John Krasinski Breaks Down the Opening Scene from 'A Quiet Place Part II'

Are you asking did I put a child

that's under six years old

in a moving car that we had stuff flying at it?

Yeah, I did.

And I'm probably going to jail for it.

But before I go to jail, at least we all know why.

And it's pretty rad.

Hey, I'm John Krasinski, the writer-director

of A Quiet Place Part II, and this is Notes on a Scene.

[siren ringing]

Ronnie, what we got?

We got units headed out there now, EMS and fire.

Where abouts?

I think out by Walker's farm.

[radio static playing] [people screaming]

I got into the sequel world by saying I didn't want

to do it.

There was an immediate response

from the studio that they wanted a sequel.

And I think I realized in the process that I am

an audience member first before I was a writer-director,

or actor in the movie.

And as the audience member,

I've always been weary of sequels.

Why would you do another one

when the first one was so good?

How are you gonna expand the world?

I had all those same questions.

I had no intention of doing it.

I told them to find another writer-director.

And while they were sort of contemplating that,

I had this tiny idea.

My producing partner on the movie, Andrew Form,

said, Well, can you just write out an outline

to give to any writer-director we hire?

And I said, Yeah, sure, no problem.

And as I was writing the outline,

I was halfway through it typing and I went,

Damn it, I'm directing this movie.

If I could continue the metaphor of the first movie,

if I could continue the themes

and pick up right where we left off,

I could actually tell a continuation story

of the first movie.

And that's what it became for me.

The key for me, my in as a writer and as a director for it,

was making Millie the lead in the movie.

Now when you make Millie the lead of the movie,

two things happen.

One, you engage one of the most talented actresses

I've ever worked with.

But much more than that thematically,

she opened all and unlocked all these themes

and metaphors that I was dealing with in the first movie.

And so, the beginning of our movie takes place

on the day that the creatures came down to earth

and how that happened.

So, this is the family that you know

and that you've experienced,

but obviously the town that they walked through

in the first movie to get supplies is now alive and,

well, for the moment, kicking.

My goal was to do most everything

in the opening of the movie in one take

so that it would actually drop the audience into the movie.

So, you would actually be walking with my character

you'd be in the car with Emily,

and that we'd never cut

and therefore never break the energy.

So, you always felt like you were a part of it.

So in order to do that,

every single department had to be perfect that day.

So, what's about to happen is this was a one-take

where we came from up the street,

And in the movie, it's all in one take getting us

into the truck.

In order to get us out of the truck

and into this stunt that's about to happen,

we obviously had to replace the cop car

that's about to be hit.

And that takes a whole lot of reset.

It also takes a whole lot of stunt people

and a whole lot of safety issues.

So, I couldn't just get out of the car

and have a police car fly through the air.

That doesn't really go well.

So, what we ended up doing is hiding a stitch.

And a stitch is actually something where you're cutting

into a new shot, but just hiding it.

And this is the only stitch we did

in the opening of the movie.

And I'm about to show it to you right here.

So as I'm getting out of the car, you will see right here,

the camera and ILM break the plane of the two shots.

So this is one shot here, and this is another shot.

And you're gonna see my head go

from one shot into the next shot.

And this shot is the shot that has the stunts.

And this shot is no stunts, just a dumb actor.

[siren ringing]

If you guys like Hamilton,

Oke is in Hamilton, the original Hamilton.

That's Hercules Mulligan, y'all.

He's in my movie. That's right.

So, what I was meaning about having to do safety,

right here there are massive flippers under the car.

The car is secured by all these wires

to make sure that when it flies through the air

it won't hit any people.

All that has been painted out by ILM,

which is Industrial Light Magic.

This is ILM here, their creation of this meteor.

And so, what you're about to see obviously

is a creature coming through.

And this is all secured and ready to go up into the air.

And we just paint everything else out that made it happen.

[radio static]

[people screaming]

A little tidbit, this is Brody's Pizza,

the biggest reference for me in making A Quiet Place.

I said to my wife early on, when we first met,

she said, What would you want out of your career?

What's your dream?

I said, I'd love to direct 'Jaws', so this is my Jaws.

And so, Brody's Pizza I named after Chief Brody.

This is technically not the town we shot in

in the first movie.

It is actually the creation

of this amazing production designer, Jess Gonchor.

This is a real town that everything you see

on the front side of it will be Jess Gonchor

and his amazing team.

So, all these signs are ours. This sign's ours.

This Hairpins is all ours.

We designed the entire thing

to feel like small town, America

Units headed out there now, EMS and fire.

Where about?

I think up by Walker's farm.

[people screaming]

This is one of my favorite parts of the opening.

In the first movie, we did this a little bit.

We have now come into Millie's envelope.

And what we do is, anytime you're in a close-up shot

of Millie, I established that you can get into her envelope.

And by that, we mean you hear the world

the way she hears the world.

Where I got that in the first movie was actually based

on something Millie's mom told me about Millie.

One day when we were first getting to know each other,

I said, Can Millie hear anything?

And her mom said, 'She actually can.

