JEREMY SAULNIER RECENTLY showed Green Room to his 16-year-old daughter. “She’s a horror nerd, like her father,” he laughs. “She goes to an art school in LA, and the funny thing is, they teach genre lighting, and Green Room is on the curriculum.” So, did she like her old man’s film? “I think she dug it,” says Saulnier. “Although she did try to watch it in two sittings. I was like, ‘No. This is a ride, my friend. You get on, you cannot get off.’”
Say that again. Green Room, which Saulnier wrote and directed, is as relentless and gripping as it was when it first came out in 2016. It is a boot on the throat, a Stanley knife to the arm, a shotgun-blast to the face. Which is what Saulnier was going for when he first came up with the film’s central notion: it would be a siege movie in which a punk band, the Ain’t Rights, wind up taking refuge in the green room of a neo-Nazi bar in a Southern backwater after they witness a murder and become expendable as a result. Saulnier started writing it after the success of his breakout film, Blue Ruin, in 2013. “I was getting thrown some scripts that I didn’t understand completely,” he tells Empire from an edit suite, where he’s finishing his fifth movie, Rebel Ridge. “I’d had this idea floating around, based on my youth. We were into punk rock and going to hardcore shows. I remember being at a metal show in Virginia, out in the sticks, with some tough people, and it was a little scary. And I realised, if shit went down, we would be in really deep trouble. That stuck with me.”
Saulnier started writing Green Room as both a technical exercise, in how to generate and sustain tension, and an exorcism, getting rid of that idea. He didn’t necessarily intend to make it his follow-up, but somewhere along the way he lured himself in. “I’m not writing for executives, I’m not writing for anyone but the audience and myself,” he recalls of his attitude. “And I put myself in the audience’s place. I allowed the script to create its own tension, because I wasn’t over-navigating it. I was there, I was scared, I was living it.”