If you’ve seen Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s 2019 indie gem Villains, then you understand why the Novocaine directing duo wouldn’t want to make another austere action movie.
Their 2019 genre mashup starring Maika Monroe and Bill Skarsgard had an unconventional romance in between all the laughs, thrills and scares, and the former NYU roommates knew that the most successful version of Novocaine would also need some tonal variation to complement its own unfamiliar love story. Based on a script by Lars Jacobson, the co-directors revamped the more “straightforward” tone into a bloody action-comedy with plenty of heart to balance it all out.
Jack Quaid plays Nathan Caine, an assistant bank manager who suffers from congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). As a result of his life without physical pain, Nate lives a very insular existence outside of work until his long-standing crush and co-worker, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), makes the first move. Overall, Berk and Olsen insisted on smuggling a 25-minute romantic comedy into their action movie so that the audience is fully invested in Nate’s quest to rescue Sherry from bank robbers who take her hostage at the end of the first act.
Berk and Olsen admit that they faced some resistance to this choice. After all, producers and executives do a great deal of accounting for short attention spans in this day and age.
“There were certainly voices here and there that said, ‘Hey, can we tighten this up?’ And we always tried to tell them, ‘Look, you’ve got to trust the audience here. This isn’t a streaming movie,’” Olsen tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We always wanted this to feel like a throwback, and action movies back in the day used to take a little bit more time to meet the characters. They weren’t so scared of losing the audience’s attention back then.”
Berk also believes it’s a symptom of how much social media and streaming have rewired viewers’ brains.
“We understand why this transition has happened. Consumption habits have changed a lot. TikTok is eating our lunch, and executives are scared,” Berk says. “But when they say to move your action up and discard character development, we don’t think it’s going to have the effect that they want. It’s not going to make Hollywood gain more market share.”
In 2022, Maika Monroe told THR that she once considered leaving the entertainment industry. She later elaborated that she’d been working non-stop to the tune of seven movies, and some unpleasant experiences had her rethinking her direction in life. But that all changed in 2018 when she met Berk and Olsen during the process of making Villains. She now credits the co-directors for why she “fell in love with her job again.” In fact, she’s currently enjoying a second wind that rivals the momentum she had coming out of 2014’s one-two punch of The Guest and It Follows.
“I don’t think we were aware at the time, but once we wrapped, she did mention that to us. It’s obviously the biggest compliment we could ever receive,” Olsen says. “This is a really tough industry, especially for actors, and it can chew you up and spit you out. Sometimes, you feel like you’re up here because you’re in this huge movie, but then that huge movie bombs. So it was really validating to hear Maika say that because we really do try to make our sets fun, inclusive places.”
Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Berk and Olsen also discuss the unintended significance of Quaid’s showdown with Ray Nicholson’s Simon.
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What’s the backstory for your team-up that’s now birthed five films?
ROBERT OLSEN We met as randomly assigned roommates during our freshman year of college at NYU. So we owe everything that we have in our lives to the Bursar’s office there and whatever algorithm put us together. We were best friends for years before we ever started to actually work together. We then started a little production company with a couple other buddies when we got out of school, and we would shoot short films, music videos, corporate videos and New York Fashion Week. If somebody paid us to use a camera, we did it. From there, we started to write together, and we had a little bit of success with that by selling a script or two. We then just really wanted to direct, but nobody lets you direct a movie until you direct a movie. So we went out and raised a micro budget to make our first film, Body, and that was our feature directorial debut. We’ve been going strong ever since.
DAN BERK: That led us to a hired-gun situation on the sequel to Jim Mickle’s Stake Land, The Stakelander. After that, we finally found ourselves in a position where we could make our third feature, Villains. In many ways, it felt like our first feature because it was the first time it was our script. We had a budget that felt like an infinite amount of money at the time, and that was $2.5 million. We had real movie stars in Bill Skarsgard, Maika Monroe, Kyra Sedgwick and Jeff Donovan. It was just a spectacular experience for us. It premiered at South by, and Gunpowder & Sky bought it. It got a tiny theatrical release, which felt like it really moved the needle for us in a big way. So the delineating line in our careers is pre-Villains and post-Villains, and that also urged our move to Los Angeles. Our reps told us to only move out if we’ve got “heat.” You don’t want to go out to L.A. with your tail between your legs, begging for work. So we finally felt that we were sufficiently warm to move out to L.A., and then Covid happened several months later, which sucked. But that led to us making Significant Other.
