No One Will Save You takes a unique approach to the alien invasion story, leaning into the horror genre. The movie follows Brynn Adams, who suffers from extreme anxiety while living alone in her childhood home. While living her life of solitude, Brynn is forced to fight for her life when an extraterrestrial being invades her home.
No One Will Save You is written and directed by Brian Duffield. The movie is produced by Tim White, Trevor White, Allan Mandelbaum, and Brian Duffield. No One Will Save You stars the talented Kaitlyn Dever who is also a producer on the movie.
Screen Rant spoke with director Brian Duffield about No One Will Save You. He praised Dever’s incredible performance and discussed the limited dialogue in the movie. Duffield also explained why he wanted the aliens to look the way they do in the movie and why it was important for this character to be isolated. Note: This interview was conducted during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the movie covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions.
Brian Duffield Talks No One Will Save You
Screen Rant: This film is fantastic, and the score is brilliant in this film.
Brian Duffield: I’ll talk about the score for days, man.
How did you come up with the concept for No One Will Save You? What inspired you to tell this unique thrilling story?
Brian Duffield: Yeah, it started with the character that Kaitlyn Dever plays, Brynn. I had this idea for the character, there’s some spoilery inspirations for her, but I was just like, “This is such an interesting character. She’s so young to have gone through so much and what does that person look like in the day-to-day world?” And as I was working on that, I have the movie theater in my mind that’s playing all the different ideas I have and the walls crash down between these two movies. And I was like, “That’s really interesting.”
It’s the idea of if this event happens, it’s going to happen to everybody. It’s going to happen on someone’s wedding day, it’s going to happen five minutes before or after someone dies. It’s just going to happen. It doesn’t care what you’re going through or who you are. And that felt like a really fun way into an alien invasion thing, from the least likely person possible, this recluse girl who is going through quite a lot in her life already and then has to deal with this other layer of drama on top of it. The ideas just got married in my mind and then it was off to the races, man.
Kaitlyn’s performance is outstanding in this film, man. She’s in almost every scene in this movie, if not every scene. What did she bring to the role that either surprised you or just wasn’t on the page? It’s also impressive because there’s not a ton of dialogue.
Brian Duffield: The thing with Kaitlyn is [that] I cast her, and as soon as she was in, I was just like, “Well, I’m done.” And she knows, everyone knows. I’m such a fan of hers; [she’s] so funny in Book Smart. I don’t think Dopesick had come out yet, and then that was insane.
But I was really blown away by her in Unbelievable on Netflix. Someone does that many just bangers, and you’re like, “That’s not a fluke and that’s not a director pulling the performance.” You’re just like, “Someone’s really good at their job.” And that was true of Kaitlyn, and it was just she’s so meticulous and dedicated and planned.
One of the things that’s really cool about Kaitlyn is that in the editing process, you might move a shot a little earlier or a little later, and she could always tell. She would be like, “That’s not quite the performance I’m giving in this shot.” I was like, “It works. It’s great.” But she has such mastery over what her face can do and what it can convey, and she can read it. It’s like someone reading sheet music. It’s crazy.
And so on camera, I got everything I expected, which was that she’s one of the best actors alive. I wish I could say she gave me more than I expected, but that would, I think, diminish how incredible she has been for the last 20 years, because so young, but has been doing crazy good work for so long.
And then what was really great, and that was a surprise, and I knew she was a lovely girl, but being a director can be isolating and hard just because you have so much to do. And then having a partner, because she’s a producer on the movie as well, and having a partner that just would rally the crew.
The crew! I don’t want to say I’ve never been part of something like this, but the crew loved Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn loved the crew. It was really cool. Because she’s on every frame, you want all the crew to show up for that person, way more so than me. Hopefully I’m a nice guy, but they have to make her look good.
