Sounding Off! A Conversation with ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ Screenwriter-Director Michael Sarnoski

Warning: major spoilers ahead.

When Michael Sarnoski was handpicked by franchise creator John Krasinski to write and direct A Quiet Place: Day One -the third installment and prequel to the wildly successful series, the ground rules of this bone-chilling universe were squarely in place. In a narrative nutshell: blind aliens savagely hunt their earthly human prey by tracking them through sound. You make noise, you’re toast.

This baked-in convention ratcheted up the stakes for Sarnoski, who was tasked with setting this back-in-time origin story in the loudest place on earth: Manhattan. In doing so, he gently guides us into his pre-invasion world by introducing us to Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a terminally ill cancer patient laying low in a suburban hospice facility. When we first meet her, she’s is justifiably depressed and defeated. Maybe that’s why when her hospice nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff) plans a Manhattan field trip to see a puppet show of all things, she agrees to join only when promised a slice of authentic New York pizza. After all, this former NYC dweller knows what she wants and has nothing to lose.

Samira’s pathos is put to the ultimate test when the Manhattan sky suddenly rains down an asteroid shower carrying thousands of the iconic car-sized armor-plated toothy predators, who instantly obliterate anyone in their auditory paths. Somehow, Samira navigates the catastrophe better than others—ever incentivized by that illusive pizza slice.

Along the way, she encounters a face familiar to viewers in the form of Henri (Djimon Hounsou), who we know must survive to make it to A Quiet Place Part II, but who we still watch through clasped fingers. Samira also finds herself begrudgingly shadowed by fellow newcomer Eric (Joseph Quinn); an overly-clingy British tourist who chose the worst time imaginable to visit the Big Apple.

Although the players have changed from the rural Abbott family in the first two films, the escape sequences are just as nail-biting, like when Samira and Eric wade through a flooded subway track to evade the aliens, for whom exposure to H₂O is fatal. Thanks to top-notch special effects by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), we observe the particularly gruesome demise of one such alien who puts this watery hazard to the test. But for Sarnoski, the visual spectacles were secondary to character.

“I wanted almost everything we see in the movie to be through Samira’s lens as she tries to figure out this world,” says Sarnoski, who spoke to Script about bringing the next installment of this franchise to life.

Did coming into a well-established cinematic universe with a built-in set of ground rules help your writing process or constrict it?

A little bit of both. For me, character was the entry point into this movie from a writer’s standpoint. The ground rules were already fundamentally laid out with the creatures -you make a sound, you die—which leaves a lot of leeway to interpret character.

And we can’t talk about character without discussing Samira, who started out already vulnerable with terminal cancer—well before the alien invasion. How did that idea come to you?

I vividly remember meeting with John Krasinksi who told me, 'Hey, I want to make this installment a New York Day One invasion movie. What would be your entry into this?' And I thought of all the tropes of New York invasion and disaster movies that I didn’t want to explore, but I couldn’t come up with a character that I did care to explore. Then one Sunday night, Samira just appeared to me. I thought, 'What if we were following someone who had a different relationship to death and survival than other people?' Because I knew that maybe in a weird way, the Apocalypse could be an opportunity for her to live in a way she hadn’t before. Then a lot of the other stuff organically came out of that.

That leads me to the question about Samira sticking a medicinal pain patch to her back before she left the hospice facility, which provided a payoff when Eric later scrambled to find a replacement patch in the pharmacy. Did you initially plan for that payoff?

Well, the way I write, I tend to first find the character and the world they inhabit in order to get a general sense of what I’m putting them through. Then my first draft is always a vomit pass, where I just crank it out. And I know it’s going to be rough and that it won’t make much sense in some ways, but it allows me to reread it and say, 'Here are things I want to explore further,' maybe without even realizing it. So, I don’t usually decide on a detail like the medicine patch in advance because that’s something I would usually discover through the character in fleshing out what her life is like as a cancer patient. How would her condition become an obstacle in this new world?

And it was also interesting to connect her character with Eric—a British tourist in Manhattan, who in a way was already displaced even before disaster struck. Was that intentional?

A big thing for me was trying to do justice to New York City, which means different things to different people. I liked the idea of exploring how Samira was a native New Yorker, who’s now grappling with how to reconnect to that place, and then pairing that with an immigrant story in New York, with a character who came to New York for different reasons. It’s the idea that this City and its destruction can mean different things to different people. 

