Five years ago, I interviewed brothers/filmmakers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle about their film DEVIL, their third horror offering in a row, after the effective [REC] remake QUARANTINE and the notorious found-footage work THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES, which I saw at a Butt Numb-a-Thon screening a few years earlier that the Dowdles later referred to as a low point in their careers; needless to say, the film didn’t play well for reasons that weren’t entirely about the film itself, I’m convinced.
I think DEVIL works more often than it doesn’t, and their 2014 follow-up AS ABOVE, SO BELOW might not be the greatest, it does feature one of the greatest locations for a horror film in a long time. After years of serial killers and supernatural evil, the Dowdles latest film, NO ESCAPE, tackles a different type of scare film—the kind where an entire nation is out for your blood and there are very few options when it comes to running and hiding. Acting against type, Owen Wilson plays a husband and father who has been forced to uproot his family from Austin to an unidentified nation in Southeast Asia right as a coup is breaking out and Americans are being targeted for execution. There are some true moments of terror in NO ESCAPE, all based in reality and not having anything to do with ghost, demons, aliens, etc. The heart is pumping just as hard, but for different reason.
I had a chance to sit down with the Dowdles in Chicago not long ago, just before the film opened last week, and they were just as appealing and fun to chat with as I’d remembered. With that, please enjoy my talk with John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle…
Capone: Leading up to seeing the film, I had read that it was a change of pace for you guys. I watched it and was like, “Did you see this movie?” The only thing different is it’s not a supernatural horror movie; it’s a reality-based horror movie. The blood is still pumping the same. The adrenaline is still kicking in. Do you acknowledge that you’re still in the business of fear generation?
John Erick Dowdle: Yeah, it definitely has a similar momentum of other stuff we’ve done and a similar pace. It has more real-world dramatic elements that’s been really nice to start delving into, with the relationship with the father and kids and family.
Drew Dowdle: We thought this one was maybe more experiential. Maybe the audience is asking themselves “What would I do in this moment?” a little bit more.
Capone: It’s something they could actually get caught up in.
DD: We tried on QUARANTINE, DEVIL, and AS ABOVE to be grounded. Even with supernatural elements, we wanted a grounded take on that. But with anything supernatural, you are still a half step removed, where we felt like this is one where you could be more emerged in. I think it’s maybe even more effective for that reason.
Capone: It’s funny you call it a drama; I guess some of the stuff with the family might be a little bit. But it’s a tourist horror movie. There’s nothing scarier than being caught out in a place where you don’t know the language, no one knows your language. I love that scene when they’re looking at a map in another language, and they’re like, “We just need a map. Oh wait, this map does us no good.”
[Everybody laughs]
JED: There’s this moment too when you are traveling, I remember I went to Egypt years ago by myself. It was like, “I’m going to go to Egypt!” So I checked into this one hotel in this little tiny town, and then I went out to look for a phone, and I couldn't find my hotel when I tried to go back, and the chief of police said “Come over here. Are you American?” I said “Yeah.” He said, “Americans aren’t welcome in this town. We want you out.” Then I couldn't find my hotel, and it’s nighttime, and my passport was in my hotel, and literally I was walking up and down every street like, “Someone’s going to kill me here.” It was one of those moments where something that would be so innocuous. Here, if I get lost and cant find my hotel, who cares? But when you travel, it exacerbates that so much.
DD: We traveled a lot as a family growing up and out of the country a lot, into Asia, and we loved it. There are moments when you can’t read the map, and under normal circumstances, that’s fun and adventurous, and you have to take extra steps to figure it out, and there’s a fun element to it. But in a moment of crisis, suddenly not having those basic tools, it becomes a really scary thing.
Capone: For some people that go to the movies, this might be the first film of yours that they see, because they may say, “I don’t like horror movies,” but they might go see this, just because of who’s in it.
JED: And it’s different enough; it’s not horror.
DD: Yeah. We tested the movie. It tested really great. And among an older audience, it tested crazy great. So not typically our demo, but you know, it played young and old. We were really amazed at how great it tested for over 35.
Capone: So you get Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, who would be wonderful in a romantic comedy together, but that’s not what this is. When you’re looking for actors, because this is a film about someone stepping completely out of their comfort zone, is that what you wanted out of the actors too is, to maybe try something a little out of their comfort zone?
JED: Yeah, that’s really good insight. Really all three of them [including Pierce Brosnan].
