‘Locked’ Exclusive Interview: Director David Yarovesky

Opening in theaters on March 21st is ‘Locked,’ directed by David Yarovesky, and starring Bill Skarsgård, Anthony Hopkins, Ashley Cartwright, and Michael Eklund.

Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with director David Yarovesky about his work on ‘Locked’, how he came to direct the project, the Argentinian film it is based on, other inspirations, practical aspects of the story, and working with Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins on set.

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Moviefone: To begin with, how did this project land in your lap?

David Yarovesky: I just made a movie with Sam Raimi called ‘Nightbooks,’ and it was just a really great experience. So he sent me this script, which was not a kind of thing I’d ever done before. But Sam’s sending me a script, so I’m in, right? I’m going to do anything to work with Sam, but I had to kind of get my brain around how I’m going to take this on. The more I started digging in, the more I was like, “It feels like something I’ve seen before, but I’ve really never seen this before.” I couldn’t find a comp. So I started to pull on that thread and go, “Okay, you’ve got a guy trapped somewhere — what are things that are tropes for this subgenre?” I started to think about those tropes that we see over and over again, and I said, “Okay, one of the things is that you’re trapped in a little space.” So shooting it is very tricky. Oftentimes the cinematography is very simplistic and you’re really limited in shooting. So one of the things I wanted to do with this was really break that open and shoot this as a big cinematic movie and try to capture something that the people haven’t seen before.

MF: Did you see ‘4×4,’ the Argentinian film that this is based on?

DY: Immediately after reading the script, the next thing I did was watch ‘4×4.’ I loved it. I thought it was just so well done, super unique obviously. I had never seen something quite done like this before. I watched that movie one time and then I was like, “I don’t want to see this again,” because I love seeing remakes or reboots or adaptations where I can say, “Okay, this was their interpretation, and now we brought a new filmmaker in, and this is a totally different voice coming into this, and it feels totally different.” So my aim was to do that with this movie, to go in with the most respect and admiration for the original team that made this and did an incredible job with it, but take a crack at telling the story and see how my story ends up going down different paths than their story. I guess that was part of what had inspired me.

MF: Did you look at films like ‘Buried,’ which come at the same problem (shooting in a small space) from different angles?

DY: I had actually seen ‘Buried’ a couple of times over the years, but I rewatched it for this. I love ‘Buried.’ I think ‘Buried’ is incredible, but I mean, they’re very trapped in there. They’re very contained. Then ‘Phone Booth,’ of course. All these movies were clear inspirations, but this is ‘Phone Booth’ or ‘Buried’ in ‘Christine,’ so it takes it to a different place. This movie has a foot in the elevated thriller space, and it has a foot in the genre space. I think it’s because it’s so experiential — at times, Eddie’s terrified, so it can feel like a horror movie to a degree. I also think oftentimes movies like this can become a series of puzzles and traps to solve that are heightened and not believable. I love that stuff, but I wanted to ground this movie in reality, and I wanted to just sort of explore, “Okay, if a guy wanted to build a trap car and capture someone and really take revenge, what would that really look like?”

MF: How plausible was it in terms of what the car was able to do, and what William was able to control remotely? Did you have things that you wanted to try that weren’t possible?

DY: I’m not actually a car person at all. I am not a big car guy. I don’t know the new car stuff or whatever. But when I took on this movie, obviously I had to learn a lot about cars and car manufacturing and building and design. In that process I really came to sort of love cars in a way and get pulled into it. Now I find myself driving around going like, “Oh, that’s the new thing. Oh yeah, I like what they did with this.” So after doing many deep dives, I found that there were a number of companies that will modify cars, like an Escalade or whatever, to be armored in a number of different ways. The sky’s the limit. There’s like multi-million-dollar cars that are made to transport princes and kings and stuff. I tried to follow every painstaking detail of it. I’ll give you an example of that, something that probably you saw and didn’t notice. In the trailer, there’s a moment where Anthony Hopkins’ character is standing outside and the window lowers and he says something. But if you look at the window, it’s layers and layers and layers of window, because the armored glass is that thick. I’ve not heard one person mention that they saw that, but we went through that painstaking process to make sure that detail was in there for people. We did a lot of research and I really wanted to keep it all within the boundaries of what is realistic and believable for right now, and in doing that, we really followed that to a very intense degree. We did our absolute best to try to recreate what that would be like, how you would achieve it, and so on.

MF: Can you talk about working with both Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins?

DY: You’re talking about two of the greatest living actors today. Both of them are playing these intense roles and bringing their A-game. When the two of them met, they met on set. I didn’t want them to meet before. I wanted to be like, “Hey, nice to meet you. Get in the car. We’re doing it now.” I parked the SUV under a bridge and we did the movie like a play, with Anthony Hopkins calling into the car and Bill there. The day they met, they walked up to each other and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. It was almost like a weigh-in at a boxing match. The two of them were just standing and looking at each other, and they just start grinning at each other and staring into each other’s eyes like they were about to have this cage match, and it went on for, I don’t know, 20 seconds or something. They were just staring at each other, sizing each other up. I’d never quite seen anything like it before. Then obviously we jumped right into it, and they just went for it. It was so wild to see. I really feel like we captured a little bit of magic that day. I think the entire crew really felt it. There were these texts that were going around that people were just like, “I can’t believe I’m watching this happen. It’s Hannibal versus Pennywise and blah, blah, blah.” It felt like a really special thing that was happening.

MF: Did you shoot it that way too, with Anthony Hopkins calling into the car?

DY: No, no, no. We couldn’t shoot it that way, but we rehearsed it that way so that we could create these moments that felt really naturalistic. Then we did a whole recording pass so that we could get the best performance possible from Bill. Sometimes we used Anthony Hopkins’ voice, sometimes it was me, so that there could be an interactivity. Sometimes it was the first AD — whatever that moment needed to make it feel alive. Then we replaced all of it again. Anthony Hopkins came back in, and we re-recorded all of it to keep it alive really, to keep that sort of naturalistic thing happening.

MF: Finally, did either of them add any bits of business that wasn’t in the script, just to flesh out their characters a bit more?

DY: I went to breakfast with Anthony Hopkins before he signed onto the movie, and he told me how much he loved the script. Shout out to Michael Arlen Ross, the writer, who was totally responsible for that, and also the original filmmakers who made a great movie. We started talking about the character, and he would just become William, and he would talk to me like I’m Eddie. We started talking about our lives, and we started talking about our relationships with our families and morality and the human capacity to do evil. We just start going down all these really deep paths, and through that, we started to shape this character. Then Anthony Hopkins would call me almost every night for a long time, and we would talk through aspects of the character, aspects of how he felt, what he thought, and then he would talk to me again like I was Eddie. Through that, he would give me ideas that we would put into the script and we created this thing together. I really wanted to shape it around who he was and where this was going. It was a really organic process, but I think in order to create that sort of naturalistic feeling of the movie, I think it needed to be organic.

What is the plot of ‘Locked’?

A petty criminal named Eddie (Bill Skarsgård), desperate for money so he can take care of his daughter, breaks into an SUV but finds himself locked in the heavily fortified, trap-laden vehicle by its owner, William (Anthony Hopkins), who torments Eddie via remote control as part of his own twisted plan for vengeance.

Who is in the cast of ‘Locked’?

• Bill Skarsgård as Eddie Barrish
• Anthony Hopkins as William
• Ashley Cartwright as Sarah
• Michael Eklund as Karl
• Navid Charkhi as Butter

Bill Skarsgård in the Horror/Thriller film ‘Locked’, a The Avenue release. Photo courtesy of The Avenue.

List of Movies Directed by David Yarovesky:

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