When A Quiet Place took the world by storm, John Krasinski dropped audiences into a world where creatures had invaded our planet and swiftly decimated the bulk of our civilization. Very little was revealed about the origins of the alien monsters. All we learned was that they were attracted by sound, and were very fast, consuming human victims the moment they made any noise. The upcoming sequel, A Quiet Place Part II, provides a little more backstory for the alien invasion, as we have seen in trailers that the movie shows flashback scenes to the Abbott family in their town the day of the invasion. But when CinemaBlend spoke with Krasinski and his wife/co-star Emily Blunt about the creatures, they had very different takes regarding their importance to the story at hand. Listen to their answers in the clip above.
Maybe it’s me, but if I were an actor participating in a movie like A Quiet Place as well as it’s sequel, A Quiet Place Part II, I would want to know as much as possible about the alien threat I was hiding from. Elements like creature design and extent of their powers might come later. But initially, I’d demand to know where they came from, what they want and, perhaps most important, how can we kill them? That’s not how Emily Blunt felt when approaching the role of Evelyn Abbott, protective mother of two who is fighting against impossible odds to keep her family alive. To her, that wasn’t as important. When we asked Blunt if she needed to know more about the aliens to better prepare, she told us:
I think all you need to know is that they invade. They invade, that’s what they do. And so, why they invade is sort of irrelevant to me because the movie’s not about the creatures. It’s about humanity, and how humanity survives.
She’s right. A big part of the reason why audiences connected so viscerally with A Quiet Place is because they cared so deeply about the Abbotts, and wanted to see them survive. However, when I posed the same question to John Krasinski, who wrote and directed both the original movie and this new sequel, you could tell that he had more of an investment into details about the origin -- because their existence does propel his plot forward. Krasinski told CinemaBlend:
It’s really important. I think the thing that I found most exciting after the first one is that people were excited to learn more about the things I wanted to learn more about. … I loved reading that people were like, ‘Who’s on the other end of the fires?’ And, ‘What’s it like to live in this world if you’re not the Abbott family?’ And then the other one was, ‘Where do these creatures come from?’ And so I knew that if I did do a second one, how I wanted to deal with where the creatures came from was to, again, piecemeal this information as you go. Because I think that in the moment, what makes things so terrifying is that you don’t have all the backstory.
That does make it scarier. Krasinski is right, also. It’s the subtle difference between being the storyteller keeping a tight grip on where he or she wants the audience to be at any given moment of a narrative, and an actor who’d prefer to be immersed in the moment, and know basically as much as her character would know. It makes for a more realistic performance, at least from Emily Blunt.
Learn more about the alien threat, and the next moves from the Abbott family, when A Quiet Place Part II opens in theaters on May 28. Make sure that you read CinemaBlend’s official review before heading out to see this one on the big screen.
