First dates are nerve-wracking enough. Going on a first date while an unnamed, unseen troll pings you personal memes that escalate from annoying to homicidal? Blood-chilling!
Returning to the thriller genre with the playful, keep-you-guessing intensity he perfected in the Happy Death Day films, director Christopher Landon delivers an of-the-moment whodunnit where everyone in the vicinity is a suspect…or victim.
This is Drop.
Starring Meghann Fahy as a widowed mother on her first date in years, and Brandon Sklenar as the more charming-than-she-expected date she’s been dreading, Drop escalates in chills as she starts to receives a series of anonymous drops to her phone, instructing her to follow a series of specific instructions or her young son will be killed. The final objective? Kill her date.
As the film arrives in theatres (you can read our full review here), our Peter Gray spoke with Landon about what floored him about his cast, how easy he finds calibrating comedy amongst the thrills, and inverting the expectation of the damsel in distress trope.
When you’re looking at some of the setups in Jillian Jacobs’ and Chris Roach’s script and the way you have to manoeuvre the action, was there a specific part that you thought was going to be the most difficult to film? And ultimately was it? Or did another aspect surprise you along the way?
I think I’ve been doing this long enough now to identity the “problem children”, as it was, for the most part. I would say I knew where it was going to be challenging, technically. And we were very prepared for it. There was one scene in particular, which I won’t name, but there was a scene where it felt like everything was off. The writing felt a little off, the performances felt a little off, and we were rushed, and it was somebody’s first day. All of it. So about halfway through that particular scene, I called our line producer over and, I was like, “This sucks.” I literally whispered in his ear, “We’re reshooting it.”
So we stopped and kind of just moved on with the rest of the day. I went back and worked on the scene, and it was only a few days later we re-shot that scene, and it was right. It’s just to know where something is just not clicking.
Going off that, were there any moments that Meghann or Brandon interpreted something in the scene that surprised you, or reshaped anything for you?
I don’t think anything was surprising, but I was sometimes floored by the depth of emotion. There’s one scene, in particular, between the two of them, and it’s really the centerpiece. It’s the emotional centerpiece of the movie, where Violet is revealing herself in a really, really vulnerable and personal way, and she’s weirdly doing it to distract him and disarm him a little bit. But then the surprise in that moment is that he comes back with his own truth and his own story. The performances are so amazing, and I remember really watching Meghann and just being so moved by her, knowing that she was feeling all those things that she was saying. It’s a really powerful moment.
It’s so awesome seeing her get her leading lady moment. She’s just such an energy about her.
One of the big joys of making this movie is really feeling like, yeah, this is the moment where she becomes a big movie star. As she should.
I find in your films there’s always an element of playfulness to them. Obviously Drop is more a thriller than the horror that you’ve dabbled in, but do you find that incorporation of comedy, or levity, easy to balance with darker material?
I think it’s easy for me in the sense that I feel like I have a particular instinct for it. I know when it feels appropriate and when it doesn’t. Drop is a different movie from things like Freaky or Happy Death Day, because those are horror comedies, and Drop is very much more a classic thriller. But it still doesn’t mean that there aren’t appropriate moments of levity, in the darkest of moments, you know? Because that’s life. Especially when you have a character like in Drop, who’s so designed to be that comedic relief and that disruption, because (Jeffrey Self) is always barreling into the scene, just being who he is. It makes it work, because it’s very germane to the setting, as opposed to our characters, like Violet and Henry, cracking jokes at inappropriate moments. It can take you out of the movie. It’s really all about calibration and knowing when it’s appropriate and when it’s not.
When you’re approaching someone else’s script, is there a view of maintaining their vision but also wanting to reshape it to your own? Do you find it difficult taking on someone else’s work?
Not at all. I think it starts immediately with it’s not an “Us versus them” kind of thing. We’re all on the same team. Our collective goal is to make the best movie possible and tell the best story possible. So, when I got Chris and Jill’s script, I was so immediately taken by how well written (it was). It was an amazing concept, an amazing central character, some wonderful supporting characters as well. But because I’m a writer, I was able to identify a lot of other things that I thought we could change or augment or improve. Whatever the case may be.
So I got to work really closely with them on the script, and it was so nice, because we all did it without any sense of ego. Everything was the best idea wins. And that happened again and again, where I would be, like, “Hey, let’s try this instead,” and they would write it, but then suddenly they would surprise me with something that we hadn’t even discussed that made it even better. So it was really just a seamless process in terms of just pushing towards the best version of the movie that we could find.
All the ideas definitely worked here together. It was kind of masterful to see how it all started off, seeing what Violet went through, to the date and the reveals of everything. And then obviously the big set piece with the window. Everything just worked. And one of the things I really loved was the camera work here. There was a great one shot and some really interesting angles. Were they something that you envisioned when reading the script? Or did they develop more spontaneously as you were putting the scene together?
It’s all of the above. There were certain shot that were very specific in my head that I would either ask the writers to incorporate into the script, just so I could hang on to them. I often keep my own sort of little list of shots and things that I want to incorporate along the way. And then, of course, I start to work with my DP, Marc Spicer, who’s an Australian, and he and I just have this really wonderful relationship. He has brilliant ideas. And he surprises me with amazing shots that I never thought of. So it’s just that constant open collaboration. We find, I would say, 90% of the shots when he and I sit down together, and we go scene by scene and just figure that out. We create our shot list and our little mud maps, and by the time we get to se, everything is kind of ready to go and everybody knows what we’re doing.
As I said, everything just worked together so well. And I’m going to say, as a gay man, having Brandon Sklenar…I didn’t hate that. That man’s voice does things to me.
(Laughs) That’s funny that you mentioned that. When we were casting, and obviously we had Meghann first, everybody had a different idea about who Henry should be. But I didn’t, and I said that he is a sort of inversion of the trope of the damsel in distress. He’s the damsel in distress, and typically the damsel is very beautiful. I thought there should be a wish fulfilment element, and that’s not to say I wanted a great actor, and I didn’t think that those had to be mutually exclusive, but I thought the wish fulfilment aspect of the movie was going on a date with Brandon. And only as gay men could we recognise that, or a female director (laughs).
Drop is screening in Australian theatres from April 17th, 2025.