Capone: Pierce does stuff like this every once in a while. I saw BEHIND ENEMY LINES, and that’s the only film I could come up with that Owen had done that’s even remotely like this, and that was 15 years ago.
JED: That was 15 years ago. The drama of it is very different than this. We wanted someone who you haven’t seen do this kind of thing really. We kept saying we wanted Owen; Jason Bateman was someone else we talked about—somebody who when you see them get violent, it’s really upsetting and shocking, versus someone you’ve seen do this, like Stallone. This means something totally different.
Capone: That’s actually what I was thinking: 25 years ago, Bruce Willis would have been in this movie. Schwartzenegger might have done it. Because it has that family-protective element that I think most people can identify with, but it’s also an action film, basically. It actually felt like something of a throwback to me; I used to see films like this all the time.
JED: That was intentional, too. We wanted the ’70s or ’80s font in the opening titles at the start. After the prime minister’s assassination, we wanted to score this with Tangerine Dream. We got a little bit away from that. I like this feeling, something of a throwback. Costa-Gavras’ MISSING was a real touchstone for us, which is sort of like that, but that one’s maybe a little more political. There’s so much drama in this crisis in that movie.
DD: Yeah, and just one thing about the casting. You brought up Bruce Willis, and Bruce Willis in DIE HARD was such an interesting choice because he hadn’t done that before; he was the “Moonlighting” guy. That’s what we love. We have a dual litmus test for the actor who plays for Jack: Does he feel like a really good father, and would it shock you to see him kill someone with his bare hands? Those two, if it was a resounding yes in both of those tests, we were interested. Owen was top choice from the beginning. A lot of people asked, “Are you going to cut his hair real short? Are you going to try to reinvent his look?” Our thought was no. We want the Owen you know, the MARLEY AND ME Owen, in this circumstance. That’s what’s most powerful.
JED: Someone who’s not prepared. He’s not ex-CIA, not ex-Special Forces This is a dude who’s been working a desk, and he’s in a situation where he’s got to protect his family and doesn't know if he can do it.
Capone: Were you cognizant of that? What I noticed is that everything they do is messy. It’s not clean and slick. They’re tripping over themselves.
DD: It was very intentional. We wanted the fights to feel sloppy and messy. Yeah, yeah.
JED: We were always saying “Sloppier,” and with the Thai stunts, they’re so amazing, but they have a tendency to be very precise. So that was a big thing, saying to the stunt coordinator, who was amazing…
DD: And he got it.
JED: He got it. Yeah. He’d say, “Sloppier, sloppier.” Exactly what you’re saying—tripping over themselves. We had all these moments of Owen slipping and falling written into the script, and then when it came time to shoot, we said, “We don’t need to do that; it’s looking rough enough.”
[Everybody laughs]
DD: The casting of Lake Bell was an extension of Owen in a way where you look at that couple and say “They don't belong in this situation.” And I think that adds to it.
Capone: I like those moments in the beginning where you can tell that this move is not what they really want to be doing with their lives. They’re not a shaky couple, but they’ve been shaken a little by having to leave Austin. Speaking of striking a balance, when you have a film like this where children are part of the action and if they become too much of a burden on this couple, that becomes a real pain in the ass for the audience to watch.
JED: You’re absolutely right. We wanted them young enough that they can’t really be part of the solution. We kept saying, Jack has to fight a two-front war. There’s all this horrible stuff happening, then he has to convince his kids and his wife to like go along with him in the way he thinks this should be solved. But the kids, there are moments where we wanted to make sure each of them was a little bit a part of the solution, where, as a family, them coming together serves them all.
DD: And you’re right. If they hold up the parents too much, an audience will turn on kids. They will have that reaction. You can’t help it.
JED: “Will you just shut up?”
DD: Yeah. If they’re too whiney or too anything, an audience will turn hard. We carefully calibrated that. The kids really understood that in their performances, so they really got that they needed to be a part of the solution.
Capone: I’m guessing that probably the question you’re going to get asked the most is about that rooftop scene. That whole sequence is great, with the helicopter crash. But when you’re throwing kids from one rooftop to another, tell me was it at least a little bit dangerous in the execution.
DD: It was. We used the real kids.
JED: We don't believe in green screens or CGI. So we’re really on a real rooftop for most of the scenes, then we did a lower four-story down to a two-story rooftops, and we threw the kids; they were tethered to a crane, but they were free falling. We threw my son first to show them all it was safe.
