Out on DVD and Blu-Ray across the UK from today (Monday 11th, January) is the thrilling action film No Escape. The film is a fast paced and intense edge-of-your-seat thriller about an American business man Jack Dywer (Owen Wilson) and his family who upon relocating to Asia suddenly find themselves in the middle of a violent political uprising leading to them frantically looking for a safe escape. With seasoned expat Hammond (Pierce Brosnan) as their only ally, time is against Jack and his family as their courage is put to the ultimate test.
We caught up with the film’s director John Erick Dowdle and his brother Drew Dowdle, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay.
The Hollywood News: I’m interested as to where the idea for the film came from?
John Erick Dowdle: My father and I travelled to south-east Asia and right before we left a coup happened in Thailand. The general took over the country and kicked out the prime minister. We showed up in the country two days later, and, it was a peaceful coup but there was a very heavily armed presence everywhere we went. People were on edge and coming in from the airport our car was searched for bombs and it was like that everywhere we went. It really got me thinking; ‘what if everything went terribly wrong? What if you had children with you on this trip?’ So that was the seed of the idea and as Drew and I sat down, there was an attack on the Taj Mahal in India… there was like a whole series of things that felt like this kind of thing so it kind of snowballed from there.
No Escape
You’re obviously known for your horror films, and although there’s some really scary stuff in No Escape, this is obviously very different from your previous output. Was it intentional that you’d move away from horror after Devil and As Above, So Below?
John: We’ve done a fair amount of horror and that’s a lot of fun and we love the genre but we wanted to start playing more with drama and having more human stakes, and experimenting with that more. This was a really fun step in a new direction and we had such a great time making this. We’ll definitely be doing more this like this.
Drew Dowdle: We love horror and we were going to make No Escape right after Quarantine. We love horror and we can always make horror films but it would be nice to establish ourselves outside of the genre on something a little bit bigger with a bigger cast. It kept falling apart, and then it finally came back around, but yes, it is always a direction we’ve wanted to go.
I’m interested in the process the two of you have when it comes to writing. Is there a set work ethic as to how you guys approach a screenplay together?
John: Yeah, Drew and I basically spend our lives on the phone together talking 24/7 and we write very fast and then override everything and then discuss it, and then shave it down and shave it down until it feels really tight and has a good flow to it. For any script we write we probably throw away two or three times the length of it. Stuff that we won’t end up shooting. We try to arrive at the hundred pages or so that we will shoot.
Drew: Each screenplay is so different too. It depends. The original title [for No Escape] was The Coup. It was such a linear story; they get there, shit hits the fan. It was a lot simpler than some of the stuff that we’re writing now which is more mosaic. John and I override it, and then shave it and they hit much more targeted re-drafts.
It’s great to see an unrelenting action thriller like this. The film is probably a very hard-R certificate in the States. In the world we live in was there any pressure to tone down some of the violence?
John: We were really worried about that. When we made the film we didn’t have distribution. We were worried that they were going to say ‘Great, now make it a PG-13 and its a go.’ We didn’t want that. We didn’t want to split the difference. We want to make this clear that this isn’t a family film. We wanted it to feel gritty and a world that you wouldn’t naturally bring children into. So yes, we really wanted to maintain the hard-R. We also didn’t want to burn people out with too much visceral violence. We spent a lot of time [trying to find the balance]; How do you not cross that line in some of these scenes?
Drew: Our aim was to try to find how to feel it rather than seeing it. We tried to use that technique a lot. Like Owen seeing the guy get shot in front of the hotel. Seeing a close-up of a guy getting shot in the head is not what we wanted. The point is seeing Owen seeing that. We hardly actually see anything, but we feel it. It’s a better technique I think.
John: I’ve got to say, one of the most horrific, violence moments of the movie is when Owen is standing in the elevator and he’s hearing people running through the lobby and he’s trying to get the doors of the elevator closed, and getting his key card out, and you feel that violence, but you’re literally just looking at Owen’s face. It’s what you’re hearing in the background. It’s so upsetting.
You definitely feel it.
Drew: [Laughs]. We sold it to the Weinsteins and we took the movie down by a couple of minutes overall. We changed a little for the theatrical release. We reduced the violence that we see by 5%.
We’ve just interviewed Lenny Abrahamson for Room and he spoke about directing children in a film that has particularly disturbing material. I’m interesting John in how you approach directing young actors in the kind of situation like we see in No Escape?
John: That was really interesting. It was my first time. We’ve had kids in other movies but no like this. Not where they have like, really heavy lifting. First of all the girls were so good; they’re such good actors. That made life a lot easier but we also treated them with the same level of respect and really asked them to create their characters. Like, if Owen had a question and one of the girls were talking, we’d ask Owen to hold a beat while we let them ask their question. We didn’t treat them like kids, we treated them like professionals and they really were. We kept saying ‘I don’t know what it’s really like to be an eight-year-old girl. You do. What would you do in this situation? How would you react?’ And they would tell us. There’s a moment when they’re on the boat and travelling towards Vietnam and one of the girls just leans forward and hugs the other one. She was feeling that in that moment and she did it and she knew that she wouldn’t get into trouble. There was none of that. We made a deal with the cinematographer that we’d never set marks for them. We had one camera that would just be on them all of the time and we really tried to create a free environment for the kids, and they delivered within that.
Drew: We auditioned a couple of hundred girls for these two parts and we sometimes feel that we’ve made the right decisions in auditions and when it comes to shooting the movie you either think that you’ve made the right decision or not. It’s always hard to tell if things can translate from an audition room to set but this just happened to be one of those where we made two really good choices. These girls were just inherently great, and there’s scares and then there’s movie scares and they had their safe word, and there were a few of those moments but we treated them like adults and I think that really helped.
John: At this point I have two small kids myself and we brought them to the set for the ‘roof throw,’ and Drew said let’s throw your kids off to see if it’s safe. [Laughs] My son was four and he was the first one to get thrown off the roof and he had such a good time with it that the girls were then lie ‘I wanna be next!’ Originally we were never going to ask them to do it but once my son was willing to be thrown it sort of opened that door for them.
No Escape is available on Blu-ray and DVD on 11th January 2016, courtesy of Entertainment One.
