.

Bryan: I love that you said that. That is, hands down, our favorite thing. As filmgoers, we have been craving something fresh and new and something that’s not a comic book, not a sequel, not a remake or a reboot, or whatever. We crave those stories.

We felt like we can’t be the only ones out there that want to see something slightly different or a new spin on an old thing. The fact that the movie’s been embraced on that level is our proudest achievement. Hopefully, now as filmgoers, we get to watch more movies like that.

Scott Beck: Yeah, in some ways, we feel like it’s somewhat full circle going back to the movies that inspired us in high school like Magnolia, American Beauty, and The Sixth Sense, all these films that just offered a fresh perspective in an otherwise crowded cinema market.

As Bryan said, that’s one of the favorite things that have come out of this journey. Again, yeah, hopefully empowering not just us, but other filmmakers as well to pursue their own voice and, more importantly, their own passion and get those stories on screen.

Scott Myers: Out of this, you’ve got this movie Haunt that you talked to me about earlier. It revolves around a group of friends who discover an extreme haunted house Halloween attraction turns out to be deadly. I think you’re in post‑production now.

Bryan: We are in post‑production.

Scott Beck: Yeah, we’re editing right now. Actually, as of a few hours ago, we were still in the edit room. It’s a Halloween movie, so it can’t come out 4th of July, it can’t come out 1st of January. It’ll have to come out, we’re hoping this Halloween or next Halloween.

Bryan: It’s been such a fun process. We partnered with Eli Roth early on. Our producers had sent Eli Roth the script and he got really excited. We heard he was going to come in. He had some notes for us and wanted to be a part of the project.

Immediately, we start going through Eli’s filmography, which, of course, we had seen all of his movies and were fans. Fans of him as not just a filmmaker, but also as an ambassador for the horror genre.

We were really curious. We’re like, “What are these notes going to be? Is it going to be more violence, more gore? What’s he going to come to the table with?”

It was so cool to us as writers. He came in and said, “Let’s invest in these characters. Let’s make these characters so lovable.” He talked a lot about how his feeling was a lot of times studio horror doesn’t work because the number one thing they forget about is investment in character.

A scary movie isn’t scary unless you love the people that you’re following. It really spoke to our hearts and made us even more excited to make Haunt and get it made, so we did a bunch of revisions with him and then eventually got to shoot the movie.

Scott Myers: That’s great. That’s a nice segue into some craft questions. I preach to my students all the time to start with character, end with character, find the story in‑between. How do you go about developing characters for your stories?

Scott Beck: I would use A Quiet Place, as an example, where we’re trying to figure out the characters in the story simultaneously in terms of how does the character service the story and how does the story service the character?

The character of John in A Quiet Place, that was one where we knew it was a survivalist. It was somebody that is trying to keep their family together. From that inception point we needed to figure out what was their arc? What does this character need? What does this character want?

That led us to the inevitable conclusion that he comes to in the story about needing to communicate to his daughter, who he does not have a healthy relationship with. That’s somewhat our inception point.

Bryan: Another thing I would say in terms of process and craft, Scott and I, the advantage we have as co‑writers and two people who have been friends for many, many, many years is that we have a shared experience.

It’s awesome and easy for Scott and I to go, “Oh, remember Andy in high school? What if we had a character like him? Remember the neighbor you had across the street in the cul‑de‑sac?” We can draw from our shared experience in our real life and people that we know.

It’s not to say we take people and put them in our movies. It’s more about, “Oh, remember the way so‑and‑so used to say a certain thing a certain way,” stealing little elements from real life that we connect to and doing our best to make the characters as truthful and honest to our experience as possible.

Scott Myers: Let’s talk about the writing duo dynamic. One article I read, you mentioned “the healthy competition of ideas.”

Scott Beck: Yeah, yeah.

Scott Myers: Could you describe what your process is like?

Scott Beck: Certainly. To describe the competition aspect, it’s simply the idea of if Bryan comes up with, let’s just say, a concept. He’ll pitch that to me. My reaction may be, “That’s cool, but I think we can take that even further.”

We ping‑pong ideas back and forth to the point where ‑‑ whether that’s a character, or a concept, or a plot point ‑‑ it’s much stronger from that back and forth than it would be if we just settled on the first idea.

We always like to incubate our ideas for a long time, sometimes to the frustration of our agent or manager who just want us to write faster, but we feel and our hope is that if we take a little more time, that it will be a much stronger final product.

Bryan: That extends all the way to the writing process, too. That’s us kicking scenes, or dialogue, or whatever back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Each of us privately, in our own space, doing passes on each other’s work and then sending it back and just trying to elevate or strengthen the material as much as possible.

