Spontaneous stars Katherine Langford, Charlie Plummer, Yvonne Orji, Hayley Law, with Rob Huebel and Piper Perabo, and tells the story of a group of high school students whose classmates begin inexplicably exploding. Forced to sruggle to survive in a world where each moment may be their last, an unexpected romance blossoms between them, and Mara (Langford) and Dylan (Plummer) discover that when tomorrow is no longer promised, they can finally start living for today.
The movie is absolutely phenomenal, and the feel-good, uplifting love story we all need right now. Spookily, it boasts a lot of similarities to what's going on in the world right now with COVID-19, and fans of comedies, sci-fi, and horror will definitely find something to love in Brian Duffield's movie.
The writer makes his directorial debut with Aaron Starmer's novel, and is a filmmaker to watch moving forward. When we were lucky enough to talk to him about Spontaneous, he gave us an in-depth look into making the movie, finding the right movie, being splattered with a blood cannon, and more.
Needless to say, we want to extend a huge thank you to Brian for talking to us, and we've also included a number of clips from Spontaneous below for you to get a better idea of what to expect.
Spontaneous is now available on Premium Video-On-Demand and for Digital purchase on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Microsoft Movies & TV, Sony PlayStation Video, FandangoNOW, and more. Don't forget to check out our (spoiler-free) review of the movie by clicking here.
Right now, Spontaneous has that highly sought after 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, so...how does that feel?
It really stresses me out! I hate it [Laughs]. I'm not someone that reads reviews or anything. I feel like if we'd got one or two negatives at the start, but still some good reviews, it would have been fine. Now, it's like every time there's a new review, I get a bunch of people reaching out and teasing me about it because they know the fact we've had this streak (that's definitely going to get broken) stresses me out. It's been a really nice ending to a really bizarre journey. Honestly, up until two weeks ago, or whenever it was when they started sending out the links, I personally knew every single person who had seen the movie. I had no idea what to expect when people I have no relationship with watched it for the first time, so that's been nice. My nightmares of a 0% directorial debut got to die pretty quickly [Laughs]. The 100% really stresses me out, but I am really happy it seems to be vibing with people in the way the team intended.
How did Aaron Starmer's Spontaneous find its way on to your radar, and what was it about the book that appealed to you as a filmmaker?
I'd been looking to direct for a while and had a couple of projects that maybe got 90% of the way to getting made, and then something would happen, and they would fall by the wayside which is extremely typical. I'd gotten Aaron's book before publishing and it was a competitive situation where I was told, 'Hey, you basically have the night to read the book and if you're interested, let us know because there's other people interested.' I don't think ever in my career, I'd responded well to that. You're committing to something blind and it's a little bit of an arranged marriage, especially for someone who typically writes his own material. I can think about whether I want to write that movie for a long time as opposed to, 'Read the book and give us a call at 9am to tell us whether you want to speak to Aaron and plead your case.'
Pretty much all of the dialogue in the first scene is from the book and it's such a hook where you're instantly, you know, on page one, this kid explodes, and you're like, 'Where can this book possibly go from here?' I felt like it was exactly all the things I wanted at the time to write about as a lot of it is about what's going on in the world, even back in 2017/2018 when I wrote it. Aaron really came up with the genius idea of putting this crazy thing in a high school movie and I felt it scratched the itch of writing my John Hughes-esque feature. On the other hand, there's still this crazy sci-fi horror movie that keeps interrupting it. It's also a movie about loss and grief and being broken and figuring out how to reassemble yourself. That's a lot more, not complex, but challenging to pull off in that kind of movie. The challenge of that really appealed to me, so as soon as I finished the book, which I would say was structurally really similar to the movie, I was head over heels and just knew I could write it.
On the directing side, it was such a tonal challenge where there's this idea about having forty kids die on screen! I knew in another director's hands, it could have been a better movie, perhaps, but I also knew I couldn't control what that director might do and the last thing I wanted to do was make the offensive version of what the story is. I felt like, tonally, I knew exactly how I would pull it off. You're making the cutest movie about grief ever [Laughs] and then treating those combustions in a way that's R-Rated, but palatable for as wide an audience as possible. I'm not only trying to hit horror fans, I want the To All the Boys I've Loved Before fans and all those groups. If I failed, let it be my failure, as opposed to writing something and having another director mess it up. In this case, it being such a daunting tonal challenge, I felt I was well-equipped to take it on, and I didn't trust anyone else not to f**k it up [Laughs].
