Like Mr. Reed, the villain at the center of their A24 horror thriller Heretic, filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods were preoccupied with an experiment.
An embodiment of lifelong existential questions and concerns, their latest project posed an unusual question: Is it possible to turn a three-person dialectic on faith, within a contained setting, into a thrill ride, the kind of cinematic experience that is essential theatrical viewing?
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Released on November 8, Heretic watches as Sisters Paxton (Chloe East) and Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), a pair of Mormon missionaries, are lured into the home of the reclusive Reed (Hugh Grant), where a sinister test of faith and the nature of belief turns into a fight for their lives.
For Beck and Woods, Heretic is something of a rebellion against a filmmaking culture of “complacency” — a world in which it’s easier than ever for art to become just more “white noise.” An Iowa-based duo, the pair have carved out a unique space for themselves in entertainment within the last decade, launching their own franchise with A Quiet Place, and even opening their own movie theater, The Last Picture House, in the city of Davenport.
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Drawing on their diverse set of experiences, and Hollywood’s recent successes and failures, the pair reflect on what they see as essential, within the realms of filmmaking, marketing and exhibition, to avoid perpetuating a “future of fatigue.” Before diving “back into the unknown” of their creative process, where they’re most at home, they also discuss economic disconnects in filmmaking, the ongoing struggle to create “cultural moments” with streaming movies, why they spend most of their time in their home state of Iowa, and what will dictate the project they take on next.
DEADLINE: You’re big proponents of both original storytelling and the theatrical experience. How do you know when you’ve landed on an idea that merits that treatment?
SCOTT BECK: For Bryan and I, the ideas that ruminate in our collective imaginations for years are always the ones that make their way to a final screenplay. A Quiet Place was a movie that we dreamt up in college, like 12 years before the movie was released, and Heretic was something that Bryan and I had just been scratching at — the idea of religious ideologies Trojan horsing into a genre movie — for years and years. And I think it helps that there’s two of us. There’s this idea of, if Bryan’s still excited about something and I’m still excited about something, we can steamroll and snowball those ideas into something more fleshed out. So it’s always about what keeps us engaged.
DEADLINE: How do you feel about the state of the industry, where risk-taking is concerned? Obviously, while the culture is dominated by sequels, remakes, reboots and other kinds of IP plays, daring, original works continue to sneak through.
BRYAN WOODS: Well, it’s funny. Hollywood’s never been a place of great risk-taking, throughout the history of cinema. The business tends to conform to a certain thing that works, and Scott and I talk a lot about the period of the late ’60s, early ’70s. [There] was this period of upheaval when Easy Rider randomly hit: All of a sudden, it was like all bets off. Like, “Oh my gosh, audiences want weird, dark, crazy, small, independent things, and new voices.” So we have these kind of cycles of exciting things happening — and Hollywood’s in a weird place right now. We’ve certainly felt for years this fatigue of superhero movies, and fatigue of the sequel/remakes. And it’s not to say that those movies don’t still do well. But when you have a film like Joker [Folie à Deux]— which, admittedly, was a big swing — when these kind of things that you expect to connect in a big way don’t, it’s maybe hinting at a future of fatigue, and the hope that studios take weirder chances.
A24 is a studio that we’ve loved since the beginning. They feel like a studio that’s figured out how to take a film that’s left-of-center — that’s not based on IP, not a sequel, not a sure bet in any way, shape or form — and they’ve figured out a business model. They’ve figured out an access to an audience that appreciates those types of choices, and they’ve been able to make it work as a business. And that’s f*cking incredible to us, as not just filmmakers, but as filmgoers and also as theater owners. So we need studios that know how to take interesting choices, but also make them financially successful.
DEADLINE: In its opening weekend, Heretic made back its production budget of less than $10M. The result speaks to something I’ve been thinking about, which is a recurring disconnect in the industry between budget and potential box office return. You set yourselves up for a great result by keeping costs down and cinematic value up, whereas when budgets are as inflated as they’ve gotten, filmmakers of even great movies put themselves in a position to take a sure loss. Do you see this as a systemic issue?