It's just all dimmed down as if it's been really muffled.

So if there was a big sound behind her, she'd hear it.

And she can hear laughter and things like that,

but very, very low.

So I thought, wow, what if I tried to put that

in the movie actually as Millie heard.

And one of the greatest moments of my career

as a director was when Millie's mom saw the movie,

she burst into tears because she said

that I gave her something that she never thought

she'd be able to do is to actually experience

the world like her daughter does.

And I still to this day get choked up talking about it.

So erase this before I cry!

Millie's insanely smart and insanely talented.

So, she had a lot of ideas going through.

I personally, being an actor,

know that actors have a lot to say

about the scripts they read.

So, I am willing to throw the script out the window

if it means that the scene sort of shifts and changes

as it goes along.

Cillian Murphy actually had a bunch of lines put

into the movie that he had notes on

and he thought it would be better for the movie.

And they worked.

We fired him quickly after that, but he did have ideas.

We definitely shot this entire sequence first.

So, this sequence is pretty much shot

in chronological order.

Something like this we had to do

at certain times of the day.

So our incredible DP, Polly Morgan,

the sun would have been right here in the morning.

So, she wanted the sun behind us, very smart.

It's still incredibly hot and the sun's sort of above us.

But, we got bumped around due to rain.

So, we were trying to do this earlier and then it rained.

And so we had to push this to another day,

which threw the whole schedule out of whack.

It's one of those things where, weirdly making movies,

and this just sounds so pretentious,

but making movies is a little bit like jazz.

And the best work I think comes

from when people are asked to do things

a day before they were supposed to do things,

again, working on pure instinct.

I'm hearing something on the radio that is now transmitting

to Emily's radio.

And now we're into this car shot.

So, this is a crazy thing.

There is a giant camera and a weird robotic arm

that's doing this.

So, this robotic arm is in the back of the car

and it has a camera, basically right here,

that can shoot at all angles.

Problem with this is you have to program it.

So, there is no changing the shot midway.

So, we had to rehearse this shot for about three weeks

with stunts, extras, set design, props, everything.

And what happened was you have

to program the camera exactly where it's going to be.

So, no one can improv or change anything on the day.

That was extremely terrifying

because the one thing you want is

for a scene like this to feel alive.

The great news is we blew up a car right in front of them

and then had my wife racing through the street at top speed,

basically avoiding traffic and avoiding getting hit,

and then have a bus fly at her at 40 miles an hour.

So, I got a pretty organic performance from her.

So, the camera got to do its thing.

This was a group called Mocos from Germany.

And they, I guess, they use this camera and this arm

on movies like Transformers and things like that.

But, it had never been used like this.

It's okay, honey. It's okay, honey.

[horn honking] It's okay, baby.

[Son] It's okay. Mom?

Yeah. [horn honking]

What is happening. [car crunching]

[monster growling] [son screaming]

[horn honking]

It's okay. It's okay.

We're okay. We're okay.

That's dad! That's dad!

Dad, dad, dad! Where? Where?

Mom, mom!

Oh my God!

Mom, Mom!

My inspiration for shots like this was Children of Men,

which if you've seen it,

it does an incredible job of putting you right

in the moment where terrifying things happen.

And so, I wanted to take that and push it a little farther.

The roof was taken off the car.

There was a stunt driver on top of the car.

It's called a pod car.

So, it just looks like a little dune buggy and a roll cage.

And he's actually driving the car.

Emily is not driving the car.

They disengage all the steering wheel and everything

so Emily can make it look like she's driving.

But instead,

she's on the best rollercoaster ride of her life.

I remember her favorite quote

in this scene was she looked up at the driver and said,

Your life is quite literally in my hands.

And this guy leaned forward, the nicest guy

in the world, he leaned forward and went, I'm the best.

And that's kind of what you want to hear

before you do a shot like this.

One of my favorite parts about what happened today,

the camera broke and started to slide forward,

and perfectly went into a closeup of my wife.

This is a mistake.

It's the best mistake I've ever made in my career.

There's a lot of me that loves being an actor in the movies.

I am, not just because I'm conceited,

but also because it's super helpful for me to direct.

There's this weird magic that you can do

when you're on set with your actors,

because you could sort of shape the energy of the scene

as you went, whether it was whispering to someone

to do it again just like that, or something like that.

Or weirdly, if you wanted someone to be emotional

and you're on the other side of their scene,

you can actually get emotional

and they will learn that they should go more emotional

in the scene because you're getting emotional.

So, you can weirdly direct through your acting,

which is really fun.

That said, I would say it should have been less stress

to just direct, but I very stupidly wrote

a much bigger movie, which had a lot bigger sets,

and a lot more special effects and stuff like that.

So, it was a brand new learning experience for me.

And I was sort of living by the edge of my seat,

which I now hope people watch the movie

at the edge of their seats.

[horn honking] It's okay.

[Son] Mom. Yeah.

What is happening? [car crunching]

[monster growling]

That creature is real.

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

We had to train it.

No, I'm just kidding.