DD: We were going to shoot them face down, because we thought we were going to have to use doubles, then we had this idea. On a Saturday, we were going to test a real rig on a real stage. We had done tests in a warehouse…
JED: …and my son saw video of somebody jumping, and he was like, “I want to do that.” And he was four. It was like, “Alright, come on. It’s Saturday. We’re throwing you.”
DD: And I invited the actresses and their mothers to come watch. And Lake was coming. We were going to do a Saturday afternoon out of it. And the first guinea pig was his son. He throws Henry, and it immediately became like all the kids wanted to do it next. Then it was a ride.
JED: There’s a big difference. That day we were throwing everyone face down. Then once we realized we had the real kids, we were like, “Why are we face down? Let’s re-rig them so we can throw them backwards, and they can face up at us.” There’s that moment when you can see Claire’s legs are higher up than her body. She is free falling. Those guys let her out fast, and it was one of those where everyone’s breath stopped. Everyone was like, “Oh god.” Thankfully it was okay, but those are some real…
Capone: Did the test audiences push back on that scene?
JED: No, people love it. It was the highest rated scene every time
DD: To step back, we got a huge amount of pushback for even having kids this age in this movie. It made it a very hard movie to finance. We thought it was the most interesting version of the movie, but when it came to financing and the risk that that entails, it was a big issue. Now that the movie’s done, everyone likes that choice, but it definitely cost us.
Capone: How did you find these two girls? What did you test them on in terms of performance?
JED: We probably auditioned…
DD: Three or four hundred.
JED: Three or four hundred kids. When you start really going through numbers of auditions, you’ll see 100 people do the exact same thing. They’ll show up, they hit the exact same mark, and then someone will show up and do something totally different. Those are typically the people we cast. “That guy is tapped into something no one else is.” The same was true with them. Claire, the girl who plays Beeze…most of these kids come in like, “Hello, Mr. Dowdle.” They’re like wind-up robots.
DD: Some plan stories that they tell you that they practiced.
JED: Then you try and say like, “Can you do the same scene but this way?” And they’re like, “Wait, no. That’s not how I practiced it with my mom.” Whereas Claire showed up and she was goofing around. She was hardly paying attention to the audition, and we were like “That’s a real kid.” It was like we weren’t even in the room. She was futzing with stuff; she was a kid.
DD: We recognized that this entire movie becomes unraveled if the kids aren’t good. You have Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, and Pierce Brosnan—we all go to Thailand and shoot a movie. If the eight- and nine-year-old aren’t good, it all unravels. So the choice is incredibly important.
JED: We were very stressed about it.
DD: We would look for kids that are real kids, not actor kids. And Sterling’s a very experienced actor for her age, but she has this real craft. She’s a really exceptional actor, and Claire, she’s a total natural.
JED: We looked in Canada, in Texas. We searched everywhere—St. Louis. Chicago.
DD: Georgia. All over the U.S.
JED: We saw tapes from everywhere. We were like maybe we’ve got to get out of L.A. and look for not actor kids.
Capone: The film is set in Thailand. Were you concerned at all about being culturally insensitive? I was doing research for this last night, and there was a coup in Thailand not too long ago, maybe even around the time you were there.
JED: Two weeks after we were out.
Capone: Most of the people that we see who are natives of that country, we don’t know their names, we don’t know anything abut them other than they’re trying to kill these Americans. Were you a careful about how much you demonize an entire culture?
JED: Just for clarity, it’s not technically set in Thailand.
DD: It’s very specifically not set in Thailand.
Capone: That’s where you shot it, though.
DD: That’s where we shot it.
JED: So there’s that. But the idea was inspired because my dad and I went to Thailand, and there was a coup like while we were there, or right before we had got there. So that spurred the idea. Actually, when we shot the riot scene, there was five uprisings happening right then, so they shut us down because they were worried that if someone shoots a camera phone video of police firing on people [in our movie], it could start the real thing. But we also wanted to have a bunch of people who helped the Dwyers. There’s even one of the guys who’s a rebel. The rebels are all wearing that red-and-white-checked thing, and one of them at one point sees them and could have called them out. But once he sees them as individuals, he doesn’t want to really hurt them. He’s just a part of this group. He turns and lets them be.