BECK: Yeah, I think it’s our responsibility as filmmakers not only to think creatively about the story, but to think creatively about how do we get movies made in this landscape right now, especially coming from the viewpoint that we love movies that aren’t based on anything else, and ostensibly are original stories. I think about Heretic the same way I think about A Quiet Place — when working on the script for these movies, we didn’t think either were necessarily a home run, meaning we needed to protect ourselves to just have the means to make each movie. So each movie was written in the spirit of, can we make this for $50,000 in our home state of Iowa? And best case scenario, can we get it made at the studio level with proper resources? Heretic was certainly something, because of the content of having a theological debate in the vessel of a thriller, that we felt it may not be a home run. But if so, a home like A24 could incubate that in a responsible way, both creatively and financially.
I think it’s our interest also when creating these movies to make sure that it feels like there’s a demand to see the movie in a theater. So while Heretic, certain people have compared it to a stage play, we’re very adamant about the fact that it’s a piece of cinema. Chung-hoon Chung, our incredible cinematographer who’s done movies like Oldboy, he’s somebody that’s bringing a visual flourish to this movie. Our sound designers who have worked on Christopher Nolan’s movies, those are people that are thinking three-dimensionally about, how do we use Dolby Atmos, so it creates an environment and an atmosphere when you’re sitting there in the theater? And then from the performance standpoint, casting Hugh Grant, there’s a degree of which we felt he was perfect for the role, but there was something exciting about it potentially being a conversation piece, weaponizing Hugh Grant’s persona and making that a moment of intrigue to bring people out to the theater. So we’re thinking about scalability, in terms of making the movie, but also the other added elements to make sure it felt like a theatrical necessity.
WOODS: There is a conversation, though, that we’re picking up on in movie culture right now, this feeling of “Oh, if only movies were cheaper, then they would be more financially responsible, and therefore more successful.” It’s an interesting question to be asking, but also, we would caution against that a little bit because you do want to preserve this feeling of spectacle, this feeling of going to a theater and seeing something special. Big movies, and studios that spend a lot of money on movies, that’s a great thing. I think what’s not a great thing is just how boring it’s all gotten. It’s gotten too easy to make white noise, and so taking risks on a big level, for us, is a great thing.
DEADLINE: Where scale seems to be a real issue is when it becomes about thoughtless excess. Most often, with $200M+ tentpoles — some even made for streaming, and many of which actually fail to make any cultural impact at all.
WOODS: Yeah. It’s interesting how hard it’s been for streaming. No matter how much money they’ve spent, they’ve struggled to create cultural moments, especially with movies. Squid Game, of course, was a cultural event, but with movies, they haven’t quite replicated that experiential feeling of going to a cinema, watching a piece of work with 200 strangers. The conversation that comes out of that experience, and the lasting memories, has not been replicated at all.
DEADLINE: Turning to Heretic, it’s interesting that you’ve said that you at one point felt unable to write this movie, given the level of understanding of world religions it required. Because the film feels meticulously thought through in the dialectic it’s presenting. How did you get there? How do you decide when to stop researching?
WOODS: We started writing the film 10 years ago, and got to the young missionaries meeting Mr. Reed. They sit down with him, Mr. Reed opens his mouth, and immediately, we kind of stopped dead in our tracks. Because he has a genius-level IQ, he has studied all the world’s religions, and we felt like we had not done that work yet. We’ve been interested in religion and cult our whole lives, but we hadn’t sat down and read the Quran or The Book of Mormon. We hadn’t filled our heads with enough information. So we spent the last decade just enriching our point of view — speaking with a lot of people, sitting down with missionaries, reading a lot of atheist thinkers and ingesting their point of view.
