After the success of his punk rock thriller, Saulnier tells IndieWire he wanted to make something that kept up his trademark intensity, but in an entirely different way. “Hold the Dark” director Jeremy Saulnier wasn’t messing around when it came time to followup his tense thriller “Green Room.” First stop: go outside. Saulnier’s 2015 film is mostly set in an eponymous waiting room in a Portland club that just so happens to be a Nazi haven, and follows a punk rock band as they try to get the hell out of it. After months working with such constraints, Saulnier went to the opposite extreme with a thriller set in the Alaskan wilderness and based on the novel of the same name by William Giraldi. Saulnier told IndieWire he “absolutely” wanted to do something different after “Green Room,” though he laughed when recounting just how different the actual production of “Hold the Dark” proved to be. “Flash forward to me, the cast, and crew in negative 30-degree Celsius weather — be careful what you wish for — but yeah, I wanted to break out,” he said. The filmmaker, who wrote all three of his previous directorial efforts, said that he’d been on the hunt for fresh material to adapt to his style of moviemaking, though it hadn’t proven to be an easy ask. “The way I make movies, there’s a certain amount of immediacy and simplicity and kinetic visual attraction to the stories, and that’s often hard to immediately see when you’re doing literary adaptations,” he said. “‘With ‘Hold the Dark,’ I read it and it was all right there. It read very cinematically, it was atmospheric. … It spoke to me like all the films I end up doing, on an intuitive, impulsive level.” Saulnier has a natural disdain for overly flowery prose — “voluminous” literature is not his bag — but he found that Giraldi’s writing spoke directly to his sensibilities. It is “extremely elegant, but also refreshingly sparse,” he said. The story follows a wolf expert (Jeffrey Wright) who travels to a remote Alaska town to investigate a series of missing children cases, believed to be the product of wolves literally stealing the town’s kids. The film also stars Alexander Skarsgard and Riley Keough. While finding the right material for his first adaptation was tough, Saulnier said he was pleased to finally have the chance to work with a script from someone else — the screenplay was adapted by his long-time friend and creative partner Macon Blair, who also appears in the film — that had such a compelling starting point. “You don’t have to labor through the terrible dialogue that you first sketch out,” he said with a laugh. “It’s all there.” For Saulnier, the experience of making “Green Room” was “so constructed and every single line was dialed in,” allowing him to keep “insane amounts of control.” He couldn’t do that with “Hold the Dark.” “It was a huge challenge, but I think I needed it just to get some fresh air, so to speak,” he said. And get some fresh air he did, thanks to a production that took him from Canada to Morocco and back again. And that’s to say nothing of the animals required for a film that’s centered around something as daunting as wild wolf attacks. “There’s scenes in the Iraq War,” he said. “There’s a lot of outback Alaskan landscapes. There’s aerial sequences. We’re dealing with bison and lynxes and wolves and all kinds of creatures. That was great to not build a contained environment and really milk it for all it’s worth like I did in ‘Green Room,’ but really bend my will around the landscape and the needs of the animals and to keep it very grounded and realistic, and not indulge in artificiality and exactly what I wanted every time.” Still, Saulnier’s instincts did help him prepare for stuff that could have proven more daunting. “The things that I feared the most did not come into play,” Saulnier said. “It was basically, you hear about harsh conditions and animals and that being tough, and pyrotechnics and blowing up a whole village or whatever it was, but those were easy because you’re so scared going in that you over-prep. They seem like a piece of cake compared to everything else.” He learned to adapt under the circumstances. “When you are under the gun trying to punch above your weight class, the epic scale of the movie versus your budget, you have to conform,” he said. “You definitely don’t have to retreat or concede; you have to bend to the will of the universe.” Another change from “Green Room”: The new movie marks Saulnier’s first with Netflix, which came on board to produce the feature in pre-production. While Saulnier has risen in the Hollywood ranks when it comes to his distributors — “Murder Party” and “Blue Ruin” were both made independently before going to small distributors, Broad Green financed “Green Room” before selling it to A24 — he’s got nothing but good words for the streaming giant. “Netflix is just a great creative partner,” he said. “When I’m attached to material, when I find something that really hits me at the bone marrow level like this story did, the only mission is to make it with the partner who’s going to provide the most resources so you can fully realize it. And Netflix was, without a doubt, the best partner for this movie.” Another thing that doesn’t hurt: all those Netflix members, a worldwide audience that will be able to watch Saulnier’s film instantly when it hits the streaming platform in late September. “This movie will see, in its first week of release, more eyes than all of my films combined in the theater,” he said. First, though, the movie has its world premiere at next month’s Toronto International Film Festival, where it will debut in a Special Presentations slot (where “Green Room” had its North American premiere). One thing hasn’t changed for Saulnier: wanting to experience the intensity in a big room, with a ton of people. “I’m not allowed to sit side-by-side with all the people who see my movie, whether it’s theatrical or streaming platforms or what have you, but I just love that electric charge when you world premiere a movie,” he said. “And this venue is going to be huge, it’s going to be over a thousand people. … It’s going to be a chance to see the film in all its cinematic glory with our DCP and our super sexy sound mix. …This is a two-year journey for me and so I’m just going to be focusing on celebrating and honoring everyone who worked so hard on it, and giving it a nice, quick launch.” Check out IndieWire’s exclusive first poster for “Hold the Dark” below. “Hold the Dark” will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month. It will be available for streaming on Netflix on Friday, September 28. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.<doc-sep>We do loves us some Jeremy Saulnier in these parts. Time and time again the director has thrilled us with his claustrophobic thrillers: Murder Party, Blue Ruin and Green Room. Saulnier has brought his thriller chops to the great white north now, embracing the dangerous wilderness of Alaska (props to our own Calgary, Alberta as the stand in) in his new film Hold The Dark. With the new thriller fast approaching on Netflix next month the key art was released today. Front and center is Jeffrey Wright, the protagonist in Saulnier's film. Look at the banner above and you can see who we presume will be the antagonist. You are usually not the good guy if you are wearing a wolf mask and brandishing a nasty compound bow. Just saying, based on our experience, bad guy. Here it is... Retired naturalist and wolf expert Russell Core (JEFFREY WRIGHT) journeys to the edge of civilization in northern Alaska at the pleading of Medora Slone (RILEY KEOUGH), a young mother whose son was killed by a pack of wolves. As Core attempts to help Medora track down the wolves who took her son, a strange and dangerous relationship develops between the two lonely souls. But when Medora's husband Vernon (ALEXANDER SKARSGARD) returns home from the Iraq War, the news of his child's death ignites a violent chain of events. As local cop, Donald Marium (JAMES BADGE DALE), races to stop Vernon’s vengeful rampage, Core is forced on a perilous odyssey into the heart of darkness. In a recent interview with EW Saulnier spoke about his new film... "Oh, man, it was completely insane. It was great, we had just enough to get it done, but we were punching way above our weight class as far as the scope and scale of this film. I also was able to experiment with many new things, the challenges of many firsts. Not only did it have the most intense dialogue, and also the highest body count, it had a first war scene, it had an aerial sequence, and by far the most animals I’ve worked with." That intense dialogue was written by Saulnier's spirit animal Macon Blair. Any word of Saulnier working on a bigger and bloodier canvas sounds very promising indeed. They had me at 'highest body count'. Hold the Dark premieres globally on Netflix on September 28, 2018.<doc-sep>The first trailer for Hold the Dark will leave you with your fair share of chills, and not just because it's set in Alaska. Jeremy Saulnier's psychological thriller, which hits Netflix on Sept. 28, stars Westworld's Jeffrey Wright as retired wolf expert Russell Core, who receives a disturbing, desperate letter from a grieving mother (Riley Keough) who lives in a small Alaskan village. "Dear Mr. Core, three days ago my son Bailey was taken by wolves," she writes, as images of blood-soaked animals flash across the screen. "No one in the village will hunt them. My husband will come home from the war soon. I must have something to show him." Russell agrees to go to the village and investigate the boy's disappearance and soon finds himself tangled up in a web far more dangerous than he ever could have expected. Alexander Skarsgard plays the boy's father, and though he's clearly not involved in his disappearance, he doesn't seem to be trustworthy, either. There's also the matter of a masked killer who appears to be stalking the town — which is "scattered with bodies," one woman remarks — and who the villagers seem keen on protecting. Hold the Dark arrives on Netflix on Sept. 28.<doc-sep>
Netflix's next great original movie is upon us. Today, we have the first trailer for Hold the Dark. And it's a decidedly different kind of thriller that should stop you from complaining that there are no more original stories left in the world. Cause we don't think you've ever seen anything quite like this. Retired naturalist and wolf expert Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright) journeys to the edge of civilization in northern Alaska at the pleading of Medora Slone (Riley Keough), a young mother whose son was killed by a pack of wolves. As Core attempts to help Medora track down the wolves who took her son, a strange and dangerous relationship develops between the two lonely souls. But when Medora's husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard) returns home from the Iraq War, the news of his child's death ignites a violent chain of events. As local cop, Donald Marium (James Badge Dale), races to stop Vernon's vengeful rampage, Core is forced on a perilous odyssey into the heart of darkness. A gripping psychological thriller unfolds in the treacherous Alaskan wilderness when a retired wolf expert is summoned to investigate a child's disappearance. Hold The Dark, starring Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgård and Riley Keough, and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, premieres on September 28, only on Netflix. Director Jeremy Saulnier first made waves with his acclaimed crime drama Blue Ruin, which really put him on the map as a filmmaker. The story followed a mysterious outsider, who's quiet life is turned upside down when he returns to his childhood home to carry out an act of vengeance. Proving himself an amateur assassin, he winds up in a brutal fight to protect his estranged family. Next came the acclaimed thriller Green Room, which garnered quite a bit of attention. In the movie, a punk rock band is forced to fight for survival after witnessing a murder at a neo-Nazi skinhead bar. It was one of Anton Yelchin's finally performances as a leading man before his untimely death. Since shooting Hold the Dark, Saulnier went onto direct HBO's True Detective. He helmed Season 3's first two episodes, setting the tone for what will play out in these new episodes. True Detective will return to HBO in early 2019, where Saulnier's work will be on full display. Hold the Dark star Jeffrey Wright is also no stranger to HBO, as he stars as Bernard Lowe on the hit drama Westworld. He's an accomplished actor who has been around since the very early 90s. He isn't often offered the lead, but here he commands the screen in a performance that won't soon be forgotten. You can check out a first look at Hold the Dark direct from Netflix streaming Youtube. They also offer up the first poster. Get ready for one of the most unique movies of 2018, coming this fall. It's going to hit the chest hard.