It is incredible how you blend those different elements...
Thank you!
...and I do feel in the wrong hands, it could have been a gory, over the top, not very good sci-fi film with a love story in the background. Clearly, finding the right balance was incredibly important to you?
Absolutely. That was something with that cast and crew that was in all the conversations. Especially for the actors where it reads one way for sure, but visualising that, 'I'm going to be in a movie where forty people are exploding around me, does that mean I'm pulling intestines out of my hair?' It can go so many different ways visually, so a lot of the conversation with them were, 'We're treating this like the combustions could be anything...it could be your friends have cancer, your friends get hit by a car, or your friends move away. There's an earthquake and you lose a friend.' It was treating it as normal and grounded emotionally as possible. In the movie itself, there was very little discussion of people exploding verbally. There's a lot of people dying, but there weren't too many mentions of the explosions.
This thing is happening, and visually it's very obvious, but emotionally, let's ground this with Katherine Langford's character. Let her be a messy, normal teenage girl who falls for a normal teenage boy and make that relationship as special and as sweet as we can because it doesn't really need any romantic complications. The complication is that they could die at any moment! Talking with Katherine, Charlie, and Hayley about how to play a different movie than you would expect a movie about spontaneous combustion to be. To what you were saying about that mixture, I think you get that cocktail where Katherine is trying to hold on to the fun romcom she starts off in and the movie just keeps ruining her ability to do that. That was another thing we talked about too with Katherine working overtime to have fun and enjoy the movie, but it's determined not to let her and everything goes off the rails. That's all part of the ingredients into the weird little cocktail that this movie is.
Talking of the explosions, how did you handle those from a technical standpoint? We often see the reactions to them rather than the explosions themselves, so was blood splatter and the like something you gave a lot of thought to?
There're two things. In terms of how you see them, I always knew the movie was going to start and a kid would explode five seconds in. Then, right away, you're in it, but where do you go from there? I'm not saying the audience wants to see what it looks like, but they do! You can get away with cutting to the splatter instead of seeing a kid evaporate into blood, but knowing let's start off and not go full force with that. You're not seeing the kid go, but the splatter, you can play with for a while. However, as the movie progresses, it gets more and more graphic and Katherine gets drawn more and more into what's going on.
On the second hand, we were a small budget movie. We had 21 days and terrible weather which cost us a lot of time. We had a really wonderful crew and so one of the things we worked hard on, if something goes wrong with the blood you have to reset, but that could be an hour of your day where I no longer have Katherine or Charlie because they're taking showers or drying off and going back into hair and makeup and the whole set has to get cleaned up, but it's covered in sticky red goo. We worked really hard on preparing and being ready for that every time, so when that stuff happened, we were ready to move on and it had to be as good a first take as possible. There were maybe one or two shots during the big set piece in the middle of the movie, but other than that, I think everything is the first take.
That's a testament to the crew and actors who really got prepared and before the movie was shooting. It's like this weird gun machine that shoots out blood at you and can be quite intimidating to look at, especially when it's pointing right at your face. I wanted the actors to know, 'You're definitely not doing anything I haven't done... a lot!' All of the testing was done on my assistant and myself, and it was super fun, but as soon as the cast sees fifty videos of me getting drenched in blood, it takes away a little bit of the fear that I have this weird blood gun pointed at my face and it becomes an exercise in just not enjoying how goofy and ridiculous getting shot with gallons of sticky, red syrup is. Tonally, how much blood can we show so that it's obvious what's happening, but we're not going too far into a horror movie where people who are not fans of blood in movies are repulsed by it. It instantly became there's no matter within the blood; there's no hair, bones, or organs. What's the most friendly way to have someone explode so that if you're not an audience member that likes blood, right away in the first minute you see what you're getting, you know whether you can hang with the movie, and get the tone of what we're doing with it, and you can take it from there on that bloody journey [Laughs].
Without getting into spoilers, that set piece in the high school you mentioned was awesome and so well put together!