OLSEN: It became our very first studio job.
BERK: Yeah, we were all stuck in our homes, and we decided to write a script that took place a hundred percent outdoors. The original plan was to make it for a shoestring and cast actors that were already quarantining together. The script then came out really good, and our reps convinced us to share it with the studios. Ashley Brucks was at Paramount Players at the time, and she threw her hat into the ring. So we got to make that movie right on the heels of Covid, which was such a blessing and such a fun experience. That came out in fall of ‘22, and we became attached to Novocaine at the top of ‘23.
Did the two of you ever workshop a collective name à la Radio Silence or the Daniels?
BERK & OLSEN: (Laugh.)
BERK: We have never workshopped a directing name. I don’t think we could pull it off.
OLSEN: Every time we even discussed it, we were just like, “No, it’s not our style.” I don’t think we could do it with a straight face.
BERK It would be like one of us trying to wear a fedora or a newsboy cap. We can’t pull it off. We would feel like frauds. Those other guys can, though. We love both of those teams.
Assuming Novocaine was an open directing assignment, what do you think was the key to your pitch?
OLSEN Lars’ [Jacobson] script had such a brilliant core concept, but the tone of the movie was totally different. It wasn’t funny, really. It was a pretty straightforward, serious action movie. So we were like, “What a concept here, but we’ve got to have more fun with it. The fact that he can’t feel pain, that’s got to be a source of comedy throughout the movie. Tonally, this needs a bit of an overhaul.” And so we were basically like, “There’s got to be a booby-trapped house and a torture scene where he has to pretend that he can feel pain. We’ve got to have more fun with this.” So, to their credit, the producers were into that idea, and they let us do a pretty invasive pass of the script. We changed the tone in a wholesale way and rewrote the whole back half of it to where it really started to sing. We always try to cast an actor in our minds so that we’re writing with the same voice, and because we were watching The Boys at the time, we were like, “This character must be Jack Quaid.” We ultimately did our pass in his voice, and then we just pushed super hard to go to him as a potential lead. I think he could feel how tailored the script was to him, and once he came on, the whole thing took off like a rocket ship. So we have to give big props to our producers for letting us do all that.
On The Boys, Jack has a knack for barely reacting to all the horrifying sights his character encounters on a regular basis. Did you recognize that you could use that to portray his immunity to pain?
BERK Yeah, we understood that the comedic engine of this movie involved these moments of grizzly violence being met with no reaction, and there was real fertile ground there for super funny contrast jokes. And Jack is just such an amazing comedian, both physically and in delivery of dialogue. So we saw that on The Boys, and we knew that we would be asking him to utilize some of the same tools. The Boys was just proof positive that he would be able to do it.
Sherry (Amber Midthunder) jokes that Nate is a superhero, but if people refer to Novocaine as a superhero film, are you going to bristle at that description?
OLSEN I don’t think we mind if somebody wants to say it functions that way. The marketing leans into that more than the movie does. It makes it seem like it’s all just fun and great that he can’t feel pain, whereas the movie itself pays a lot of attention to this condition that has caused him to have to live this hermetic lifestyle where he doesn’t have a lot of close relationships. So he starts off the movie in a really isolated place. He’s not going to the bar and stabbing himself in the hand to make new friends. To me, a superhero movie is something where a person becomes a vigilante of some kind and goes out as one multiple times. This character is just using his disability as a superpower to save the woman he loves. So you could say it’s a superhero movie in that way, but this is a one-off for him. The day after this movie ends, he’s not going to go out and fight other crimes. So if people want to call it a superhero movie, we’re not going to get mad at it, but I just don’t want somebody to think that this is Kick-Ass.
In Unbreakable, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) can’t draw blood, so there was never any need for an R-rating. With Nathan Caine, he can’t feel pain, but he can still get hurt and die. So was the R-rating a prerequisite in order to properly illustrate that point?
BERK Definitely. This movie could have never been sub-R based on the way that we wanted to do it. From the earliest days of pitching, we knew that we wanted to have these horrible moments of violence, but they’re contextualized with humor and with heart, which softens the blow on that. We’ve actually found that a lot of viewers who are generally queasy or uncomfortable in situations where they’re seeing violence or blood are not being affected in the same way they usually are in the torture porn realm. Novocaine exists in this very unique space where it’s still joyful to watch.
