Director Drew Hancock Talks AI & Horror in Companion

What made you want to explore the idea of AI and robots in this whole world? That's a great question. Because, yeah, I, you know, like, to be honest with you, like, the how this story all came about is just because I was at a place in my career where I wasn't getting the job opportunities that I wanted. And I love genre movies. I just love, you know, anything with horror, sci fi or thriller.

And I realized, you know, like, there's a reason why I'm not getting these jobs is because I didn't have a writing sample that reflected that. So Companion was born out of that, honestly. And so, you know, like, you know, I spent a long time kind of generating ideas that were in the genre space. And the one that I kept coming back to was this idea of, you know, Companion, which is, you know, originally it was three couples go to a cabin in the middle of the woods.

One of them finds out they're a robot. They go haywire and then, you know, a character gets picked off every. 10 pages. But honestly, like, honestly, she was the antagonist at the beginning. That was where my brain immediately went. It was like the AI gone wrong story. And it wasn't until I started writing it that I realized that I was actually relating to Iris more than any other character.

And suddenly the experiment became, can I tell the story of a robot finding empowerment where you're actually relating to her more than you're relating to the human characters? And that became a very, very fun game. Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like the original premise would have been completely opposite, totally different. And I think this just works so well that I'm glad you changed the direction of it.

Megan came out like six months later and I'm like, I'm so glad that I didn't, that I didn't do that version. This movie is categorized as a thriller slash mystery, but there's so much humor and there is some horror in there. So tell me how that all plays into it. And do you see it more as a horror film or kind of a horror comedy than thriller mystery in a sense?

Neither actually. How I see this movie is I see this movie as a relationship drama. Like that is what I think it is at the core. This is a breakup movie. This is about a woman discovering that she's in a relationship that's toxic and it's about her finding empowerment through discovery of self. And that even though it's dealing with AI and robots and stuff like that, like the core is what, you know, like that, that is what you give to your actors and what you give to your department heads and say like, look, let's not treat this like a horror movie or a comedy or a sci-fi movie.

Let's all think about this as a relationship drama. And don't worry about, you know, what movie you're in right now. This is a, this is, this is a breakup movie. Just treat it like that. And yeah, hopefully it comes across as that. Otherwise, I feel like if, if, if your actors are like aware that they're in the horror part or the thriller part or the heist part, it just starts to feel like you start to feel like a little bit of a tonal whiplash because it's like the movie is changing what it is.