Well, I'm really amazed at how today's movie making is getting the attention of people like Steven Spielberg and he says it's in the directing and it's also in the writing because you guys have tapped into this brand new generation of storytelling and you know how to reach us and you know how to get in there with that intrigue you're talking about while shifting subjects but not interrupting the pattern of flow.

Right.

And that's...

It's all in the, in the writing.

I studied screenwriting for four years at a film school in Germany before I ever directed anything, and to this day writing to me is the moment of genius.

It's the moment of inception, you know, when someone creates this noth- something out of nothing.

It's a God-like process.

You believe in sharing the vision.

And I thought, that is brilliant that you took my mind off this movie for just a second to get some relief and then show back up.

Yeah.

I love that you're pointing that out, because that's one of my favorite moments in the whole movie.

I mean, the whole thing is so unusual, right? Because you have them down as the, not to give anything away, but you have them down as the classic villains, and then they turn out to be something completely different.

And how do you deal with that? Like if you're in a horror movie, you know what the protagonist is supposed to be behaving like.

It's easy if you know these are the bad guys, these are the good guys, what do I do? But to pull it onto the real world level for a moment, because that was the great thing about the movie to me and the podcast.

It's like this is how evil would present itself if it happened to you or I.

Are my eyes screwing around with me or did you actually do that on purpose? You kind of put a like a different kind of effect on that moment.

Do you see lockbox as a story about evil entity pursuing someone or is it about grief making people emotionally reachable by forces that they might not otherwise resist or that they might otherwise resist is what I should say.

I think that's not a contradiction at all.

I think it's exactly both.

One makes you vulnerable because like the force, the evil that is pursuing their victim is kind of preying on that and looking for exactly those cracks.

And then the question is what caused those cracks and can the cracks be healed? Which is very much, if you think about it on a more abstract level, exactly what drama does.

You know, you bring your characters to the breaking point, and then you see if they can survive it or not, if they heal or if they perish.

And horror is just kind of the heightened version of that.

Is Ellen's greatest strength that she protects Winthrop, or is it the choice that makes her the most vulnerable person? I think, again,

Daniel, what interested you, you know, in the in the story to begin with?

Well, the first thing was that I didn't know where it was going when I was reading it, which sounds banal, but that's a huge, like one in 200 scripts occasion because everything, you know, there's this whole every story has been told.

And I love a lot of those stuff.

I love Joseph Campbell with his hero's journey.

There are all these paradigms.

And then you get very good stories like superimposed onto that.

But it's rare that a story comes with this level of confidence in its originality and basically says, I don't need a crutch.

And again, I don't want to spoil the movie, but what was that like to shoot Daniel to get the eye scene right? You probably know what I'm talking

Right.

And then the second half is this monstrous, amazing, incredible movie.

But you either could give it away in the trailer, or you didn't.

You either have a trailer where nobody wants to see the movie- Or you have a trailer where everybody wants to see the movie, but then you don't enjoy the movie.

And I had that with Last Exorcism back then, that they made a trailer that gave everything away, and the effect was that a lot of people came to watch it, and very few people enjoyed it, because they already, you know? And I think, uh, but Lockbox, I mean, ideally if, to your audience, if you haven't seen the trailer, it's, I think, a much more remarkable experience.

If you have seen a trailer, I hope that the level of craft and passion that we put in there is still very worth the watch, and maybe it's a different, different movie.

... uh, but yeah, your score on this, are you gonna release it? Because that is just a beautiful, beautiful haunting score.

I, I love that you're pointing that out.

So what drew you

to Lockbox? To me, the big selling point when I read the script was how unpredictable it was.

Every moment of the script, I had no idea what was going to come next.

And every time I thought I knew what was going to come next, something completely different happened.

And that's something that's really rare when most scripts you are being offered remind you of something.

And it's like, oh, this is a version of that and that.

And this one wasn't a version of anything.

So yeah, it wasn't something I drew from completely, but it was nice to have that as an asset.