Filmmaker & Cast Behind THE BLACK PHONE

THE BLACK PHONE is the rarest of contemporary studio genre films, one that places the human drama above jump scares and special effects, which in turn makes for one of the most suspenseful and genuinely engaging horror films in recent years.

Following prior successful collaborations, Sinister and Doctor Strange, screenwriters Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill reunited to adapt author Joe Hill‘s short story, The Black Phone, taken from his 2005 anthology, 20th Century Ghosts, into a feature-length screenplay.

Hill’s story follows protagonist Finney Blake, a thirteen year-old boy trapped in the basement of his abductor, The Grabber, with only a rotary phone as a means of communication, that despite being disconnected allows him to speak with The Grabber’s previous victims.
Both having grown up within the era that Hill’s text was set, the late 1970s, Derrickson and Cargill approached reworking the source material through a personal lens by injecting their own childhood experiences and trauma into the feature script.

Derrickson citing that before he had decided to work on The Black Phone that he “was thinking about making a movie that was really rooted in my own childhood memory, as something like an American The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959).”

Having grown up in North Denver, Derrickson was around the same age of the character of Finney, “I was 12 in 1978, and my home life and neighbourhood life was very much what you see on screen. You know, it’s sort of working class blue collar, pretty violent, both in a home and out of home environment. And there was a lot of fear of serial killers. Especially in North Denver in 1978, the Manson murders had happened, not long before Ted Bundy had come through Colorado and killed a bunch of women and then was, arrested and escaped in Colorado.”

“Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) had come out and also on a personal note, my friend who lived next door when I was nine years old, knocked on my door and I answered it and he said, somebody murdered my mom and his mother had been abducted and raped and wrapped in phone cord and thrown in the local lake. So like the presence of the ominous serial killer, who could take you from your bed or take you from the way to school was just a very real thing for those of us, you know, that age in 1978, North Denver, it just was a real thing, you know? So I think a lot of the desire I had was to tell a story in that environment.”

That desire to tell of his own personal experience made for a fitting union with Hill’s story, that Derrickson had actually optioned several years prior.

“When I thought about combining it with Joe’s short story, I was like, this is a good idea, you know it makes the film really personal and feels really personal. That’s very satisfying because I think the more personal a storyteller can convey something it’s almost inevitably more universal and the more specific it is to real experiences, the more it tends to speak to people because people can feel the truth in it.”
Having left Marvel Studios’ Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness due to creative differences, Derrickson and Cargill set about working on The Black Phone screenplay, not only drawing upon their own experiences but expanding upon the story and its characters also, as such rounding out a dark coming-of-age, not too dissimilar to the narrative spin of 2017’s Super Dark Times.

“The main things that we expanded were, in this short story, there was one ghost that calls on the phone, we’ve got five and, and the sister, Gwen, I felt that we needed a female character to be central in the story. And this nine year old girl, Gwen, who I think is an older sister and not much dealt with in the short story, becomes really the soul of the movie.”

Derrickson and Cargill having worked once previously with producer Jason Blum on 2012’s Sinister, on which Derrickson also directed, were eager to collaborate again and once the script for The Black Phone was complete, their first port of call was Blumhouse Productions.

Derrickson saying that Blum is “100% supportive, he just trusts me to make the movie I want to make, very protective of creative talent and for my vision for both of the pictures we’ve made together, he’s just the best, he’s a great guy”.
Given the fiercely personal nature of The Black Phone, Blumhouse was a perfect fit, as it had been their prior collaboration Sinister, which Derrickson cites as being another personal story.

“When I made Sinister, I was very much in a place like Ellison Oswalt, Ethan Hawke’s character. I wrote a pretty personal and revealing movie then as well. I had made The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005). It was a big hit. Everybody wanted to work with me. And then I made The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008), which was a big studio disaster, and wasn’t very appreciated. And then like Ethan’s character. I was afraid of losing my status in my workplace. And I was afraid of not making a living and all of that. And I was just really trying to deal with the things I was afraid of.”
“That’s really a movie about ambition, how Ethan’s character Ellison was more afraid of losing his financial and notoriety status. He was more afraid of losing that than he was about the crazy paranormal things going on in his house, that’s kind of what that movie was about, I was trying to reckon with that aspect of my own of my own life at that time.”

