🎧 The Quiet Force Behind 'A Quiet Place: Day One'

My conversation with director Michael Sarnoski. Plus: 'Sex, lies, and videotape' at 35

QUIET RIOT Michael Sarnoski put his stamp on the third film in the Quiet Place series. (John Nacion/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures)

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A whole lot of people went to see A Quiet Place: Day One this past weekend, and they probably came out raving about Lupita Nyong’o’s ferocious lead performance, the visceral alien special effects — or the cat named Frodo who steals the movie from everybody. But for anyone who saw 2021’s moody revenge thriller Pig, the latest film in the A Quiet Place series is unmistakably the work of writer and director Michael Sarnoski, whom I talked to on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast. 

I had a blast watching A Quiet Place: Day One and got to pepper Sarnoski with all of my questions big and small, from how to work with actors like Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn on such a large-scale production to what was apparently an unintentional nod to Titanic. 

By building the film around Nyong’o’s character Sam, a woman with terminal cancer who is determined to get one last slice of New York pizza, Sarnoski created an utterly unique kind of disaster movie character. “At their core, a lot of these movies tend to be about survival,” Sarnoski told me. “What if our character didn’t even really want to survive?”

This jam-packed episode also includes a conversation with my longtime friend, The Ringer’s Joanna Robinson, who joins me to celebrate the 35th anniversary of what’s still a landmark indie film: Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape. We take a look back at Soderbergh’s autobiographical inspirations, the performances that hold up the best — and why the Oscars weren’t quite ready for this movie, even if they would be now.