And the idea of Eric feeling out of place was important because I almost wanted the audience to feel the way Sam does when she first encounters him. She has an idea of what her narrative is going to be, then suddenly some random guy invades her movie, and she’s like, 'What are you doing? This is my movie. Go away.' She has to grapple with this other person who comes out of nowhere.

And in bringing back Djimon Hounsou to reprise his role as Henri from A Quiet Place Part II, was it helpful to write and direct a character who had a built-in back story? Did you invite Djimon to rewatch the second film to calibrate his performance?

We never watched Part II together because he was familiar enough with it and he’s an incredible actor, so he knew what he needed to bring to that role. Day One also takes place a year and a half before we see his character in Part II, and he’s probably gone through a lot between those two points, so I talked to him about that, and it was fun to play around with what we were hinting at as far as the things he had to go through to ultimately find some sort of peace on that island. I liked suggesting that it was a trying time for him to get to that place of safety.

Given that there’s such a heavy visual effects element with the alien creatures, what was your level of post-production involvement? Did you peek your head into the editing bay to give notes?

Yeah, I was constantly going back and forth with ILM and our VFX supervisor, Malcolm Humphreys, to review the visual effects they were working on. From very early phases—from early post-vis animations, through the end, we were constantly communicating about how the creatures should be moving and how we wanted things to look. ILM was on set with us every single day to determine how we could shoot as much as we could practically, and what we could do with visual effects and not get in the way.

What was your experience with CGI like prior to shooting this film? Did you receive a crash course in the subject, or did you have built-in knowledge?

I had a decent amount of built-in knowledge. Obviously, I never worked on something with this scale of creature animation, and ILM really knows what they’re doing, but I knew a little bit about CGI. On my last movie, Pig, I had done a lot of the VFX work myself, but it was basic rotos and compositing, so I could sort of talk the language.

I think you’re minimizing your expertise because using jargon like “rotos” and “compositing” suggests that you’re advanced. Did this give you a shorthand when talking with the other techs?

Yeah, it did. But it’s the job of the director to have a little bit of the shorthand with everyone involved in the film - from sound, to visual effects, to camera. You need to know enough to make suggestions about what you want, and I was comfortable enough with my VFX skills in the indie film world to have those talks, but I’m essentially a complete beginner when it comes to the level of effects ILM pulled off in this movie.

Speaking about collaborating with the other department heads, I read that your director of photography Pat Scola came to the table already envisioning certain Apocalyptic scenarios, such as the flooded New York subways, which set the scene for that suspenseful moment where Samira and Eric are wading neck deep in rising water to escape the creatures. Did this action come from Pat’s idea to flood the subway? Or was this your pre-existing idea that necessitated the flooded subway? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

First off, I couldn’t imagine filming this movie without Pat because we had such a shorthand from Pig, and I trust him because he understands what I’m visually looking for. But to answer your question, a lot of those ideas arose from conversations with all sorts of department heads. I spent a month in New York when I first got this job—steeping myself in the City while writing the script. I was wandering around and thinking of what all the classic New York spots could offer this franchise, which previously took place in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, and now we’re in one of the biggest cities in the world, where we got to explore all of the “wouldn’t-it-be-cools” of trying this and that. 

Pat came up with a ton of stuff that I give him credit for, but I don’t remember the subway specifically because that evolved gradually. I remember looking at videos of hurricanes hitting New York and the flooded streets and subways, so it was an exploration of what the City could look like in a state of desolation and destruction.

Finally, the idea of Samira and the other hospice patients venturing into Manhattan to see a puppet show was unexpected. How did you come up with that specific art form versus a play or a poetry slam?

Something about a puppet show appealed to me. And I’ve said it before - there’s something related to the pandemic in this story, in that we’ve all experienced what it feels like for the world to fall apart, and to try to find connection and peace and hope in quiet little ways, and I like the idea of Sam going to something that outwardly seems like an eye roll, where she thinks, 'Oh my god, really? I’m not a child!' Yet somehow, she sees this beauty in it. It’s a deeply emotional moment from something she thinks is going to be a goof. 

A Quiet Place: Day One is now available to watch in Theatres.