Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett‘s “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” is, like its 2019 predecessor, filled with elaborate action set pieces and gory (and often hilarious) death scenes.
For the directing team better known as Radio Silence, however, the biggest challenge on the movie came not in orchestrating that kind of complicated violence and physical comedy, but in staging the film‘s most exposition-heavy scene. There’s no blood or guts in this lengthy sequence, but it does feature all of the major characters as they follow Elijah Wood’s attorney character as he lays out the rules of the game to come.
“We joke that we have that scene in all of our movies,” Bettinelli-Olpin told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “There’s always a scene where the entire ensemble is in a room having some big conversation. We try to have a different approach every time so it doesn’t get stale.” Although the directors had thought a similar scene in their previous movie, “Abigail,” was difficult, it was “a walk in the park” compared to the 14-character scene that kicks “Ready or Not 2” into high gear.
According to Bettinelli-Olpin, he and Gillett began by breaking the sequence up into the “mini-acts” within the scene that needed to tell their own self-contained story. The hard part was keeping everyone’s energy up on set, particularly since some actors were essentially just listening, while others had highly physical business to perform.
“We’re shooting that scene over two or three days, but you have to maintain the sense that it’s happening in 15 minutes,” Bettinelli-Olpin said. “It’s one of two places in the movie where we backed ourselves into a corner, because the tone has to live confidently in a scene that is essentially Elijah Wood giving rules for 10 minutes. On paper, that could go wrong very quickly.”
Gillett noted that, while covering a scene with 14 characters poses challenges, it also presents opportunities. “ It’s rare with a big ensemble that there are days when everybody is on set at the same time,” Gillett said. “There’s something really wonderful about those scenes as a mile marker, not only in the movie, but in the process of making it. This is the reason we brought all of these people together, to play off of each other, and we get to do that in one big, fun, long scene.”
Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin tried to structure the shoot around the actors who had the most to give both physically and emotionally in the sequence, but they also wanted to stay attuned to the smallest details and gestures happening all around the room. “We want to make sure that everybody has the time to give their best in what little moment they may have, whether it’s a line of dialogue or just a reaction,” Gillett said, with Bettinelli-Olpin adding that they usually defer to the actors when it comes to scheduling the day.
“ When someone has a trying scene, an exhausting scene, we usually ask, ‘Do you want us to start with you or end with you?,’” Bettinelli-Olpin said. “‘Are you going to give it all and then not have it? Or do you want to save it?’ And then we structure the day around that.”
Although it can be tedious, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett said it’s essential to get as much coverage as possible so that they can honor multiple perspectives in the editing room. “Our producer jokes that the way we shoot, you could tell the story from any character’s point of view at any moment,” Gillett said. “That’s actually really important to us, that we have enough footage to check in with people.”
Gillett says reactions are key to creating the emotional effects and rhythms of his and Bettinelli-Olpin’s cinema, hence the need for extensive coverage. “It’s not just what’s said,” Gillett said. “It’s how people respond and react to what’s said. So it’s valuable for us to have coverage in multiple sizes of everybody, and that just takes time and energy.”
Once they were in the editing room, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett had to find not only the emotional arcs for each of the characters but make sure the information Wood’s character was dispensing was landing for the audience.
“We had to make sure we didn’t have repeat moments that were sneakily hiding in there,” Bettinelli-Olpin said. “We did a kind of mix-and-match puzzle game where we had to move the rules around because the way they were written was really clear, but what we realized in the edit was that you had to put the stuff that felt like it was about the same thing in a group. Otherwise it felt like we had already talked about that. So we did a whole restructure of all the information.”
Finding the right shape for the scene took great patience both on set and in the cutting room, but Gillett says it’s not the kind of thing that can be rushed: “Any movie is just a series of choices with pressure over time. And it’s easy to just want to be at the end, but you have to be patient because it’s in the doing of it that you experience all the wonderful discovery.”
“Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” is currently in theaters from Searchlight Pictures.
To hear the entire conversation with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
