Renny Harlin & Courtney Solomon Discuss The Strangers: Chapter 1

I'm Allison Rose with FlickDirect. Hi gentlemen, how are you? - Hi Allison, how are you? - Tied up at the moment, so we'll do this quick, yeah. - Yeah, we gotta get you untied before you know somebody bad comes in here. - Oh, I hope not. Or are you the bad guys? - No, we're the good guys. - We're the good guys, we're the good guys. - All right, Renny, can you tell me, since you have such an eclectic movie career, why would you choose a horror movie at this point?

- Because I love horror films. I've loved them since I was a kid, and that's what I really grew up with. And for me as a filmmaker, the ability and the opportunity to have an impact on the audience is the greatest satisfaction. Because when people go to the movie theater to experience movies together, they want to feel something. They want to be scared, or they want to fall in love, or they wanna cry, or they wanna laugh.

And for me to be able to scare people, to give them that cathartic experience of getting their stress and all the everyday worries and fears and phobias out of the way by channeling them through the movie screen, I think it's fantastic. And to see the audience scream at the screen is the best thing that I can give them. - Well, besides being psychological, I will admit that I jumped more than once, so you did your job well.

- So it's also a great exercise. - Exactly, there you go. Courtney, this is a trilogy. What is it like, the complexities of doing three films kind of back to back to back or filming at the same time? - Oh my Lord, well, far more complicated than I ever imagined when we went on the journey. Let me put it that way. No, it's amazing. I mean, this is the funny thing about it.

So you could call it the trilogy for sure. We call it chapter one, two, and three because it was one giant film. So literally just when we re-imagined it and we loved the original one so much, it was sort of like, there's so much of a bigger story to tell here and there's so many interesting things and it needs time to really be done in the way that the original was done, character wise on both sides, antagonist and protagonist.

And so it was like overwhelming at times. And, but like exhilarating and exciting and like so much fun. And it was the first part for us as a producer is get all your team involved, get your director, get your stars, get your department heads, get everybody involved inside this crazy thing that like Renny always loves to tell a story. I'm like, yeah, yeah, just read the script.

And I send him the script and then get it like a note back. He's like, you know, this is 280 pages. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know. So that's where it all started. - I don't think you could condense it down and make it as powerful as it is so far. - And that's just act one. We look at that and to us, that's just act one of our script, you know? So, you know, other people, yes, it's a whole movie, but it's just act one.

You're gonna have to wait to see act two. - Renny, how do you decide what's gonna be a jump scare? What's gonna be psychological? Where those two worlds are gonna meld in a sense? - One of the best questions anybody's ever asked. - Well, thank you. - Not that I have the answer, but it's a great question. (laughing) But that's exactly what you work on so hard when you're doing a horror film and especially this kind of a horror film 'cause this is all reality based.

There's nothing supernatural about this movie or fantastical. So for us, the most important thing was the atmosphere of the movie, which is a constant feeling of dread of this just incredibly heavy sense of fear and that you are in a normal environment, you are in a house, but there's no place to escape and there's no rhyme and reason. Why are these people there to scare you and to potentially and very likely hurt you and maybe kill you?

And of course there are jump scares. Of course you want those moments when the audience jumps out of their seats and gasps or screams, but more important for me is really to have that sense of tension all the time and not to revert to, I mean, jump scares are easy. I can throw a cat at you and you'll go like, oh my God, a cat? - Cat big boom, there it is.

- But for me, it's about keeping it real and just having everything come from real situation that the audience can relate to so that when you're sitting there in the theater with your friends, you can sense, it makes it scary for you because you can see yourself in the place of that character. There's no some kind of a supernatural three-dimensional monster in the room.

There's just somebody knocking on your door and you'll say like, why is somebody knocking on my door three o'clock in the morning? - And we had a rule about that and making it that we established right from the beginning, which was no false jump scares in the entire trilogy. No false jump scares. So the cat example was an example we'd always use. You don't throw the cat just to get the scare and put the big bang on it so that you as the audience jumps.

The scares come in the context of the story itself or they don't come. (ethereal music) [Music] (lightchant music)