It’s Got a Hook (That You Shouldn’t Know About Going In)
Influences: The Sixth Sense, The Cabin In the Woods
Could you imagine seeing The Sixth Sense knowing Bruce Willis was [SPOILER ALERT] a ghost from the get-go? Neither could we. Even though The One I Love’s first twist comes at the beginning of the movie, there are plenty of turns throughout, which we won’t divulge here so as not to ruin the fun. “My movies tend to be word-of-mouth movies,” says Duplass, who also serves as the film’s executive producer. “[But] ultimately, I’m not worried about something having a huge audience because we didn’t reveal the twists ahead of time.” Still, the movie’s peg— and the guessing game behind it—is central to its marketing campaign. It’s reminiscent of how The Cabin In The Woods told us we knew nothing about otherworldly forces.
The architecture of the twist started out in a document that lives on Duplass’ computer. It contains about 100 ideas, separated by movies he could direct with his collaborator and brother, Jay, potential projects to produce, and ideas for other risky movies he’ll never make “but I think are kind of cool,” he says. He sent one of those unlikely ideas to director Charlie McDowell, who then forwarded it to his writing partner, Justin Lader. It was a vague, hair-raising two-to-three sentence germ. “I responded back saying, ‘Did that get cut off? Is that all there is?’” says Lader, who would eventually write The One I Love’s script. McDowell was equally stumped. “It was a very barebones thing to the point I called him up and was like, ‘Mark, this isn’t a movie,’” he says. “And he was like, ‘I know. You have to go figure it out.’”
They took Duplass’ idea and put together a 10-page outline and, eventually, a film. It’s one that Lader thinks is unique, even if it borrows from known tropes. “You know, it’s not like the hook has never been done before,” Lader admits. It’s true. It’s been around in fiction forever. But he’s convinced this movie is different, and the fact that its being released by an indie studio—Radius-TWC, which released the bold Snowpiercer earlier this year—means audiences are more likely to be surprised. “It’ll just be familiar enough that it’ll feel like they’re not watching an independent movie and being fed their vegetables,” he says. “But they’ll be able to appreciate the fact that it doesn’t quite go where you think it’s going to go.”
It Sends You to The Outer Reaches
Influence: The Twilight Zone
The first night of Ethan and Sophie’s weekend getaway is picture-perfect: They make dinner, flirt, drink wine, and genuinely reconnect for the first time in ages. Then the high-concept twist shoots them into something that would make Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling proud. But it also goes beyond its first surprising bombshell.
“I was never one of those kids obsessed with Star Wars,” says Lader, speaking sacrilege. “I was very much into things that were mysterious.” It shows. A diehard devotee of The Twilight Zone since the first or second grade, Lader’s script turns a trip with good intentions into something menacing. “I remember when my dad showed me the episode when the nuclear bomb goes off,” he says. “The guy’s so happy because all he wants to do is read and before the bomb went off his wife was nagging him.” Of course, any sci-fi enthusiast knows how that episode, “Time Enough at Last,” ends: The last man alive, Mr. Henry Bremis, finally finds himself in a library and immediately breaks his glasses. “That ending blew my mind,” Lader says. The One I Love is chock-full of these moments.
McDowell agrees. “That was definitely an inspiration,” he says. “There’s even a line in the movie where Ethan goes, ‘There’s some really weird fucked up Twilight Zone shit going on.” Similar to the very best episodes of that seminal series, The One I Love grounds its fantastical elements to create a believable world. McDowell, who has watched episodes of The Twilight Zone since directing the film, now says he’s interested in playing with the genre in the future. “It was really interesting taking a universal movie in the romantic space and adding this sci-fi element,” he says. “I think sci-fi, mystery, and thriller and all of that really lends itself to kind of play around in the comedy and drama space.”
It Doesn’t Let You Trust Anyone
Influences: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby
Duplass is a genre dork, even if he’s now known for starring alongside Melissa McCarthy in Tammy, and a huge fan of classic thrillers. “Repulsion was a very exciting movie because you couldn’t tell what was happening and how much was was going on in [Catherine Deneuve's] brain,” he says. “Rosemary’s Baby was similar to that.” Those Roman Polanski movies, followed by The Tenant, were unofficially dubbed the “Apartment Trilogy.” They favored the silent and the strange over gore. More importantly, they’re about trust—or the lack of it. That’s just what happens when your husband sells your body to the Devil for fame and fortune.
Like that trilogy, The One I Love addresses dwindling confidence and faith in marriage. “Are the characters emotionally true and honest?” McDowell asks. “If that’s sincere and if that’s real—if it feels organic—then we can go to places that aren’t of this planet as we know it.” This also challenged the actors to create truly multi-faceted performances. Duplass says that in casting Moss, they needed someone who could be light and endearing in a rom-com way, but also dark and strange in a way that would make Rosemary Woodhouse proud. “There was a lot of tonal balance going on in this movie,” he says. “We had to test in front of a lot of audiences to see if they liked how it jumped around in the feel or if it bothered them.” But unlike those movies, this isn’t all doom and gloom. “I never wanted things to feel goofy or look for a joke,” McDowell says. “Any of the humor, for me, was just to come out of the situation which was rich with comedy anyway.”
It Latches Onto Constraints and Rules (See Also: Isolated Cabins = Evil)
Influences: Low budget-ingenuity, Night of the Living Dead, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity
Director Charlie McDowell (right) on the One I Love set with Mark Duplass. courtesy Radius-TWC
When George Romero released The Night of the Living Dead in 1968, it was a gimmick. It was made out of desperation after his movie Whine the Fawn, a serious coming-of-age movie, couldn’t get funding. It was an odyssey similar to one McDowell and Lader went on with their film Fighting Jacob, which did get financing but ultimately fell apart. “He knew I had a reputation for making things fast and cheap,” Duplass says of McDowell. And working fast and cheap on The One I Love actually channeled the filmmakers’ creativity—specifically when it came to the movie’s retreat house in Ojai, California, which inspired a lot of the sci-fi and horror plot points that would otherwise not have occurred to them.
Most of the science fiction and horror aspects take place in the retreat’s guesthouse. “It was deliberate keeping 90 percent, or however much it is, on the property between the guesthouse and the main house,” Lader says. “We wanted to convey what it’s like being trapped in a relationship that’s not working.” It was also practical. “There’s no way we could afford it with special effects,” McDowell says. “The rules kind of presented themselves with what we were presented with.” To differentiate the action in the guesthouse, McDowell shot everything happening inside with anamorphic lenses. Think of it as an Instagram filter set to Sci-Fi. “It gave it this kind of warp-y feeling like something felt slightly off,” he says. “Everything was very colorful in the guest house and the lighting felt very romantic, sort of perfect.”
The Rules of Horror dictate that one should never, ever—under any circumstances— go to a cabin or move into a new house. Anywhere. You’re either going to find and read a Sumerian version of the Book of the Dead, contract a flesh-eating virus, or discover a portal that leads to who-knows-where. Ethan and Sophie are completely safe in their retreat until they find themselves in The Outer Reaches. When that happens, standard genre rules kick in. “Charlie and I would talk for hours and hours,” Lader says. “They were the kind of conversations that would make it so we’d never get a date again if you heard how nerdy they were.” But they were important from a storytelling standpoint because they guided the filmmakers on how much to reveal and how much to leave a mystery. “The more you try to explain a magic trick, the less interesting it becomes and also the more silly it can be,” Lader says. “Ethan and Sophie don’t have all the answers by the end of the movie and we’re seeing it through their eyes.”
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