By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Continuing our interview that began here, we present more of our conversation with writer/director Drew Hancock on COMPANION. Now in release from New Line Cinema, and produced by a team including BARBARIAN filmmaker Zach Cregger and genre specialists BoulderLight Pictures and Vertigo Entertainment, it stars Sophie Thatcher in the lead role of Iris. A young woman taking a weekend trip with boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) to an isolated mansion where they join two other couples, Iris is revealed as a robot after a violent encounter, and the plot keeps twisting from there. (See our review of COMPANION here.)
I read that Zach Cregger was thinking of directing COMPANION at first in addition to producing it, before turning it over to you.
Just to give you a window into my brain for this project: Even though it was a writing sample, I wanted to do everything possible to increase the likelihood of it getting made. It was obviously a spec, but I wanted to keep it to one location, minimal characters, because if someone liked it, I didn’t want to stand in the way of it getting made. I thought, “Let’s make a low-budget sci-fi movie with limited practical effects that can be done in a conceivable way.”
That mentality also translated to the directing. I started out as a director, became a writer, and my intention was always to come back to directing. I didn’t want to be a burden on COMPANION, because I knew a first-time director comes with a lot of compromises: You’re not going to get a big budget, you’re probably not going to get any studio interest. So my m.o. in this process was just, if I’m going to get in the way of this movie getting made, I’m not the right person for it. The best director is the one who gets this movie made.
So when BoulderLight sent the script to Zach, he responded to the material, he really liked it, and for a brief moment he was like, “Yeah, I think I can direct this.” That was a tremendously helpful time; we didn’t make too many adjustments to the script, but for the next three or four weeks we talked about it, fine-tuned it and focused it and polished it together. I’m very protective of my material, and so as we were reading and talking through every scene, I was going, “How would you shoot this scene? Whose point of view is it? What lenses would you use?” I did that over and over and over again, so either Zach got so annoyed that he was like, “You know what? You do it!” or he recognized that I had a clear vision of the movie, and he would be best suited to take a step back and have more of a producing role, and mentor and shepherd me.
It was his idea to do that; I wasn’t doing any kind of calculated, Machiavellian thing to push him out, it was just my protective nature. So behind my back, he talked to BoulderLight and Vertigo and they all signed off on me directing it. Then he called me up and said, “Look, I’m not going to direct it, but I want to stay on as a producer. I talked to BoulderLight, I talked to Vertigo, and if you want to direct it, it’s yours.”
I’d be lying if I said I went, “Yes! Let’s do it!” When he told me that, it was just…fear. I was thinking, “Oh my God! Can I do this?” and I told him, “I need a couple of days to think this over.” Which is crazy in hindsight, but I needed a moment to sit and think. I didn’t seek out anyone else’s advice; it was a decision I needed to make on my own. And I just happened to be listening to a podcast where a writer was talking about being in the exact same position. He got an offer to direct a really low-budget version of one of his scripts, he turned it down out of fear, and he’s regretted it ever since. As soon as I heard that, I called Zach up and was like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry [laughs], I’m the director, please! I’m sorry that it took two days to figure that out!”
What made Sophie Thatcher the right person to play Iris?
Sophie was the only one who came in and nailed it. We used three scenes during the audition process; you know, you pick a few scenes that represent the arc of the character. One scene was from the first act, one from the second act, one from the third act. We found so many actors who nailed one or two, but never all three. Iris is very passive at the beginning; she’s won’t stand up to Josh in the first act, and then she turns into a bad-ass action heroine by the end. There were tons of actors who could nail the first half but not the second half, or the second but not the first.
We did the chemistry read with Sophie over Zoom, which is a crazy way to do that; you’re just acting to a little box on a computer screen. She nailed the first scene, she nailed the second scene, she nailed the third scene, and it was not a case of some people were in, some people were out. It was unanimous across the board–all the producers, everyone at the studio was like, “Sophie Thatcher is Iris. What are we going to do to get her to be in this role, because we haven’t found anyone who’s even close to her.” It was this brilliant Hollywood-cliché moment of the movie gods just handing her to us, and us being so grateful.
