“We make nowhere near enough thrillers in our country!” Director James Watkins on Speak No Evil

Written for the screen and directed by Eden Lake’s James Watkins and based on the screenplay of the 2022 award-winning Danish horror Gæsterne, written by Christian Tafdrup and Mads Tafdrup, Speak No Evil follows an American family, Louise and Ben Dalton (played by Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) who, along with their 11-year-old daughter Agnes (Alix West), are invited to spend the weekend at the idyllic country estate of a seemingly charming British family – Paddy, his wife Ciara (played by James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi) and their furtive, mute son Antthey (Dan Hough) – who they befriend while on vacation. However, what begins as a dream holiday soon warps into a snarled psychological nightmare.

We sat down with the film’s writer and director James Watkins to talk about working with Blumhouse, living in an age of anxiety and what he wanted to change from the original Danish movie…

How did you get involved with Speak No Evil?

I’ve had a long-time conversation with Blumhouse about trying to do something together since Eden Lake, which was my first movie, which was a long time ago! They sent me a link to Christian’s movie and said ‘do you think there’s something in this?’ and I was like ‘yeah, it’s brilliant!’

It’s interesting when you see a movie like that, that’s so brilliant and relentless and uncompromising. But it was more than that. I also thought, ‘here’s a movie that I can have a conversation with and play in a different key, and take in a different direction and do some different things’. There’s no point making exactly the same movie. The movie is there. If you want to see it, go and see it. And people should go and see it.

I thought, can I relocate this into the UK? Because I’m passionate about the fact that we make nowhere near enough thrillers in our country. When did you last see a great mainstream movie set in the UK? I mean, Edgar Wright does it, but so few people do. It gave me a specificity: a British sensibility, the social awkwardness, the Americans, McAvoy’s character, how Americans behave (which is very different to how Danish people behave) and things like that allowed me a way to go ‘okay, I can do this slightly differently’.

As you’ve mentioned, the movie is based on the Danish movie of the same name, what from that movie did you want to keep for your movie?

There’s a lot of the social awkwardness of Christian’s movie, and I wanted to definitely honor that and explore that. But I also wanted to push it in a slightly more comedic direction as well. Whether it’s the films of Reuben Ausland or the work of Ricky Gervais, there’s a strain of awkward, cringe, how-to-negotiate-awkwardness-of-life humor there. I thought that was fun, but awkward fun. So I thought there’s a lot there that I could lean into.

That’s the first two acts of the movie, and then I take it in a different direction. That’s when the cat is out of the bag and things are no longer covert and beneath the surface, but overt, I thought it was important to take it to a new place.

I sort of thought, it’s no longer about politeness, it’s about survival, particularly for these American characters. What do they do? Do they run? Do they hide? Do they fight? I very deliberately didn’t want them to be suddenly not be who they are and suddenly become these militarized Navy SEALs. I wanted them to be cack-handed and inept, particularly Ben. Because he’s been following Paddy’s mentorship, thinking ‘oh, if I could be this old school guy, this outdoorsman…’ and it’s bullshit, it’s actually Louise, who is the alpha character when it comes down to it. Ben has a complete freak out, as probably would I!

In the third act [I wanted to explore] how overt confrontation was a different conversation than how we deal with polite microaggressions, and I wanted to take it into that different place.

What horror elements can audiences expect from Speak No Evil?

We live in an age of anxiety and everyone’s terrified of saying the wrong thing. The best horrors or psychological thrillers, for me, are the ones that engage with the anxieties of our age. Not just jump scares and people in dark. The dark corridor of this movie is the psychology of the character and I think that’s incredibly relatable. How do you react when you’re in a room with somebody who you think is breaking the rules? When do you call them out? What do you do?

I was talking with the cast yesterday and I said ‘if you’re in a cinema and somebody’s talking on their phone, do you tell them to shut up?’ and we had this big debate. Some were like, ‘Yeah, maybe, I don’t know’, or ‘I’d want to, but maybe I’ll just sit it out’. We all struggle with those sorts of negotiations in everyday life, and I think everyday life is more aggressive now, and that feeds into the DNA of this movie.

The characters in the movie feel so real. How did you flesh out those characters to make them feel authentic on screen?

Firstly, it was important I set it in the UK, so I could write characters that I felt I knew.  If it was a couple of New Yorkers going to West Virginia, even implicitly, I’d be writing characters that were based on TV, rather than the world I live in, because I live in the UK. So I felt I kind of knew Paddy-type characters in a way, obviously, not as extreme, but you know that character, the kind of guy that likes to hold forth in the pub, that kind of Fallstaff type character, the life and soul of the party, that’s fun in short bursts. But after a while, you wouldn’t want to spend a week with them! It’s exactly that person.

So I felt I knew the characters, and then it was building on that in rehearsal. We had a week rehearsing, sitting around as a cast, just talking. We’d talk, and then I’d make little tiny revisions in the script, and then once it gets onto the set, just being playful and loose with the characters and the actors, and letting everybody enjoy each other. As a director, I’ve learned not to be too constrained by my first impressions. If you see an actor doing something and you’re like ‘okay, what are they doing?’ They’re bringing something different, and it’s loose and if there’s truth there, let’s go with that because sometimes it takes you to fantastic places.

What do you want audiences to be thinking and feeling once those credits roll at the end of the movie?

I want the audience to have a fantastic time in the cinema. I think we need to give people a reason to go to the cinema. If you go to see this movie and you sit with 100 people, you’re going to have a blast. The animal, the amplification of the audience, I’ve seen it. You’re just going to have a fantastic time feeding off everyone’s tension and laughter and humor and people shouting at the screen. It’s insane.

But also, I think it’s got some resonance. John Harris, my editor and I talk about it as a ‘way-homer’, the way-homer conversation that you can have about this movie on the bus. You can have a blast in cinemas, and then afterwards, you can all go to the pub, have a couple of double gin and tonics, and go, ‘oh bloody hell, that reminds me of that guy!’.

Speak No Evil is out in cinemas now. Read our review here.