We spoke with director James Watkins leading up to the release of his new film Speak No Evil, a terrifying remake of the 2022 Danish thriller of the same name. The new one stars Scoot McNairy and other household names, though James McAvoy reliably steals the show as the villainous weekend host from hell. You know exactly what’s going to happen as the terror unfolds, but critics are agreeing that it’s A-OK for the sake of psychologically thrilling entertainment. Leading up to Speak No Evil, Watkins had directed a standout episode of Netflix’s hit series Black Mirror called “Shut Up and Dance” (2016).
“Interestingly, they actually approached me with [the Emmy-winning episode] ‘San Junipero,’ which I would have done, but they were filming in South Africa, and I couldn’t make the dates, so I was quite keen to do something with them,” Watkins told MovieWeb about his Black Mirror experience. “And they said, ‘Well, we maybe got this other dark story, and I was like, ‘Oh OK, yeah, that’s cool.’ I thought it was incredibly freeing. It was all my team… a lot of the team on [Speak No Evil] were on that — director of photography, editor, and it was very quick.”
He concluded, “And I had total freedom. It was like making a little, tiny movie. They were very hands-off.” Then came Speak No Evil, which sees McAvoy giving perhaps his best performance in years. Says Watkins:
“It was a delight working with James. And I’m not just saying that. He read the script, I went to his house. We talked about the script and the ideas and what it was about. It was clear we saw it the same way… James does two things, and they’re incredibly rare:
He’s incredibly professional and committed, and incredibly talented
.”
Watkins went on to add, “And so he’s just in it, you know, and so he’s just a gift to a director, you know? You can do nine takes; he’ll do nine different things. He’ll just keep exploring. You can give him a note, he’ll lean into the note, he’ll try it. He’s fearless, but also, he’s kind of measured, you know? That part, the duality of that part, to be able to say, ‘How do we capture the cheek, the charm, but also the sort of depth?’ And just to walk that line, constantly walk that line, James was brilliant like that.”
Speak No Evil in 2024: ‘A Different Dynamic’
It’s a unique journey of the Speak No Evil remake, given that the Danish original was released just two years back. “I loved the themes of the original. I loved the movie, but I didn’t want to remake the same movie. That seems crazy when you can go and see it,” Watkins told us. “So in choosing to do it, I was basically thinking, ‘Okay, here’s something that I can do that I think I can lean into and explore things that I’m interested in, within a slightly different context.'”
Watkins needed to make specific changes, “So my first conversation with Blumhouse was, ‘Can I relocate this movie to England? I don’t want to make it in America. I don’t know how to do that.’ I think if I know these characters in England, I can do that, make it specific, and then from the specificity, make it universal, you know? And so then, immediately having English characters and then having American characters coming in, it just started creating a different dynamic, how they would react to each other, their worldview.”
From Universal Pictures, Speak No Evil is now playing in theaters.