“The spirit of what we were going for was Purple Rain but with a thriller…!” says M. Night Shyamalan about his latest movie, Trap, which sees serial killer Cooper (played by Josh Hartnett) attend a music concert with his daughter, which turns out to be a trap set up by the authorities.
Though Shyamalan is of course no stranger to thrillers, it was the music aspect that initially started the wheels rolling on this movie, deriving from a conversation with his musician daughter, Saleka Shyamalan.
“It started as a kind of challenge for Saleka and me to think of a movie where she would write 14 songs,” he remembers. “It was thinking ‘hey, when has a movie actually done a full album where the characters are actually listening to the whole thing?’ I think it was when Prince did Purple Rain.
“So we said ‘where would the characters listen to a whole album?’ The obvious one was a concert, and so we said, well, maybe I could set it in an indoor arena, and that way we get the suspense. And then we started thinking of why would we stay in an arena. Someone would be trapped…”
Though a neat idea, surely shooting a movie set entirely at a music concert would come with a slew of challenges. Well, according to Shyamalan, the complications of shooting a movie in that setting actually came with a few blessings.
“I tend to think complications are where the beauty happens,” Shyamalan smiles. “Shooting a live concert while we’re doing a thriller is extraordinarily difficult, but then beautiful things happen. The kids are reacting to what Saleka does on stage. The lighting is bouncing off of Josh. The kids are cheering right at the moment he leans in to talk to his daughter, and he has to navigate that. So it’s genuine.”
Now, Josh Hartnett may not be an actor who immediately springs to mind when casting a psychopathic serial killer, as he’s probably most well known for being an early-Noughties heartthrob. However, after taking a break from the industry after his Noughties rise to fame, Hartnett is back and his latest roles have certainly varied, recently starring in Oscar-winning Oppenheimer as well as comedy series Die Hart.
When you think about it, then, Hartnett, was the perfect choice to play a serial killer, successfully being able to embody seriousness, comedy and a little bit of charm… “Josh walked in, and I was like, ‘ah, there he is’,” Shyamalan remembers. “He had all the elements that I needed – the charm, the handsomeness, the intellect and the interest in playing somebody very dangerous, and I don’t mean dangerous like he’s a killer, but dangerous in the sense that there’s no ground here. Me and him are going to invent this, and it’s either going to work or it’s not going to work!”
For Hartnett, he relished the opportunity to play such a complex character. Plus, well, playing Cooper meant he got to work with Shyamalan. “I think [Night] is an incredible filmmaker,” Hartnett says. “He’s one of the only filmmakers working today that is doing consistently original work. I want to work with people that have that sort of ambition. And then when he sent me the script, I was like ‘oh God, this is going to be really challenging’. Is this character something that can be pulled off with the tone that he wants, because it’s a serial killer film, yes, but it’s supposed to be really fun and we needed it to be authentic as well.
“So it was this really interesting tone and high-wire act that we had to pull off. I knew that it was going to be extraordinary if we were able to do it, but the challenge was too enticing to pass up!”
Playing Cooper was certainly going to be a challenge – how do you go about playing a person who on the surface seems like a perfect dad taking his daughter to a concert, but who is also hiding such a deep, dark secret?
“First off, I wanted him to be psychologically sound,” Hartnett explains. “So we had to come up with a clear identity for Cooper; his internal feelings and what we end up finding out about him later on. Then on top of that, we were able to layer on all the fun stuff.
“Sometimes you can take on a role where you have to be an excellent horse rider or race car driver and you can go out and meet the people to do that. But you can’t do that with serial killers. So it just involved reading a lot and then discussing with Night about how we wanted this all to play out and how you strike that balance between being so warm and likable and then sort of this dark and sinister kind of character as well.”
To get into the mindset of a serial killer, Hartnett took to reading books about psychopathy and serial killers, which came up with a few surprises.
“From my research, I discovered that a lot of serial killers are incredibly charismatic and they tell a good story,” Hartnett says. “If they want to make you think they didn’t do it, they can. There was a book I was reading where the author ended up advocating for a serial killer, thinking it couldn’t possibly have been him, and then realising, over the course of it, that he’d just been totally duped. He was trying to get him a re-trial! This serial killer had the charisma and the storytelling ability to convince someone who’s supposed to be an investigative journalist that he didn’t do it, even after he was convicted, and was in jail!”
Hartnett decided that this storytelling angle was the way to approach Cooper and that he was “more intact in his darkness, and everything else on top is this layer of fiction that he’s created”.
“He’s very good at creating this life that might be a little too good, a little too simple. He’s a really good dad, a really good husband, a pillar of the community, part of the bowling team, a firefighter… All these things are almost a little too perfect and I thought that would be a lot of fun to watch crack on screen.”
Part of Cooper’s narrative is the persona of ‘family man’ and the central relationship in the movie is his relationship with his daughter Riley, played by Ariel Donoghue. And though the rest of Cooper was pretty complex to nail down, creating the dynamic with Ariel was very easy for Hartnett: “It was pretty natural, because she’s such a good actress, and she knew exactly what the intent was, and what she wanted to get from the character,” he enthuses. “When we got to Toronto, we spent time together. Her family and my family went out to the zoo, and we spent time just generally hanging out. My daughters were obsessed with her. She’s a little bit older than my daughters, and they spent a lot of time together and we just got to know each other.
“Because she’s such a good actress, it was very easy for us to play this duo. But also the one thing that kind of saved it as well is she’s not really involved in any of the darker stuff.”
Ah yes, the darker stuff. Superstar concerts and doting dads aside, this is a Shyamalan movie, and ‘thriller’ is a genre that always, ahem, entraps him (sorry). “I can so easily imagine anything in a suspenseful tilt,” he explains. “It’s just something I’m drawn to. The way an author is drawn to a specific genre, and they don’t mind writing endless amounts of books about a particular genre, like Stephen King or Agatha Christie. I find it a very interesting form.”
Next to that, it’s also pretty safe to say that Shyamalan is a movie fan, so it’s no great surprise that he wanted to make a movie that would lure (sorry again) audiences into cinemas…
“I wanted to make something that should be seen in the movie theaters,” he nods. “You should watch it with other people. It’s a concert, you’re supposed to be bopping along, and then the humor… it’s so funny that I want you guys to hear each other laughing! Who wants to watch a comedy or something scary by themselves?!
“When we showed it for the first time it was raucous. That first audience hadn’t even seen a trailer, so they were in complete shock at everything that was happening. It was so fun. They were looking to each other to kind of support each other, and then it just grew into this huge, loud thing. Man, you’re going to miss all that if you don’t go and see it…!”
Trap will be released in cinemas on 9 August