The reason we picked up the script again and kept writing wasn’t so much that we reached a point of, “We did it! We’ve solved religion,” or, “We’ve read enough to understand Mr. Reed.” It was actually a confluence of personal and professional events… I don’t like talking about this, in the sense that we’ve been very lucky and have lived privileged lives, so when I say we were at a low point, I don’t want to compare that to anybody else’s. It was just in our lives, we had hit this emotional low point where it seemed like everything was going wrong. At that low point, my father passed away unexpectedly from esophageal cancer, and because Scott and I are so close, it felt like it was both of us losing a father. And it was that kind of pain and depression and confrontation with these large questions of, what happens when you die? Is there something? Is there nothing?
It was that moment where we were like, “It’s time to finally pick up the script and write it.” Because we were feeling it so raw and emotionally. We always felt that Heretic needed to be one of these projects that’s just embarrassingly personal, and we’ve always dreamed of doing a movie like that. Our heroes, our favorite writers, like Cameron Crowe or Sofia Coppola, are these artists who, you read their work or you see their movies and you don’t have to guess what their obsessions are. You don’t have to pretend to know what their pains and fears are. It’s all on the page, all in the work. We’ve always wanted to do that, and felt like we hadn’t done that before.
DEADLINE: To me, this story evokes the feeling of a fairy tale, like Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. Did you think of it that way?
BECK: It’s funny because I can’t deny that it’s there, but I can’t [say] it was a conscientious thought going into it. But I mean, there’s even the image of Paxton and Barnes walking up to the house, and I can identify that it does have a fairy tale quality. I think there’s also a degree at which, because we’re dealing in religious discourse, so much of holy stories are parables. They have relationships to fairytales. You could even argue that many of them are fairy tales because there is a story that you can’t necessarily prove happened, but there can be lessons that can be extracted from there. And I think that’s how we see Heretic, to a certain degree: The depictions of the story, even the reality of Mormon missionaries going door to door, we’re telling a story about that. We’re not telling a factual tale, necessarily.
DEADLINE: Obviously, your production designer, Phil Messina, was integral in fleshing this out. But how much did you think through the logistics of how Mr. Reed’s ‘mystery box’ house functions, at the script stage?
WOODS: We’re very visual writers, and I mean that literally. Like, our script for A Quiet Place had certain pages that were completely blank, and then just had one word on it to emphasize a certain sound effect, or would have images and diagrams to help sell the concept of a modern-day silent film. With Heretic, we’re using the Monopoly board images in the script — we’re putting them in, how we see them all lay out. And to that end, the house layout, as Scott and I are writing, we’re diagramming and drawing up the bad version of what the house looks like and how it connects. And it’s funny. We write in a kind of dream logic, and there’s two of us. There’s two brains, and sometimes we wonder if we’re like right and left brain, and then the two of us equal one brain. It’s funny how when we write, Scott will diagram something out. He’ll have a door be on the left side, and I’ll be like, “Oh, interesting. I always saw it on the right side.” So a big part of our process is drawing and diagramming so that we’re imagining the same movie. Then, you bring in someone like Phil Messina, and he elevates it and helps us clarify some of the dream logic.
As you get to the end of the movie, one of the big reveals is that the house is kind of a Möbius strip, that it circles back on itself. So it’s very tricky, from an architectural standpoint, to not only service the set pieces that the movie demands, but then also make that make sense, as a piece of architecture that we can see from a bird’s eye view.
DEADLINE: Did the idea for the butterfly symbolism throughout the film begin with the concept of the “Butterfly Dream” that Mr. Reed discusses?
WOODS: It did not start with that philosophical parable about the butterfly. To be honest, I struggle to remember where it started, because as we write, we kind of collect ideas. And Scott and I are constantly talking, so the origin of the butterfly, it’s lost in reams of research and handwritten notes.
