So, Maika, how did you come to get involved with Villains?
Monroe: I was sent the script and I think immediately spoke with you guys. I’m pretty sure it was a quick turnaround. I fell in love with the characters and then met Bobby and Dan over Skype and we just hit it off.
Dan Berk: Yeah, it was really funny. I have such a vivid memory of that day. Sometimes you send a script or offer an actor something and for a million reasons, they could be working or have family stuff. Usually, it could take sometimes about two months, or never. Sometimes you never hear anything and you take it as a pass. You have to because you have to keep moving. So this was when we were still in New York and every day Bobby and I would either work at my apartment or his apartment and that day we were at his apartment working on something else entirely, and I biked home, I opened the door and said hi to my wife and then my phone buzzed and it was one of our producers texting us, saying that Maika Monroe loved the script, she wants to Skype in 15 minutes, and I was like “Bye Bye!” to my wife and got right back on my bike and went to Bobby’s and we were Skyping with her. Then that night we were like “Oh my God, is this a movie? I think we have our Jules!”
“…if we had never rehearsed at all, it could have been a real disaster.”
So what was it like for everyone to work with the rest of the cast because it appears as though you all worked so well together? Also with that, did you guys have rehearsal time?
Olsen: Yeah, we fought really hard to get a week of rehearsal. I don’t think we wound up with quite a week but we got a few days especially with Maika and Bill (Skarsgard). It’s hard to get at this budget level, this type of movie to get some real rehearsal in there. It’s just a hard thing to do. We were so, so happy we were able to do that because the tone of the film is a really small bullseye you have to hit. So we had to find that place north of reality and south of farce together so we were all making the same movie. I think without rehearsal that would have been tough. It would have been a tough thing to do on set, shooting out of order. If we just tried to figure that out on the day, if we had never rehearsed at all, it could have been a real disaster.
Berk: You just never get (rehearsal) anymore. One of my favorite books is Making Movies by Sidney Lumet and there’s a whole passage in there about rehearsals and he says “I usually tend to do eight to twelve weeks rehearsal before a film” and to do that now, it’s just impossible. It’s like “Sidney, Come on!” He goes on to say “I wake up at about eight, have breakfast with the family, read the newspaper, head to set, shoot for six hours, come home and I’m in bed by nine.” But in any event, it was very important for us to get some rehearsal in.
