Trey Edward Shults wrote the film after the death of his father, and used much of his personal experiences to inform the script.
With It Comes at Night, writer-director Trey Edward Shults has created a compelling family story set to the backdrop of an apocalypse.
The film centers on a family living in a secluded home in the woods.
They are led by family patriarch Paul (Joel Edgerton), with the film
opening as Paul's father-in-law Bud (David Pendleton) is in his final
moments, dying of a mysterious disease. Bud's breathing is labored, and
he's clearly not long for this Earth. Paul's wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo),
tells her father it's okay, that he can let go. It's a very human moment
that signals the film is not just about scares. For this emotional
moment, Shults took took direct inspiration his own words to his father,
who died of cancer.
The film from A24, which opens Friday, follows Shults' 2015 debut feature, Krisha, which starred his family and was greeted with critical acclaim.
In a conversation with Heat Vision, Shults reveals the personal
memories he put into his film and the unlikely way Edgerton ended up
finally saying yes to the movie.
You wrote it after your father's death, and have said the
lines in the first scene were influenced by that. What else from your
life did you put in the movie?
It started with that first scene. It started out that I lost my dad
to cancer, after we had a rough relationship and I hadn't talked to turn
him in 10 years. And he was full of regret and all this heavy and
traumatic stuff. I wrote it two months after that. In hindsight, I see
it was a way of me dealing with my grief. There's so much in there, like
Joel's character is definitely a combination of my dad and my step dad.
I see Travis [Kelvin Harrison Jr.] as me, and my Grandpa was Bud. The
house that you see in the movie was very much inspired by my
grandparents' house that I sort of grew up in. After my parents split
up, my mom took us there all the time.
It was like my childhood house. There's literally all that stuff in
there, but then, what it was, I think, really making a fictional
narrative that represented the emotions I was going through. Coming
right after my dad, it was death and it was fear and it was regret and
family and family. And all of that kind of bubbled up and boiled
together into what this movie is.
We don't learn much about the outside world in this movie. How much of it did you create just for your own knowledge?
The first time I wrote this, the first draft spewed out of me in
three days. It was a gibberish mess and I typed it and made it better,
which so far is how I've done stuff. It started with that opening scene
and being dropped into this world and feeling it and figuring it out as
they do. It was very immediate like that. It spewed out of me. I felt
intrigued and scared when they were and sobbed and cried writing it and
all this crazy stuff. After that, it's not like you make the movie
immediately. I had years to think about it. Then I started thinking more
about the world leading up. In my mind, I know everything that lead up
to this family's particular situation. I don't know the particulars of
the disease and how it works, because they don't. I do know stuff I
don't reveal, story beats.
How did you go about casting Joel? Did you always know you would have someone of that caliber?
I had no idea. My first movie, I made with my family. It was
important to me that my second movie not be with my family and be a
whole new challenge and be different. But I'm naive. It was my first
time casting or anything like that. At first, I really hated it and I
just got a taste of how annoying the casting process could be. With
this, our strategy was to cast Paul's role first, Joel. Joel was always
at the top of that list, but he's a busy guy because he's great and he
works a lot. He was booked. So I spent a lot of time sending a script to
an actor, waiting a month to hear feedback. Then it's like, "Oh yeah,
he liked it. He's interested." Then you never know. Just a lot of that
crap. Basically Joel's schedule opened up and I told my buddy Jeff
Nichols that I was going to him and Jeff texted Joel and said, "Take
this kid seriously." And Joel read the script and then he got it. He
gave feedback the next day. He watched Krisha. He met me the
following Monday and said he wanted to do the film the next day. The
first time I met him, Chris Abbott [who plays Will in the movie] was
around the corner, and he brought Chris by at the end of the meeting
just so we could all hang out. It was the most beautiful, cut through
the bullshit, just great thing ever. After that it was so easy and
smooth and great.
Had you already sent the script to Chris? Or did Joel sort of cast Chris?
I had already met Chris, because I thought he was extraordinary in James White.
When I had written the script initially, Will's character was older. I
thought Chris was too old to play Travis and too young to pay Will,
until Joel put him in my mind. Then I started thinking, this is
interesting and we all hung out together and it was too right to pass
up. I cast Chris and changed the ages and made them younger, and it
worked out perfectly. That led to Riley and everything else.
What were some of the big challenges you faced on this movie?
One thing that proved itself challenging was getting the balance
right of fluctuating with reality and nightmares. The goal was always
that you could balance that and do different approaches with that, with
your film grammar. Nightmare has its own look and a different aspect
ratio and anamorphic lenses. It's subtly different. And then a different
sonic scape. The sound is a little different and the score we do a
different instrumentation with the nightmares. All that stuff collides
to where nightmare and reality are one, because reality has become so
bad it is a nightmare.
When making a movie, do you think about marketing at all? The nightmare aspect of this is sold in the trailers.
No, not marketing. You can't help but think, "What's the commercial
potential, at all, with a movie in terms of what kind of budget you can
get. And can you realistically get a movie made? There's no way you
don't think of that. I initially wrote this before I made Krisha.
After I wrote it, it started from processing grief and all of that.
After I wrote it, this is not a conventional horror movie. It's sort of a
horror psychological thriller thing. Maybe I'll have a better shot at
getting it made. But I, at least so far, with the scale of the movies
I'm doing, I don't think "what's the marketing potential of this."
It Comes at Night is in theaters now.
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