![]() Recalling a junior high lesson about medieval villagers lighting fires down a coastline to warn against incoming threats, he directed his crew to string lights across the property to simulate that primitive alert system. He dressed the house with private photographs of himself, Blunt and their real-life children. He scoured Zillow to find the perfect farmhouse in upstate New York. Krasinski went all-in on the production details. Sound effects are sparse, the few bursts of dialogue precise. In the pervading silences, the family communicates almost entirely in sign language and by facial expression. “There was a power to that.a confidence that I wanted to put in our movie.” Confidence, indeed: His script for A Quiet Place, a film that runs 90 minutes, has only about 90 lines of dialogue. He studied horror films, noting “every single music cue, tension beat or jump scare.that worked on me.” He noticed the ways There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men went quiet in certain scenes. But when Blunt, a Golden Globe-winning actress, read the script, she said, “I had this overwhelming feeling of, ‘I don’t want anybody else to play this part.’”įor the first time, “I wanted to put my whole self into a movie,” Krasinski told me. He and Blunt, who married in 2010, had been cautious about collaborating professionally. (Tag line: “If they hear you, they hunt you.”) He revised the script to amplify the plight of a family trying to survive in a world where alien creatures with heightened hearing attack at the slightest sound. (Their firstborn, Hazel, was 2 at the time.) Like so many new parents, Krasinski was terrified that he might not be able to protect his children, and he saw the potential for a horror story anchored in this primal fear. The script, by Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, came over Krasinski’s transom shortly after Blunt gave birth to their younger daughter, Violet. Still, he had good reason to be anxious at the screening: With A Quiet Place, he made a horror movie for grown-ups, exploding the genre by eschewing gore, deploying silence as an instrument of suspense and focusing on familial love. He still wonders whether he deserved what he calls his “lottery ticket” breakout role as paper salesman Jim Halpert on the American version of The Office, which he landed after studying playwriting and English literature at Brown University and working his way through small movie roles. Krasinski, now 39, seems modest by nature and nurture: He was raised in a Boston suburb by loving parents-his father a doctor and his mother a nurse-who reinforced family values and a how-can-I-help attitude in him and his two brothers, both older. Sitting in the car, he thought: “If people clapped, that would be really cool.” So Blunt suggested that he focus on a single expectation for the screening. Nearly 20 years into his career, Krasinski had directed other features ( Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, The Hollars ) and held his own acting opposite formidable co-stars. L ast March John Krasinski and his wife, Emily Blunt, were driving to the world premiere of their first collaboration- A Quiet Place -at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas.
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