One of the best benefits of having a writing partner who you trust is that you never feel ‑‑ at least in our experience ‑‑ we never feel precious over the material. [laughs] I never have that confidence of like, “Oh, I wrote this thing, and it’s so great because I wrote it.” It’s more like it feels like somebody else wrote it because Scott and I have such a good collaboration.

It always feels like something that’s other. We’re never precious about it, very easy for us to tear down our own ideas or attack our own scenes and try to make it as good as possible, and it’s always best idea wins.

Scott Beck: I would also say ‑‑ I’m just realizing in retrospect ‑‑ it’s impossible for us to ever point back to an idea and be like, “Oh, that was Bryan’s idea, that was my idea,” because they’re all thrown in a blender. Again, what comes out of that, we feel, is always stronger than if it was just one of us.

Scott Myers: When you’re breaking story, how do you spend your time in prep writing? Brainstorming? Character development? Plotting? Research outlining?

Bryan: Playing video games usually.

[laughter]

Scott Beck: No, we each keep our own word document. I use Microsoft One Note, where I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages that are just basically scraps of ideas for different projects. That can be character sketches. It could be a line of dialogue.

When we’re honing in on a single project, we start having our own brainstorm meetings where we talk about, “Oh, this is what the first act could be. This is what the character is feeling in the beginning of the story, and this is where we need to see them end up.”

We have these conversations that then allow us the ability to finally sit down and start opening final draft and crafting scenes. Bryan may write one scene and then he passes it to me. I do a pass on that and then write the second scene. We go back and forth.

The process changes, I would say, somewhat project‑to‑project. We always love having our conversations first and foremost so that we’re not staring at the blank page, not knowing where it’s going to go.

Scott Myers: What about dialogue? How do you go about finding your characters’ voices?

Bryan: Just the same way exactly as Scott said. We’ll write a scene. I might be writing the characters and dialogue. Then, I’ll send it over to him and he does a pass on the dialogue.

It’s weird thinking about it. You asking that question is making me wonder, “How does it work?” and I can only chalk it up to the alchemy of screenwriting and just putting the characters on a page and getting them talking.

It’s kind of a bizarre thing that I have not thought about and maybe shouldn’t think about because it works all right for us.

Scott Myers: You were talking about the theme of communication in A Quiet Place. How important is theme to you in your writing? Do you begin with the themes of your story or do they emerge over time?

Bryan: Yeah, both. With A Quiet Place, we weren’t comfortable writing the script until we knew that the theme was going to be about communication. We liked how that paralleled the idea of a world and a story that’s scary because the characters can’t talk and they can’t make noise.

We didn’t feel good about the story until we were like, “OK, we are comfortable with this theme.” One of the interesting things about theme is that you can start off with one thing in your head, and then the ultimate movie teaches you what it’s really about.

While I think that theme of communication that we started with is very much prevalent in the finished film, I think another theme emerged, which is the theme of, what would you do to protect your children and how hard is it to protect your children?

I think that theme is maybe an obvious one that we didn’t intellectualize but comes through very boldly in the finished film. I think that’s the best way to do it. I think you should be thinking about making sure your story has layers and that it can resonate on a deeper level.

At the same time, you’ve got to let it teach you what it wants to be and not be so constricted that you’re forcing it into a certain box.

Scott Beck: I will say like any time that we’ve gone off and written things where we haven’t really honed in on any theme whatsoever, that’s where you start getting into the weeds and you start losing your sight. It’s always important to hone in on some certain ideas that can at least be the starting point.

Scott Myers: What do you think about when you’re writing a scene? You talk about writing scenes and switching off and reading them. Do you have any specific goals in mind?

Scott Beck: It’s like the core lessons of come into a scene late and leave it early. Also trying to figure out the arc of each scene. It still needs to have a certain beginning, middle, and end. Those are the core concepts that we always go into. Then, of course, just make it interesting.

I know in plenty of our early screenplays that we wrote in high school and even throughout college, we’d look back at those now, and there would be so many scenes that are maybe only conveying character, but it’s not conveying any story. Yet there’s another scene that conveys only story and not character.

Really, what we should have done is just cinch those two together and be more economical in the storytelling.

Bryan: Another thing we love about writing is discovery. We talk a lot about how there’s nothing more exciting for us than getting bored with our own story, or our own scene, or our own characters because then it’s an opportunity to take a left turn instead of a right turn, and reinvigorate not only the story, but also ourselves as writers. That’s a big part of our process as well.

Scott Myers: I can’t think of better people to ask this question than you all because of the script, A Quiet Place, where you had to write essentially all scene description. What keys do you have to writing entertaining scene descriptions?

Scott Beck: I think, for us, it was very much visualizing what that final film would look like and what it would sound like, and then choosing our words very carefully. Bryan and I take time even drafting our emails to producers just to make sure that things are being communicated as succinctly as possible.

