In 2019’s “Ready or Not,” a bride, splattered in blood and viscera, laughs so hard she snorts as the bodies of her in-laws start exploding all around her. The moment is so unexpected, so absurd, so gory, that it alone made Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directing team known as Radio Silence, a sensation with horror fans.
“The laughs in our movies are often ‘Am I supposed to be laughing?’ moments,” Bettinelli-Olpin says.
“Like, ‘I can’t believe they just did that,’” Gillett adds.
The pair are hoping to outdo themselves when they debut “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” another exercise in outrageous carnage and boundary-pushing laughs, tonight at this year’s SXSW.
This installment follows the bride (Samara Weaving) as she and her sister (Kathryn Newton) try to outwit the richest families on earth, who are playing a deadly game where the siblings are their prey.
Shot for just $6 million, “Ready or Not” was a hit, but instead of leveraging its success to get more money for the sequel, the directors opted to keep things lean. The duo gave themselves 30 days to complete “Ready or Not 2,” just four more than they had for the original film, so they could keep costs low. “It was a meticulously planned shoot,” Gillett says. “But for as much as you can organize and plan and design, things go wrong.”
The pair look like they still can’t believe they made it out alive while reminiscing over the toughest moments on a film filled with lush sets and bloody, complicated action sequences. Sets were scrapped at the end of the day, which meant no second chances to capture any missed shots, and the company had to move locations a dozen times in as many days.
Elijah Wood, who has a villainous turn in “Ready or Not 2,” says the duo’s enthusiasm was contagious, overriding any stress he felt. “The atmosphere on a film set descends from the top,” Wood says. “Matt and Tyler create a really warm, fun environment for their crew and their cast. They’re incredibly approachable. They’re genre fans. They’re filmmaking fans. They really love the process. It rubs off on everybody else.”
Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett on set of “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come.”
©Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett, who grew up in Oakland and Arizona, respectively, met and hit it off while working in the New Line Cinema mailroom in late 2000, chatting nonstop about their favorite movies, like “Aliens” and “Midnight Run.” Their sensibilities were tied up in a love of comedy even more than horror. “We find the same things funny, and creating humor out of subverting expectations was something we knew we had in common,” Gillett says. “That hasn’t changed.”
Instead of gravitating toward laugh-out-loud movies, Bettinelli-Olpin wanted to do something different; they imagined “that cop movie that’s also pretty funny, or a sci-fi movie that’s got a lot of jokes.”
So the pair started writing short films and shooting some of them after hours in the New Line offices. They did everything themselves, from the writing to the editing to the camerawork, learning how to work efficiently together. “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m the director, and you’re the editor, and you’re the this,’” Bettinelli-Olpin says. “We were just all hands on deck. And the two of us were working together really, really well. Throughout the process — when we were filming, when we were editing — I remember we had a moment where we said, ‘We should just do this together.’ It was very simple.”
They dubbed themselves Radio Silence, an in-joke about the lack of callbacks they’d get about early pitches to studios. Despite the rejections, their shorts eventually got recognition, which led to bigger gigs. They provided a popular segment for the 2012 found-footage film “V/H/S,” and produced 2015’s well-received anthology film “Southbound,” for which they helmed two segments. Along the way, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett directed 2014’s haunted-pregnancy feature “Devil’s Due.” All of these projects paved a path to their breakout with “Ready or Not.”
Gillett describes the many hats they wore on their first sets as “building our own film school” with collaborators, and it helped to set the terms of their ways of working early on.
“We know what we’re asking of people and the process,” he says. “We have a real humble sense of what it takes to make the rubber meet the road when you’re making a movie. Between Matt and I, as well as the team of writers and producers that we’ve worked with so many times, we don’t just like making stuff — we love the collaboration.”
Weaving enjoyed this spirit on set. “I feel so heard when I have a suggestion or an idea,” she says. “As a young woman coming up in Hollywood, it’s hard to be taken seriously sometimes. As an actor, people might assume things about you. And Matt and Tyler were so open-minded and took my ideas and let me try things out. They really do have respect for actors, and that’s not always the case.”
The success of “Ready or Not” allowed the duo to throw their hat in the ring in 2020 to revive the “Scream” series. Co-written by “Ready” writer Guy Busick and James Vanderbilt, the fifth chapter was a fresh twist on the franchise, mixing in toxic fandom and Reddit culture by creating serial killers who are terminally online.
“The way we approach everything we’ve ever made is we love having fun little tie-ins and Easter eggs for ourselves and our friends,” Bettinelli-Olpin says. “But we approach everything like, ‘All right, we’re making this story; we’re not trying to open the door to 12 other stories and do a bunch of other stuff.’ So when we were doing ‘Scream 5,’ it was as fans. We were really able to tap into the kind of core thematic premise of what the guys had written.”
The fifth “Scream” debuted in 2022, and Radio Silence has been busy ever since, putting out a sequel in 2023 and directing the original vampire comedy “Abigail” in 2024.
Many of those features have been lo-fi or modestly budgeted affairs. But Radio Silence’s next project will be bigger. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett were tapped to direct a reboot of the beloved “Mummy” series, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. The previous films in the franchise were special effects-driven showpieces. Despite the sprawling canvas, the directors feel it’s a job they’ve been heading toward for their entire careers.
“An adventure movie in the desert is the Holy Grail for us,” Bettinelli-Olpin says. “We were raised on ‘Indiana Jones.’ When ‘The Mummy’ came around, we were a little older and fell in love with it. There’s something about it from that vantage point that is so thrilling to us.”
Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett don’t offer many clues about how they plan to revive “The Mummy,” but audiences should probably expect some of the jump scares and laughs Radio Silence is known for — even if the pair have to leave the exploding bodies out of the family-friendly fare.
“We love an absurd idea made very well, where it has no business being as good as it is,” Gillett says. “It sneaks up on you: ‘Oh my God, how crazy was that kill?’ ‘Whoa, that fight was nuts.’ ‘Oh, wow, I can’t believe I’m crying! I’m actually feeling something!’”
Watch the “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” trailer below.
Correction: An earlier print version of this story stated an incorrect number of shooting days for “Ready or Not 2.”
Leave a Reply