The lost flashback scene and 5 other things you didn't know about 'A Quiet Place'
Warning: Minor A Quiet Place spoilers ahead.
A Quiet Place is not just one of the biggest sleeper hits of the year, it’s one of the biggest hits, period. The $17 million horror movie about a future where humans live in near-silence to avoid the attacks of man-eating aliens grossed $188 million at the U.S. box office, and is currently the 10th-biggest earner of 2018.
The film, directed, cowritten, produced by, and starring John Krasinski (who also doubled as one of the monsters, if that wasn’t already enough), could even tiptoe into the Oscars race.
In a recent stop into Yahoo Studios, A Quiet Place producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller whispered a half-dozen new details about the making of the film, which you can watch in the video above.
Some highlights:
At one point, the film was going to show what life looked like before aliens arrived. The movie contains only about 25 lines of dialogue, according to IMDb, but “there was more dialogue in the original screenplay [by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck],” Form revealed. “Because there was an enormous flashback sequence that was removed from the film once John took over [as director and cowriter]” that took place “way before the invasion” and featured a different character who was ultimately not in the movie. The film’s opening sequence, in which Beau (Cade Woodward), the youngest son of Lee (Krasinski) and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) is mauled by one of the monsters, was also originally going to play out as a flashback, rather than in “real time.”
The shot of young actress Millicent Simmonds drowning under corn kernels was so realistic it terrified Form. “We built a silo and we had the corn, but it was only 2 feet deep and the special-effects guy built this amazing rig where they could walk and it looked like they were sinking in corn,” the producer says. “And I remember the first time we were shooting it, Milli goes under [the corn], and it looks like she’s drowning. I was watching the monitor and I was very into the shot, and I literally got scared for a second. And they showed me again how the ramp goes. I was like, ‘Oh my God, guys, that was genius … I’m 8 feet away and you had me.”
All that sand presented one of the production’s biggest challenges. To cut down on their noise output, the Abbott family creates sand paths everywhere they walk in the film. Which meant the filmmakers needed … a whole lot of sand. “What you don’t realize is the amount of people you need to keep sand paths up, and how much sand you need, because they go forever,” Form said, noting that every new scene they conceived needed its own sand plan. “You can’t believe how hard it is.” Added Fuller: “We definitely had the largest sand department of any movie ever made.”
Watch Form and Fuller talk about why test audiences initially laughed at the monster in A Quiet Place:
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