Anyone who’s ever taken a stab a story knows that pitching a story in a few lines or minutes is one of the most difficult aspects of the whole deal. To many, it’s even more difficult than the actual writing of the story itself. Not only do you have to pitch the story but you also have to pretty much convince the person you’re talking to that it’s a movie worth spending millions of dollars on.

You can imagine the extra level of difficulty involved with a film like A Quiet Place, which has almost no dialogue in it and has a script that’s only 67 pages in length.

“The movie was risky on every level,” Platinum Dunes production company co-founder Andrew Form told Slate. “You start reading [the script] and go, ‘Oh, there’s no dialogue.’ The idea was so original. And here we are coming to the studio with John: ‘This is the guy we’re betting on to star, write and direct this movie for us. And we’re all in on him! You have to trust us. We’re not going to let you down.’”

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Co-screenwriter Bryan Woods recalled trying to pitch the film to studios, and how challenging it was to actually get their interest.

“We would pitch it to studio executives that were fans of ours, producers that we had worked with, even close friends, and people would just look at us and their eyes would glaze over. They’d just be like, ‘What are you guys talking about? A movie with no dialogue? I don’t see how that’s a movie. That doesn’t sound very commercial. You should just move past it.’”

Sounds about right. Despite the medium of film being inherently visual, audiences have grown so used to dialogue, that it would certainly be a coin toss as to whether or not audiences would have the attention spans for a movie like A Quiet Place. Sure, maybe some hardcore film fans would love it, but would it be engaging enough for mainstream audiences?

The film has come out and become the big surprise of the year, so the answer is a resounding yes, but the doubts from the suits are understandable. What do you think? Did you think A Quiet Place would be enough to carry a full film? Let us know your thoughts down below!

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SOURCE: Slate