‘Locked’ Director David Yarovesky on Crashing Two Horror Icons Together

As horror fans, we love our villains. We spend hours analyzing signature weapons while geeking out over our favorite kills. These discussions often lead to imagined scenarios where we pit our favorite bad guys against each other then guess who would win in a head-to-head duel. But it’s rare that we actually get to see this play out. Fortunately, David Yarovesky’s Locked features a high stakes showdown between two genre legends who find themselves trapped by a malevolent car. Both Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård) climb behind the wheel of this dangerous vehicle knowing that only one will emerge.

In Locked, Eddie (Skarsgård) is a down on his luck car thief trolling the streets in search of a major score. When he stumbles upon a luxury car left unattended and unlocked, he makes the mistake of climbing inside. Just moments later, the petty criminal finds himself trapped within the heavily armored SUV and the latest pawn in a dangerous game. William (Hopkins) calls to taunt his terrified captive while amusing himself with sadistic torture designed to make a devious point. Based on Mariano Cohn’s 2019 film 4×4, Locked is a blood-soaked morality play set against the backdrop of a divided world.

In anticipation of its Friday release, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Yarovesky to explore the secrets of this killer SUV, the experience of working with two genre legends, and that thrilling moment when they come face to face. Read below and buckle up those tickets for the weekend.

I don’t use the word “icon” lightly, but I don’t think you get more iconic in the horror world than Hannibal Lecter and Pennywise the Dancing Clown. And now we can add Count Orlok into the mix as well. What was it to work with Sir Anthony Hopkins and Bill Skarsgård?

It was a dream come true. You’re talking about two of the greatest living actors, both of which have played some of the most iconic villains of all time. I’m trying to speak without spoiling anything, but there’s a sequence, a showdown between them. When we filmed it, the two of them hadn’t met yet. I didn’t want them to meet before filming. We had rehearsed it, but we did rehearsals in a car so that Anthony Hopkins could call in and we could recreate the reality of it as much as possible.

So this is the first time they’re meeting, and then very quickly we’re rolling camera. There was this electricity in the air that I can’t quite explain. The two of them start going at it in the scene, and I’m just sort of whispering in their ear, pushing them further and further. We start going off script and exploring these dark places. I’m saying, “Are you going to let him talk to you like that? Push his buttons!” Every take got better and better and I’m watching it all play out. We got done that day and I was thinking, wow, that was the most incredible day I’ve ever had on set. That was electric. And then I started getting texts from the crew saying. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I just saw Hannibal and Pennywise going at it like that!” It felt like we captured magic between the two of them. It had that kind of sparkle to it. I can’t quite put it to words, but it’s that magic you hunt for when you’re shooting.

Courtesy of The Avenue

They’re also genre icons from two different generations. How does that tension play into the conflict on screen and is Locked a generational story?

I think there’s absolutely a generational element to Locked. The movie’s really a morality play. The two characters have a conversation about how people with so much and people who have almost nothing can live together in the same little space. Then you add this generational gap. The way my generation or people even younger than me, how quickly and how advanced we all became on the internet. And the gap between this older generation can feel so wide. I think all of those factors are part of what keeps these two people hating each other.

Do you feel like this is a political movie?

It’s funny because I think there are people who will watch this movie and interpret it as a political movie, but I didn’t take it that way at all. To me, the movie is about morality. It’s about how we get along together, with massive disagreements and sometimes absolutely hating each other. How do we get along? How do we talk to each other? How do we treat each other? I wanted that tension, anxiety, and distrust to be present in the movie. But that said, I don’t feel like it’s a political movie. I feel like it’s a movie that is really about the human spirit.

Courtesy of The Avenue

It does feel very relevant to the current moment, but you also have Eddie referencing classical literature so there’s a timeless quality to the story as well.

We wanted all three of the main characters in this movie—including the car, because I consider the car a character—to be this layered person. Each layer you pull back has a little surprise in it, something you didn’t expect. When you meet Eddie, he looks like he’s straight out of Good Times or Uncut Gems. He’s from this hustling, scummier space. You don’t expect him to be as smart as he is or as clever as he is. I think that’s something William definitely overlooks about Eddie.

I hate giving the audience the message because I like people to pull out the morality of the story. But I’ll speak to one aspect of the morality conversation, which is that Eddie has a problem. He needs money and he thinks that the solution to his problem is to get some money and to fix his van. But the bigger problem is that he does not have a good relationship with his daughter. And what is his life without that? So the lesson he thinks he needs to learn is how to get money. But what he really needs is to have a better relationship with his daughter. And I think going through this kind of hell teaches him that.

