Interview: Writer/Director Brian Duffield on the Tonal Challenges of SPONTANEOUS and Collaborating with Katherine Langford

For his directorial debut, Brian Duffield (who also penned Underwater as well as the upcoming film, Love and Monsters) takes on senior year in high school with Spontaneous, his genre-bending teen comedy that follows a group of students who might spontaneously combust at any moment, with Katherine Langford’s character Mara at the center of it all (you can read my review HERE). 

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to chat with Duffield about Spontaneous, and how Aaron Starmer’s novel of the same name initially hooked him years prior. Duffield also discussed the challenges of nailing the film’s complex tonal shifts throughout, collaborating with Langford on the project and more.

Spontaneous is currently playing select theaters and is also available to rent digitally as well, courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

Between Underwater and Spontaneous being out this year, and then there’s Love and Monsters coming up too, all things considered, you are having a pretty okay year. So congrats on everything, Brian.

Brian Duffield: Thank you, yes. It seems like this weird thing where Underwater and Spontaneous were finished a minute ago, but they we're both separately involved in two different studio mergers. So it took a while for them to see the light of day. So, them all coming out right now feels weird because they happened at very different times. 

And taking that into consideration, with Spontaneous, but I'm sure the timely issues that this movie deals with probably felt a bit more fictional when you were making this.

Brian Duffield: Yeah, we liked the movie better when it felt more outlandish (laughs). Even in the movie, there are a couple of jokes about war and nuclear bombs and stuff because we felt like that was where America's heading. And then for a pandemic to hit, it was just a case of being like, “Oh well, what are you going to do?”

So, let's start off talking about this book that came out a few years ago. Was this a case of you reading the book and you were like, “Oh, I really want to turn this into a feature.” Or was this something that Paramount brought to you then?

Brian Duffield: Paramount actually acquired the movie last year so they weren't involved at all until it was done and dusted. But the book was something that I was sent and read. And the first thing in the book is the first scene in the movie, which is obviously quite the hook. And I was like, “Now I have to keep reading the next 300 pages.” It was a very competitive situation where it was handed to me and they said that I had to tell them if I was interested in taking it on by the morning because other people are interested. I'm a fast reader, but I don't like having that kind of compressed time frame where you have to decide if you want to spend the next two years of your life doing this thing and you have 10 hours to figure it out.

I can't even think of an instance where I read something and knew immediately that I really wanted this, but that was what happened when I was reading Spontaneous. Where it was this creeping dread as I was reading it because it was so good. And then I got to the third act, which is the third act of the movie, and I was just like, “Oh, I'm gone. I'm going to be so upset if I don't get this.” The next day I got on the horn with Aaron and told him all my really quick thoughts about how I would do the movie, and it was just the kind of thing where I felt like he really cracked the code for how to on the one hand deal with spontaneous combustion in a book and in the movie world.

It also felt like such a way to get to do a high school movie where you are hitting all the tropes, but then you're using some of those tropes against expectations. And you're also talking about really heavy themes for a high school movie, but doing it in as much of a fun way as possible. It felt like a really big challenge both as a writer and as a director to do a serious movie where 40 kids die and it's not a joke. I'm sure my reps really hate it because I really gravitate towards as difficult of a job as I can take on, and this was not easy. 

Can you talk about navigating those shifts from a screenwriting perspective, because I was so impressed by how well this movie handles those tonal shifts? 

Brian Duffield: With the tone, a lot of that comes from the book. Visually, things hit a lot harder in a movie like this than they would on the page, where if a character on the page bloodily explodes, I don't want to say easier totally to get past that, but it's really easy for us to go off the rails immediately if an explosion is a little too gory, or a little too upsetting, or a little too insensitive.

And so then that became a little bit of the trick of the movie was figuring out how to handle those explosions in a way that is not going to turn off everyone that's not a horror fan, because this is not a “hard” movie necessarily. And then, we were going to be dealing with some shit in the third act, but I didn't want the movie to play really dark and depressing, but I also don't want to cheapen the grief that characters are dealing with either. And so I had to figure out what are the ways that we can have as much fun as possible while respecting grief and while knowing that these characters are not doing well.

Katherine was a huge steward of the tone, too, and then a lot of it happened in post. We had a great editor, Steve Edwards, who I had gotten turned on to from the Dear White People TV show. So, having Steve could help steer me on a lot of these moments. It's an interesting balance and it's one of the things that you can only try to do when you have your best intentions. 

It's one of those things where I definitely did a lot of work on the tone, but I would be remiss if I didn't say that a lot of other people really helped shape that tone into being what it is, which is outside of the performances is the thing I'm most proud of in the movie because it's an unusual tone for sure. We spent a lot of time just really making sure that everything was in service of creating a whole cohesive movie feeling, where it feels like it's the right mixture of what everything needs to be.

You mentioned Katherine, and this movie lives or dies by her and she's so, so good in it. Can you talk about diving into this character of Mara with her and really finding those character beats with her? It's easy to have a disaffected teen who is trying to deal with grief in their own way, but ultimately, this character still needs to have those emotional beats to her as well.

Brian Duffield: So when I cast Katherine, I think she was in the middle of filming season two of 13 Reasons Why. I'd known her a little bit previously, as we had almost done a movie together that just couldn't get off the ground. And even when we'd started to put together Spontaneous, she wasn't available. But when the days got moved around, she became available. I think for me, what was so exciting is that it could not be more different from her character in 13 Reasons Why. She's very confident and bubbly and goofy, but then has to go through this journey where that's really broken out of her, but also she learns how to put those pieces back together.

But the movie does completely live or die on Katherine. It's just the kind of thing where she was such a dream person to work with. She understood the pratfalls of a character like this who could really come off as a psychopath because they’re not reacting to death in an appropriate manner. So it was really about us going through the script and going through all those beats.

Another thing that just came out of Katherine and I talking about her character was that she really wanted to make sure things weren't all about just the jokes. It's like how do I let people know that Mara is going through a lot and she's just dealing with it in a very unique way, but she's not not dealing with what's going on. So a lot of that just came with us page turning through the script with my assistant Max and just being like, “Hey, we could really make this moment have a little bit more meat on the bone if you look at Charlie like this, all while you say this really dumb thing.” She can do a dozen things at once with her eyes, too, so it's really wonderful to have an actor like her to work with. The whole movie is her, and so if the movie works for people it's because of Katherine, and I'm just happy to be along for the ride and just pat myself on the back that she said yes because I sent her the script. That was the biggest hurdle I had.

What was so great is there would be takes on set where I would be like, number three was definitely the take that's going in the movie, and Katherine would be like, “I really like this take, I think that's the Mara take.” And then in the edit, realizing that Katherine was always correct about that stuff. She just had it really nailed down and it was a great experience to work with her. I was thrilled that I was able to work with an actor who knows your characters better than you do. You're really cooking with fire at that point.

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