Also, on the page ‑‑ when it comes to the page ‑‑ as interesting as possible. That may be something as using alliteration. It might be something dig into a Thesaurus and figuring out a better word or making sure we’re not repeating a word multiple times on the page so that it doesn’t catch a reader’s eye in terms of being repetitive.

There’s all these little tricks that we use, but, really, it just comes down to doing the work and not getting lazy, which is something that it’s nice to have a writing partner because we challenge ourselves to do our best work possible.

Scott Myers: How about this? When you finish a first draft, now you got to rewrite, is there a process that you have, a specific process that you go through or any techniques that you use to move the thing forward?

Scott Beck: I would say for those first drafts we really rely on our close circle of friends and family. We will send the draft out to maybe four confidants that have been reading our work for a decade, at least, now. They know our strength, they know our weaknesses, and so they’re not afraid to call BS on [laughs] anything that we’re trying to sneak through.

They’re also really good at figuring out where we’ve jumped over certain narrative pieces. We’ve always been able to rely on them, first and foremost. After we get their feedback, that’s when we can really go back, have a conversation about how we really can forge ahead and get everything into shape.

Of course, our manager, Ryan Cunningham at Madhouse, he’s certainly somebody that we rely on at a certain stage just to get his fresh perspective on everything. What’s great about him is he is always approaching things from a story theme and character level. It’s not necessarily, “This is what the marketplace needs so we need to augment this.” It’s really just a pure, unadulterated feedback.

Scott Myers: Let’s talk about your future here. You’re in the horror space, clearly, and Hollywood has a way of pigeonholing writers and filmmakers. I assume, since you got a lifelong affection for horror, you don’t have a problem with that, but do you ever see yourself stepping outside of that space and doing some other type of genre work?

Bryan: Yes and no. I mean we have a lifelong love of not just horror, but everything. Thinking about A Quiet Place like the genesis starting from Jacques Tati, silent film comedies. We love Alexander Payne. We love Wes Anderson. Billy Wilder and Cameron Crowe. On and on and on. We love movies and stories in all genres and every facet of what movies can do.

Having said that, our taste naturally tends to steer a little to the dark side of things. We like to be a little edgy and a little dark in genre. Not necessarily just horror, but sci‑fi and thriller and drama. That’s just where our taste naturally brings us.

Scott Beck: I think one of the reasons we lean towards that is because we love films that evoke reactions. Whether that’s a comedy, or a horror, or a thriller. You can sit in the audience, as we did throughout our childhood up until now, on a Friday night and feel the communal experience as people are screaming or laughing.

A film like Quiet Place, a film like Haunt, those are movies that we very much are crafting for an audience in the purest form in that we want to be able to replicate all those times that we were sitting in a theater and just loving what’s happening on screen, and be able to vocalize that as well.

Scott Myers: Finally, this is a question I’m sure you’ll be asked way more based off the success of A Quiet Place. What advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood?

Bryan: I think reading is so crucial. Reading other scripts, other screenwriters. Doing the work of just familiarizing yourself with the medium is huge.

Scott Beck: I think observation as well. As Bryan said, a lot of our character sketches and character work come from people that we knew in real life. There’s nothing more authentic than drawing upon your own experiences to really breathe life into a piece.

I think also, from a practical standpoint, what we always found was making your own opportunities from a stand point of writing something that either you can go out and make, or a friend can go out and make, or, a production executive can pick up and say, “This is manageable to me.

“It’s not $150 million movie that requires hundreds of people to sign off on it.” It’s something that you can force through the system if it’s got an interesting hook and good writing.”

Then, lastly, just be passionate about what you want to make. That was a lesson that Bryan and I really, really learned on Quiet Place amidst working on different projects that maybe we didn’t have as much passion for.

What’s ironic is all of those had the promise of the big sale, or being the next big step in our career, but those never went anywhere. They all hit dead ends. A Quiet Place was this little engine that could that we just had this burning passion for and felt like we had a plan to make this hell or high water.

It’s been nice to finally see something that you’re really passionate about pay off. That would certainly be a huge piece of advice I would give anybody.

Check this out. With Bryan and Scott spearheading the community effort, the community of Davenport, Iowa is now home to The Last Picture House, a “boutique cinema and cocktail lounge.”

You can read about that here: A dream come true: Hollywood filmmakers open Davenport cinema.

Here is the video of my conversation with Bryan and Scott during their appearance at DePaul University.

Bryan and Scott are repped by CAA and Anonymous Content.

Twitter/X: @beckandwoods

For more Go Into The Story interviews with screenwriters, filmmakers, TV producers, and industry insiders, go here.