Thank you. Dude, it was so hard. It's funny because that's three different school stitched together as we had one school where the classrooms are in an abandoned elementary school, so we could basically destroy the room in that. Then, we had a school where you could get the hallways bloody, but we couldn't get the classrooms bloody. Then, the exterior is a third school where the scene ends. We were like this crazy circus moving from school to school based on what we were allowed to do at these different locations [Laughs]. That and the opening were the scenes we spent the most time planning. The opening because if it hits the wrong note, you're sunk, and then that scene because not wanting it to be the wrong kind of upsetting as it should be upsetting because characters you know and love at this point are dying and it's scary, but not wanting it to veer too far into an exploitative direction. There are things the movie is about that it doesn't come out and say, but we didn't want people to be upset by some of the things we were saying, and with that piece in particular, we wanted to be careful it was the right kind of scary and right kind of horror. It was very Katherine centric and the camera never really veers too far from her in that set piece. It was a challenge, but I'm glad that you dug it. That's the last time there are explosions in the movie and you have to go out with a bang because then you have thirty minutes of no blood which is an interesting dilemma to solve as well [Laughs].
That's fair enough, but you're making a big impact in Hollywood as a writer and director now, so I'm curious whether superhero movies are something that interest you and, if so, whether there are any Marvel or DC characters you'd like to bring to the screen?
I wouldn't be opposed to it if it was the right kind of thing! I feel like a lot of people have that comic book movie fatigue on the one hand, but on the other, I think Spider-Verse was the best movie of the year when that came out and I thought Logan was the best movie of the year when that came out, so part of me that says, 'I'm over these comic book movies,' and then I'll see one and say, 'Well, that's the best movie I've ever seen!' [Laughs] If it's the right kind of thing and I felt I could do my sensibilities with, I would be totally open to that. My buddy Matt Shakman is directing WandaVision right now and I don't know much about it, but even based on the trailers, it's clear they're doing something really cool and unique with that. It's great the genre is so successful and popular, because I'm sure if it was an original thing, they never would have gotten to make something as bold and risky, but because it's Wanda and Vision, that big tent is over it, they get to do something really cool and unique.
So, if it was something like a WandaVision, or Spider-Verse, or Logan, I'd be all in! I wouldn't say no, I just have no idea what that thing is. I will say, I would love to do a Superman movie [Laughs] actually because I feel like everyone always gives him the short end of the stick saying he's not an interesting character, but I feel like I get the tone of how to do that and All-Star Superman could be used as a jumping off point to have a really great standalone Superman movie. I also think, just in terms of how crazy the world is right now, and right before you called I was watching The Boys, and I love all that stuff like Watchmen which was the best thing I've seen in forever, I feel like now is the time where a really human and hopeful Superman living in this kind of world that we're in right now could be uplifting and funny and cool in a way. My buddy Mattson Tomlin wrote the new Batman movie which is obviously on the darker end and awesome looking side of things, but I feel with Superman, you could do something not too dissimilar in tone to Spontaneous with it where it's just a lot of fun, but you're dealing with bigger issues. I think that's the thing I've been missing in some of those movies. I just wish they were fun and felt awesome after leaving the theater. Some, like Spider-Verse is a perfect movie, and doing a Superman movie in that [Sam] Raimi Spider-Man 2 energy and light would be incredible. I've never really put my hat in the ring for it and no one's called about it either, but I wish there was a really dope Superman movie coming down the pipe. I loved good chunks of Man of Steel and I think Henry Cavill is hard to come up with a better Superman than him right now too.
There are some unintentional similarities in Spontaneous to what's happening in the world with COVID, so how does it feel looking back at the film now and seeing those parallels?
It's really weird [Laughs]. I was talking to somebody earlier today about it. I finished the movie before COVID, and the lenses everyone is watching the movie on right now, I really had nothing to do with that and there was no intentionality behind it. It is like this very interesting thing where every review or interview, COVID comes up for obvious reasons. When we made and finished the movie, it didn't exist! I haven't quite wrapped my head around it and it will probably take me a while to wrap my head around this idea that I made a movie and after that, the world changed, and that changed how people view the movie. It's kind of bizarre and I don't know if some people will now think it's too on the nose, but so far, at least the nice people, have told me how they find a catharsis with it. We have this global experience that everyone is going through at the exact same time and to then have a movie about one girl going through a not dissimilar situation as it is a pandemic in Covington, and how that lines up in a movie about a 17 year old girl learning about grief and reaching for tomorrow. It was not meant to be prescient, but it is, so I hope people are administered by that as they need.
