Drew Hancock on Why ‘Companion' Is More ‘Marriage Story' Than ‘Minority Report': ‘This Is a Breakup Movie at Its Core'
Writer/director Drew Hancock's 'Companion' is the best kind of cinematic thrill ride, a combination rom-com, heist movie, and sci-fi thriller that keeps the audience guessing at every turn — yet reveals itself on second viewing to have been carefully constructed so that every twist seems completely inevitable. According to Hancock, it was a structure arrived at by a combination of careful planning and improvisation.
'It was a heavily outlined first half,' Hancock told IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, 'and then I knew where it was going and had the basic ingredients of what we would end up with. But I've written enough to know that if you outline too much, you end up wasting a lot of time on the ending, because most of the time, you'll find a completely different ending while you're writing it.'
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To that end, Hancock meticulously outlined the first hour of the movie and started writing. Once he figured out the characters' voices, and they were 'telling me what story they wanted to be told,' he closed the Final Draft file and outlined the second half after the first half had been fully written. 'That took about a month to crack, and then I opened the Final Draft file again and just started where I left off and finished it. And then the rewriting process was pretty intense.'
One thing that continued to evolve throughout the rewriting process was the film's tone, which is carefully calibrated throughout to walk a fine line between comedy and drama, fantasy and reality, and romance and horror. Many of the genre elements that made it into the final film weren't even there in the original conception. 'The very first draft had no comedy to it,' Hancock said. 'It had no heist element to it. It was a not very good 'Black Mirror' episode.'
That forced Hancock to step back and think about the purpose of writing the script to begin with. 'I was in a place where I wasn't being given the career opportunities that I wanted, and 'Companion' sprung from that,' he said. 'It was just, sit down, write something that represents your voice. The irony of that is the first draft didn't represent my voice because I have a very comedic mindset. A lot of people that come from comedy think it's easy, and, therefore, you think, because it's easy, it's not what I should be doing. Writing needs to be tough.'
Once Hancock realized that his instincts were wrong, he went back and added the comedy and tonal shifts. 'In hindsight, obviously there were all these genres mixed together because it could easily have been my last script,' Hancock said. 'I was in my 40s and living paycheck to paycheck with a comfortably low cost of living because I don't have a family. So when I look back at the script, it does feel like, oh, this might be the only thing I write, so let's throw everything at the wall. Let's make it a heist movie. Let's make it a horror movie. Let's make it a thriller with a relationship drama at the spine of it.'
The ways in which 'Companion' keeps rebooting are what make it such a pleasure for the audience. It gives the viewer the same charge as early John Carpenter or Quentin Tarantino movies in the way that it reinvents and reinvigorates the genres it's riffing on. That grew out of Hancock's desire to go for broke. 'It was me advertising to the world, 'Look, I can do all of these things.' That's something I didn't realize when I was writing it, but I feel now.'
Writing the script was one thing, but what makes 'Companion' truly remarkable is how precisely — again, echoes of early Tarantino and Carpenter — Hancock expresses what's in the script and gives it another layer through his visual language. His orchestration of the production design, cinematography, costumes, and other elements to find a pitch-perfect balance between a relatable real world and a slightly futuristic one in which key aspects are just slightly off-kilter exhibits an impressive degree of control and taste for a first-time director.
Hancock credits his collaborators with contributing a lot of the film's ideas, explaining that part of directing was not keeping too tight a grip on what he had created as a writer. 'I think the best directing comes from a place of finding the guardrails,' he said. ''This is too far in this direction, this is too far in that direction.' Within this boundary you can play and have fun and make discoveries of your own and figure it out.'
Hancock feels that it's especially important to give the actors both freedom and protection, an approach that yields two thrillingly inventive and hilarious performances from leads Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher. He said that he let the actors know 'I will protect you and make sure you never color outside the lines. When I'm writing the script, I want to define as much as possible and paint my version of the movie. And then we can change that and mess with it, and I'm always open for any conversations.'
In the end, what unifies 'Companion and gives it its impact is Hancock's emphasis on the more grounded aspects of his genre-jumping script. 'There was a very specific directive,' he said. 'I didn't want this movie to look or feel like a sci-fi movie. Let's think of this as a relationship drama and filter everything through that. You want it to be more like 'Marriage Story' than 'Minority Report.' This is a breakup movie at its core.'
To hear our interview with Drew Hancock, subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
'Companion' opens nationwide on January 31.
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