How ‘Locked’ Pulled Off The Most Hellish Vehicular Experience Since ‘Christine’

From a certain point-of-view, cars are nothing more than very expensive death traps.

Director David Yarovesky (Brightburn, Nightbooks) takes that perspective quite literally in his latest effort, Locked, a unique psychological thriller co-starring Bill Skarsgård and two-time Academy Award recipient Anthony Hopkins (The Silence of the Lambs, The Father). An English-language remake of the Argentine release 4×4, the film centers around Eddie (Skarsgård), a cash-strapped deadbeat and failure of a father who makes the grievous error of breaking into a luxury SUV that just so happens to be a trap set by William, an unhinged millionaire (Anthony Hopkins) with a personal grudge against brazen vandals and way too much time on his hands.

Once Eddie closes the door of the vehicle — a sinister model called “Dolus” (the Latin word for a deceitful trick) — he’s locked inside without food, water, or any means of contacting the outside world for days on end. In essence, he becomes William’s hapless plaything, tortured with electrified seats, a mercurial A/C system, an eardrum-bursting stereo system, and remote steering. It’s less cat and mouse and more cat catches mouse and makes the poor thing suffer.

“It really drew me into this thing,” Yarovesky says of the screenplay written by Michael Arlen Ross (The Throwaways, Oracle). “It was like, ‘Wow, I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to make this compelling.’ I wanted to explore that and as we began to pull that thread, I started saying, ‘I want to shoot the inside of this car like no one’s ever shot inside of a car before. I want to be able to shoot it in crazy ways.’”

The filmmaker was also excited by the idea of another collaboration with producer and legendary genre auteur, Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Spider-Man), who doesn’t bring a massive ego to the table, despite his great professional success.

“Oftentimes, when you hear about people who struggled on a movie with a producer, it’s because the producer had a vision for the film and director had a vision for the film, and they fought about it the whole time,” Yarovesky says. “[By the end of that scenario]

, you have this sort of halfway [compromise], and no one’s happy. I told Sam what I wanted to do, I walked him through the movie, I told him how I wanted to shoot it, and he got it. He really understood what we were trying to do and would offer suggestions that just elevated that direction. So it felt like, ‘Man, we’re on a team. We’re in-sync.’”

***WARNING! The following contains mild plot spoilers for Locked!***

Rather than just have Skarsgård sitting “in the car on a soundstage surrounded by green screens” for the entire shoot (as would be the case if a much less ambitious storyteller had been at the helm), the production team “built the car in a break-apart way,” Yarovesky explains. “It was on a platform and each segment of the car was on rails. So one person could very easily slide a segment of the car back and forth or lock it in if Bill had to smash on it or whatever.”

He continues: “We built this complicated little box and it allowed us to execute these crazy shots, where we could coordinate with the camera team and have people almost puppeting the set. [They were] moving chunks of it out of the way and bringing it back in, allowing the camera to get into places that cameras don’t really go to, and really allowing us to search the space in a really unique way.”

In addition, Yarovesky tasked cinematographer Michael Dallatorre with developing a special kind of anamorphic lens that would allow for a classic cinematic look in the movie’s confined space. Usually, “you can’t get a camera in a car and shoot an actor and focus on him if you’re gonna shoot anamorphic,” notes the director. “I think we shot with the widest anamorphic lens Panavision’s ever made, [and] it was custom-made for us … Instead of falling into genre conventions for trapped-in-a-car movies, I wanted to shoot it like a movie. Make it feel cinematic and and keep it feeling tense. Never let that environment be a roadblock, but allow it to be an opportunity.”

When it came to the interior design of the dastardly Dolus car itself, Yarovesky wanted to avoid the “heightened” aesthetic one often sees in the genre of films where a person finds themselves trapped in a claustrophobic space.

