Interview: Brian Duffield
Conversation with the writer-director of the new science fiction horror movie No One Will Save You.
Conversation with the writer-director of the new science fiction horror movie No One Will Save You.
I’ve known Brian Duffield for about a decade and it’s been exciting to watch his filmmaking career unfold. His screenwriting credits include The Babysitter, Underwater, and Love and Monsters. His movie Spontaneous should become a cult classic … it is that good.
His latest writing-directing effort is No One Will Save You starring Kaitlin Deever. Plot summary:
An exiled anxiety-ridden homebody must battle an alien who’s found its way into her home.
Collider recently featured an interview with Duffield after a screening of the movie in Los Angele. Here is an excerpt:
COLLIDER: How many of you knew before coming in here how much dialogue was in this movie?
BRIAN DUFFIELD: 20th [Century] was super nervous about people finding out because I think people think silent means quiet and boring. It’s loud and probably not boring.
It’s pretty crazy, though. If I’m not mistaken, this was a spec script.
DUFFIELD: Yeah, it was a spec script that I packaged with the producers and Kaitlyn. So when it went out to the town we were like, “We’re ready to go if you want to get on board.” So it’s not like a normal spec where you just sell it, and then they fire you.
Did you set out to make a movie that was this alien kind of movie, and then you realized, “I don’t need dialogue?” Talk a little bit about where the idea came from versus the no-dialogue thing.
DUFFIELD: The dialogue came in late. Like, I was like halfway done, and I had typed in the final draft– When you do a character speaking dialogue, you have to type it in, but if you’ve written it before then it will autofill, and then I realized I had to type it in the whole way, like the very long name of Brynn, and that was like 45 pages in, and then it was just her saying, “I…” and then she gets spit on. And then I was like, “Well, I guess I haven’t written any dialogue yet.” [Laughs] I don’t outline, and so I just kind of go where the winds take me. So there’s a lot of accidental and embarrassing discoveries like that where you think that was the plan, but it wasn’t. There weren’t aliens in the movie when I started. [Laughs] I was like, “Whoops.”
I’m so curious, what was it before aliens, or was it like you’re writing, and then all of a sudden, you realize, “Oh, wait a minute…?”
DUFFIELD: No, I had the character of Brynn because I am really obsessed with the movie Heavenly Creatures, which if you haven’t seen it, it’s Peter Jackson before Lord of the Rings, and it’s about two girls in their young teens that form a very intense bond and then kill one of the girls’ mothers. And it’s a true story. Then a couple of years, like a decade or two ago, it was revealed that one of the girls grew up, changed her name, and became a very famous author, and I thought that was a very interesting character. Then the Slenderman stabbings happened right before I was about to have kids. I just thought it was very interesting about these, like, 10-year-olds that had done something so terrible but were also 10 and then had their whole life ahead of them to figure out all of that insanity. It felt like a very interesting character.
Here is a trailer for the movie:
I’ve always enjoyed reading Brian’s screenplays as he has fun playing around with script format and his narrative voice. For example, here is a page from his script for No One Will Save You:
William Goldman wrote: “”Screenplays don’t have to read like an instruction manual for a refrigerator. You can write them as a pleasurable read.” Brian writes screenplays that are pleasurable reads … and hugely entertaining. That goes for the movie as well. Don’t just take my word for it.
For the rest of the Collider interview, go here.
To read the 2014 Go Into The Story interview, go here.
For 100s more interviews with screenwriters and filmmakers, go here.