GREEN ROOM written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, with Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat and Patrick Stewart. A D Films release. 94 minutes. Opens Friday (April 29). See Listing.
It’s a bright September day, and the Green Room team – Patrick Stewart, Anton Yelchin and writer/director Jeremy Saulnier – are sitting in hotel rooms talking about punk rock and blood geysers.
“It’s not a boogeyman trying to kill kids,” Saulnier tells me. “It’s just people trying to protect their interests, and kids who just want to see the light of day.”
Set in a remote Oregon community where a punk band gets trapped in a club by murderous white supremacists, Green Room is a taut, kick-ass siege picture. Yelchin plays one of the musicians who barricade themselves in the club after stumbling across something terrible Stewart is the club’s owner, who’ll stop at nothing to eliminate them.
“We spend, I think, five script pages talking through a locked door, but we’re never in the same room together,” Stewart points out. “I don’t come face-to-face with [Yelchin] until the dying seconds of the movie. And it was a little like that socially, too. I got to know these guys better this weekend than I did while we were making the movie, and they’re really nice people!” he laughs.
As for Yelchin, he couldn’t wait to dive in.
“I was just a fan of Jeremy’s films,” he says, “and, you know, the combination of being an admirer of someone’s films and then reading that he’s making a punk rock movie is pretty much, I think, enough for anyone to want in.”
The next thing Yelchin knew, he and his Fright Night co-star Imogen Poots were in Oregon bleeding their way through the movie’s spectacularly gruesome finale.
“We shot that first, the climax,” Yelchin recalls. “I remember everyone standing around, and [Saulnier] being like, ‘No, put more blood, more blood, more. Put blood on their shoes.’ We were covered in it.”
“We had to do reverse blood cutting,” Saulnier laughs. “We decided how we’d end the film, and had to track all the wounds [backwards] – it was insane. But what helps with practical effects, I think, is that it’s easier to track these sort of things and have it impact the performance when it’s right there attached to you.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” Yelchin says. “It’s on you, it’s in you, it’s all over you.”
Stewart admits that Green Room’s bloodthirstiness was an attraction for him as well.
“I got to have a moment in the movie that involved prosthetics and tubes and blood,” he says. “I had seen these effects in movies and wondered, ‘How the hell did they do that? You see the back of someone’s head explode!’
“Well, I know now how it happens,” he grins, “and that was absolutely delightful.”
Don’t miss our review of Green Room here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