As a first-time feature director, what was the biggest challenge on set for you?
It’s all challenging, you know? There’s never a day that’s not challenging, and then the day you think is going to be easiest ends up inevitably being the hardest day, and things happen you were not accounting for. The day we were going to shoot the Hendrix scene, the cop on the highway, the whole highway got flooded. We had a backup scene to shoot in case it rained, and the road up to that location flooded as well, so we had nothing to shoot. It’s just the triage that is being a director, and figuring out, “OK, a thousand things are going wrong, how do we put a Band-Aid on this?”
The other thing, which you just get over with time, is, that first week I was directing, I was putting a tremendous amount of stress on myself, to make the version of the movie that was in my head. There’s no way you’re going to do that, because even if Eli Born, the DP, gave me a beautiful shot, it was not exactly the shot that was in my mind. Or a performance might knock it out of the park, but it was still not exactly what I envisioned. So I was going back to my hotel room frustrated every day, being like, “It’s not the movie I want it to be.” And it wasn’t until the second week that I thought, “What is the movie you want it to be? It’s never going to be that; embrace the movie it could be, and just let go. Lean on your collaborators a little more, and don’t try to make the movie that’s in your head; make the movie that’s in everyone’s head. There’s magic in that.” That just takes time, and a willingness to let go of perfection.
When it came to marketing COMPANION, how involved were you and how much control did you have, including in terms of how much to reveal about the movie, and when?
I was very lucky. [New Line parent company] Warner Bros. was extremely collaborative. You know, you hear horror stories where a studio says, “Oh, you made the movie, great. We’re going to do whatever we want in the marketing.” But we had meetings constantly with the creatives and the higher-ups, and talk about what it could be and how much to reveal. It became pretty obvious that we were going to have to reveal that she’s a robot. As much as we all were like, “No, we can’t reveal it, we can’t reveal it,” because of what I said before about the first 20 minutes or so being purposely banal, if we didn’t have that reveal, that part of the film that we’d be pulling from for the trailer was kind of a boring, been-there-done-that movie. So we really needed to reveal that she’s a robot, because then we could take moments from later on in the film that result from that.
And also, if you make a trailer that’s just like, “Trust us, go in blind, you’ll never believe the twists and turns,” that’s a certain type of movie; that’s a puzzlebox movie. I know what those movies’ experiences are, because I’ve gone to a billion of them, and you’re never enjoying the movie as a movie; you’re always trying to get one step ahead, you’re watching everyone’s behavior and you’re not getting immersed in the story. So there’s something kind of liberating about saying, “You know, this is what the movie’s about, just sit back and relax and enjoy it, and don’t try to get ahead of it, because you probably won’t anyway.”
How do you see COMPANION’s place within the subgenre that goes back to movies like WESTWORLD?
You know, I get a lot of questions about what I was watching when I was writing it, and I know a lot of writers who, if they’re writing an action movie, just saturate themselves in action movies, and get inspiration from that. But I’ve found that while that works for them, for me, I end up just copying whatever I’m watching. So as soon as I had this idea, and I knew it was going to be sci-fi and have elements of WESTWORLD and THE STEPFORD WIVES, I didn’t touch that. I didn’t go back and watch WESTWORLD, the Crichton one or the TV show, I didn’t watch STEPFORD WIVES. I preferred to watch THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD or MARRIAGE STORY, movies that are in the exact opposite category, and kind of pull from those.
Because at the end of the day, I don’t think of COMPANION as anything other than a relationship drama. Obviously there are layers and layers of genre and tone within that, but at its core, the glue that holds it together is the story of a woman who is in a toxic relationship and is trying to escape it, and finds empowerment through discovery of self. That, to me, is what the movie’s about. Now that it’s out, I’ll start watching those films; I haven’t even seen M3GAN, because I was worried about stealing something from that!
