COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS24 SPRING 2020 MOVIEMAKER.COM
1950S NEW MEXICO, UFO LANDING
The Vast of Night director Andrew Patterson wanted a film that could exist across multiple mediums, like podcasts and plays
HE GENESIS FOR The Vast of Night was that I had
a list of ideas from probably the last 10 years, and one
just said: “1950s black and white. New Mexico, UFO
landing.” The only thing I had to ditch was making it
black and white, but there was nothing else to it; there
was no other meat behind that. From there, we started working
on fleshing it out, building it into a full script and actually mak-
ing it into something that was potentially going to stand out in the
cinematic landscape—which is hard to know how to do. We decided
to crawl into some really bold choices about how to use sound and
when to turn off visuals and leave the screen black, and when to let
people tell long stories, and try to build something new from that.
The hardest part of the screenwriting process was trying to build a
dynamic with the two lead characters. That easily took two thirds of
the time it took to write this script. Interestingly enough, the genders
swapped a couple of times in the process. At one point the character
of Everett (Jake Horowitz), a radio DJ, was introverted and shy, and
the character of Fay (Sierra McCormick) was extremely vivacious—
she was the one grabbing the microphone and running around inter-
viewing local people. We found that felt a little forced for this movie,and we also wanted an arc for
the character of Fay, where she
starts out kind of quiet and in
the background, and has sort of
an Ellen Ripley arc where she
takes the lead by the end of the
movie.
It took a long time to figure
out that first act of the movie.
It ended up being 18-20
minutes in the movie, but on
the page, it gets twice as many
pages—it’s about 35-36 pages of
Fay and Everett getting to know
each other, walking through
the street, interviewing people
and getting to their jobs. That
was what we wanted to feel
super fresh and new in cinema,
so much so that you would be
along for the next two acts, no
matter what happened.
Shooting that opening with
Everett and Fay was scatteredall throughout the shoot. On
an indie movie, you don’t get
any breaks at all. Everything we
shot in a key parking lot scene
was in one evening, because
we had to utilize our period-
accurate cars. There were only
about 12 to 15 of them, and
they kept disappearing over the
course of the evening. People
think it’s going to be real fun to
shoot a movie, until it gets to be
2 a.m., and you’re only halfway
through your day. So as the cars
disappeared, we had to block
things differently. Then there
are scenes where they’re walk-
ing and talking and she’s telling
a story. Those were tacked onto
a night that we would shoot
something else.
This method of shooting
is convenient until you have
to light every square inch ofT
BY ANDREW PATTERSON, AS TOLD TO CALEB HAMMOND