The whole cast is great, but I feel like Katherine Langford is just amazing in this film, so can you talk about what it was like to work with her and what she brought to this role?
It's the best. Everyone in the cast is one of my favourite people, but it obviously lived and died on Katherine. She's basically in every shot. I think she is such a phenomenal actress just naturally, but also a really studious actress in that I don't think there was a line of dialogue we didn't have conversations about. She's such a great actress because she can do nine different things at once and it's such a joy as a director to have someone in your movie where it's like, 'This person might know the movie better than me.' It felt like a creative partnership in terms of getting this boulder up the mountain. At the end of the day, no matter how well I do my job, if that actress is off, the movie sinks. Just having an actress that was so smart and on the ball, and just such a joy to work with. The combination of her, Charlie, and Hayley, a big part of it for me was that I wanted to feel like all the kids loved each other and were having a great time. That's why the explosions aren't ruining that because you're like, 'I love all these characters and they love each other, and there's no bad kids in the movie.' Everyone is very nurturing and a little goofy together, and I think Charlie and Hayley also keyed into that in such a great and natural way so those relationships feel fun and silly in a way that teenagers are fun and a little silly. The world is just conspiring against them, so I got really lucky with this cast and I couldn't be prouder of their performances in it. I wish I could take more credit than I probably can, but they're all just as good as actors in that age range that exist right now and I'm desperate to work with all of them again.
Finally, the movie has a phenomenal soundtrack so I'd love to know what inspired you to pick "Fourth of July" for the final few minutes of the film, and were there were any songs you couldn't include here for whatever reason?
The Fourth of July...I was obsessed with that album when it came out and thematically, it's really similar to the movie in that I wrote a lot of the movie to that album. Sufjan Stevens' songs are very mellow and quiet on the album and I'd seen him live and he'd done a version like the one that's in the movie which is very rock and roll and released that. From the get go, I really wanted it. It's a long song, but a long ending montage and you have that exact point when it kicks into high gear, and that droning 'We're all going to die' over and over again felt like it reflected what the movie was about as Katherine was closing out the movie and there's not another movie I can think of with 'We're all going to die' sung like a hundred times over and over and using that as a triumphant idea [Laughs]. That was one right off the bat I wanted.
It's funny, and I hope I'm not blowing up someone's spot about this, but in the tent montage, we thought we had the rights to Roy Orbison singing 'Bye, Bye Love' from the end of All that Jazz. We'd gotten permission from his estate and a bunch of people, so we were done editing. Then, a background vocalist on the song, because everyone you hear needs to sign off, who we didn't think would be an issue wrote a very love email back saying, 'Hey, I'm so sorry to do this to you guys, but since making the movie, I've found Jesus and I can't allow my voice to be used for anything but praising the Lord, so I respectfully decline letting you use the song.' It was a panic inducing moment where we had this locked edit and no song to put there. That scene is specifically so beat to the song and even interacts a little bit with it in picture, so I was saying, 'What the f**k do we do?'
Luckily, our wonderful music supervisor Lindsay Wolfington reached out to some bands she knew to see if they would do a demo showing what they would do. A day or two later, we got what's in the movie minus some small tweaks we made from an LA band called Tampa, and it was so cool and made it better than the previous version. That was one of those great stressful moments where you think everything is going one way, and then suddenly you're pulled another and you're then so lucky you have crew that love the movie and what we're going for who help solve the problem in a way that's better for the movie, so that's always a challenge. In terms of music, you wave a cheque around and hope the artists says 'Yes.' A lot of the time they don't, and then you're figuring out what to do with a backup and that's better than what you could have hoped for.
Awesome. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak to me - the movie is so good, and it feels like exactly what we all need right now.
I know, it feels like we made it yesterday in a weird way, so I hope everyone gets everything they need out of it.
Oh, and I know you're not checking those reviews, but we're one of the 5* ones on Rotten Tomatoes for you!
[Laughs] That's so cool, thank you. I don't know if I ever got 5* for anything before, so it's very exciting to hear that. Thank you, man.