Speak No Evil director acknowledges trailers show "more than filmmakers want"

Even if you weren’t familiar with the premise of James Watkins’ Speak No Evil from the fact that it was a remake of an existing movie—Christian Tafdrup’s Danish horror film of the same name—you certainly were by the time you got to the end of the movie’s first trailer. After all, the promo, released five months before the movie actually came out, lays out 95 percent of the narrative arc of the entire film in just three quick minutes. No need for audiences to worry that there’s something up with James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi’s Paddy and Ciara, the couple who invite Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy’s characters out for a rural hell visit; the trailer makes it extremely clear what they’re up to right around the time the creepy music kicks in. (Heck, they even give away, nigh-explicitly, the reason their son Ant doesn’t talk.)

There’s nothing unique about this, of course—film trailers have been getting more and more spoiler-y, it feels like, for years—but Watkins did express a little bit of irritation with the practice in an interview with Variety this week, promoting his movie. Speaking diplomatically, Watkins observes that “Well, as a filmmaker, you don’t make the trailer, you watch the trailer and you respond to it. Generally, we live in a world where trailers probably show more than filmmakers want.” But he’s also quick to note that “it is trying to entice people into seeing the film. They do that brilliantly. It’s very easy as a filmmaker to get a bit precious and go, ‘I really want that really cool, classy poster.’ And then they go, ‘Well, yeah, but no one’s going to see your movie.'”

Again, there’s nothing explicitly new about directors complaining, even gently, about this stuff. David Lynch expressed his irritation at the practice back in 2015, telling Rolling Stone, “I think it’s really harmful. For me, personally, I don’t want to know anything when I go into a theater.” Colin Trevorrow complained (gently, nobody wants the marketing department mad at them) about the trailers for his Jurassic World films, telling IGN, “They have shown far more of this movie than I would ever have wanted.” Everybody acknowledges that this kind of “here’s what you get, almost in its entirety, when you go see this movie” marketing seems to work, but nobody actually making the thing, and building it to have internal reveals to surprise the actual viewer, seems that happy about it. (Although, look to M. Night Shyamalan, whose recent thriller Trap has a twist built right into its premise that doesn’t become clear until about 15 minutes into the movie, but which was made explicit in the trailer, to defy convention by saying he views the trailer as part of the cinematic experience: “The story already starts months before you come into the movie theatre.”)

You can read Watkins’ full comments about Speak No Evil—including a spoiler-y conversation in its own right about how he handled the Danish film’s ending in his adaptation—over at Variety.