Tori Breyer (Elizabeth Banks) with Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn) in Screen Gems’ BRIGHTBURN.

I’m also a huge fan of your 2019 film, Brightburn. As a parent and as a superhero fan, it terrified me and I love how you play with this idea of an antihero. Do you consider Eddie to be an antihero in Locked?

I see him as an antihero for sure. Certainly at the start of the movie, he exhibits behavior that I wouldn’t exactly put at the moral forefront. I wouldn’t encourage people to act in that way. He’s a thief. He’s a petty criminal. I like to think that he’s mostly straightened out his life, but he’s got some skills that he can lean on if he absolutely needs to in a pinch. I’m glad that you enjoyed Brightburn. It’s certainly a more extreme version of an antihero story in a way, right?

Yes. It’s almost like a journey from hero to antihero to villain.

This is something that Anthony Hopkins and I immediately bonded over when we met. I’m drawn to dark characters. I’m drawn to the bad guy. I like to explore what that means and find the humanity. I’m constantly fascinated by the really good things that bad people do because it’s so confusing to know that something like that is possible. I can see how Brightburn and Locked are connected in that way.

What was it that drew you to this story? Was it this clash between two people who seem to be villains but might have something deeper to them?

Well I made this movie called Nightbooks with Sam Raimi. I was a really big fan of his growing up and still am today. He was great to work with. Just a dream come true. You know, it’s such a cliche, but everyone says, “don’t meet your idols.” And that’s mostly true, but Sam Raimi has been an exception for me thus far. He’s truly been everything I could hope for and more. So I made that movie and we had a good working relationship, which is surreal to even say, but it’s true. He sent me the script and I was like, “I’m gonna work with you, whatever it is.” [Laughs] And then I read it and I thought, this is gonna be something very different.

I love a challenge. I look at filmmaking as an opportunity to grow parts of myself. I don’t know if I should share this, but I sometimes feel like a stunted person, you know, incapable of so many basic things. But the one place that I can really expand my horizons and grow in extreme ways is through filmmaking and through the creative process. So it just felt like an opportunity to exercise a different muscle. To focus on character development and tell a really tense story.

We’ve all seen movies where people are trapped in places before. I love those movies, but they’re often incredibly heightened and they quickly become unbelievable. They’re fun to explore, but they’re not believable. So I started reading the script and I was like, wow, what would it be like if someone really wanted to do this? How would it play out and how much would that suck for Eddie? I think that’s the best and most compelling version of this movie. And that’s the thing I really haven’t seen before from this genre. So I wanted to give the viewer something completely fresh and new.

Director David Yarovesky on the set of Screen Gems’ BRIGHTBURN.

Well, I definitely think you accomplished that. This is a movie about being trapped and the first act is so claustrophobic. And then without spoiling anything, at a certain point, the world opens up in a really exciting way. How did you approach those shifting tones and was either side of that equation more challenging than the other?

Each one had their own unique challenges. This entire movie was a challenge. In some ways it was the hardest movie I’ve ever made because it’s an indie film. We didn’t have the support of big studios and things like that. We shot this movie in 19 days, which is really fast. And so the whole movie was challenging to pull off in a way that gives you something new, a different journey in that trapped experience. I said before that I wanted each character, car included, to be layered and to have more and more discoveries. And I think what you’re talking about is one of the discoveries along the way that takes the movie in an exciting new direction.

I really like to study the sub-genre of the film I’m about to make and so I watched a lot of movies where someone is trapped. One of the weaknesses of the genre is that you can usually see where things are going. That doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy it, but you feel a little safe. And so we really tried to tell a story that kept surprising you and taking you in a direction that you didn’t expect—putting you, the viewer, through the ringer.

Courtesy of The Avenue

I want to ask about this car. You described it as a character in and of itself. Do you feel like it’s a kind of villain or an avatar for evil?

Well the movie is told from Eddie’s perspective. It’s his story. And in his perspective, this car is definitely a villain, a source of villainy. So, yeah, it’s represented that way in the film. But following that sense of realism, I wanted to create a car that would be believable based on the technology of today, right now. We did a lot of research on how they armor cars, how they modify cars to take rocket fire and stuff like that. We really tried to bring that to this car because I wanted you to not question it. I didn’t want you to wonder, would it work like that? And the only way to do that was to dot our I’s and cross our T’s.