OLSEN Without the humor and heart, you’d be like, “Alright, I don’t want to watch this anymore. This guy’s getting too beat up.”
BERK In order for that balance to work properly, you have to push the boundaries of the way you’re showing the violence. You could never do this without showing all the blood or exposed bone. The whole thing might fall apart that way.
Ray Nicholson plays Jack’s character’s foil, and they both come from Hollywood royalty. Did they have any ties to each other already?
OLSEN They’d maybe met once or twice, but it’s not like they were best friends or had met at some we-have-famous-parents ball or something. Honestly, we did not know that Ray was a Nicholson until after we saw his audition and loved him. It wasn’t until the callback that we realized who he was after looking up his stuff. But both of them are just so talented in their own right, and they’re both the best people at talking about nepotism. They both acknowledge the privilege that they’ve had, and they both talk about it the right way. Not every “nepo baby” does. So people have appreciated it, and we’ve seen a couple responses, saying, “Love the nepo baby fight at the end of the movie!”
The first-act relationship between Nate and Sherry is the key to the entire movie. I would argue that the movie doesn’t work if the audience doesn’t fall for them as a couple. Did everyone operate as if their bond was the linchpin?
BERK Yeah, we used some of those exact phrases, verbatim, when we were in prep with our department heads and performers. The movie completely falls apart if you don’t believe that Nate would risk his life for Sherry, and they’re only meeting for a very short 25-minute period of time. So we had to have that classic setup where, in a single crazy night, Nate’s life goes from gray to technicolor, and he would now do anything to save the engine of that transition. And yeah, if it didn’t work, we would be fucked. A lot of that is not just what we designed on the page and how we directed the actors; it’s just their natural chemistry as performers. We met both of Jack and Amber independently, and while we knew they were both so charming, you never really know until you’re reading lines together or just having a meal. So our first dinner together in Cape Town was actually when Bobby and I looked at each other and said, “Oh, thank God.” They were joking around, and it was like we were watching Nate and Sherry in that moment. It was so effortless between the two of them.
So they didn’t read or interact together before they arrived in Cape Town?
BERK They had been circling each other for years because Dan Trachtenberg, who directed Amber in Prey and Jack in The Boys’ pilot, thought they would enjoy working with each other. So, when Amber was cast, they met up at Swingers Diner in L.A. and hit it off before leaving for South Africa.
Returning to your point about the 25-minute romcom, that amount of character runway is not always a given.
OLSEN Yeah, you have to fight to maintain a first act like that. There’s not a lot of studios out there that are going to let you make an action movie with 25 minutes of romcom before any action happens. There were certainly voices here and there that said, “Hey, can we tighten this up? Is there any way we can get this pulled up here?” And we always tried to tell them, “Look, you’ve got to trust the audience here. This isn’t a streaming movie.” We always wanted this to feel like a throwback, and action movies back in the day used to take a little bit more time to meet the characters. They weren’t so scared of losing the audience’s attention back then. Nowadays, as writers, you get a lot of pressure to open a movie with a bang, or put the end of the movie at the beginning before flashing back to show how you got there. So it was really cool of our producers at Paramount, Infrared and Safehouse to get behind us on that and trust us. People now like that part of the movie where we establish Nate and Sherry. If we got right into the action, you wouldn’t care.
BERK Movies resonate for decades because you invested in a character and their journey, but you’re not going to invest in the character’s journey if you don’t care about the character. So by putting your action kickoff at minute 12 like most studios would want you to do, you are making it so that people do not give a shit once everything goes crazy, and your movie is going to be forgettable. All the movies that we referenced in prep, whether it was Die Hard or Lethal Weapon or Midnight Run, have stood the test of time because of their characters. The hijacking in Air Force One takes place at 25 minutes; it doesn’t take place at 12. But if you made that movie today, you’d have a lot of people telling you to get to the fucking hijacking earlier.
OLSEN It’s okay if certain kinds of action movies do that. They’re either more about the fighting itself, or they know the audience just wants to see all the cool kung fu or whatever. But we wanted to make a character-based movie, and you can’t invest in character if the action starts within the first 10 minutes.