BECK: Our process is such that our ideas get lost in the midst. Because there’s two of us, neither of us take ownership over it, and really what we take ownership over is the conversations that evolve into the reasons why things are in the script. I don’t want to go too deep into it because I think it impacts certain pieces of the ending, but there’s certainly a symbolic quality to the butterfly, and I think through our conversations of “Oh, how do we finalize this ending and communicate an ambiguity, but an intentional ambiguity, so that it can anchor in people’s interpretations of the movie, in terms of their relationship with either being religious or non-religious, and the way you see the world,” the butterfly felt like it was a proper symbol for that. Then, you kind of find these little fence posts throughout that string everything together of where you can have that reference. You can have that reference in even the song that is playing on a record, when they first enter the library, which is this old song, I think from the ’20s or ’30s, about a butterfly in the rain. Or you see the moth that is trapped earlier in the living room. All these connective things just kind of evolve from the conversations that Bryan and I have together, and then subsequently when you bring in collaborators that have incredible insight into storytelling.
DEADLINE: With A Quiet Place, you’re a couple of the rare up-and-coming filmmakers to have manifested a franchise based on an original idea, a world that is now internationally recognized. How does it feel to have achieved that?
WOODS: It’s really gratifying and special. It’s almost impossible to describe when something that you dream up catches on with the culture and people are excited for more things. But I think as filmmakers, what gets us out of bed in the morning is dreaming up weird things that nobody’s asking for, and in fact are actually telling you, “Please put that away. That’s insane. Nobody wants to see a movie with no dialogue, and aliens, and a family on a farm.” Being told multiple times with something like A Quiet Place that nobody wants it — and with Heretic, when we finished writing the script, we told ourselves, “We want this movie, but nobody else does.” That’s just an exciting place to be. It’s not even this feeling of, “We don’t like sequels or remakes.” We like anything that’s wonderful and go see those movies. It’s just, it’s less exciting for us to go play in somebody else’s sandbox.
DEADLINE: What you’re saying does, however, bring to mind an important addendum to our earlier discussion on originality. These days, innovating within an existing framework, à la Barbie, seems an equally interesting and valid way of bringing an exciting experience to the table.
BECK: That’s true. Something like Barbie is absolutely incredible and inspiring because there’s a narrow framework for that, right? You’re underneath the mantles of Warner Bros. and Mattel, and the idea of trying to Trojan Horse something as beautiful as what that movie was, is a small bullseye. And yet we feel that with original film, too. I think of that [Wayne] Gretzky quote about, “Don’t skate to where the puck is, skate where it’s going to be,” and I feel like in Bryan and my short career so far, sometimes we’ve skated to where we think the puck is and people join us, and then there’s other times we’ve skated where we think the puck’s going to be, and the game’s happening on the other side of the rink. Yet there’s no better place to be for us, personally, because the unknown is, I think, what keeps us going.
If we knew the next five films were in somebody else’s sandbox — say, we’re writing, or writing and directing, a sequel or a piece of IP — some people are masters of that. Like Chris McQuarrie, what he’s done with the Mission: Impossible franchise is amazingly beautiful. For us, though, we want to go to the unknown, and that invites face-planting sometimes. That invites failure, but I feel like Bryan and I, we’ve been making movies since we were 11 years old: We’ve encountered failure before. We’ve encountered hardships in the struggle of trying to make your dreams come true in this industry, and pushing through it is really the sweet spot for us. So while we’re enjoying the fact that Heretic is inviting a conversation, if nothing else, with critics or with audiences, we’re happy to go back into the unknown and find out if anyone wants to play hockey with us from here on forward.
DEADLINE: Interestingly, unlike most filmmakers, you’re also theater owners. My feeling for some time is that exhibition is a space calling for innovation — that reconsidering the moviegoing experience may be critical to the continued health of the enterprise…
BECK: That’s absolutely something we’ve observed, as theater chains have been going through their restructuring or bankruptcies or whatnot. We’ve gone through a multitude of issues, obviously, with the pandemic, and the strikes, and the pipeline of films constricting. I always wonder, does it come back to community engagement and being a place that’s not merely transactional? I know with our theater, that’s something that we’ve modeled ourselves off of — [places] like Alamo Drafthouse. The cultural currency that it has with its patrons, and the movies that they show, and the excitement and the energy they put in all the small, little touches, you don’t always feel that with the larger multiplexes.
