By Shannon McGrew
In LOCKED, director David Yarovesky's latest horror/thriller, Eddie (Bill Skarsgård) breaks into a luxury SUV and unknowingly steps into a deadly trap set by William (Anthony Hopkins), a self-proclaimed vigilante with a sinister sense of justice. With no way out, Eddie must fight for his survival in a nightmarish battle where escape is an illusion.
For the release of LOCKED, Creepy Kingdom's Shannon McGrew spoke with director David Yarovesky (Brightburn, Nightbooks). During their chat, they discussed everything from crafting tension in a confined space to the intense performances of Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins and the film’s unique sound design.
Hi David, thank you so much for speaking with me today! What about this story made you want to take on the director's role?
David Yarovesky: I’d never really made an elevated thriller before, and when Sam [Raimi] sent me this script, I paused for a moment because I hadn’t done this before. Everything I’ve made has had some supernatural creatures and stuff. Anything Sam sends me, I’m like, yeah, I’m in, but I had to think about how to make this movie. I worked a lot with visual effects while making music videos. I worked a lot with the camera. I’m a highly technically sophisticated director in terms of shooting. However, I didn’t have a language with the actors, so I went to acting school and started taking classes and doing scenes. I can draw a direct line from that choice to this movie and working with these incredible actors because it awoke something in me: an interest in exploring characters and performances and pushing to tell these human stories. You see that a bit in Nightbooks, with Alex’s personal story. With this film, you see a further step in that direction of pushing characters, putting them at the forefront of storytelling, and making it about people.
I love that the film occurs entirely within a confined setting of a car. What challenges did that present for you during filming?
David Yarovesky: After I read the script, I got on a Zoom with Sam, and he asked me, are you concerned about keeping it visually interesting being trapped in a car the whole time? And I said, yes [Laughs]. There are these things that are eye-rolling at this point. They’re just obvious choices when making a claustrophobic thriller or any claustrophobic movie. You’ve heard a million times before filmmakers say they were using a compressed lens, and they’re going to shrink the set closer and closer to give a sense of claustrophobia. Those are techniques that we’ve seen again and again and again, we’ve seen in great movies, and we’ve seen in not-great films, but it doesn’t seem to have a resounding impact on people’s enjoyment of the movie. I wanted to go a different path with it.
I met with our production designer, Grant Armstrong, an art director on Gravity. I told him I wanted to shoot this differently, and we had this opportunity to be in this cage and this tiny little box, but I didn’t want to be confined by the box; I wanted to be able to shoot it any way we can and push the boundaries of what cinematography in this sort of specific genre can be. He said when he was working on Gravity, they were in really tight spaces there, too, and so they built these sets on raised platforms, and then they were segmented on sliding rails so you could literally grab a piece of the set and slide it out and slide it back in smoothly and it reconnects. We started talking about doing that with the car, and we had a version of this car where the entire set sort of explodes piece by piece. He had to develop a locking mechanism because they weren’t trying to get out in Gravity. They weren’t hitting it, and we needed it to be solid when he hit it. So this was that plus this locking mechanism you could put it in and trap it so it was safe and looked sturdy. We used that when we were on a stage, but we also tried to shoot as much realistically and on location and do as much real as we possibly could. That was another big part of why it looks and feels the way it does.
I'm a massive fan of Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins, and watching them play off each other was so much fun. What was it like directing them, and how did the casting process come about?
David Yarovesky: It was a more traditional casting process. What surprised me the most was the speed and the intensity with which Anthony Hopkins got the script and was interested. When talking about Anthony Hopkins, we were talking about it in a dream universe. We sent it to him, and I was having breakfast with him within a couple of days. We shot out of a rocket after that.
Honestly, working with them was incredible. You’re talking about two of the greatest living actors going at it. It was almost like a cage match at times with those guys. I’m trying to say this in the least spoiler way possible, but there’s this showdown that happens between them, and shooting some of that was some of the greatest days I’ve ever had on set and some of the most fun days I’ve ever had on set and some of the most gratifying. It felt like we captured magic between those two. Michael Ross wrote this amazing script, but sometimes, we would divert from the script and go off on these tangents, and I would encourage them to go after each other. The three of us built it to a wild fervor. We all felt like we captured magic, lighting in a bottle, which was surreal.
I love how sound is incorporated into the film as a tool to drive Skarsgård’s character to the brink. What was your approach to using sound to intensify the tension?
David Yarovesky: Marti Humphrey, our sound mixer extraordinaire, stepped up on this. We might come off as a big fancy movie, but we’re not; we’re a small indie movie. We’re really small, and I don’t think people understand that about this movie. Marti stepped up for us. The funny thing is, when I met him, I learned in the room that he had done Drag Me To Hell. I told him I’ve never sound-mixed a movie without talking about the sound mix of Drag Me To Hell and encouraging them to watch how the dynamics of that play out and how it goes from such a quiet thing to aggressive. To work with him and to be there doing that was awesome. He was incredible to work with.
Then, at the same time, I got to work with Tim Williams again, who did the score for Brightburn, and he’s incredible. He also stepped up for us in a big way. He brought on this percussionist named Gil Sharone. The score is so percussive. The day after I cast Anthony, I flew to New York and was walking around Brooklyn, and I heard these street performers playing on pots and pans. It echoed off the alleyways and filled the space, orchestrating this urban environment that felt much like Eddie’s world. It felt like this sort of human jungle that Anthony Hopkins refers to at some point in making his conversations, and so I thought that would be an exciting way to score this movie. I always find stuff like that tense, which was our goal. It was to put people in a pressure cooker to put people through what Eddie goes through and make them feel that tension and anxiety the entire time.
LOCKED is now in theaters.