A Quiet Place Part II
A QUIET PLACE MADE A LOT OF NOISE. NOW JOHN KRASINSKI RETURNS TO DIRECT A QUIET PLACE PART II , AS EMILY BLUNT’S BEREAVED NEW MUM ONCE AGAIN BATTLES SOUND-SENSITIVE ALIENS
I FEEL LIKE MARY POPPINS IS VERY chatty…” SFX has just asked Emily Blunt who, out of all her movie characters, would fare worst in
A Quiet Place Part II, in which even the slightest noise triggers the gigantic, pulsating eardrums of alien invaders who hunt using sound location.
“And The Devil Wears Prada character [Emily Charlton] would be useless in that environment,” she adds.
What would Miranda Priestly’s uptight personal assistant even wear in an apocalypse, one wonders?
“Well, exactly!” muses Blunt, with her trademark deadpan humour. “I don’t think she’d do well with bare feet. I think between the two of them they’d be dead, for sure!”
In a scene straight out of that fashion world flick, we meet the hilarious Blunt and her husband of 10 years, A Quiet Place Part II director John Krasinski, in a plush New York hotel suite, skyline gleaming behind them. After the monstrously successful 2018 original – which grossed $341 million worldwide against a $17 million budget, and which Krasinski also directed and starred in – expectations for the follow-up are as high as the skyscraper we’re sitting in. But if the two are feeling the pressure, they don’t show it: they’re both grinning from ear to ear.
“You definitely get a sense of how it all started,” says Krasinski of the new story. It’s mostly set after the events of the first film – in which his character, Lee, sacrificed himself to save his kids – but also shows, via flashback, the aliens gatecrashing planet Earth.
Krasinski won’t be drawn on whether this means he’ll be returning as an actor for the prequel sequences (“You’ll have to wait and see”), but then the fact that he’s returning as director is perhaps surprise enough.
“I wasn’t planning on doing a sequel at all,” he explains. “I told the studio, ‘Good luck!’ I think it’s unfair on the audience when a sequel’s a foregone conclusion. But then, genuinely, Emily and I were blown away by the response.”
Indeed, A Quiet Place wasn’t just a commercial juggernaut, but a critical one, too. At 95%, it’s Blunt’s top-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes, besting classy dramas like The Young Victoria as well as more bombastic sci-fi and action flicks like Edge Of Tomorrow, Looper and Sicario. Not to mention Prada, which Blunt calls “the big shift, the starting point of me being much more in the conversation. It gets quoted to me all the time.”
DOING IT FOR THE KIDS
The secret to A Quiet Place’s success? Arguably, depth. Sure, the films tick genre boxes: with their Predator-esque expanding faces, these aliens are some of the most entertainingly grotesque we’ve seen in aeons. “There’s genuine fun in seeing our creature in situations we haven’t seen him in before,” says a palpably enthused Krasinski. He pauses and adds, “Or her, or it, or whatever!”
But what really made A Quiet Place a critical darling was the intense exploration of very human themes, in spite of a dearth of dialogue. You can expect more of the same from Part II.
Krasinski calls A Quiet Place “a love letter to my kids, as crazy as it sounds; a very personal movie” about “the intimacy of family. That promise you make: ‘If you stay close to me, everything’s going to be fine’. At the end, that promise is inevitably broken. All parents know it has to be one day. Some day, you’re going to have to let your kids go.”
The second film, meanwhile – which has “a little bit more dialogue” but “follows the rules” – is “a continuation of my story with my kids. It’s about growing up.”
Krasinski and Blunt are parents to daughters Hazel, five, and Violet, three, which the director says means that the story again feels “close to home”.
“As much as the first, or maybe more so, this is the most personal film I’ve ever been in when it comes to how intense I found some of those scenes,” Blunt says. “Not that I’ve ever, thank god, touch wood, experienced the kind of loss that Evelyn has – not only of her child, but then her husband, and now the abject fear she lives in of not losing anyone else.”
Calling some of her new scenes “agonising”, she continues, “I’ve never considered myself a very method-y actor, but you go somewhere you don’t like going. These scenes took their toll on me because of the subject matter.”
Plot points for Part II are being kept under wraps, but suffice to say, Evelyn is staring down a precipice along with kids Regan and Marcus (the brilliant Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) and her newborn baby.
“Their secluded environment is shattered,” says Blunt. “New baby, husband’s dead, house is burnt down. Where do they go? What do they do? What does this mother do?
Evelyn’s really alone now: grief-stricken, panicked and overwhelmed. You’ve got a baby who doesn’t understand the rules of the game – at least her other kids understood it. And how do you put one foot in front of the other after losing somebody like that? How is she going to survive without this partner who helped her create this thriving little world that they had in the first one? How does she cope?”
THE ACT OF CILLIAN
One major change is the widening of the societal lens, as fresh characters are introduced – most notably a bearded, bedraggled stranger in the form of Cillian Murphy.
“I know people have asked, ‘Is he going to take the place of your character?’ No, he’s a completely different character,” Krasinski says. “I could talk all day about Cillian’s character. His was the one I’ve had the most fun writing, and certainly directing. He’s enigmatic.” Judging from a line Murphy utters in the trailer – “The people that are left are not the kind of people worth saving” – this seems to be a character whose experience of survival has left him extremely cynical about humanity as a whole.
“I highly doubted you’d meet someone else in the world who’d be completely trusting and emotionally human, because of the circumstances,” Krasinski explains. “Certainly in today’s world, everyone’s on high
alert. That idea of community is being questioned. So I think in times of great strain, the big human question is, ‘Can you open your heart to other people?’ This is definitely a character who is investigating whether or not he wants to open up and be a part of a community again.”
“When you’ve got the introduction of new characters who could potentially be a threat – or not – there’s going to be a lack of trust there,” Blunt adds. “Especially a character like Cillian’s, who is a bit ambiguous. There’s so much mystery, as people could tell from the trailer. That idea of them encountering people who are morally on the fence and unwilling to help – that creates a lack of trust within all of them. But they’re so in over their heads, they need somewhere. They need a refuge.”
For her, Murphy’s role represents “the idea of a fractured society. Of whether neighbours will extend their hand. And how has everyone else dealt with this invasion? It’s certainly a bigger movie, but has the same taut muscularity of tension as the first. But I’m interested, as a fan, to see how everyone else survived this!”
Indeed, what of the survivors outside the forests and farmlands of New York State? How are the creatures doing in deserts, in the polar regions and out in the oceans? The scope for story expansion is obvious. So does Krasinski have plans for A Quiet Place Parts III, IV and beyond, SFX wonders?
“Oh man, I’m going to do a videogame… I’m just kidding!” he laughs. “It’s got to be organic to me, but I actually do have ideas. ‘The kids’ call them Easter eggs now, but there are sprinklings of future plans in the second movie. But I feel it’s a bit conceited [to assume] we’d be lucky enough to have a third and a fourth.” A franchise would certainly be new territory for Blunt: by our calculations, this is her first sequel. But is there another character she’d consider revisiting? “I don’t know if it’ll happen, but I loved playing Poppins so much,” she reflects. “Probably her. I don’t necessarily like to revisit parts I’ve already done, but the ones I found joyous, I’d think about it.”
Well, a Mary Poppins/ Quiet Place crossover would be nothing if not inventive!
A Quiet Place Part II is in cinemas from 20 March.
New baby, husband’s dead, house is burnt down. Where do they go? What do they do?