It’s easy to compare writer-director Brian Duffield’s alien invasion thriller, No One Will Save You (now streaming on Hulu), to A Quiet Place. After all, both films contain little to no dialogue and center around characters desperately trying to protect their farmhouse properties from a malevolent presence not of this planet.
But I would like to argue that Duffield (director of Spontaneous, co-writer of Love and Monsters and, more recently, a producer on Cocaine Bear) has tapped into the silent dread of a classic Twilight Zone episode, “The Invaders,” which stars Agnes Moorehead as a lone and taciturn woman fending off strange visitors from beyond the stars. If you haven’t seen the episode, go check it out — the twist is a doozy!
Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Dopesick) channels that classic Moorehead energy in No One Will Save You as Brynn, a resourceful outcast forced to confront the trauma of her past by some truly creepy extra-terrestrials, whose sudden arrival proves more cathartic than several thousand dollars of psychoanalysis.
I recently had a chance to catch up with Duffield over Zoom to discuss his engaging and emotionally nuanced taken on the UFO-hovers-over-farmstead-genre.
***WARNING! The following contains spoilers for the film!***
Where did the idea for this movie come from?
I had the idea of the character that Kaitlyn plays for a really long time and just didn’t know what to do with her. But I knew all of her backstory and the mystery of her character. And then I had this other alien idea that I knew was a little unconventional or unique. At some point, the two ideas just got hitched in my brain. It felt like Brynn’s experience and her point-of-view was an interesting way into that story.
Did you play around with any alternate titles?
I couldn’t think of a title for a really long time. I think even when Kailyn read it, it might have just said, ‘Written by Brian Duffield’ on the cover. I don’t remember why that popped into my head. I liked the idea of a ‘50s-style title. I liked that for a movie without a lot of dialogue; the title is doing a lot of dialoguing with the movie.
There’s a lot of different ways you can read that title and that was really fun to us. Is it something that the aliens are saying to her? Is it about her place in the world? Is it about what she’s telling herself in terms of bucking up? The title gets the questions going in a fun way. I was tempted to put an exclamation mark at the end of it, but I chickened out [laughs]
At what point did you decide that there would be no dialogue?
Pretty late in the writing of it. It wasn’t something I set out to do. I knew I didn’t want there to be exposition dumps that tell her what’s going on or anything like that. Because I think it’s scarier to not know what’s going on. So it was just kind of happenstance. And when I realized it, I was like, ‘Oh, I can see this through to the end, no problem.’ … I wish I could take more credit for for doing it, but it honestly didn’t feel that different from making a talkie [laughs].
Your movie reminded me of “The Invaders,” the classic Twilight Zone episode starring Agnes Moorehead. Would you say that was a major influence?
Not really. I love The Twilight Zone. I love that episode. I didn’t set out [to do that], but the DNA is probably in it. But, by the same token, I think there were bigger movies that I was probably in conversation with.
What are some of your favorite alien invasion films?
Signs is a really big one. I think one of the things we joked about is that the end of Signs is kind of the start of our movie in terms of the alien walking in the house. I grew up at the perfect age for Signs to hit me and I’ve always loved it. But it was also one of those things where it’s just like, ‘Yeah, if these dudes traveled all this way, would they hide out for a little bit in the woods?’ Flying to Earth is an immense achievement and then it feels like walking in a front door is pretty simple.
So, I felt like, ‘Well, yeah, that’s what happens if they show up.’ They’re just like, ‘Here we are!’ They just walk in and that felt like…not a correction to Signs, but a little bit of a conversation [with it]. Sometimes, people bring up Signs in relation to my movie in ways that I haven’t thought of, similarly to what you just did with The Twilight Zone, and I’m always delighted how these things do burrow into your brain and they all get into that gumbo.
Speaking of the aliens, you’ve got a wide range of them — from the more traditional to Slender Man types. Can you talk a little bit about what you wanted out of the designs?
I always wanted to kick off with the [classic] Grey, partially because I’d been missing them onscreen. And then I also knew Kaitlyn’s character and the audience would initially see it as a sliver of something and wanted them to instantly understand that it was an alien and not a mutated bug or whatever else their minds could go to.
That felt like a really great starting line for everybody. [But I didn’t want] that to be the lone threat of the movie. Because we start so early and we show so much, I wanted that threat to evolve, so Kaitlyn’s never comfortable. I wanted to build out that she’s getting little glimpses and peeks at their culture; at their hierarchy — a little bit of the behind-the-scenes of how they work and how they think.
The noises they make are super-creepy too. What went into the sound design for the aliens?
I just got the best dudes to work on it. Chris Terhune and Will Files, they do all of Matt Reeves’ stuff and Will got nominated for The Batman a couple years ago. But it was great. One of the classic things about the Grey design is that they’re usually silent. And I was like, ‘I want these guys to be chatterboxes.’ They’re always talking and they’re frequently talking to Kaitlyn.
