Director Christopher Landon is no stranger to challenging concepts with a high degree of filmmaking difficulty. His 2017 hit “Happy Death Day” was a horror riff on “Groundhog Day,” where he had to present the same events dozens of times with subtle and obvious changes, all while keeping the story clear and the visual style varied. (The sequel, “Happy Death Day 2U,” complicated things even further by adding a science-fiction component.) In “Freaky,” Landon crafted a body-switch movie as intricate in its plotting as it is breezily entertaining — a complicated thriller that comes across as simple and effortless thanks to the filmmaker’s meticulous construction and unerring calibration of horror and comedy.
Like Landon’s previous films, his new movie “Drop” is a tonally tricky genre film with a logistical challenge at its center. Set almost entirely in a high-end restaurant, the movie follows widowed mother Violet (Meghann Fahy), who, while on a date, receives a series of threatening texts from someone claiming to have her son. The unseen texter gives Violet a series of increasingly unpleasant tasks to fulfill, and over the course of the movie, she tries to figure out who in the restaurant is sending her these “drops” without getting herself, her child, or her date — provided he’s not the texter — killed.
When Landon read Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s screenplay, he immediately knew he wanted to make the movie. “I tend to be very slow, and I tend to put scripts down a lot and then come back to them,” Landon told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, “but I read this thing quickly, in one sitting. I saw a lot of promise and opportunity.” Working closely with Landon, Jacobs and Roach fleshed out a backstory for Violet involving domestic violence, adding emotional resonance and urgency. At every point, the tension is heightened, because there are both external and internal pressures on the heroine.
In spite of the grim nature of Violet’s past, what really stands out about “Drop” is how much fun it is — like many of Landon’s earlier films, it manages to be a thrill ride about something serious that neither cheapens its real-world issues nor gets dragged down by them. The deft balance between psychological veracity and genre movie escapism is truly impressive, all in keeping with Landon’s overall view of the kinds of movies he wants to make.
“ It’s something that I have always tried to do,” Landon said. “I like to Trojan-horse heavy stuff into otherwise very entertaining movies. The ‘Happy Death Day’ movies wrestled a lot with grief and loss, which is a top-of-mind subject for me and goes into a lot of my work. But nobody wants a mouthful of bad medicine — it goes down easier if you’re having a good time. And it still gets people to think and talk about this stuff. I grew up on a very steady diet of horror movies and pop culture, so that’s constantly what I’m reaching into, but I don’t want it to be empty calories. I like to have a conversation with the audience about meaningful things, just in a fun way.”
For Landon, the key to getting audiences on board with his material, no matter how dark, is character and casting. “You can get away with anything in a movie if you endear your audience to your main character,” he said. “You can put the audience through a lot of different kinds of tonal paces, and they’ll stay with you.”
To that end, the casting of Fahy is central to “Drop,” as she’s called upon to play every emotional note on the scale over the course of the film. “You have to fall in love with your lead actor in some way, and I immediately did. It’s always tricky, especially nowadays, when people don’t audition, so you’re crossing your fingers and hoping that they’re going to be great. You really do have to trust your gut more than anything, but I knew she was the right person.”
While Fahy and Brandon Sklenar, who plays her date, anchor the film, “Drop” is also filled with a compelling array of supporting characters around the restaurant, where there are dozens of employees and diners who could theoretically be the anonymous villain (or villains) behind Violet’s texts. What makes “Drop” great is the precise attention to detail that Landon gives every single character in the frame — even extras who never speak. “We acknowledged early on that these are people we’re going to be with for the entire night, and that they mattered a lot,” Landon said. “We were really selective. I chose every single background actor.”
Working in close collaboration with costume designer Gwen Jeffares Hourie, Landon built characters and storylines for every table in the restaurant. “We talked a lot about the kinds of people that would go to this restaurant,” Landon said. “Are they celebrating an anniversary? Is this a big night out for them, but budget-wise, it doesn’t really fit their wallets? Are they overdressed? Not too far in the background of our main table, there was a gay couple, and I was really specific about what kind of gays they were. We did a lot of work on that stuff.”
The movie is made even more convincing by the rigor with which Landon and his crew built a timeline for the restaurant, making sure they knew what was happening at every table at any given point. “We had to know, what course were they on? What were they eating? When were they going to get up? Were they getting up to go to the bathroom? Every single table had to get mapped out perfectly so that our continuity always matched. That was a bear of an undertaking.”
One thing that helped with continuity was the fact that Landon largely shot the movie in sequence, giving the actors the opportunity to build their characters from beginning to end without having to jump around the script. That was the big advantage of shooting a film set mostly in one location. The big drawback? “The negative is that I have to make a movie about two people sitting at a table and I have to make that interesting,” Landon said. Yet just as he created a visual language for “Happy Death Day” that evolved over the course of the film and kept its repetitions from becoming static or monotonous, Landon devised a plan for “Drop” that made it feel more dynamic than many films set on a much larger scale.
“I wanted to work in two visual modes at all times,” Landon said, explaining that the entire movie is from Violet’s point of view, but she’s often performing for her date and hiding the crisis she’s going through. “When we were shooting stuff that was Violet performing we were in a very conventional mode. It was steady and very typical of traditional coverage. But when we went to Violet in crisis, I wanted the shots to become really weird and off-axis, so there are a lot of Dutch angles and movement that gets you a little seasick.”
Landon also worked with cinematographer Marc Spicer to create specific lighting cues to place the audience in Violet’s head, and used the presentation of the texts themselves to convey her emotional state, using different fonts and placements to create an emotional effect.
“We had to plan in advance where all of that text was going to go,” Landon said. “We were always thinking about negative space, and where do we place it? How big is the text? All of that stuff we planned, none of that was like, ‘Let’s figure it out in post.’”
Landon also credits production designer Susie Cullen with helping to reinforce the movie’s emotional subtext via the design of the restaurant, which was entirely built on a stage in Dublin. “I wanted the set to feel like a gilded cage, so when you look at it, you’ll see a lot of gold bars reaching up and around people. It covers different areas of the restaurant. You start to get a sense that she’s, in a weird way, very isolated even though she’s around a ton of people.”
Although Landon says he tries to avoid watching other movies as conscious influences while he’s making a movie, there’s no denying that “Drop” is in the tradition of one of his favorites, Wes Craven’s “Red Eye.” In Carl Ellsworth’s script for that thriller, the tension is generated between two people on an even more compact set than the one in “Drop”: an airplane instead of a restaurant. Landon had originally intended to follow in Craven’s footsteps in a different way, directing the next “Scream” movie. That process turned into what the director called “a nightmare,” and he left the project, but making his own variation on “Red Eye” proved cathartic.
“There was this weird kismet kind of thing at play here,” Landon said. “I was supposed to direct another type of Wes Craven movie that didn’t work out, and then this movie was already there in the wings. And I felt, ‘Oh, this was the Wes movie I was supposed to make, not that other one. It just felt like fate.”
“Drop” opens in theaters on April 11. To hear the entire interview with Christopher Landon, and to make sure you don’t miss other in-depth filmmaking conversations, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
