Early cuts of horror smash A Quiet Place featured no sound at all, director John Krasinski has revealed. A Quiet Place focuses on a family struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world decimated by creatures that hunt by sound. The movie combined this high-concept idea with genuine tension and emotion, with viewers growing attached to this family’s plight. A Quiet Place proved to be a surprise smash hit in 2018, with a sequel being quickly greenlit.

Last year proved to be a quality one for horror fans, with movies like A Quiet Place, Hereditary and Annihilation placing as much thought into character development and emotion as they did to scares. While the genre never really went away, it’s experiencing something of a golden era right now, where horror is enjoying both box-office success and glowing critical reviews. 2017’s Get Out scored multiple Academy Award nominations, with Jordan Peele receiving an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and A Quiet Place is tipped to receive some nominations at the 2019 ceremony.

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A Quiet Place is notable for featuring a sparse amount of spoken dialogue and relying on visuals to tell the story. Since so much of the story functions without sound, Krasinski recently revealed in a conversation with The New York Times his early cuts of the movie had no sound whatsoever.

The truth is that I did that exactly for the first month of editing. On the first day or two, I was going through different sounds with my editor to equalize it out, and I just said, ‘Hit mute.’ And we hit mute for what might have been five weeks. The first cut and the second cut were all done without one ounce of sound. I needed to be able to connect with these characters without anything else.

The director was later asked if he ever considered whether this silent cut could be a complete movie on its own.

One hundred percent, and that sounds super pretentious, but it’s true. Even on silent, there was so much communication happening. I didn’t think our movie would be so commercially accepted because the only other time I’ve seen someone do a movie with no spoken dialogue is Paul Thomas Anderson at the beginning of ‘There Will Be Blood.’ That first 12 to 14 minutes where Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t speak was a huge touchstone for me.

These silent early cuts were intended to see if the movie worked emotionally if stripped of sound, but it’s doubtful the studio would have considered releasing the movie this way. Since A Quiet Place is about the main characters making no noise it makes sense most of the movie is silent, but there are also key dialogue scenes between the family that won’t have worked if the movie was totally without sound. That said, for viewers curious to see how the movie functions this way, they could always watch the movie at home with the sound muted.

While A Quiet Place doesn’t really end on a sequel hook, the movie’s runaway success practically guaranteed one was going to happen. Krasinski was initially reluctant to return, but he’s currently onboard to write the sequel’s script, which he claims will focus on the world and not necessarily on returning characters or the monsters. Krasinski has revealed recently he played the monster in A Quiet Place and donned a motion capture suit to provide a reference for how the vicious creatures should move and act.

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Source: The New York Times

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Padraig Cotter
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It’s pronounced Paw-rick, not Pad-raig. Now that’s out of the way, a brief introduction. Padraig has been writing about film online since 2012, when a friend asked if he’d like to contribute the occasional review or feature to their site.

A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games – he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU – where Hawkeye is clearly the best character – to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle.

He’s super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman. He can be found as i_Padds on Twitter making bad puns.

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