By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Writer/director Drew Hancock has received a lot of great reviews (including ours) for his first feature COMPANION, but he admits he hasn’t read them. “That’s just a lot of noise, the good ones and the bad ones,” he says at the start of our interview. “I’m a glass-half-empty man, and something in a good review might make me go, ‘Oh, wait a minute, is this actually good?’ I don’t like to fixate on those kinds of things; to me it’s all about having made a movie, as hard as it is, and being happy with that.”
He definitely has a lot to be happy about with COMPANION, which has received plenty of positive response from audiences as well as critics. Part of the appeal are the many surprises in Hancock’s plot, which begins with a young woman named Iris (Sophie Thatcher) taking a weekend trip with her boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) to a remote lakeside house with two other couples. Just before the half-hour mark, the first big twist is sprung: Iris is actually a “companion” robot, her programming controlled by Josh. The plot takes many turns from there, some of them violent, and COMPANION (which counts BARBARIAN filmmaker Zach Cregger among its producers) succeeds as a horror/sci-fi piece, a wicked comedy and a heightened examination of toxic relationships all in one. It’s an impressive genre debut for Hancock, who has numerous comedy television credits as a writer and director, ranging from THE WASTELANDER to SUBURGATORY, and is now writing a remake of THE FACULTY (see his comments on that here).
COMPANION has a lot of ideas and plot twists going on; what was the first idea that sparked the story?
It came from a place of being in a position in my career where I wasn’t getting the job opportunities I wanted. I was a TV writer for about 15 years, just bouncing around different sitcoms, and my one true love is genre–I love horror, sci-fi and thrillers, and I wanted to work in that space. But I wasn’t getting any jobs there, and it took the pandemic for me to sit down and think, “Why is that?” Well, of course, I didn’t have the writing sample to prove to people that I could do it. Just because you can write YA romance/comedy doesn’t mean that’ll translate to the genre space. It was really a prison of my own design.
The pandemic gave me a lot of time to just noodle away, and I spent about four or five months generating as many ideas as I possibly could. COMPANION was one of them, and it’s really weird how that one happened. Usually the starting point is an image or a scene or a character, but this one came into my brain kind of fully baked. I still have the journal entry from the day I thought of it, and it was three couples going to a cabin in the middle of the woods, and one of them is robot discovering they’re about to be shut down, and things go haywire. I knew it was going to have that horror structure where every 10 pages, someone was going to get picked off.
I recognized that I had an interesting concept, but what I didn’t have in that moment was the idea that Iris was going to be the protagonist. My initial instinct was to tell the story from Josh’s point of view, and it would be another one of those technology-gone-wrong stories. But as I was breaking it, and thinking about her showing up at the house, and how nervous she is to meet his friends, it started tapping into these emotions I also have about meeting partners’ friends. I was like, “Wait a minute, I’m empathizing with the robot more than the human characters!” I had to stop myself and say, “Is this a possibility? Can I take this idea further and tell a story where the most human character is actually a robot?”
You take a bit of a risk by revealing in the opening scene, via Iris’ narration, that she’s going to kill Josh. What made you decide to put that reveal in early?
There were two reasons behind that. When you’re writing a spec, you’re not necessarily expecting this movie to get made, and there are so many reasons for a reader to throw a script in the trash. So you really have to catch their interest in the first couple of pages. That line was just a promise of violence to come, because I knew that the way the story was going to be structured, you weren’t going to find out she was a robot until sometime late in the first act. I kind of had to do that because the first act of the movie is purposely kind of banal; it’s luring you into a sense of familiarity with movies you’ve seen before, and then when the reveal happens, it’s pedal-to-the-metal, all bets are off, and it zigs and zags and goes in all these different directions. So it just came from me being worried that anyone reading it would be like, “What is this? I’ve seen this movie a billion times.”
I always thought that line would possibly get cut, because it served that function. But the producers loved it, even though I wasn’t really sure about it. Then we did a test screening with friends and family, and someone in the audience talked about how what that line was doing was suddenly, now that you’re watching the movie knowing she’s going to kill him, you’re looking at Josh like, “What’s going on with him?” and his behavior is under a microscope. It was a perfect mislead that was unintentional, but made people not really concentrate on Iris and think about who she is; it was putting more of the focus on Josh. As soon as they said that, I was like, “Yeah, we’re definitely keeping it in, if it’s adding this almost sleight-of-hand element to the reveal.”
At what point in the writing did it also become a dissection of toxic relationships and masculinity?
Honestly, I didn’t go into the process wanting to tell a story about toxic masculinity. What I realized was, as soon as it became a story told through Iris’ eyes, it was a metaphor for being in a bad relationship. I think everyone can relate to this idea that you’re in a bad relationship, you don’t recognize it, you break up, and at the end of it, you look back going, “What’s wrong with me? It feels like I was programmed.” And Iris is literally programmed, so it was kind of tapping into that.
So when your protagonist is a character who is being controlled, the antagonist is the one who’s controlling them, and now I was making her partner that kind of bad, controlling boyfriend. But there would be no arc if he started off being a villain; he needed to come in with nice-guy energy. That is probably the most dangerous kind of toxicity: The guy who comes at you like, “I’m a good guy, I’m your friend.” So that came out of necessity, when I was building the chessboard of what the movie was, to figure out who would be the best villain, that counterpoint to Iris.
Some people have talked about COMPANION being a commentary on AI. Was that part of your thinking when you were writing and making the movie?
No, I never wanted it to be a commentary about AI, because it is a metaphor for being programmed, you know? That’s the gift it was giving me. But I will say that what I was trying to convey in the story was, if AI is bad, it’s because of something a human did to manipulate it. AI is a tool, it’s tech, so you can use it for good, you can use it for bad. Obviously, there need to be rules and regulations for how you use it, because it can steal people’s jobs, and that’s not OK at all. But I think if we wind up living in a TERMINATOR world, and AI takes over, it’ll be because of something a human programmed into it, and not because it gained sentience and imitated what a human does.
How did you hook up with Zach Cregger? I understand you read the BARBARIAN script while writing COMPANION.
It was crazy, the serendipity involved in that. I have a friend, Ryan Ridley, who is friends with J.D. Lifshitz from BoulderLight Pictures. They were shooting BARBARIAN, and I was writing COMPANION, and J.D. was a guy I only knew peripherally; I wouldn’t say we were friends, just acquaintances. But Ryan got a copy of the BARBARIAN script, and he slipped it to me saying, “Hey, I read this and it’s pretty great. If you want to read it, here it is.” So I was writing COMPANION, and I read BARBARIAN, and I was immediately smitten with the writing. I was like, “This is fantastic.” I got to the midpoint point-of-view shift, where it goes from the monster reveal to some guy driving on the Pacific Coast Highway, and I was going, “Oh my gosh, this is brilliant.” Sometimes as a writer, you need to be reminded that you just need to entertain yourself. You don’t have to follow the rules, the do’s and don’ts of screenwriting; as long as you’re entertaining yourself, you’re probably going to be entertaining other people. So it was fantastic to see that; it just gave me a jolt of adrenaline, and it inspired me in such a magical way.
And I never thought in a million years that it would come full circle and they would all be producers on COMPANION. But with that J.D. connection, when I finished the screenplay, he was the first person I sent it to, because BARBARIAN was so great and I was like, “Maybe the producer of that will like this script!” Luckily, he did, and BoulderLight attached themselves the day after they read it, and it just hit the ground running. It was this Cinderella story; you don’t see movies get made as quickly as this one did.
TO BE CONTINUED
