Interviews
Christopher Landon’s ‘Drop’ Built Fully Functioning Restaurant for Immersive Thriller [Interview]
Meghann Fahy (“The White Lotus”) and Brandon Sklenar (It Ends With Us) star as a budding couple embarking on a first date that goes terribly awry thanks to a twisty murder plot in Happy Death Day and Freaky director Christopher Landon’s thriller Drop.
The suspenseful thriller sets its whodunnit in motion when widowed mother Violet begins receiving mysterious airdrops on her phone, lighthearted memes at first that quickly snowball into sinister threats, prompting Violet to commit murder before her loved ones suffer the price.
Landon, speaking with Bloody Disgusting at SXSW for the film’s premiere, shared the true origins that inspired Drop. He explains, “Our producers were on vacation; they’re in a restaurant, and they started getting all of these mysterious airdrops from somebody in the restaurant. They could not figure it out. They never figured it out. They never solved it, but that’s when they were like, ‘This is like a great premise for a movie.’ They approached Chris [Roach] and Jill [Jacobs], our writers, and said, ‘Here’s the threadbare idea. Go.’
“They went off and came up with this very classic thriller concept. Then they wrote a first draft, and then the producers brought that draft to me and said, ‘We think that there’s a movie in here somewhere.’ I read it really fast because I thought it was a really fun script, but it was great because there was still a lot of work to do. A lot of things to solve, which is my favorite thing to do: roll up my sleeves as a writer and put that hat on. The three of us got together and worked really closely on the script. It was such a joy to work with them.”
(from left) Violet (Meghann Fahy) and Henry (Brandon Sklenar) in Drop, directed by Christopher Landon.
One huge piece of the puzzle to solve was maintaining momentum in the pressure cooker scenario. Landon tells BD, “That was one of the big challenges of the movie, how do we continue to cast suspicion on a lot of different people and make them feel like credible suspects? How do you keep subverting expectations? I think also one of the challenges here, and it was something that I was really deeply involved in, was in the original script, there were a lot of different motivations and a lot of different things happening that for me didn’t land quite right. It was just about making sure that motivations were clean, that they made sense, that they tracked so that if you do go back and watch the movie a second time, you’re going to see like, oh, okay, now this all makes sense. There are a lot of hidden things in the movie that people will miss. If they go back and watch it, they’ll see a lot more.”
Drop also marks a departure from Landon’s recent genre-mashup output, in what his husband lovingly and humorously refers to as his “grown-up” movie. The more sophisticated and simple concept was a huge part of the appeal for the filmmaker. He explains, “I think what I was more conscious of was wanting to make something that I think was less of a mash-up and more straightforward. I think for a lot of filmmakers, every project that we tackle is a reaction to the thing we did before. I was reacting to a movie that I didn’t even make but was supposed to. It was the best version of kismet where I had this project. It really was a great sandbox for me to work out a lot because I’m always kind of wrestling and dealing with my stuff. I’m sorry I drag millions of people along with me into my therapy sessions. But that’s what it was for me. I was really excited to make something that was darker and heavier, and a little more emotional, but still manages to find the light. I always like to have humor in everything I do, so I still found that here. It’s just not as broad as those other movies.”
Landon continues, “We live in an age where we’re dealing with a lot of movies that have these enormous production budgets and so many visual effects, and all this stuff that’s getting thrown at the audience. For me, sometimes there’s just something impossibly magical and enthralling about two people just at a table. The stakes can still be so high, even though your environment and the amount of characters you’re interacting with is so minimal. I saw Red Eye multiple times in the theater. Again, sort of going full circle kismet, I did not get to make the Wes Craven movie that I thought I was going to make.“
The pared-back thriller pays homage to the suspense greats, from Alfred Hitchcock to Brian De Palma to Wes Craven, and sets up a tension-fueled whodunnit that takes place almost exclusively within an upscale restaurant on the 38th floor of a Chicago high-rise. Palate, the film’s fictional restaurant, becomes a character in itself because so much of the film is set there. While it’s not surprising that production built the setting from scratch, what is surprising is that it was fully functional. As in, Palate even served tasty food that not even the actors could resist, and it required careful planning for the sake of continuity.
“We built a 12,000-square-foot restaurant,“ Landon reveals. “We had 100 extras. We had to train an entire staff. We had actual food. We had a chef who made food. We created a full menu of very specific dishes, and then they had to go and create. I don’t even know what they were made of, but they were fake versions of our dishes that look photoreal. We vacillated between those because you don’t want a set that stinks of food all day and is gross. We also needed some people to be eating. It was such a crazy, elaborate operation. Hats off to our AD department because they had so much work to do in terms of tracking. Also, we had to manage continuity. Who’s getting up? Who’s getting what? What table’s being seated? What table’s done? What course are they on? Every single table had to be mapped out. It was mind-blowing. There were giant graphs and charts and all kinds of crazy shit that was done.
“When you watch the movie, it is seamless. The food was good. I had to stop Brandon from eating at a certain point because he would just keep going between takes. He would be like, ‘This is delicious.‘ He kept tucking into it. I was like, ‘Slow down. You’ve had five steaks.’
The restaurant set piece wasn’t just functional to create an immersive restaurant experience. Landon details, “It was 16 feet off the ground. We had to build an elevated set for a couple of reasons. One, because there’s a sequence later in the movie that requires the height. It was also like a big technical feat because they built this massive tunnel through the middle of the set so that we could move cranes and other gear from one side of the restaurant to the other side of the restaurant. It was a marvel. I was blown away by this thing. It was really cool. We had to get a certain amount of clearance so that we could do certain things with the actors after.”
“Then,“ Landon teases of a stunt-heavy third act, “we had to build an alternate facade of the building so that we could hang actors on wires even higher than that. Meghann was way up there. She was so brave because I was scared looking at it.”
Drop releases in theaters on April 11, 2025.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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