EVERY MOMENT
CHRISTOPHER MCQUARRIE on THE BREAKFAST CLUB and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
In the late ’80s, I worked as a security guard at a movie theatre in a pretty rough part of New Jersey (the opening credits of The Sopranos were my commute to work). We had drug deals, fights, muggings, stabbings, and even a riot — watching a movie there on a Friday night meant taking a genuine risk.
It was magnificent.
What was meant to be a summer job stretched on for four years, watching the audience while they watched the movie — a nightly focus group that I later realised was my film school. As you might imagine, I saw some amazing crowd reactions there, none of which came close to a reaction I witnessed a few years before at a screening of The Breakfast Club.
In those days, you could occasionally catch a sneak preview of an upcoming movie as part of a two-for-one double feature. The Breakfast Club was the main event, hitting me and my teenage friends squarely in our collective wheelhouse. The audience loved the movie, cheering at the end and still on a high from it when the second feature started — a film for which we were utterly emotionally unprepared:
A Nightmare On Elm Street.
Within minutes, people were screaming. Not gleefully, but in genuine terror. Thanks to the high of The Breakfast Club, everyone had forgotten they were also coming to see a horror movie, let alone one that so effectively touched on a fundamental collective fear (and it didn’t help that Wes Craven’s nightmare looked so eerily like my own). The girl next to me (on whom I had a mad, unrequited crush) spent the whole movie with her arms around my neck and her legs in my lap without her ass ever leaving her seat. A grown man stood up midway and screamed, “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE,” before running out, only to storm back to his seat a few minutes later, announcing to no-one: “I HAVE TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS.” He articulated exactly what I was feeling.
I was petrified. But I felt strongly that if I left, I’d never sleep again.
When it was over, people left the theatre sweating, moaning, traumatised.
It was magnificent.
A few years later, I worked up the courage to rewatch the film on VHS. It was mid-afternoon.
There was no audience, no unrequited crush
half-choking me. The movie had almost no effect whatsoever.
There is simply no substitute for seeing a movie in the dark with a few hundred strangers (and an unrequited mad-crush for a neck-warmer if you can manage it). It’s not just part of the experience, it can often be the very heart of the experience itself. The audience that I hope will one day watch my films is with me when I’m making them — the urge to make a crowd laugh, gasp, hold their collective breath is the number one reason I do what
I do. My awareness of this is an essential ingredient in the making of the film itself.
An audience of strangers is my greatest collaborator — my most secret of ingredients.
The rest is just... content.