I thought that was a really interesting terror, where something’s talking to you and you don’t understand what they’re saying. But you start picking up on familiar phrases and the [sound] guys just knocked it out of the park and came up with so many great little sounds and ideas. I really wanted to be specific so that if you heard something, you would go, ‘Oh, that’s the aliens talking from No One Will Save You!’”
The UFOs have a pretty organic look I haven’t quite seen before…
If it’s going to be from her point-of-view, you want the audience to just instantly go, ‘I know what that is!’ and know what the problem is. When she sees that ship coming towards her for the first time, she has to make a lot of assumptions right off the bat of what that ship can do, just based on sci-fi lore. I think if it was an X-wing that swooped in, I’d assume that’s a problem, but I don’t know specifically know what the problem is.
As opposed to having the UFO, as soon as she sees it, she’s like, ‘I know there’s gonna be a f—in’ light beam that I’m gonna have to deal with.’ That helps ratchet up the tension. And then, like you said, there’s [an organic look to the craft]. Same with the Greys. It was like, ‘Okay, let’s start from there, but then what’s something surprising about this design we haven’t seen before?’
Once you knew that this was going to be a one-woman show, how did you go about casting the lead?
Selfishly, getting an actor like Kaitlyn, who has done so many great things, I was like, ‘Well, that’s half my job finished.’ Because you point the camera at her and she does it — and it is always perfect. Also, there are so many action franchises right now. There’s not too many [actors] of that age range that haven’t done a Marvel or Star Wars kind of thing. Kaitlyn, at the time of working together, hadn’t and that was really exciting to both of us where you couldn’t remember her Scarlet Witch-ing herself out of a situation like this.
With Kaitlyn, you haven’t built up that memory of seeing her throw a punch. I think she has her little anger moments in Short Term 12, but I don’t think those count as action heroine stuff. So getting to put someone that you were so unfamiliar with in that genre was really exciting. Everyone knows and loves Kaitlyn from her dramatic and comedic work, but I think she was really excited to get to do a Tom Cruise movie and be Tom Cruise.
Brynn seems to prefer clothing from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Was there a specific rationale behind her retro sense of fashion?
Our pitch with Kaitlyn; Ramsey [Avery], our production designer; and Natalie [O’Brien], our costume designer, was that she’s kind of what a 10-year-old’s idea of an adult is. There’s big story reasons for that. She’s made her peace with not really being accepted as part of the town and has this house she inherited from her mom. She gets to be like, ‘Well, I’m alive and I am never gonna have relationships or friends, so how I do just enjoy my life?’ We talked a lot with Ramsey and Natalie about how she wishes she was living in Far From Heaven or a Douglas Sirk movie or Mad Men.
She wishes she was part of that world and she’s like, ‘Well, why can’t I be? If I have to be alone and have these walls and resources, why not make that my world?’ And as the movie starts, you can think it’s a period piece, but then she drives into town ands it’s a modern 2023 town. But for us, it was just about, ‘Okay, she’s built out this bubble for herself’ and then this science fiction element destroys her bubble and forces her out into the real world, which doesn’t go great for her either.
I get the feeling that viewers are going to have many debates over the ending. What was your intention with those final moments?
I really love Brynn and she really gets her ass kicked in the movie. I was always like, ‘I really want this character to end the movie in a better place than she was at the start.’ The ass-kicking inadvertently gets her to a very strange win you’d never assume was coming. But I think narratively and thematically, it makes a lot of sense …
You can go through these really awful events in your life, you can do really terrible things, but you also have to keep living. And sometimes, those things might not necessarily make your life better, but they will put you in situations that might be surprising or also not terrible. Our ending is meant to be read as genuine and that Brynn has come a long way.
Are there any plans to use this project as a springboard to launch a Cloverfield-style universe?
No. I joke that when the strike ends — and if it’s a hit — Hulu has my number. But I don’t have a plan in place or anything like that. I’d be flattered if people wanted it, but the movie is fairly conclusive. Kaitlyn and I have joked it could be like our Before Sunrise series where, unexpectedly, seven years later, there’s the weirdest follow-up possible. Because it would be an interesting seven years later kind of thing. But I also don’t know what genre that movie would even look like. So I have no plans, but I hope people want it [laughs]
That does it for my questions, but the movie is awesome. I think this and Nope are the most unique takes on the genre that I’ve seen in quite a while.
There was a lot of anxiety. Everyone was like, ‘Is Nope gonna be Greys?’ Then they had the little fake-out Greys in the marketing and were like, Oh, sh**.’ But we are very different. The secretive nature of Jordan Peele sometimes gave me nightmares. I was like, ‘Oh, I really don’t want to follow up him doing the same movie because he’s so much cooler than me.’ They’re very different, but there was this period of time where we’re like, ‘Oh, God, we’re gonna have to follow up his aliens.’ But thankfully, we don’t.
*This interview was edited for length and clarity
No One Will Save You is now streaming on Hulu.
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