John Krasinski talks to us about his latest movie as director, IF, and how it’s taken him well out of his comfort zone…
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #50 in May 2024.
In a few weeks’ time, the third film in the A Quiet Place series arrives in cinemas. The first two films – directed by John Krasinski, who up to that point most people knew as Jim from The Office (US version) – were big hits. The original in particular remains a bolt out of nowhere. Krasinski had directed before at that point, but still: few saw him as the man to bring the surprise horror hit of its respective year to the screen. The sequel proved it was no fluke.
The third film?
Well, your guess is as good as mine. Krasinski said ‘no’. Instead, he’s handed that over to someone else, with A Quiet Place: Day One directed by Michael Samoski.
Meanwhile, John Krasinski chose to direct a big family movie about imaginary friends instead.
Imagination
That film is IF, about a young girl called Bea (played by Cailey Fleming) who’s not having an easy life. She turns to a collection of imaginary friends – IFs – who themselves don’t appear to be going through the best of times. Krasinski has penned the script as well as directing the movie, roping in his old mate Ryan Reynolds to co-star and co-produce.
He’s bearded and relaxed as we meet in London in March 2024, warmly shaking my hand, and not displaying the slightest sign of a man with an expensive movie deep in post-production. One that, he concedes, has absolutely terrified him.
That, though, was part of the plan. When he jumped into making A Quiet Place, he freely admitted that he wasn’t a horror expert. He thus sat in front of a host of horror films and learned, taking in what made them work. He had a little more experience in family movies, though, and so opted to do things a little differently.
“I decided not to re-watch movies, but go solely off how I remembered them, and the moments in those movies that were indelible,” he explains.
The initial touchpoints are probably guessable: E.T., The Goonies, Hook, any of the Spielberg family movies of the ’80s era. Krasinski throws in My Neighbour Totoro from Studio Ghibli as well. The thinking?
“It all came down to the emotionality. It’s why I remember [those films] the most. I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground by saying the moment we remember most in E.T. is him flying across the moon or saying goodbye. The reason we remember that is we went along with the journey of someone we really cared about. And the movies that I don’t remember as well had a visual aspect, or a comedic aspect or something, but didn’t dig a little deeper.”
It begins…
IF was first announced in 2019, under the title of Imaginary Friends, with Reynolds already involved. The catalyst had been Krasinski wanting to make a film for his children (perhaps unsurprisingly, they’ve seen neither A Quiet Place film, nor his stint as Jack Ryan in the Amazon Prime series).
He knew if he was going to make a big, live-action movie, he had to do it properly. His research led him towards child psychology work about imagination and imaginary projects.
“I learned that [imaginary friends] are often a projection of what kids need. If a kid is being bullied at school, they need something huge to protect them, or give them a hug. But also, if your parents are going through a divorce, and your dad is wearing a tie on the day he told you about the divorce, that might be the tie your imaginary friend is wearing.”
A skeleton idea for a family movie about said imaginary friends was taking shape, and he set an early ground rule: the film couldn’t be just silly.
“I wanted kids to have fun, but I remember the movies that had the most indelible impact on me were the ones that were emotional. I wanted to dig a bit deeper.”
2020 of course brought with it the onset of the global pandemic, and what changed the framing of IF a little was Krasinski watching his children trying to process what was going on. The happiness, the playfulness, but also the worries.
Given that at heart his two A Quiet Place movies are about a family unit, he wasn’t straying into entirely alien territory with IF. In fact, we talk for a while about how the best family movies are Trojan horses to a degree. That, and celebrating films where the global stakes might not be world-ending, but they’re dramatic for the characters. All the Goonies are trying to do at heart is save their home, after all.
“I remember saying in press for A Quiet Place that I made Ordinary People and Trojan-horsed in a genre film. This one, I feel the same way. It’s a Trojan horse in the genre of having fun.”
Not for nothing has Krasinski previously described IF as aiming towards a live-action Pixar movie.
Success
The difference though between the director who embarked on A Quiet Place and the one who started filming IF is success. Krasinski’s last two films were sizeable box-office hits, and I wonder if he feels the pressure of that. “You know, is there a weight on you after having a successful film to doing another successful film? Yes, I’m sure there’s a fractionality of that,” he admits.
What he did, though, was look at A Quiet Place and work out why it was successful for him. Then he could move forward with IF.
“With the imaginary friends thing, as soon as I realised I would tell it through the lens of a coping mechanism, I really couldn’t get it out of my head again,” he concluded.
He had to keep himself as grounded as possible: to make sure he was making this story because it worked, not just because he now had the clout to do so.
Tough crowd
Given that IF is a film that John Krasinski was inspired to make for his children, I wonder what they’ve made of what they’ve seen?
