Making movies is a complicated process with a lot of moving parts. One might think a smaller film like A Quiet Place might have an easier time, but that isn't exactly the case. It turns out the complicated part of making A Quiet Place wasn't creating the alien creatures with digital effects, it was making sure the cornfield was ready. No, really. After the production found the farmhouse they wanted to use for the film, they had to turn around and plant corn quickly, in order to be sure it would be the right height when they needed it several months down the road. According to producer Andrew Form...
[The neighbors] had actually told us, 'if you don't plant your corn by a certain date, you're not going to have corn fields.' This is early for a movie to start doing stuff like this, we're not even in pre-production yet, but we have to plant our corn fields to get them up to eight feet.
Apparently, the people living around the location where A Quiet Place was filmed were quite excited to have a movie crew making a film near them, which meant they were more than happy to offer an important piece of advice to the non-farmers, which could have caused problems had it not been relayed. A Quiet Place producer Andrew Form says in a behind-the-scenes feature on the new Blu-ray release that, since the film wasn't officially in pre-production yet, the crew was mostly focused on finding the location and clearing it out so they could start to get it ready for filming. By the time anybody might have thought about planting corn, it likely would have been too late in the season, potentially pushing shooting back by months, if not a full year.
And that cornfield is an important one, there's a significant sequence in A Quiet Place that takes place in the cornfield. Without corn that is tall enough to conceal the creatures, the sequence wouldn't work. That would mean either completely changing the story, or if possible, putting CGI corn on top of the actual corn to complete the necessary height, which would have greatly increased the film's costs, and probably wouldn't have worked well anyway.
Part of what makes A Quiet Place work is that, with the exception of the creatures, which look even more alien because they are digital effects, the rest of the movie is practical and real, even the corn.
It's crazy to think that something as simple as corn was a potential hurdle for A Quiet Place. Luckily, they dealt with it the proper time and were able to put together a compelling and unique horror movie. You can pick up A Quiet Place on Digital and Blu-ray today.
