Adam Robitel Interview: Escape Room: Tournament of Champions

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions goes bigger and wider in scale when it arrives in theater on July 16. The sequel to 2019’s Escape Room sends survivors Zoey and Ben on a mission to stop the evil corporation Minos from constructing more games – and they must work with survivors of other cities to succeed.

Director Adam Robitel spoke to Screen Rant about the growth of the heroes and the difficulty of setting up another round of beautiful sets that can kill you.

Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is finally here, and the games aren’t just in the escape rooms this time around. Can you tell me about how the rooms are elevated this time around?

Adam Robitel: I love what you said, because the game has definitely expanded. Minos has been hard at work, but what I love about this movie is – anywhere you go, anybody you talk to – what is reality? There is no spoon. The game can be anywhere; the puzzles are anywhere. And the idea that there is this Machiavellian force controlling every single choice we make, I think it’s a really scary one – particularly coming out of a pandemic where we feel like we’ve lost all agency over our lives.

We tried to really outdo ourselves with the rooms and the set pieces. You have a train car in New York City that derails and turns into a Tesla coil; you have a giant Cape Cod beach that swallows people whole. We really tried to raise the bar, and then have some really cool twists along the way. The game from the first movie was just happening there, but there were games happening all over the world.

They’re really bored, rich people who are just out to punk us.

You guys really opened it up, and I want to talk about that. Your production designer, Edward Thomas, did a brilliant job of making these beautiful sets that can kill you. Out of all the set pieces that you guys had, which one was your favorite?

Adam Robitel: I would say candidly that the billiard room is still my favorite from the first movie. They were all really hard. I mean, I’ll tell you the hardest part of it is that we used fire, gravity, gas the first movie. Everything that can kill you, we’ve already used. And, by the way, it’s PG-13. So, we couldn’t rely on gore or reverse bear trap or anything like that.

The train I thought was really cool, because you find a cool space that people can relate to whether it’s a train – okay, electricity, third rail. The bank was a really cool art deco location we found in Cape Town.

The beach is pretty rad. It was the hardest set to shoot, because it was all practical. We had 22,000 pounds of sand; you’re aerating the sand so that people can sink. Actors are getting sand in their eyes; scratching their corneas. It smelled like a dead crustacean. It was super challenging – all the set was on a hydraulic so it could be lowered into the sand. We had a water tank. Logan Miller is in this water tank, like a freezing cold brackish water. There’s a little bit of tempered glass keeping this massive tidal wave from killing my entire crew. So, it was definitely challenging.

But, like you said, they’re beautiful spaces that kill people. I like the idea that Minos is like Jony Ive behind Apple design. They’re taking their time; they’re like that beautiful post you have in your wall. They’re picking out every single piece or thing that you see, and Ed Thomas is the guy who does that. There’s a magazine in the motel room that’s called Ceiling, so when the ceiling comes down, there’s all these aster eggs that the audience can find and have fun talking about.

Zoey hasn’t solved the biggest puzzle yet, and that’s who’s behind Minos to try to stop them. We pick up right where we left off with Ben and Zoey trying to discover things, but what can you tell me about their characters and relationship this time around?

Adam Robitel: I love the arc of Zoey’s character. When we meet her in movie one, she’s so mouse-ish she can barely leave her dorm. She takes a huge risk to go to this game that she thinks is going to get her out of her shell, and the poor thing is put through the wringer. But what I love about Zoey is she’s so smart. This is a nerd power movie, in a way, and it’s the brains that win.

Ben’s a bit of a schlub, right? At the beginning of the first movie, he’s a bit of an Alky, he’s smoking, and he’s in the back of a liquor store working. But they’ve come together, and they’ve forged this friendship. I think Zoey’s character is so much stronger than the first movie, in the sense that she’s kind of gone full Ripley. By the end of the second movie, she’s ready to gas the whole place.

Again, it’s a popcorn movie, but it’s the heart of this relationship. Ben probably has a crush on her. I don’t know if it’s requited or not, but he’s there for her. She’s like Lois Lane, going into the viper’s den again. And they’re really out on a limb, because nobody believes them. It’s that sense of isolation and loneliness. You only have one person in the world who knows what you’re going through, and I think that inherently bonds you.