Radio Silence Makes Some Noise With ‘Ready Or Not’
Speaker 1: 00:00 Game night can become a great family tradition, but in the new comedy slash horror movie, ready or not, that tradition takes on a lethal twist. KPBS arts reporter Beth Armando devotes a recent edition of her cinema Junkie podcast to the movie and the trio of filmmakers behind it. Matt and Ben Ali, all Upenn, Tyler Gillette and Chan Ville. Ella makeup, the film collective called Radio Silence. Here's Beth with an excerpt. Here's a little of the trailer for ready or not in which a young bride discover some of the family traditions she's about to marry into. Speaker 2: 00:34 Ah, I can't believe that in half an hour I will be a part of the Lib Domus Scheming Dynasty Empire. A dominion for Dominion, Yo touch. I honestly can't wait to be a part of your family. [inaudible] just one more thing and then you are officially part of the family. Speaker 1: 00:59 So Speaker 2: 00:59 at midnight you have to play a game. Why is just something we do when someone new joins the family again, what game hide and seek are we really gonna play that? Wow. The rules are simple. You can hide anywhere. We then tried to find you. So there's no way for me to win. Right. Let me stay hidden. Told him. No, thank you. Good luck. Speaker 1: 01:26 I asked the radio silence guys to identify themselves when they spoke and they mostly do, but even when you're not sure who's talking, I think you'll be as entertained as I was by the energy, passion and craft these young filmmakers bring to the table. First of all, the name radio silence is interesting for a group of people that have decided to work in movies. So explain a little bit about what radio silence is and kind of, um, what the genesis of this group was. Speaker 3: 01:54 Uh, we started working together 10 years ago now. This is Tyler. We started working together 10 years, uh, 10 years ago or so. The name radio silence came about. Uh, it's sort of a, um, I mean, I guess it's based on the way that we, that we all started working together. We had this very do it yourself mentality. And uh, as we were starting to get some followers for the stuff we were making. Yeah. Online, we were getting a handful of meetings around town and we were oftentimes having conversations with people and that would end with uh, hey, we should work together on something. Let's, let's find a project to do. And we, of course we're saying yes to everything. We wanted nothing more than to continue to make projects. So we would say yes and then follow up and never hear back. Speaker 4: 02:39 Whole lot of no sides. Speaker 3: 02:42 And um, I think what it, it was just a reminder that for us to continue to make stuff, it was, it was going to be about not asking for permission and to just go and do and tell the stories that we wanted to tell. It's been a reminder of how we started. But I think also, uh, how we love to work, which is to just find something that we love and then pursue it until it's, until it's done. Speaker 5: 03:01 So did you guys start with those online pranks and things like that? Was that where the, the group kind of had its big Speaker 3: 03:09 yeah. Yeah. No, we did. We started as Chad, Matt and rob, our first chat man around video came out in July of 2007. That's Chad by the way. Speaker 5: 03:18 Yeah. Speaker 3: 03:19 Um, and uh, yeah, and we did the brand videos. We did a bunch of like random shorts that were kind of just all over the place. We did interactive adventures, which were choose your own adventure stories that Kinda like were similar in theme and style and tone to what we did with ready or not. They kind of blended different elements of action and comedy and Zahra and Hor, uh, into their shorts. But you know, they're a choose your own adventure style. So you get it at the end of each video, you got to choose another path to go down and hopefully you can make it there without dying. Speaker 5: 03:55 And did you guys have formal film school education or did you just kinda jump into this, Speaker 3: 04:01 uh, Chad d and go to film school? I went to film school in Santa Cruz, which was more about, it was very, very art film based at the time when I was there in the 90s. And Tyler went to the slightly more traditional film school, but, but all in all we, we kind of have always treated our work as its own film school. And we started making stuff together. Chad was just saying, you know, we had no money. It was just time and ambition. So we'd get together and decide what we want to make and then go out and make it. And that usually involved us doing everything from getting the costumes to getting the food, to getting the camera to lighting it, gabbing it, every, everything was on us. Speaker 5: 04:42 And how did ready or not come to you? Is this a project that you initiated or did it come to you as a script? Speaker 3: 04:48 Yeah, it can feel us as a script actually twice the way it blended both elements of genre and also comedy was like something that we wanted to get back to doing. You know, we were coming off of found footage and we were coming off of south bound, which was a little bit more dark I would say. And we just wanted to get back to having fun. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't, that, you know, the funds, the chance to play with this kind of commentary on the 1% and the length that they'll go to, which they'll go to maintain their wealth. And is there an implicit deal with the devil when you have obscene amounts of money? You know, those are all really fun. Somatics to play with. Yeah. And then, uh, this is Tyler. I think the other thing that we really were immediately drawn to was the script, uh, with such a page Turner. Speaker 3: 05:35 But within it, there were all of these wildly unique obstacles and set pieces and characters and, and yeah. And the characters that were running the, those gauntlets were so interesting to us. There was a real opportunity for us as filmmakers to try to try something new to, to design sequences that we'd never seen before and to do them with characters that, that we genuinely loved and whose perspectives were, were interesting and bizarre. It's this, it's this wild ride that captivated us and had our attention from page one, and we sit at cool opportunity to get to bring it all to life. Speaker 1: 06:13 The film ready or not as playing at theaters around San Diego. You can hear the rest of Beth's conversation with a guise of radio silence on her cinema junkie podcast. Find it@kpbs.org or wherever you get your podcasts.
