Adam Wingard describes “Onslaught,” his blood-soaked action thriller, as “an A-plus B-movie.” Sound a little contradictory? Don’t worry. He says Adria Arjona didn’t quite know what that meant, either, and she’s the lead actor.
“We're going to deliver everything in a satisfying way that you want out of a B-movie, but we're going to do it with the A-plus sheen that A24 is expected to bring,” he remembers telling Arjona.
If any director knows the deep satisfaction of genre filmmaking, it’s Wingard. Indie horror flicks like 2011’s “You’re Next” and 2014’s “The Guest” helped launch him to major franchise projects, including the 2013 “Blair Witch” sequel. On his two most recent films, Godzilla and King Kong topped the call sheet.
For “Onslaught,” Wingard looked back to the video store canon—“Assault on Precinct 13,” “Tremors,” the “Terminator” films—for inspiration.
“All my favorite movies are B-movies,” he says.
Arjona stars as Celeste, a single mom and traumatized ex-Army sniper. She runs afoul of three unstoppable super soldiers who have recently escaped from a government lab. As they wreak carnage throughout her desert trailer park, the odds of survival look slim—for the super soldiers, that is. Costarring Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall, Drew Starkey, and Reginald VelJohnson, the film hits theaters Sept. 4.
Photo credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Alamy
Backstage recently chatted with Wingard about turning his cast into classic cinematic killing machines.
How did you work with Adria Arjona to build a unique kind of action hero?
She was ready to inhabit the warts-and-all aspect of the character. I mean, Celeste is a mess. She's at a shitty point in her life. She's become a hermit out in this trailer park, and she's a little bit emotionally immature. I was excited that Adria wanted to dive into that.
A lot of actors, their instinct is to try to make the character more likable. She was fearless in that sense. She knows there are just certain people who don't like to see women yell at men. I like that she just [expletive] went for it—ferocious.
But in her very natural, charismatic way, I think she still [brought] gentleness to it. We talked a lot about Sigourney Weaver [who played Ellen Ripley in the “Alien” films] and the best of the best of those types of characters.
There’s a maternal side to Celeste. How did you approach the onscreen bond between Arjona and Blake Kennedy, who plays her 7-year-old daughter?
A lot of times, the kids are more prepared than the adults. People who are afraid of directing kids, they just haven't directed the right kids.
Blake was a professional. She and Adria bonded right away. Adria was very smart, in the sense that she was like, OK, I'm going to be your mother in this thing, so I'm going to create that bond right out the gate. She was teaching Blake Spanish the entire time.
Reginald VelJohnson is an action movie icon from the “Die Hard” films. Did he surprise you at all on set?
He's just so game. I could throw things at him, and he could roll with it. One of his best lines in the film is when—no spoilers—something happens and he says, “You blew that [expletive]'s brains out.” That line wasn't scripted. In the moment, I was like, I want to hear Reginald say this.
We had written [the part] originally with Keith David in mind. I think if we'd written it for Reggie, we would have had a completely different take. But what I like is that it's Reggie reading Keith David lines. It pushes him in a direction that is really interesting. He has some of the best moments. I even told him, “Dude, you're the heart of the movie.”
Drew Starkey’s character, mysterious government “cleaner” Cyrus, brings a lot of idiosyncratic moments to the film. Where did those choices come from?
I saw his character as being an Illuminati kind of guy. He's in a completely different reality. He's almost like a fallen angel, in a way.
I love Drew Starkey. He's such a great collaborator. Talking to him is so exciting, because he always has these great little ideas that just amp things up. I described to him that his character, there's something catlike. His scenes should feel kind of like a dance. They should have a little bit of a different rhythm than the rest of the movie.
His character's on MDMA the whole film, and he researched a lot. He watched a lot of videos on YouTube of people. He's grinding his teeth, and the way he does his eyes, it was just so funny.
My favorite part of the movie—I laughed out loud in the theater—was when Starkey did a little hop over a dead body.
I knew you were gonna say that. I'm so glad you did. We shot a couple takes, and he kept going around [the body]. I went up to him during one of the takes, and I was like, "What if you give it a little hop?” He was like, "Damn it! I was going to say that.” What I like is that he doesn't just hop over it—he kind of leaps over it like a pony.
How did you think about the characters during the writing process?
The ’80s influence. Going back to something like “Tremors,” I like those films because there's not a wasted character. With this film, we actually cut some characters out of the script because I didn't feel like they had enough personality. They can't just be a random character. They all have to make some sort of impression on you.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