DD: It was never Thailand. Thailand was just the best place to shoot this movie. We originally wrote the script as Cambodia. It was the Khmer Rouge coming back. They had this opportunity based on this water company to come back into power. A lot of people read the script, and they liked it a lot, but they were very much like the first question was “Does the Khmer Rouge still exist? Could this really happen? What’s Cambodia like” Is this a realistic situation in Cambodia?” We’re like, “That’s missing the point.” The story should be about this family and about this crisis and what they do to survive. It shouldn’t be about the location or the country.
Capone: I don’t know if I agree, because I actually thought that water rights angle was an interesting way to sneak that issue into an action movie. I thought maybe you were getting a little political. It adds reality to why they would specifically target Americans with such violence.
DD: Yeah, it was important to us to give them motivation. I’m not saying it justifies that level of violence, but it had to feel like they were fighting for their survival, because of something our foreign policy has caused, and Jack is not aware of this. That’s a little above his pay grade, but he is connected to this company, so he might as well be the CEO, and it doesn’t matter.
JED: And in ’75 when the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh, they wanted no more foreign involvement in any way. They said, “The foreigners keep screwing this up. We want everyone who’s foreign out of this country or dead.” So there’s a history of that.
DD: Back to your original question, we didn’t want to demonize a specific country. This is an allegorical country. It could be in any part of the world. It’s just that developing country that suddenly everyone decides it’s safe to go to, but they may not realize if it is in fact safe or not. There are those countries that no one’s ever been to that suddenly become the hot new spot.“My neighbor went and said it was great.”
JED: Burma.
DD: Myanmar.
JED: Yeah, we kept hearing that. “Oh, Myanmar? Everyone goes to Myanmar.” I’m not bringing my kids there.
[Eveybody laughs]
Capone: When you were actually writing this, were there any plot points that were a little tough to work around? Was there a tough nut to crack when you were writing?
DD: That’s a good question.
JED: That’s interesting. I’d say probably in the third act. Our initial draft used to bring them out into the countryside and things developed from there. There was just too much going on. We were like, “It should be one last push to the river, not all this stuff.” So we reshaped that.
DD: Structurally it’s a little bit of a different movie. When we get to that rooftop and throw the kids, that’s the mid-point of the movie. It’s the tail end of a 30 minute, really intense action sequence. The back half of the movie, you’re like, “It can’t be a let down after that; it can’t move too slowly,” but we really focus on scenes that were longer and slower builds that still had great intensity at the end.
Capone: So it was about how to get them out?
DD: How to keep it exciting after we’ve done this huge amount of action in the first half of the movie. How do we keep it interesting without creating a fatigue?
Capone: We skimmed over Pierce Brosnan’s involvement, but he’s played like these grimy versions of James Bond in a couple other movies. I read somewhere that he based this character on Ginger Baker after seeing the documentary BEWARE MR. BAKER, which I’ve seen.
JED: Isn’t that great? Yeah. So Pierce saw that, and we had been looking for something a little edgier; he was going to do a South London accent. We wanted him bearded and a little scruffy, and he was down for all of that, and then he saw the Ginger Baker doc, and he’s like, “Check this out.” And we watched it like, “That’s amazing.” So he’s channeling that the whole time he was there. He was in character, to the point where people wouldn’t even recognize him. He’d be in a corner smoking and like people had no idea who he was. They’d be like, “Who’s that interesting looking alcoholic over there?”
DD: Owen Wilson’s mother said that. “That guy is so interesting. What’s he doing on the movie?” “That’s Pierce!” But we based him in part on the idea of the book “Confessions of the Economic Hit Man”—these characters that are around the world that are somewhere in the grey area between government and private, laying the ground work for these huge investments, and these huge loans. We don't know quite what he does or who he works for. But he’s been here 18 times. He’s here working on this.
Capone: He’s also Mr. Exposition. That’s why he’s there, to explain a little bit. Do you know what you’re up to next?
DD: We’re writing four things right now.
JED: Two TV and two features. There are a couple true stories. We’re following this trajectory. It moves a little from horror to thriller. We’re continuing that trajectory a little bit.
DD: We wish we could talk more specifically about at least one of them. We’re still big fans of horror. Like you said, this plays to the horror crowd. That is our natural sensibility, I think.
JED: Yeah, even if we did a romantic comedy, there would still be enough horror elements that it would still play to that crowd.
DD: We don’t have any plans to do a romantic comedy, by the way.
[Everybody laughs]
Capone: Alright, thank you. Good to see you again.
DD: Awesome, Steve. So cool to see you again. Thanks for checking it out.
