Just call him Mr Blunt
John Krasinki tells Andrew Purcell that this is his ‘‘best collaboration’’ yet.
No one really should have to experience Times Square at 7 o’clock on a wet winter morning, but here we are, at a screening room in New York, to watch the first 11 minutes of a movie.
In a fortnight, A Quiet Place will be the opening-night film at the South By Southwest festival, but today, all they can show us is the first scene. Some of the assembled journalists have flown in from Europe or Los Angeles.
They are bleary-eyed and peeved off, and director John Krasinski knows it. He strides down the aisle and addresses us, employing his considerable personal charm: ‘‘Keep your cellphones on. Nothing bad could happen if you tweet the first 11 minutes.’’
Lights down. A title informs us that it is Day 38.
We are in an abandoned pharmacy, in a picturesque American town that has recently been visited by the apocalypse. This put me in mind of Dawn Of The Dead, but any other zombie-slash-pandemic movie in which nature is reasserting its claim through cracks in the tarmac will do.
The twist is that the aliens who have laid waste to human civilisation use sound to locate their victims, which explains why the parents, played by Krasinski and Emily Blunt, are communicating with their children in sign language. Their eldest daughter, played by Millie Simmonds, is deaf. Their youngest son is 4, and as any parent knows, telling a 4-year-old to be silent is like telling a tom cat not to pee in the corner.
A Quiet Place is a big step up for Krasinski, who has previously directed two indie movies, and remains best known, in the US at least, as Jim from The Office. In person, he is handsome in a rugged, John Hamm-ish way, his face distinguished by a thick black beard, his check shirt and white T-shirt straight from an upscale catalogue. Not shown: the eight-pack abs acquired to play a former Navy Seal in 13 Hours. He is buff.
Krasinski’s line is that A Quiet Place is really a movie about the lengths parents will go to protect their kids. He tries it out when we meet at the Whitby Hotel, looking past me, through the window to the vacant lot across 56th Street that is somehow yet to become a multi-storey money laundry for the world’s billionaires.
‘‘Emily had just had our second daughter, and I was in that haze and bubble of new dad. I was wide open emotionally. I was a raw nerve, and already in the mode of being terrified of keeping this person safe … This movie hit me right in the heart.’’
Emily, for those who don’t keep up with celebrity gossip, is actress Emily Blunt. They were married at George Clooney’s villa by the banks of Lake Como, and sold their Brooklyn brownstone last year for $US8 million. Now that Brangelina and Bennifer are history, they are among People magazine’s reigning aristocrats.
A Quiet Place is their first collaboration.
In a recent Vanity Fair cover story, Blunt owned up to worrying ‘‘we might kill each other, just gently throttle the life out of each other during the process’’, but Krasinski makes it sound like an agreeable busman’s holiday in upstate New York, albeit on a set too scary for the kids to visit.
‘‘She was the most supportive. She was the most creatively stimulating. She had great ideas for the script, the shots, my performance,’’ he says. ‘‘Honestly, it was the best collaboration I’ve had in my career.’’
Krasinski has form when it comes to gushing about his wife. He told Ellen DeGeneres that the first time he saw her, he thought, ‘‘Oh God, I think I’m going to fall in love with her’’, and claims his favourite rom-com is her breakthrough film, The Devil Wears Prada. He often says she’s out of his league.
So, now he’s playing Jack Ryan in a forthcoming Amazon mega-series, and directing a studio movie with $US5 million to spend on a 30-second advert during the Super Bowl, is she still out of his league? ‘‘Yes! Don’t you think so?’’ I stifle a laugh. ‘‘I saw it on your face. You agree. I’m fine with that.’’
He tells an anecdote about flying in to visit Blunt on the set of Mary Poppins Returns in London, and meeting an immigration agent who had never heard of him, but was well aware of her.
‘‘It was like a scene in a comedy: he slowly looked up and went ‘you married Emily Blunt?’ And I said ‘yeah,’ and he slammed my passport and I could tell he was extremely disappointed, that she should have done better. I stole a treasure of England that I did not deserve. And I agree with him.’’
Krasinski sometimes refers to his ‘‘lottery-ticket life’’, with unfeigned aw-shucks gratitude. He had promised his parents he would quit acting if he hadn’t won a major role in three years, and was three weeks from that sell-by date when he auditioned for the role of Jim, and got it. The Office ,an adaptation of the British Ricky Gervais series, ran for nine seasons on NBC, and made him a household name.
A Quiet Place does not pretend to be anything other than a genre film. What looks likeliest to elevate it, based on what little I’ve seen, is the performance of Simmonds, who is herself deaf, and Krasinski’s commitment to making the way she experiences the world as real as possible for audiences. Whenever there’s a shot from her perspective, the ambient sound drops away, replaced by a low-level hum.
‘‘Dealing with the story of a family living with a deaf child … I needed a partner,’’ Krasinski says. ‘‘I needed someone who could guide me through the very specific and intimate details of being deaf in a day-to-day world. And Millie was not only that, she turned out to be the most grounded actress we’ve ever worked with.’’
When our allotted time is over, Krasinski stands up too but the PR reminds him it’s a press day, and there are many more interviews to do before he can get back to the work of editing and sound mixing and adding special effects. By blockbuster standards, four months from wrap to opening night is exceedingly tight.
‘‘We are all in full panic mode, for sure,’’ he says. ‘‘There’s a lot of people working overtime right now. I said to my parents ‘if this movie was a painting, I would literally be presenting it and getting paint slowly off the bottom because it’s still dripping on the frame’.’’
(M) opens in New Zealand cinemas on April 5.
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Quiet Place
‘‘She’s still out of my league.’’ John Krasinski on his wife and co-star Emily Blunt.