I’ll give you an example. A lot of people don’t see it even though it’s right in front of their eyes. In the trailer, when the window comes down and Anthony Hopkins is on the other side, if you look at the glass, you will see the thickness is that of intensely armored glass. It’s layers and layers of glass like it would be in real life. It’s that kind of attention to detail that we tried to bring to the movie. Also if you look at the seats very carefully, you’ll see the piping is all lined with copper wire for the tasing to work so that there’s nowhere in the car that you could be safe. We really tried to look at every meticulous detail of how it was executed and do it in the most realistic way possible.

Courtesy of The Avenue

Another thing I really loved is that it feels completely enclosed. You cannot see Eddie from the outside. You can’t hear him. So there’s this feeling of isolation in plain sight.

In preparation for this movie, I watched a lot of other movies where people are in cars for a long time. And in every one, there’s a camera mounted to the hood or the side and you see them through the windshield. It’s a great shot. It looks really cool, but you can’t see into this car. So all those shots were gone for us. We had to rethink how you shoot cars entirely for this movie and think of it more like Buried, like he’s in a box. Sam challenged me to shoot it, as cinematically as possible. And I really wanted to. That’s one of the genre tropes I wanted to take on was making this feel cinematic despite being trapped in a little spot. Panic Room does a good job of that. We’re in this little space, but you don’t feel that way. You feel like it’s a big cinematic story. So one of the ways to do that is shooting anamorphic. But traditionally anamorphic lenses, minimum focus distance is six to nine feet. So you cannot put that in a car with someone.

We were fortunate enough to be a completely independent movie. We didn’t start shooting, but we started working on the movie during the strike. We were one of the waiver movies. And so we were able to use Dan Sasaki, who worked at Panavision as a lens tech. He had nothing to do because no one’s making movies. And so he was able to tweak lenses for us and build us lenses that have never been built before because he just had the time. I mean, this is typically the treatment that Star Wars would get, but we’re this little indie movie. Dan Sasaki is amazing. I think he built us the widest anamorphic lens they had. And the minimum focus distance was almost to the tip of the lens. It was that close. And he built us what I think may be the first anamorphic probe lens. He had come up with this idea for Chris Nolan’s Dunkirk to build a lens with an elbow in it so it would have a joint. That way we could keep the camera outside and stick the lens in and go a different way. We used that a lot. That one shot in the trailer where it goes from inside the car to outside and you see her doing her lipstick, that was shot on this lens. It’s got a really unique look to it.

My production designer, Grant Armstrong, was an art director on Gravity and he told us about how they shot in these tight spaces. They built this pod where you could slide pieces away on rails very simply. He suggested we do that with this car, but the problem is, Eddie’s trying to get out of this car. He’s gonna be kicking on the doors. So we designed this locking mechanism that allowed us to slide a piece in and then lock it. For example, when you see that really long and complicated shot, we were almost like puppeteers of the set sliding a chunk out of the way as the camera passed and then sliding it back in so you couldn’t see that it was closed. It took us forever to do and endless coordination, but all based on the goal of making something that you’ve never seen before. A really cinematic, gotta see it on a big screen kind of movie from such a tiny space.

You mentioned that you’re a lifelong fan of Sam Raimi. I am too. What’s your favorite Sam Raimi movie?

That’s changed over time. There was a time when it was straight up Evil Dead II and there was a time when it was definitely Army of Darkness. Darkman held my heart for a while. It really did. But if you were to ask me right this moment, Drag Me to Hell is just so good. And let me tell you, the sound designer on this movie, Marti D. Humphrey, he was the sound designer on Drag Me to Hell. We were in a really tight spot and Sam said, “let me see if my guy will do it.” And I was thinking yeah, we should have started there.That would be amazing. [Laughs] So Marty stepped up and did such a solid job on this movie. I told him when we were mixing that in every sound mix I’ve ever been in, I always reference Drag Me to Hell. I encourage my sound mixers to watch it so that we have a common language. But I don’t need to say that to you because you mixed it and that’s so cool!

I love Drag Me to Hell. I think that’s my favorite also. And I remember running out of the theater just terrified! Disgusted too. And the sound mixing has a lot to do with it. You can really feel all the squelching.

The thing I love about Sam is that he is a joyful filmmaker.

Yes, absolutely.

You know, there are filmmakers I love, but they put misery on screen. I love movies like that too, but when you watch Drag Me to Hell, you feel his joy for these disgusting things. You feel that glee and it’s infectious.

Locked collides into theaters this Friday. Get your tickets now!

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