The Devil's Inside Them!

Matt Patches: There are many Hitchcock films that are self-contained in one set: in a room, in a boat, etc. Did you find that being an elevator - I know that you leave the elevator to deal with the cops - did you feel constrained or was did the elevator lend itself to innovation?

John Dowdle: I think both. One of the things we came up with in pre-pro was that we wanted to do in the elevator was give the audience the feel that they are in that place with them. The way we did that was used a little but of our Quarintine and Poughkeepsie Tapes training for every scene in the elevator - everything in the elevator is told subjectively.

We start with the close-up of a character. Okay, lets call this scene the 'Young Woman scene,' we start with a close-up of her and then we show what she's seeing throughout the scene and we do that every time we are in the elevator. So this time your in the elevator with the mechanic and your seeing everything that he's seeing, and your watching his reactions to everything. It's a nice way for us to limit coverage, with five people in a small space like that...you could 50 different shots - over the shoulder, over the shoulders, close-ups, close-ups, reshoots, reshoots, wideshot - and you could just beat it to death. It wouldn't be fun.

Drew Dowdle: It was a challenging experience for our actors to work for fourteen straight days in an elevator. We didn't want to beat it with coverage because we wanted to preserve the actors, we wanted a handful of great takes and move on. That was a nice way to shoot it so we didn't have to spend 20 days on an elevator.

Matt Patches: Your previous films were shot with a found footage, documentary style. Do you feel like you had to adapt or learn something new doing a more narrative/traditional film?

John Dowdle: You know what's funny, after Poughkeepsie and Quarantine, people started to get to know us and we were up for a couple of jobs and they were like, 'But could you shoot regular...like normal films?' Of course we can. It's a funny thing, once we were able to anything, just put the camera anywhere, we had to sort of retain some discipline. Let's not do tons and tons of shots because, frankly, when you are orientated in the space and you know what's around you, you see something like The Shining, do you know where you are in those spaces? Like, in every scene you know what's around you, you know what the walls look like, what the space feels like, I feel like that's often lost.

People cover things so much and cut and cut and cut that we really wanted to retain some of that more fluid camera style like our previous films. Not like they are POV, we wanted to retain the fluidity.

Jump to:

The directors sum up Devil

The influences of Hitchcock and Kubrick!

The difficulties of a twist ending

Exactly what "From the Mind of M. Night Shyamalan" means

Keeping Philadelphia Philadelphian

How to make movie elevators realistic

The Dowdle Bros.' favorite horror flicks and their next project