The Black Phone also sees Derrickson re-team with Sinister‘s lead Ethan Hawke, however this time, Hawke switches from protagonist to antagonist as the film’s villain, The Grabber. Hawke known for his empathetic characters, rarely plays the bad guy with the exception of 2004’s Taking Lives and more recently as Arthur Harrow in the Marvel Studios/Disney+ series Moon Knight.

“Ethan even said to me, before I gave him the script, I don’t really play villains. You know, it’s gotta be something really special, for me to do that. I think that the characters who are memorable villains have really unique, very actor driven characteristics,  the way that that Anthony Hopkins speaks in Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), that script is brilliant, but the way that he speaks his tone, his intonations, not in the script, that’s something that the actor brought to the table and Ethan did the same thing with The Grabber.”
Hawke recalls that when “Scott first sent me the script, I warned him before he sent it. I said, you know I’m dying to work with you again. But it’s very unlikely that I will do this movie because I, for years, I’ve had this theory about how Jack Nicholson’s whole career changed when he played The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) in that, once you unveil your madness, that evil side to the world, they can’t unsee it and they start to see it in all your other characters. So I’ve always been sensitive towards doing that, but then I read it and I felt it was so much fun. The script was so good and I’ve just enjoyed Scott’s work. I loved doing Sinister. And I thought to myself, well, you know what, I’m 50 years old, maybe it’s time to change the map and start embracing my inner grabber.”
The Black Phone would present Hawke with a unique opportunity though, in that The Grabber would be disguised in a mask the entire time, divorcing his recognisable face from the character he was portraying, whilst also presenting a challenge to the actor, of conveying his character’s physical expression from behind a mask.

“I think he understood that the challenge that the character wears a mask the whole time. I think Ethan took that not just as a challenge, but an opportunity to let the mask be the scary thing. And it allowed him, I think, to be very truthful in talking in a manner that was unique to this character” says Derrickson.

Hawke expresses that “any mask work gives you a sense of playfulness and it makes body language so important and it makes vocal work so important. And the idea that the mask itself was evolving and could say something about who the character was. It was so fun to have all these different masks out and decide which one to wear for which scene. And Scott always had really good ideas about what he wanted. And it was so new for me. I mean playing this type of horrible human being was new. And also there’s a aspect of Greek tragedy at work, right. You know, that those old fashioned Greek dramas where you are representing this evil id of the universe, in this basement.”

While the imagery of The Grabber solely features on the film’s theatrical key art, The Black Phone‘s heart and soul rests with protagonists Finney and Gwen, siblings whose bond is cemented by superb casting and the sheer chemistry of performers Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw.
Given the intensely dramatic nature of the material and their young age, both actors genuinely thrust themselves into their characters, with McGraw citing that “it really helps when you can relate to them in a lot of ways or just find how you can relate to them” and Thames adding “I really tried to see how the character of Finney would react in a lot of scenes and I really wanted to put myself into it too.”

The pair’s on-screen dynamic was no doubt boosted by the ability of having been able to forge a bond off-set by dining together regularly and playing games with one another in their downtime.

On working with Hawke, Thames said “he always talked to me, on and off-set, before scenes we’d have conversations. And even when he put on the mask, I remember in the first scene that we filmed together, which was pretty intense. I remember after they yelled cut, he was like, you all right, kid. And I was like, yeah, then he gave me like little noogie on the head. He’s such an incredible person.”
The takeaway from the film for McGraw is that’s “it’s amazing how it shows that kids can rely on each other and on themselves throughout the whole movie. And I think it’s important that adults and more kids see that.”

For Derrickson, he expresses that “there there’s a lot of love and a lot of hope in The Black Phone. I think it’s the most emotional, probably the most hopeful movie I’ve made. All of that flows out of its relationship and connection to my own personal journey. I don’t think that filmmakers necessarily have to work that way. It just is the way I seem to work. I think the movies I’ve made that have connected with audiences have always had a pretty personal connection to me and the ones that I’ve done that haven’t had so much of that have been the ones that didn’t have that, I think that’s true.”

THE BLACK PHONE in Australian Cinemas July 21