Exclusive Interview with Screenwriters Christian White and Skylar James 

 

Q: This film was produced by the “A Quiet Place” team. How did the project come about? Did you two write a screenplay and pitched to them or did they bring you the project?

Christian White: Skylar began You take it away. 

Skylar James: I had this idea of doing kind of Terry’s story and the prequel. We were joking that to write a story with one buyer in Hollywood and a legacy property is not the smartest sales pitch. But I had just fallen in love with this movie and couldn’t get the idea of Terry out of my head. And it was this loose thread that was left hanging. And so I had written up this 12 page treatment. This is like a story that needs to get out there and needs to be out in the world with no plan for how to do that.

But luckily I was able to get that story to John Krasinski. We have a friend in common who actually ended up double booking us for dinner one night. And I went in and my friend was talking about another script I’d written and said, “Oh, she has this great script that had been on the blood list” and was saying it was great.

And John just turned to me and said, “what do you want to do next? And I did not have a neat and tidy elevator pitch for it or anything like that. I just said, blabbered on about do you know Terry? And do you have this idea? It turns out he really loved Rosemary’s Baby as well.

And it was influential for him we just sparked on that level. And when he heard the idea, you see his eyes light up and it meant something to him too. And John was the first person who came on board and has been a guardian angel for this project 

He protected the creative vision And he would always like after every draft, he would just always text me like, you do you like really just believed in the story. And so once it’s set up, it takes on a life of its own. These guys came on and we kept building the brain trust.

Christian White: By the time we came on board a lot of the hard work had been done. We got to build upon this beautiful foundation Skylar had created. She’d done all the hard work and we got to just come in to play build and mess around. It was fun, often you do a project and it feels laborious like work. This project never felt like work because it was always this, fun project, a fun team, but also what a cool, I’m writing within the Rosemary’s Baby universe. It’s a privilege, so yeah, it was great. Labor of love. Yeah. 

Q:  In the original film, I believe the exterior of the apartment in which the film takes place in a Dakota House. Famous for being the home of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. So I’m curious to know, did you guys incorporate that Dakota House environment into the script?

Christian White: You used to live around there, right? 

Skylar James: I grew up in New York City near the Dakota actually. And we’re joking about the cinematic universe of New York’s Upper West Side, right? The Dakota House has a lot of legendary stories, obviously John Lennon’s assassination being the most notable, but it’s this intersection of the Bramford and the Dakota and there’s lightning rods for all of this sort of nefarious kind of negative energy that was super inspiring to play with. 

Christian White: The setting was a character that Bramford was such the Dakota and the Bramford, just the words on the page, do something to your heart, it conjures all these stories and folklore and mythology.

So yeah, that was definitely yeah. I don’t know, writing to Bramford in a scene heading was wonderful, they shot it in London, the set was built in London, and then I believe they did exterior and it felt really, when you watch it, it feels really seamless. It feels really authentic. 

Photo by Gareth Gatrell/Gareth Gatrell/Paramount+ – © 2024 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

Q:  That’s true. I’m curious to know, where did you draw the idea from? Roman Polanski’s film, or Ira Levin’s book, how much did you two get inspiration from those original works? 

Skylar James: The movie is legendary, and I think life changing for a lot of horror fans like us. But if you go back to the Ira Levin novel, there’s more about Terry, a girl who dreamed of going to secretarial school. That was a very big dream in the context of this 1965 novel and 1968 movie, for us, it was, how do we update that? How do we translate 2024, even though it’s still a period piece, we want it to feel current. We want to see this world through a new lens, through a woman with a lot of agency, a woman who’s empowered.

And so it was picking up on the essence of the novel and the character but then developing it so it holds meaning for a modern audience. 

Christian White: I reread the book a couple of times and it’s impossible not to be inspired by the film, and the book is a faithful adaptation, the book has little details about Terry, Mrs. Gardenia and peripheral characters as well. Which was really cool. And we put a little bit of Mrs. Gardenia’s backstory in the film. Having those details and access to that larger world was helpful. 

Skylar James: For true fans of that lore, we’ve got Easter eggs baked in that are fun! 

Christian White: Yeah. All the characters at that party. They’re all in the book, so I think yeah, there’s a lot, there’s a lot to look out for. 

Q :  Speaking of character, Roman and Minnie were played by Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon in an original film. They did a hell of a good job. How did you two develop those two significant characters in order to make the audience engaging from early on? Not just this film, but also the original film fans that they can relate to. 

Christian White: For me, those two characters were the easiest, most fun to write. With Terry, I had to get to know her, get in her head because she’s driving the story, and I was thinking about ambition, but those two were delivered. So whole things that were written so well in the film, Minnie’s in particular, you could get away with the most outrageous words, because she’s loud, off the cuff, strong, powerful and really creepy. Make them say anything, and it was funny and creepy at the same time. So yeah, they were the funnest. 

Skylar James: That dichotomy that Minnie has, she’s so saccharine sweet over the top nice and then so evil. It’s the danger hiding in plain sight. That’s fun to play with. Diane Wiest with her Oscars absolutely crushes it. 

Christian White: Yeah, we got really lucky. Julia was amazing and we got lucky with the cast.

Q :  What was the original film that stood out was the direction of Roman Polanski approach. What kind of conversation you had with director Natalie Erika James to capture the essence of the original, but also make it a spin and have a different twist on a new film? 

Christian White: We wanted to honor the film, but we didn’t want to remake the film in a new version, and I think sometimes even a prequel can fall victim to that, just repeating those same steps and those familiar beats. So for us very early on, it was about leaning into things unsaid back in the sixties and giving Terry all the agency and making her, she’s got this really interesting, kind of tragic story because she’s so ambitious, but the closer she gets to her goal, the less remains of herself and the more she has to sacrifice. So I think all of that sort of stuff, giving that protagonist the agency differentiates it from that early stuff. There’s certain things you need to lean into now. You can’t avoid talking about it. 

Skylar James: You have a visual language that’s continuous from Rosemary’s Baby where it all feels like this exists in the same world and it’s the same story. Adding pops of dance, adding those pops of this is a surreal world now. This is a more dangerous world in many ways. Adding the elements of Broadway and ambition and all of that stuff. You really get to punctuate it with all these things that feel really fresh and new.

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Here’s the trailer of the film.