BERK Viewers can handle sitting around for another few minutes because that investment is worth it. You don’t drive into the gates of Jurassic Park for 45 minutes, but it’s still a movie that people constantly, myself included, list in their top fours [on Letterboxd]. We understand why this transition has happened. Consumption habits have changed a lot. TikTok is eating our lunch, and executives are scared. But when they say to move your action up and discard character development, we don’t think it’s going to have the effect that they want. It’s not going to make Hollywood gain more market share. [Writer’s Note: The John Wick co-directors received the same note since John doesn’t have his first fight scene until the 30-minute mark.]
OLSEN We think you should differentiate yourself even further from all that short-form snackable content.
Jack had an especially challenging role because he can’t react to physical pain during the fights. How often would you have to reset a fight because he accidentally flinched or grimaced?
BERK: Surprisingly, it was very infrequent. Jack worked so hard at retraining himself. It was really funny because he was going to be doing other fight scenes on The Boys and in other movies after this, and he was like, “I’ve ruined myself for all future productions because I’m not wincing. I’m not selling pain anymore.” But he worked so hard in prep, and if there were ever more takes, it was usually him asking for another. He understands his process on such a granular level that he could tell when he winced a little or exhaled a little bit too much. He’s really, really cerebral about performance like that. So he’d sometimes ask for extra takes, but it was very rare that we were like, “Dude, you’re wincing. What the fuck? You forgot.”
OLSEN Yeah, a big part of prep with stunt coordinator Stanimir Stamatov was just figuring out how to unlearn all that past training that gets burned into your brain. Of course, when you get punched, you flinch. That’s acting. But here, his face is doing something different than what his body is doing. That’s why we used Upgrade as a big reference for some of these fight scenes. That movie has a similar shtick in that [Logan Marshall-Green’s character’s] face is disconnected from what his body is doing. His body is fighting the guy, but his face is apologizing. So there are some similarities because Nate is getting punched but not reacting to it. And yet, you can’t push that too far because you’ll look like you don’t care like the T-1000. So there’s other emotions there. There’s still worry about being in a fight. He’s just not wincing from pain, so that definitely took a lot of work.
After Sherry is taken hostage, Nate steals a Ford Taurus cop car. Was this choice a nod to RoboCop?
OLSEN That’s a nod to how few left-hand drive cars there are in South Africa. The action car budget on this movie was way more than it would’ve been on something else. Any car that was within viewing distance of the camera had to be left-hand drive, and because they drive on the other side of the road there, left-hand drive cars don’t just fall out of the sky. They don’t even have box ambulances there, so some very talented people had to build a box ambulance that could drive. We then had to build another version of the ambulance so that we could shoot inside of it and put it on a gimbal to move it around. So the cars on this movie were a pain in the butt, but luckily, we figured it out.
BERK So, yes, it was a RoboCop reference.
BERK & OLSEN: (Laugh.)
Was Jacob Batalon’s Wolverine line in the trailer only recorded for the trailer?
BERK: It was just recorded for the trailer, not necessarily at our behest. We’re not huge fans of trailer ADR, but we understand it’s sometimes a necessity to clearly market an idea in a compact amount of time. It’s a good match with the image, and it does get to your previous question. It puts your head more in that superhero space, which is not always our favorite thing.
OLSEN: Yeah, we get why they have to do that. The funny part to us is that once you see the movie, you realize that it’s not Roscoe’s [Batalon] position, really. It’s not like you spend the whole movie with Roscoe being like, “You have to be careful.” He desperately does not want to be brought into this story for the longest time. But marketing a movie is a different ball game, and we leave it up to the professionals.
“Everybody Hurts” is very well utilized at the start of the film. Did R.E.M drive a hard bargain?
OLSEN Anytime you use a big song like that, it’s going to cost some money, but Paramount was so supportive. During post, they were just really confident in this movie. It also tested really well, and once that happened, they were like, “Alright, you can put whatever songs you want into it now.” If we tested terribly, I think it would’ve been Dan and I recording some originals.
BERK There were no huge issues with clearing the R.E.M song. It was just a matter of, “Pay this amount.” But the torture scene has a lot of graphic violence, and so that was actually a much more challenging needle drop to find.
OLSEN People don’t know the movie, and so you have to send them the scene. And they were like, “I’m not putting my song in a scene where this guy gets his fingernails ripped off. Are you crazy?”
