Q: How did you hatch the Cry_Wolf concept together? Were there any specific thriller inspirations?
Jeff Wadlow: Not really; in fact, initially, we were going to adapt a play for the feature film leg of the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Festival competition. But the week we had to submit our idea, the playwright got cold feet and we lost the rights. With the clock ticking, I went out for a run and came up with the idea for a liars’ club that incites the wrath of a real killer when they fake an eyewitness report.
Beau Bauman: A recreational liars’ club – basically Fight Club, with lies.
JW: As opposed to the other contestants, who had at least a draft or a treatment of their scripts already written, Beau and I now had only two weeks to write an entire feature screenplay from scratch.
BB: Jeff wanted to play with the idea of a modern-day retelling of Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” fable. Originally, it was set among twentysomethings in L.A. and was called Living the Lie.
JW: For the competition, we shot a five-minute presentation piece starring Topher Grace and Estella Warren – which will hopefully be on the Cry_Wolf DVD – before pitching to a live audience at the Toronto Film Festival. The contest judges liked it enough to award me the top prize, but then we had to survive the development process.
We were counseled to make the characters younger and take the story out of L.A. Although it took us months to figure out how to make that happen while keeping the core story in place, we soon agreed that it was ultimately the right thing to do – and something we would have probably figured out on our own if we hadn’t written the first draft in fourteen days.
BB: Though the execution of the initial screenplay was imperfect, we were still passionate about the idea of telling a story about liars and exploring the themes of truth-and-lies. Doug Liman, who executive-produced Cry_Wolf, was the one who suggested setting it in high school. So we wrote new treatments and outlines, and several dozen different drafts…
JW: Although the subsequent rewrite was so different that we felt compelled to change the title to Cry_Wolf, the script we shot still retained the seeds of what excited us about the original concept; a movie that mixes film noir conventions with the conventions of the teen thriller/horror genre to play on preconceived notions of subjectivity and take an audience on a smart and scary ride.
BB: Initially, we tried to do everything we could to distinguish ourselves from the Wes Craven model, but ultimately found ourselves embracing certain established genre conventions because – let’s face it – they work.
But ours is not a typical teen thriller; it’s driven by smarter characters that don’t do obviously stupid things. There are no times when the audience will be yelling at the screen, “You idiot! Don’t open that door. Get out of the house!” We were relentless about asking ourselves, “What would we do?” The crew would laugh as Jeff and I had heated arguments about what we would actually do in the unlikely event that we were being chased by a crazed killer.
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