MOVIE PREVIEW – Wadlow was most impressed that the casting team at Blumhouse, led by TERRI TAYLOR, went all out searching for the perfect talent to embody the complex characters.  The casting department spent months finding the perfect actors who deeply understood these roles and deeply wanted to be a part of the production.

Blum was impressed by just how quickly Wadlow was able to pull everything together with the diverse group of performers.  “We were able to attract such a terrific cast, and that’s a tribute to Jeff’s involvement and the very strong script,” offers the producer.  “Our movies also have a short production schedule and they’re shot in L.A; so that was also a big help.”

To a person, Wadlow was moved by the commitment of his performers.  “The cast did an amazing job of bringing the characters to life, as well as introducing personality traits that made you care about them even more,” offers the director.  “They allow the audience to fall in love with the characters in these dangerous situations, and that increases the tension three-fold.”

Lucy was loved by everyone

As the production team began the process of casting, they looked to talent from both the big and small screen.  To portray Olivia and Lucas, they recruited Pretty Little Liars’ Lucy Hale and Teen Wolf’s Tyler Posey.  “We were so lucky to get Lucy and Tyler,” states Wadlow.  “They are lovely people, and after having gone through this grueling process together, I consider them great friends.  They’re artists, and their ability to convey emotion is so authentic, so finely tuned.  They have been working since they were kids and brought all of that experience and talent to our film; they delivered intense, thoughtful, funny, performances.”

Auditioning isn’t just for the cast, it’s also for the actors to see if they want to work with the director.  “During her audition, Lucy blew us out of the room,” lauds Wadlow.  “She’s insanely talented, and we knew we had our female lead as soon as she finished the scene.  Tyler was cast last, as that character was one of the hardest to figure out.  Lucas has to have an edge and be strong and tough, but he also has to have this sense of openness and vulnerability at the same time.  No one embodies that more than Tyler Posey.”

The heart of her tight-knit group of friends, Olivia cares more about helping the world at large than she does about taking care of herself.  She wants to spend her spring break building houses for the less fortunate, but her best friend, Markie, who she’s known since she was little, convinces her to go on vacation to Rosarito Beach in Mexico.  When Olivia and her friends get back—and terrifying moments can no longer be brushed off as coincidences—she has no choice but to accept that the game is real, and that it’s followed them home.  Now it’s up to her to convince her friends that this is happening; if she doesn’t, people are going to lose their lives.

The game is getting sicker

What interested the actress was the deep bond between the young women who are the core of the story.  Hale reveals: “Whenever I read a script, I come up with a backstory for my character.  I imagined that Olivia and Markie grew up on the same street.  Their parents were friends, and they took dance classes together.  They’ve been through all of the stepping stones with each other.  They fight like sisters, but at the end of the day they’re blood and will always have each other’s back.”

Hale appreciated that Wadlow allowed the game to get more and more twisted.  One of her more memorable moments of production was when the characters try and trick the trickster demon who’s forcing them to play.  “Everyone thinks, ‘all we have to do is tell the truth and we’ll be fine!’  But they find out that if two people choose truth, the next one has to do a dare.  It gets very dark.  Earlier in the story, Markie tells Olivia, ‘I’ll break your hand if you touch me again!’  When Olivia is forced to take a dare, she has to do it, or Markie will die.  It just escalates from there.”

Lucas is not simply Markie’s boyfriend, but he shares an unspoken crush with Olivia.  They’ve known each other since they were freshmen, and have made peace with the idea that they’re just going to be friends.  A good guy with a strong heart, Lucas can be tough when he needs to be.  That makes for quite the compelling character, because he’s about to be in a situation where he’s got to make some life-or-death choices.  The first person to believe that Olivia is telling the truth is Lucas, because he gets his turn after her.  When you get a turn, you realize that this is not a hoax.  This is not a joke.  This is happening for real.

“The game burns the question into his forearm…”

Posey reflects that Lucas is just as unbelieving as the rest of his group that the events are going down…until the game burns the question into his forearm.  “Even though Lucas doesn’t know how to handle everything that’s coming at them, he’s good at calculating and being methodical.  If Olivia’s the brains of the group and the leader, he’s the idea guy.  He’s trying to maintain peace in the group as they learn to deal with what’s happening.”

