David Robert Mitchell: “The End of Oak Street was born thanks to a garage door”

The genius behind It Follows and Under the Silver Lake returns with one of the most mysterious projects of the summer: Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor’s entire neighborhood is teleported to a place armored with hungry dinosaurs. A blockbuster, really? We discuss it with director David Robert Mitchell.

Eight years have passed since your last film, Under the Silver Lake. What happened all this time?
I wrote a lot, a lot, with the desire to make films on a different scale. To tackle something ambitious, something with a big budget that could appeal to a wider audience. This image of “indie director” that sticks to me is a misunderstanding! Well… I’m not just that. I like lots of movie genres, big and small, and I wanted to expand my sandbox. So I imagined a completely original superhero film that we were preparing to shoot. I had spent three years on it, and Covid screwed everything up. I hope that this work will not be lost and that I will one day be able to put it back together, because it is a project that I love.

And The End of Oak StreetSO ?
I always had this desire for a big film, but I was running out of ideas. And one day, while walking through my suburban Detroit neighborhood, I passed a simple garage, with trash cans and an alley next to it. Something totally banal but which caught my attention. I visualized a dinosaur in this alley, and I loved the feeling it gave me. The ordinary met the extraordinary. Something going wrong was starting to interfere with normal life.

It follows And Under the Silver Lake already worked on this principle.
Absolutely, it’s my way of creating stories. In any case after this vision, I wrote the screenplay at full speed.

From a distance, the film looks like a Spielbergian blockbuster. Except knowing you, it must be much stranger than that…
I could also quote The Fourth Dimension or Poltergeist. But I don’t know if the reference game is of much interest. In fact, it’s a mixture of many things, some of them very personal. But you can sit in the room and simply let yourself be carried away by this XXL and perfectly popcorn adventure. My obsession was that there be depth in the family interactions, that the audience sincerely loved these people. I’ve seen too many blockbusters collapse by neglecting this aspect.

The End of Oak Street comes out at a time when blockbusters are under attack, and where YouTubers are making their mark with very low-budget films. What does this inspire you?
That it’s impossible to know what the public wants, and that old recipes no longer work as well. We can at least draw one conclusion: people are intrigued by strong concepts and no longer travel to rewatch what they have already seen ten times. We therefore have to think outside the box.

But your next film will be They followthe continuation of It follows…We have seen more original!
Except that it’s a work in its own right and I would never have agreed to make the same film again. No interest! We start filming around mid-July, I’m in full preparation. I love the script and I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s the right time to make this film. It’s all there. I think those who liked the first one will really enjoy it!