And just the way she treated everybody and the way everybody loved her and the way I think she still is in touch with the whole crew basically, and how I know our whole crew is rooting for her afterwards. And I know, I think there was projects she was going to do in New Orleans until the strikes and everything, and I knew the crew was all trying to get on it. And that was so cool. It made everyone’s life so easy where you’re like, Kaitlyn… I’m the leader by the fact that I’m the director, but Kaitlyn is the movie.
And the fact that everyone was so excited because they loved this girl so much, not because she was a great actress, but because she was a great person, it made it so easy. And at a very hard time, because we had terrible weather shutdowns and we had the COVID surge, so we were losing people left and right to their two-week quarantine thing. And Kaitlyn just kept everyone motivated and happy. I clearly love her. I can’t say enough good things.
There’s not a lot of dialogue in this film, but it keeps you engaged with Kaitlyn’s performance, the mystery of the aliens and Brynn’s past, and the pacing of the film is incredible. Can you talk about the advantages and challenges of crafting a film with very little dialogue?
Brian Duffield: Yeah, I think it just became a bonus feature as opposed to a main event for us. It really stemmed out of what makes it hard for Brynn, and it’s something that I’m excited for audiences to discover at the same time, but it really just became like, it would be a bummer if she passed a TV and it explained everything to her, so she should lose power at some point and then not be able to turn on the TV and get information. And so it just stemmed from a really character centric place as opposed to a gimmicky place, I hope.
And so I hope people think it’s a really cool feature, but it’s by no means what we made the movie for, and I hope people have fun discovering it. But yeah, it just made Brynn’s life harder, which was great, which is what you want. You want her not to be able to have a boyfriend she can call and be like, “Come save me.” It’s the title for a reason, man.
I love the fact that you use the gray aliens because those are probably what most people identify with extraterrestrials. Ever since this Mexico thing with Congress saying that there were going to be aliens, I’ve been doing this deep dive on aliens, and your movie lined up perfectly for me.
Brian Duffield: We spent a lot of money on that, dude. While I’ve been doing press today, I know NASA released their giant document about UAPs, and I haven’t read it yet, but I’m like, “I got a week to go. They better not blow my release.”
What went into the decision to make the gray aliens? Because I feel like we haven’t seen those aliens a lot cinematically.
Brian Duffield: That’s why. You nailed it. That’s why. It was I wanted my boys back on screen and no one was doing it, and so I took matters into my own hands. And I mean, it was really, that was the selfish big picture reason. I love that design. And then there was the movie specific reasons, which was knowing that they were going to show up five minutes into the movie, they need a face that Kaitlyn can act opposite.
And a lot of alien designs had moved into faceless, which is really hard, especially with this much alien. And then second, because we were going to put the end of our movie minute five, or the end of most movies at minute five, I wanted the audience and Kaitlyn, there’s something downstairs. She sees a shadow, she’s like, “Oh, it’s a burglar.” And then she sees a little piece of the creature and realizes it’s an alien.
And so just by that little glimpse of it, I wanted her and the audience to go, “Alien. Done. Know what it is, all on the same page, go.” And so there’s never really a moment for me that the audience and Kaitlyn aren’t on the same page. Like you said, it’s like you want to feel like they’re holding hands and experiencing it together. And so having them, everyone goes, they see the glimpse and without having to say, “Alien,” everyone can go, “Alien.”
And then we have this gray shaped canvas that we get to work on where we get to add the fun little details, like the creeping toes or their dialect, and then how we bring in different subspecies. And so it just felt like, get everyone on the same page really fast. This is what we’re dealing with. And then you can build on that, pull the rug out from underneath it, have all the fun with it. But it’s like on page five, you don’t want audiences being like, “Maybe it’s a Dracula, maybe it’s a crocodile.” It’s like, “Alien. Done. Go.”
Speaking of aliens, Brynn almost feels like an alien in her own community, the way she’s ostracized from everybody else in the community. Can you talk about the character of Brynn a little bit?
Brian Duffield: Yeah, that’s exactly our intention. It was that she should feel a little bit of an invader herself, a little bit of an unwanted presence in the town. I think paying close attention to the birdhouse village she’s building in the movie, and there’s birdhouses that are all throughout the movie, that’s a really fun detail our amazing production designer, Ramsey Avery, came up with.