The actor particularly loved Lucas’ trip back to Rosarito—alongside Markie and Olivia—to find the root of evil and stop the game once and for all.  “Our characters return to Mexico to talk to this woman and survived a massacre, and try and figure out a way to break the curse,” explains Posey.  “While we’re at it, we’re trying to convince the same creep that brought us out to play ‘Truth or Dare’ to begin with to cut his own tongue out!”

Although Markie appears from the outside as if she’s got her life together…inside she’s a bit of a hot mess.  She’s dealt with real tragedy in her life.  Not only is she barely holding it together in her relationship, she lost her father after his suicide years ago.  Oliva’s been her rock, and their bond will become the central relationship that is tested.

For Violett Beane, known for her work on The Resident and The Flash, the chance to play such a complex character was a welcome one.  The performer notes: “Markie is a complicated friend who pushes Olivia into going to Mexico.  She’s dealing with a lot of stuff in her personal life, and she isn’t ultimately the best girlfriend to Lucas.  But she cares so much about him, and they work through their issues.”

What fascinated Beane about the story is that it layered long-simmering drama between two best friends with supernatural terror.  “At first, Markie doesn’t believe the game is really happening because Olivia exposes a secret of hers.  She can’t believe that Olivia would do that just because someone dared her to.  She wants to believe that it could have been for jealousy reasons.  It takes Markie a bit longer to believe, until she’s forced to break Olivia’s hand.”

The doc

Filling out the rest of the group are Tyson, who is getting ready to go to medical school.  As much as he feels that he’s God’s gift to the world, Tyson’s friends give him a pass because of his witty ways.  The production selected Nolan Gerard Funk, known for his breakthrough role in Riddick and recent turn on TV’s Counterpart, to play the morally questionable charmer.

Tyson is dating Penelope, who also lives with Olivia and Markie.  Played by Grey’s Anatomy’s Sophia Taylor Ali, Penelope is the life of the party—sweet, fun, beautiful, and down for anything.  Still, the fact that she parties a bit too much might just be her downfall.

Last, but not least, is Brad, who is the heart of the group.  Struggling to come to terms with his sexuality, he hasn’t come out to his parents yet.  His dad is a no-nonsense police officer, which has created a lot of tension in Brad’s life.  Ultimately, it’s an issue he’s going to have to work out throughout the course of the story.

Brad is portrayed by Hayden Szeto, whose breakout role was in The Edge of Seventeen, and his performance impressed his fellow performers.  States Hale: “Brad has kept this secret from his dad for a very long time, and his biggest fear is being truthful with his dad.  That’s why this movie’s so interesting: we have all these secrets that are weighing on us.  Once we tell them, it can help in a way…even though it’s such a twisted dark game.”

Deception

Landon Liboiron, of the Netflix series Hemlock Grove, was cast to play Carter, who deceptively brings Olivia and her friends into the game.  Wadlow explains how the character was supposed to be a new beginning for our heroine.  “For Olivia, this feels like a sign that it is time to move on from Lucas and stop pining for him.  She thinks, ‘I’m going to take a risk.’  When the night is winding down and she meets this charismatic, friendly, considerate guy at the bar—and the group is pondering what to on their last night in Mexico—Carter says, ‘I know someplace we can go…’”

The director reflects that it is hard to describe Carter as either a monster or a victim, because he is a bit of both.  He is the reason why the characters find themselves in this mess, but he didn’t want to be in this situation either.  Ultimately, that is the beginning of Olivia’s character arc.  “At the beginning of the game, Brad asks her, ‘If you could choose to save your friends, but let the entire population of Mexico die—or save the entire population of Mexico, but your friends would have to die—what would you choose?’  By the end of the movie, she has a very different answer than the one she provides in the beginning.”

Cast set, the performers fulfilled Wadlow and Blum’s objective of providing the audience with fully rounded characters to care about.  The director offers his logic: “If you push someone who is already morally questionable into a compromising situation, you don’t care as much about the outcome.  We wanted to portray multidimensional characters you connect with and like.  These aren’t placeholders waiting to die, like they often are in horror movies.  What makes very human, real moments all the more heartbreaking is that the game is using them against our characters, and there’s very little they can do to stop it…other than play.”

