Warning: spoilers ahead for John Krasinski's A Quiet Place! Read ahead at your own risk!
With near-universal critical and audience acclaim, it looks like A Quiet Place has made a serious impression on viewers. The gut-wrenchingly tense thriller has finally landed in theaters, and many fans have started talking about some of the film's most intense sequences. One scene that stands out is the birth scene in which the mother (Emily Blunt) has to go through labor while hiding in a bath tub from one of the terrifying monsters. In a recent interview with CinemaBlend, Blunt explained that the scene was particularly brutal because she had the wild idea to shoot the whole thing in order over the course of a single week. Blunt told us:
The giving birth sequence was pretty brutal. It was just really intense, and kind of exhausting at times. We shot it over the course of a week, and I asked John to schedule it. He was like, 'Are you going to be exhausted? Do you want to break it up in the schedule or do you want to shoot it all in one go?' So, I just maybe stupidly said 'Let's just shoot it all in one go because then you can get a real sense of the progression of the birth and the throughline of that so that really played out in real time.' So we shot it actually in sequence. The whole thing.
For the sake of logistics and convenience, movies often don't shoot their scenes chronologically. That said, when it came time to shoot the nail-biter birth scene for A Quiet Place, Emily Blunt ultimately agreed to film the sequence in order over the course of a single week. The decision was made to track the mother's struggle from beginning to end in an authentic way, but as an unintended side effect, the sequence also ended up proving to be one of the most "brutal" and taxing elements of the entire shoot.
To achieve that level of intensity, it probably also helps that Emily Blunt felt a very important connection to her character while filming A Quiet Place. In fact, elsewhere in her interview with CinemaBlend, Blunt made a point to note that fact that portraying this mother stood out as one of the most deeply-personal performances of her career, as well as the fact that she related to the struggle of these parents in a more natural way than she did with films like Sicario or The Girl on the Train. After all, Emily Blunt is a mother herself, so the struggle experienced by this fictional mother felt real and palpable to her -- albeit in a far more heightened way.
John Krasinski's A Quiet Place is now in theaters, so make sure to check it out and see Emily Blunt's intense birth scene for yourself. For those of you who are looking for more information about the thriller, make sure to check out CinemaBlend's full review and stay tuned for more up-to-date coverage as it rounds out its winning weekend box office run.