He smiles, and tells me how he was advised by their mother – who happens to be the mighty Emily Blunt – that they would not have the reaction he was expecting or wanting. They’d have their own reaction, and it’d be an absolutely genuine one.
“I thought it was a great piece of advice”, he admits. “None of their reactions, whether they like it or not, are wrong.”
He tells a story about how one of his children watched the trailer and seemed to like it immediately. The other walked away, seeming nonplussed, but then started asking detailed questions three days later.
“As adults, we have to put on a front and answer immediately. When you go and see a play of your friend, you have to say something. Kids don’t.
“I remember pitching the movie to a couple of people early on, just close friends. And they had a very emotional – and very quickly emotional – response.”
Still, even if he chose to make something like this on a micro-budget, a box-office hit changes expectations.
“I didn’t look at it like that, but you’re right. If I did go and make a million-dollar movie now, it would come with a totally different perspective on it. I think that’s the responsibility of breaking into the mainstream and hitting something that people want to see. But you hope that you don’t change your way of storytelling. That your storytelling stays specific, and that you don’t start answering to other entities.”
Ground
We end up back at stakes, and keeping them relatable. “You have to care, and you have to care specifically,” he says of the characters in IF.
“A girl in a bad mood is different than a girl going through loss. I think the more and more specific you make the story, the more you can build on it.”
Storytelling is clearly a passion of his, and he works hard to make his tales work.
“You have to find the specific entry point in. And you also have to figure out why it means something to you. That you try to do the un-Hollywood thing of not just making a movie because people might go and see it. You have to tell a story you’d see. Or even more terrifying: will my kids go see it?”
It sounds like he’s got a good brain trust around him to help with that. For instance, with A Quiet Place, Krasinski remembers calling in Drew Goddard (The Cabin In The Woods, The Martian, Cloverfield) for a sanity check.
“He said two things that I probably did take into this. First, ‘it’s great, the metaphor is on every page, so now the metaphor has to be in every shot of the movie’. I thought, how powerful that is. The metaphor can’t be a gimmick. The metaphor has to be an undercurrent of everything the that the movie is about, and I tried to do that with this.”
And the second thing?
“Genre is the greatest storytelling guide, because it keeps the audience at arm’s length.”
Krasinski quizzed Goddard on whether that was a good or bad thing. The response?
“He said, ‘it’s a great thing, because it allows people to experience things that they wouldn’t normally experience.”
An example?
“Kramer Vs Kramer, if you’re a child of divorce, might be too real. But if you deliver it in the package of E.T…”
I think John Krasinski likes E.T. a lot.
“You’re talking about the honesty of why I wrote the movie about kids. A movie about worrying about your kids and are they going to be okay, and coping mechanisms, good days, bad days, all that. And then you hide it in a movie about imaginary friends, where people go, ‘oh, it’s adorable.’ But wait a minute. I think it’s saying something deeper. I try to hold onto that every chance I get.”
Scale
Our time is coming to an end, and I put to John Krasinski that IF – in its evolving form – has been in his life for many, many years now. What, though, if it’d been his third film as director rather than fifth?
“I really don’t think I’d have had the confidence to do it,” he says, without blinking. “I think this is a much more ambitious thing.”
He’s not wrong. He’s making his biggest film in terms of scale, with his biggest budget, and his biggest cast. Is there a worry of losing, well, the innocence and naïveté of directing your early features?
I put to Krasinski the example of acclaimed theatre director Nicholas Hytner, who once said of his debut feature – the wonderful The Madness Of King George – that he never made a better film than when he knew the least about filmmaking. Presumably, you still need a bit of that somewhere?
“Are you surrounded by enough people who will be honest? Do you have enough honesty within yourself? Do you get high on your own supply, basically? For me, I can thank my Catholicism and my upbringing there. It’s hard for me to pat myself on the back for anything, and I think that helps,” he laughs.
That, and the fact that he took an idea with lots of possibilities, and chose the path he did.
“If I was going to do another horror film with this, I probably would have approached it differently and maybe had a different outcome. But because I’ve shifted gears, I get back into the pool in the deep end, and I’m swimming again without really knowing what I’m doing. It’s brand new to me again. I found myself in deep water, and honestly, there was a lot of fear going through this movie, because there were a lot of firsts.”
It’s been an enjoyable chat, and I leave for a train back to the rainy West Midlands, whilst Krasinski needs to finish his movie. With IF and A Quiet Place: Day One – for which he co-wrote the story – both in cinemas this summer, the Krasinski Cinematic Universe feels in a good place. And you know what? If he’s feeling the pressure of all of this, that well-groomed beard is doing a very good job of hiding it…