WOODS: I think exactly [like] you’re saying, there’s a way to innovate the moviegoing experience without selling it out, right? I don’t think the solution is, we’re going to open a movie theater where you sit in your seat and bowl, and you’re on FaceTime while watching movies. I don’t think that’s the answer, but with Last Picture House, one of the things that was really successful for us… and this is low-key innovation. I’m not trying to claim this is some kind of James Cameron-level innovation here. But we have a rooftop screening space, and that’s very different in our community. That’s something nobody has, so we’ve screened movies on the rooftop under the stars in the city, and…they were all older classics, [but] every single screening sold out over the course of the year because it was different. People were like, “Wow, what an experience.”
I look forward to a future where maybe seeing a 3D movie isn’t about wearing these glasses that cut off your peripheral vision and you don’t feel the audience. You don’t need the glasses, and the screen is immersive in a way we’ve never seen, with technological advances.
BECK: I would also add, too, I think now being on the other side as theater owners, there’s a degree that theaters have a disadvantage, meaning that they have to be reactionary to what they’re given to put on their screens. There’s a degree at which I look at the marketing for a movie like Longlegs, having just read an interview with a couple of the marketing team — Christian Parkes in specific, I’m thinking, from Neon — and the innovation they used to turn a small movie into a movie that was momentarily in the zeitgeist, and people were talking about it in a way that they wouldn’t talk about [otherwise]. So I think the marketing of certain movies, you can’t do it for every single movie, because otherwise it just becomes all white noise again. But I do think there’s something often boring about the way movies are marketed. There’s not necessarily an intrigue. It’s just like, “Oh, we know this superhero movie, it just has to look a certain way, and we’ll inevitably get some people coming through the door.” There can be way more innovation in marketing, and I think in the culture that we are now, more than ever, we are so distracted. And it takes something like a Longlegs marketing campaign to get you to lean in.
WOODS: The bar for cutting through is just getting higher and higher, and people, there’s a boredom. There’s a complacency with the theatrical experience and the movies being made, and that’s not good enough anymore.
DEADLINE: Do you spend most of your time in your home state?
BECK: We’re transient, but we try to spend as much time in Iowa as possible. One part, because we have the theater here; another part, because it’s home to us. But I also think there’s something very inspiring about reconnecting with your past, and just getting back to the basics of the lifestyle that we had when we fell in love with filmmaking, and being re-energized by that. And not always being consumed by the film industry 24/7.
DEADLINE: That’s become the new normal, these days, as there’s no disadvantage for filmmakers to getting out of L.A.…Last question would be, I understand you have five or so projects on the burners now. What dictates which one you make next?
WOODS: It’s going to be dictated entirely by passion. We’ve got this giant sci-fi movie; we’ve got a more contained thriller. We have movies at different scales, and passion will win out. And we love writing things that we don’t direct, also. So I hope it’s not going to be, we’ve got five great projects, and only one of them comes to life. A few of them, we hope to share with some of our favorite filmmakers, and they can bring some of the scripts to life, as well. But the next one we’re directing will be probably whatever scares us the most, is usually what it comes down to. We were terrified of making Heretic because the whole conceptual framework of Heretic is, can you replace the jump scare that we had been bored with and became our usual bag of tricks? Can you replace that with a potent philosophical idea? Can a line of dialogue about religion be just as scary as the monster that’s hiding under your bed?
A movie that’s wall-to-wall talking, that’s still somehow engaging, felt really hard to do. So I think whatever we do next is going to be something that we look and go, “This is insane. Nobody’s going to want to make this movie, especially ourselves.” That’ll probably be the one.