You’re in the Game: Shooting the Thriller

Wadlow’s team finished a draft of the screenplay in fall 2016, continued development with Blumhouse for about six months, and then wrapped casting approximately a year ago.  Their prep began in April 2017, then they shot Truth or Dare immediately after.

The director describes a particularly interesting exercise to get his story ready for filming: “After we had written the script, we listed all of the truths and all of the dares and gave them values on a 10-point scale.  Then we listed them in order that they occur in the film, and we made sure the values went up as the movie progressed.  That attention to detail allowed us to have a film where you feel the tension, constantly rising.”

Alongside a key crew that included collaborators such as director of photography Jacques Jouffret, Wadlow’s A-camera operator on his second film—and Michael Mann and Peter Berg’s go-to operator; co-producer and first assistant director JAMES MORAN; production designer Melanie Paizis-Jones, who served in that capacity on Whiplash, The Purge and Insidious: The Last Key; and costumer Lisa Norcia, of The Purge and Whiplash fame; Wadlow’s team was ready for a well-planned shoot.  They were joined by stunt coordinator STEVE RITZI—in his third film with Wadlow.  Along with ALAN D’ANTONI (stunt rigger on Baby Driver), Ritzi handled Truth or Dare’s extensive stuntwork sequences.

“It was important to both Jason and me that we only collaborate with key creative crew that we’d worked with before, so they would understand the parameters and the kind of movie we were trying to make,” Wadlow notes.  “Since we were on a 23-day shooting schedule in Los Angeles—with only one day in preproduction to take the cast to Mexico so they could bond a bit—we knew it would be a very tight shoot.  My editor joked that we shot 40 days in 23.”

The movie begins when the characters are nearing the end of four years together in college.  To help the actors bond before the movie began, so you really believed in their friendships and their shared history, Wadlow took them on a road trip to Mexico for a 24-hour pseudo-spring break.  “When we piled in a van and went to Mexico together, I gave them all iPhones to shoot footage of each other.  It’s really personal, and we decided to fold that footage into the film.”

For the director, one of the scenes that was most intense to shoot was the dare in which Penelope must walk the roof while drinking a handle of vodka.  “We take a character who has a drinking problem, and the game makes her finish an entire bottle, while walking the perimeter of their roof, which is 30 feet off the ground.  It was visually interesting to shoot that, and difficult from a technical standpoint, given how small our budget was and how short our schedule was.”  Wadlow laughs, “I can’t believe we spent five nights up there!”

Blum agrees with his director, noting he appreciated the skill and technique it took from all involved: “My favorite scene is when Penelope is walking on the edge of the roof.  Not because walking on the edge of a roof is that original, but it is the way that Jeff and Jacque shot it.  The way they filmed it makes you really, really nervous.”

He wasn’t the only one who was nervous, but under the watchful eyes of D’Antoni and Ritzi, everyone could take an easy breath.  Discussing the scene, Ali recalls: “Filming up on the roof was a lot a fun, but it was terrifying.  I feel like if I would have filmed something like that on a green screen I’d have had to simulate a lot of the fear.  Being up there—as fun as it was and as comfortable and safe as I felt—I still remember thinking, ‘I’m on a ROOF right now!’ and I drew from my own fear of falling.”

Movie Imitates Life: Getting “Possessed”

To capture the moments when Callux possesses his latest victim—asking the infamous question of “Truth or Dare” and showing his devious smile, the filmmakers turned to a familiar face.  The director walks us through the backstory: “Early on, I started to conceptualize what that would look like.  I wanted to avoid tropes we’ve seen before—the milky eyes and ashen face.  I thought about the spirit of the game and the mischief involved and decided that the possessed-look should convey that mischief.”

Since Wadlow was a little kid, whenever he doodles, he draws this evil smile.  That drawing inspired the look for the possession moments.  He continues: “I started pitching it to concept artists, and I talked to our visual FX supervisor about it.  We shot a test, and it quickly became apparent that this was the way to go.  Then, I reverse engineered it when you see the Callux demon face on different pieces of art work, the wall, etc.  I gave him the same smile, which became the signature look for our villain in the film.  After we showed the movie to an audience for the first time, they loved it.  This woman came out of the theater, looked at me and said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the smile!  It’s your smile!’  I never realized that I had been doodling my own evil smile all these years, but I guess I was!’’

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Source: UIP-Duna Film