Unfriended – Q&A with writer Nelson Greaves and producer Jason Blum
Staci Layne Wilson
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The Unfriended (review) press junket is being held in the Redbury Hotel at Hollywood & Vine. Its upscale vintage décor featuring murals of cinema idols from days gone by and Woodstock-era concert posters are at odds with the core of the film’s very tech-modern, uber-now storyline: Set completely on computers in Facetime, Unfriended follows a teenage girl and her friends after they become the prey of a terrifying online presence that wants revenge for a bulling video that caused a classmate to kill herself one year prior. The wallpaper in the Redbury is probably older than the cast.
Which brings me to the first questions asked of screenwriter Nelson Greaves and producer Jason Blum: Since the movie is rated R, does that not defeat the purpose of appealing to its core audience? And is it something adult audiences can relate to?
Nelson Greaves: My mom Facebooks me, and she texts me. I would say five years ago, you’re totally right; older generations have nothing to do with this movie. But the fact of the matter is, life has moved online not just for younger generations, but older generations – in order to talk to their children they have had to move onto these places. So, I think, there’s two things about it. One, they’re going to get a kick seeing all the subtleties of how the younger kids are interacting. And two, they’re going to see things that they do as well.
Jason Blum: Yeah. I totally understand what you’re saying. For me, I think that the – we make a lot of scary movies. Some of them have messages, some of them don’t. Like The Purge relayed a message, it’s really a movie about gun control, or the lack thereof. Right? And then this movie, you know, it’s about bullying. But I think that a message in it. People go to a political rally for messages, not the movies, right? So, I think that that’s a really secondary to making a great scary movie. And if it happened to have a message all the better. But I don’t think about the message first. I think if it wasn’t R, it would not feel real. So then no one would get the message because no one would come see it.
NG: I approached this very much looking at it like I was writing a play. And I understood that it was going to be in real time, and there were going to be characters in a room together, and it was going to be exactly like a play, and sort of the same logic questions and the same challenges that come up, were going to be things that we were going to be tackling and looking at. At the same time though, I think we also have the benefits of a play, which is you don’t think about anything else. It’s just the characters. It’s just the world. And if you can convince people to buy into that, then you can have something that is, in a lot of ways, a lot more dramatic than throwing chainsaws, or whatever you want to throw in; you don’t get that human connection that I think we do establish in the film.
JB: I wasn’t around when the movie was made. We got involved later. But when they made the movie, they did the whole movie from beginning to end like a play for two hours…
NG: Yeah we shot it like that as well. So, we were in a single house and we turned each room of the house into a different kid’s bedroom. And basically we – Adam Sidman – who’s the co-producer, and was also one of the first people who came onto the project, and is also an old friend of mine – we came together. He designed this system for us where they could all see each other, hear each other, and hear us as well. But they were locked alone in their room by themselves for 85 minutes. And we would do takes of it that were the entire length of the film, and people would come out of there having not seen another human being, except their computer, for 85 minutes. And I have this memory, especially of this one time Shelley Hennig – who plays Blair – it was the longest take, and it was the take that ultimately ends the movie in the current form. Shelley came out, and I looked at her. And her eyes were puffy. She looked dazed. And we were all kind of like, what just happened? Like, what did we just capture?, which is not something you can make in a normal movie.
Dread Central: Is there footage from that in the actual movie?
NG: Yes. We kept it in, as the final scene. All we set out to do in Unfriended and all I hoped that we achieved, is that we told a story, that is a story about the way people live that other people haven’t been telling. You know, most of us spend five, six, seven, ten, twelve hours a day in front of a computer – that’s most of our lives – and yet there aren’t stories onscreen telling those things. And so, the way I look at it, and the way we looked at it from the very beginning, is we weren’t setting out to tell a digital horror story; we weren’t setting out to tell a story about digital relationships. We set out to tell a story about the way people live now. You know, Facebook friendships are just friendships. Emails are just communications between family, between people – that’s all we set out to do. If we did any more than that, then you’ll have to let us know. But that’s all we hoped to do.
DC: Who came up with the idea?
NG: The idea of doing a movie on a computer has been Timur’s (Bekmambetov, producer) for probably over a decade. He runs two companies – one in Russia, one in the United States. And when his day ends in Russia, it starts in the United States. And he’s on his laptop. And so, he forever has said, you’ve got to make a movie about it. It’s drama. It’s real human drama. And it never clicked for anyone, until one night Timur and I were talking, and suddenly it was, Oh, it’s a horror movie. That’s how you do it. That’s how you do it. That’s how you get people to be in this for a full 85 minutes, and you use the constraints and restrictions of a computer desktop the same way The Blair Witch Project used the constraints and restrictions of a single camera POV. And so, in that sense, the first idea was having the movie be – and I will say a few times in the process Levan Gabriadze, the director, and I got cold feet and we were like, “Ah, Timur. I don’t know. You know, maybe we need to zoom in; maybe we need to show different.” And he’d slam his fist on the table and say, “Trost. Trost.” Like, this is it. This is it. Stick with it. And he was right.
DC: Would this setting work for anything other than a horror movie?
NG: I think any genre of movie you can think of, can be in on this. And I know Timur has several more in the works that are more romantic comedies, and farces, and adventures, and you know, again, this is where we live. This is where we live now.
JB: Yeah. I would think- kind of like found footage, which Blair Witch really started, and then Paranormal Activity took it to the next place. And after that, there were a lot of found footage movies. But it never took over, never more than two or three percent of movies were found footage. And I feel like we’re always going to see, at least in the near future, most movies will be traditionally shot. But I feel like they’ll be found footage every so often, and hopefully, there’ll be movies… I don’t know what we’re calling this. [to Nelson] Do we have a name for it yet?
NG: Screen cast movies.
JB: Screen cast, I like that. There’ll be found footage, there’ll be screen cast- as like tools that are at a director’s disposal to tell the story that he wants to tell, or she.
DC: Have you ever unfriended anyone?
JB: Yes.
NG: Yes. Ex-girlfriends… (laughs.)
Unfriended opens in theaters everywhere on April 17, 2015.
Produced by Timur Bekmambetov and directed by Leo Gabriadze, Unfriended stars Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olstead, Will Peltz, Jacob Wysocki, Courtney Halverson, and Heather Sossaman.
Synopsis:
While video chatting one night, six high school friends receive a Skype message from a classmate who killed herself exactly one year ago. At first they think it’s a prank, but when the girl starts revealing the friends’ darkest secrets, they realize they are dealing with something from beyond this world, something that wants them dead. Told entirely from a young girl’s computer desktop, Unfriended redefines found footage for a new generation of teens.
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