I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW
Only The End Of The WorldW W W.SCI FI N OW.CO.U K
Peter Dinklage’s Del
embraces his isolation.| (^057)
back story, so we gave her more
credit. She was initially just a
free spirit in the original version
of the script but Mike was cool
about fi guring out why Grace is the
way she is. It was great because
she ended up becoming a hybrid
of who I was when I was 18 and
who Elle actually is now. That
makes her more complicated to
explain as she’s genuinely looking
for companionship but she’s also
battling demons of her own because
of what she’s been through.”
One of the neat touches Morano
uses for Grace’s story is to use
the bright lights and scenery of
suburban Palm Springs to add
a trace of artifi ciality. She also
bagged Paul Giamatti and Charlotte
Gainsbourg for this part of the fi lm
which references Michel Gondry
and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal
Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Seventies
science fi ction fi lms. Morano however, shot
the majority of her fi lm in upstate New York
in a few different towns specifi cally for
the picturesque scenery. A blend of Nyack,
Congers and Hastings-on-Hudson provide Del
with his beautiful views and a utopia of his
own making.
“I didn’t want it to feel too depressing,”
Morano explains. “I wanted to make the
audience understand the warmth and feel
peaceful and imagine this post-apocalyptic
world as a beautiful place.” She took her
lead from reading The World Without Us, a
non-fi ction book written by journalist Alan
Weisman, and the subsequent documentary
that spawned from the title. It’s all about
what would happen to the planet if human
beings just suddenly disappeared.
“It’s a book that describes how the world
would evolve after a certain amount of
months and years if people had vanished
from the planet. One of the things I had to
think about was ‘what would the world look
like and what would still exist?’ I had to
make decisions about what sort of supplies
they would have and we were pretty accurate
with it. The most valuable things in an
apocalypse are batteries as much as we
think we don’t use them now. Gasoline also,
propane and anything solar powered.”
On a bleaker practical level Morano
learned a lot about body decomposition.
There are corpses all over Del’s town and
each one has a very particular decaying
look to it: “I decided how I wanted the
bodies to look based on how long it’d been
since the apocalypse. I studied non-fi ction
to make it realistic. It was very educational
in that sense.”
I Think We’re Alone Now is available on
VOD now.
apocalypse happen and where are the other
survivors? Or where’s civilisation?’. What
I loved about Mike’s script is that not only
did Del not mind, he found a way to make
it his own and it’s like he almost doesn’t
want to go out to look for anyone else. Not
only because he’s content on his own but
he’s more afraid of fi nding out that he’s not
alone. Also, he’s not concerned with trying
to solve the world’s problems. He just wants
to make his small part of the world work.
That’s probably how some people would
react. Not everyone would willingly go fi nd
people and save them. Del thinks: ‘I’ve found
a way to make it work for me and I’ll just be
taking responsibility for myself and keeping
this area where I live as pristine as I can.’ I
thought that was a really cool twist on it.”
Elle Fanning stars alongside Dinklage
as Grace, a young woman who interrupts
Del’s serene world because she’s running
away from a more disturbing one. Initially
a side character in the story, Morano added
agency and took notes from her personal
life for some of her traits: “She had a thin
I WANTED THE
AUDIENCE TO IMAGINE
THIS POST-APOCALYPTIC
WORLD AS A
BEAUTIFUL PLACE
REED MORANO
Grace (Elle Fanning)
has her own demons.