BERK We were actually getting quite desperate. We went through 15 different options, and some of these artists take a week to tell you if they’re willing to license the track or not. So we were running out of time in post, and we were like, “What’s the fallback? No music or maybe score? But that kind of eats into the humor of the scene.” So it was really stressful, and thankfully, we ended up with one of our first choices. It just took a long time for them to get back to us, but Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration” was it. We wanted there to be that funny juxtaposition of this heartfelt big ballad-y song with this insane violence, and so we ended up being okay. But that’s where they really charge you. They’re like, “We’re willing to license this, but because it’s over some fucked-up imagery, you’re going to pay a lot for that.” That was the most expensive license in the movie.
Maika Monroe told me that she was on the verge of quitting the industry, but then her experience with the two of you on Villains changed everything for her. Were you aware of her career crossroads at the time?
OLSEN I don’t think we were aware at the time, but once we wrapped, she did mention that to us. It’s obviously the biggest compliment we could ever receive. This is a really tough industry, especially for actors, and it can chew you up and spit you out. Sometimes, you feel like you’re up here because you’re in this huge movie, but then that huge movie bombs. There’s just so much that is outside of your control, and that’s why we always try to foster an environment on set that is fun. We’ve been on tons of movie sets as PAs, key PAs, second unit, and some of them are great. When it goes well, it’s like adult summer camp, and it’s the most fun thing in the world. But when it goes poorly, you usually have some assholes at the very top, whether they be the number-one star, the producer, the director. If you have somebody in one of those big three positions that is a little bit more of a hard ass, then everybody is walking on eggshells, and it’s not fun anymore. So it was really validating to hear Maika say that because we really do try to make our sets fun, inclusive places. People can bring up their ideas in a family environment, and to know that it rejuvenated her a bit was definitely a huge compliment.
BERK I think it was also fun for her to play against type. Maika and Bill both got to flex these amazing comedic muscles that they have.
OLSEN Screwball comedy.
BERK Exactly. Maika got to do this bubbly, fun character. It was the anti-Longlegs character, and I think it’s refreshing when you get to do that, especially when you’re used to being a scream queen. She would admit that herself, having done all these dour horror movies.
OLSEN Including one of our other movies, Significant Other.
BERK & OLSEN (Laugh.)
OLSEN Her character was definitely not as bubbly. She was a darker character who had some internal strife.
BERK It was still a fun set. So, like Bobby said, it was really, really validating to hear her say that. Our relationship with Maika is one of our most cherished in Hollywood. We’ve made two movies with her, and repeat business is not a guaranteed thing for actors and directors. So, for her to make a second movie with us, it’s emblematic of the mutual trust we have, and we will certainly be working with her again on something.
OLSEN She’s an unbelievable actor who’s capable of anything.
We have you guys to thank for the upcoming It Follows sequel, They Follow. Maybe that doesn’t happen without Villains righting her ship.
OLSEN Absolutely. We can’t wait for that. It’ll be awesome.
BERK We should get 2 percent of the backend on that.
BERK & OLSEN (Laugh.)
Speaking of Villains, because of the therapy doll in that movie, I always believed that M. Night Shyamalan would overcome the lawsuit involving his TV series Servant. Therapy dolls and reborn dolls are fairly common, and so he did in fact emerge victorious. Did the two of you follow that case at all?
BERK I didn’t follow along very closely, but I certainly was aware of it as it was happening. Ethan, the name of the doll in Villains, was more of a ceramic doll since it does shatter. So I felt like we were probably not going to be used as evidence in that court case, but it would’ve been pretty cool if we were.
You’re probably going to go on a water bottle tour because of Novocaine’s reception. If you could punch your own ticket, is there an IP you’d like to play with above all? Or even a Novocaine sequel?
OLSEN Yeah, we would definitely love to make a sequel to Novocaine. That would be fantastic. It would just be incredible to get the squad back together. As far as other IP goes, we don’t have some specific IP that we want to do. We grew up on big blockbuster movies, and that’s what we want to eventually work toward making. A globe-trotting adventure film really interests us, be it something in an Indiana Jones or National Treasure mold. That’s definitely something that we always talk about wanting to do.
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Novocaine is now playing in movie theaters nationwide.
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