022 | W W W. S C I FI N OW.CO.U K
“My immediate
response was ‘I don’ t
want to do a sequel’,”
laughs director, actor and writer John
Krasinski. “The first one was so personal
to me – as crazy as it sounds, it was a love
letter to my kids. So how do you beat that?”
Evidentially he thought he could because
here we are two years after the phenomenal
A Quiet Place landed in cinemas with its
sequel, A Quiet Place Part II.
A Quiet Place was released during a
high-time for horror cinema, the box-office-
busting It and Jordan Peele’s award-winning
Get Out were released the year before and
Ari Aster’s excellent Hereditary would
be released just months after. With such
exemplary horror playmates, A Quiet Place
- written and directed by The Office alumni
John Krasinski – and staring the fantastic
Emily Blunt, was a hit no-one saw coming.
But a hit it was – winning praise from
audiences and critics alike, and taking $17
million in its opening weekend. “I saw A
Quiet Place in the cinema with my kids and
I thought it was terrific,” enthuses Cillian
Murphy, who stars in its sequel. “I thought it
was one of the best films I’d seen that year.”
Now, real-life couple Krasinski and Blunt
are back with A Quiet Place Part II. But, with
Jordan Peele’s follow-up Us not winning
quite as many accolades as Get Out and
It Chapter 2 not quite reaching the same
heights as its predecessor, the pressure is on.
“You can’t repeat what happened with
the first one. So I think the approach on this
one was always that this is the next chapter,
this is the next step,” explains Emily Blunt.
“Because what happened with the first one,
it was like that lightning-in-the-bottle thing
that was astonishing to everybody involved,
especially to John and certainly to me.”
A Quiet Place was clearly a labour of love
for Krasinski and Blunt, and making a sequel
was never on the cards for them. But with
the movie being such a success, there was
likely to be a sequel no matter what. “The
studio was probably going to make anotherone regardless of our involvement and then
suddenly out of nowhere, because I think
they brought in like 20 writers to attempt to
come up with the second one and none of
the ideas really worked, John just went: ‘I
mean, if I was going to do another one, you
know, this is sort of what I would do’. And he
just started to pitch an idea. And I remember
being gripped by it and thinking ‘oh shit
we’re gonna have to do it’. It was just too rich
of an idea, it’s such an exciting world, there’s
so much to expand upon, that it then became
this sort of organic journey for both of us
that it was impossible not to do it.”
Krasinski’s desire to do right by his story
was clearly too much to resist. It also meant
he could go back and flesh out some of the
ideas he had during the making of the first
movie. “Everybody said ‘do you have a back
story?’ I had the back story, I knew it very
well and we sort of alluded to it in those
newspaper clippings and stuff [in the first
movie],” he explains. “So to get back there
and to investigate it was really fun because
again, it was something that I had created in
the first one but just decided not to do.”COVER FEATURE
A Quiet Place Part II