1 of 3 | Emily Blunt (L) and John Krasinski arrive on the red carpet at the premiere for "A Quiet Place" at AMC Lincoln Square Theater on Monday in New York City. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI |
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April 4 (UPI) -- The Office alum John Krasinski says he never wanted to make a horror movie until the script for A Quiet Place came his way.
The film Krasinski eventually agreed to direct and star in with his wife, Emily Blunt, holds a 100 percent positive rating on the review aggregator RottenTomatoes.com after its showing last month at South by Southwest and premiering Monday in Los Angeles. The film, which opens nationwide Friday, follows a married couple with three kids as they try to survive an apocalypse of mysterious origins on an upstate New York farm where terrifying monsters attack anything that makes noise.
"This is exactly what I didn't want to do," the 38-year-old Massachusetts native said at a recent New York news conference. "I am not good with horror movies. I am a scaredy cat."
Krasinski said the timing was perfect for him to say "yes," however, because he read the screenplay just a few weeks after Blunt gave birth to their second child.
"I was legitimately in that world of terror and thinking every single minute of every single day about protecting my daughter and keeping her safe, keeping her alive," he recalled. "And then a script comes about, basically, the exact same thing. So, that immediately connected me to the whole project and I called [the producers] and said I wanted to do it."
A Quiet Place marks the first time A-list lovebirds Blunt and Krasinski have shared the screen.
"We had people joking, 'You're going to be divorced by the last week,'" Blunt laughed.
"And we are," Krasinski teased. "Big headline."
"Yeah, but it was actually kind of amazing. We really creatively aligned ourselves. It was special and I would do it again, for sure," Blunt said.
The shared, real-life experience of raising two children together -- ages 2 and 4 -- appears to have helped Blunt and Krasinski empathize with their characters.
"The back story of imagining what this family's life must have been like before the horror ensued was sort of gut-wrenching to us," she said. "Imagine if this happened to our family. What would that be like? And I think that was really helpful. . .I think we just tried to bring as much of what we'd want for our children into this film."
Blunt said she is more similar to her nurturing mom character, Evelyn, than Krasinski is to Lee, the "old-school guy" he plays.
"John is a communicator. He can emotionally engage and connect," Blunt said. "All [Lee] wants is to keep these kids alive and love is, like, secondary. We talked about it a lot -- over a lot of whiskey -- which we drank throughout this process."
"The idea of surviving/thriving was something I found was one of the most fun dichotomies to play in this because I think it is very real," Krasinski chimed in, saying the characters in A Quiet Place are like the flawed, ordinary heroes in Steven Spielberg's early sci-fi movies such as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he has loved since childhood.
"I know a lot of people who wake up on Monday and just want to get through until Friday. That's it. And then I know other people, who wake up Monday and say, 'Today is going to be the best day I have ever had in my life.' And I think that is the two ways [Lee and Evelyn] were parenting. ... I very much understand both sides."