“What was really important to me, was authenticity and believability,” he says. “I didn’t want this car to become a James Bond car where someone designed these crazy gadgets and you have to solve things … I don’t know if you’ve ever had your house or car broken into, but it’s a horrible feeling. I can understand, to an extent, a desire to have justice and so, what would it be like if someone was crazy enough and and deranged enough to actually modify a car to trap someone inside? We really went through a lot of extensive detail to try to be as authentic as possible.”

Such detail included little Easter eggs on the exterior of the car that allude to William’s dark sense of ironic humor. Not only does the name “Dolus” hint at the character’s nefarious intentions (as mentioned above), but the logo and license plate reflect Lady Justice and the US penal code for the death penalty, respectively. “If you were smart enough to know that, you wouldn’t get in that car,” stresses the director. “He gave everyone every opportunity to not get in that car.”

Yarovesky’s commitment to reality also meant shooting on location in Vancouver whenever possible. In particular, he wanted the city’s rampant homelessness and drug epidemic reflect the film’s overarching themes about haves and have-nots living together in the same metropolis. In true Se7en fashion, however, the rain-drenched environment is never named aloud, giving it the aura of any contemporary American city.

“It’s surreal because it’s surrounded by people of wealth,” Yarovesky says of Vancouver’s iconic Hastings Street. “[There are] foodie restaurants where have people passed-out from drug use in front of the restaurant.” But being on the ground meant constant sweeps for used needles and the risk of having buckets of human waste dumped onto the crew. “We were in it. We were in really gnarly places. But I thought that this movie had to take us there.”

At the end of the day, though, the project would live or die on the performance of its leading man, who “proves again that he’s a movie star,” gushes the director. “He was in for the challenge and he went to crazy places with me. He allowed me to drag him through hell to make this movie as authentic as possible.”

Skarsgård impressively brings a visceral sense of believability and palpable desperation to the character of Eddie. In one particularly memorable scene, he attempts to stave off severe dehydration by drinking his own urine, but can’t bring himself to go through with the unthinkable action. “We know what people really look like when [they have] an involuntary physical reaction, when they’re repulsed by something. I didn’t want him to fake it,” the director adds. “I wanted it to be real,”

The actor’s retching was completely genuine, a natural result of malodorous Surströmming juice poured inside the water bottle prop. Thankfully, he didn’t have to drink the liquid for real, but it did make for one smelly day of shooting.

“What we didn’t think about was once he opened it, was how that entire box would just be full of that smell for the rest of the take,” Yarovesky says of the Swedish delicacy made of fermented herring that inspired a viral internet challenge. “And additionally, I didn’t want Bill to sit there on a soundstage while people shook the car. So we put him in a car with a stunt driver driving around, tossing him around the inside of the car. We really put Bill through it physically and mentally.”

On the flip side of things, Hopkins brings a malevolent gravitas to William, calling on his iconic tenure as Hannibal Lecter to play the car’s vindictive and psychopathic owner. He was so intrigued by the role, that he immediately began slipping into character during his first meeting with Yarovesky over breakfast in Los Angeles.

“At that breakfast, he would look at me and just become William. He would start talking to me like I was Eddie, telling me I got in the wrong car, and doing it in the way that only Anthony Hopkins can. It was terrifying,” Yarovesky remembers. “I found him to be such a delight. We spoke almost every night in the few weeks before shooting, talking about the character, working on aspects of it. It was such an exciting thing to be able to work with one of the greatest actors of all time on that character.”

With so much care and talent involved in turning a simple premise into a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience, Yarovesky hopes viewers will get their butts in gear (pun intended) and seriously consider checking out Locked in theaters, rather than waiting for it to become available on digital platforms.

“We made this movie with the audience in mind,” the filmmaker concludes. “We made the movie for people to enjoy, for them to come out and watch it on a big screen. It’s a movie where you react. You can feel the tension in the room, you can hear the gasps from the audience. And it’s a totally different experience in the theater than it will be at home, eventually. I was fortunate enough to have an incredible producer and two of the best actors alive to help me make this thing for the audience. But I think I speak for everyone when I say, we made it for you.”

Locked is now playing in theaters everywhere. Click here for tickets!