And yeah, for us, it was like this girl that had a very complicated, troubled past, but had put in a lot of really hard work to make herself as okay as she, I think, feels like she deserves to feel. It was really important for Kaitlyn and myself to feel like this is a character that while hard stuff has happened, she’s got some joy. She’s got this house, she’s got… It’s a really well-rounded life. She’s not miserable, but because she’s made this snow globe for herself, and then the aliens break it immediately, and then she has to pick up the pieces and figure out…
For us, it’s like, it’s not even how will she fight back? It’s like, does she want to fight back? Are some of the options better for her? And I think some of the answers are surprising to the character, and then she has to dive into that. And so it just felt like a really unusual and fun way to… On the one hand, she’s running, screaming, getting her ass kicked and kicking ass, and then on the other hand, she’s doing a lot of psychotherapy at the same time.
It felt like a really unique cocktail of a character in a movie that I wish I had a really cool reason for why they got married in my head. I don’t, but maybe in 20 years I’ll be like, “Oh, that makes total sense to me now.” But it’s just something that it made sense in my Duffield brain and I was just like, “Let’s just go with it and see where it takes us.”
The way the score works, you can almost feel what’s going on with Brynn internally. And if I’m not mistaken, you played the score during production during scenes, right?
Brian Duffield: Not during the scenes themselves, but we had the score. Yeah, I think sound would’ve murdered us if we did that. And I’ve been on sets where they do that, and I’m always just like, I just feel like the sound guys are just melting down. Not during a scene, but it was great. I’ve worked with Joe for a long time now, and on this one, he’s usually one of the first people to get scripts when I write them, and we were talking about this one and we’d cast Kaitlyn and Kaitlyn’s a musician in her own right, an amazing musician, and we were talking a lot about the music and about Joe.
And then it just became this thing where Joe was just like, “Should I just start writing music?” And I was like, “I’m never going to say no because why would I?” And it wasn’t an audition. He had the job, it wasn’t an audition piece, it was just something where we were talking about it so much that he was just like, “Let me just do this.” And in the past, Joe had sent me playlists of other tracks, not that he wrote necessarily, but he was like, “I think I’d rather do… Let’s just see what happens.” And then he would just send these playlists and Kaitlyn and I would be like, “That’s really cool. That could go really cool for this scene,” or, “That sounds like Brynn in my head.”
And so Kaitlyn was able to hear Brynn’s theme and the aliens’ themes. It wasn’t the finished score, but it was a good chunk of the movie. There’s a great ticking clock kind of thing Joe has in it, and that’s basically from the playlist. As soon as I heard, I was like, “That’s going there.” I think he sent that while we were shooting, and I picked up shots because I was like, “Oh, I need Kaitlyn to look like she’s made that turn because the music needs it.” And then Kaitlyn heard the music and was like, “We need to do this so I can pay off the music.” And it was so cool and I won’t work another way.
It was so helpful to have the studio heard the music, the crew could hear the music, and it just made everyone go, “This is the movie we’re making,” in a way that is so much more articulate than I am. It was really cool, and having that shorthand with Joe made it possible. And I don’t know what the next thing I’m doing is, but I know that it will happen that way. [inaudible 00:15:20].
I mean, it sounds like a truly immersive creative process.
Brian Duffield: It just makes so much sense. Again, I’ve heard since, I think The Wachowskis do that now. Not because of me, they did it before me, but it just makes so much… It’s crazy. As soon as we did it, it was like, it’s crazy that we never did this way. It just makes so much sense. It was so stupid that people wait until the end of the movie to score it.
I get why financially, but I was shooting specifically because the music was dope.
About No One Will Save You
A young woman who’s been alienated from her community finds herself in a face-off against a host of extraterrestrial beings who threaten her future while forcing her to deal with her past.
No One Will Save You debuts on Hulu on September 22.
