Day One Director Took Unusual Inspiration From Ocean’s Eleven [Exclusive]

When we asked Sarnoski why food has played such a central role in both of his feature films so far (“Pig” is an all-time great food movie, and pizza occupies a crucial role in “A Quiet Place: Day One”), the writer/director explained:

“As a Midwestern boy, I love some good food. I mean, I think it’s related to also why I love having animals in movies. I think there’s something that I just find so relatable about when you point a camera at an animal or when you point a camera at an actor eating food, on a certain level, you know that you can’t be lying. Like, the audience knows that’s an animal and they’re going to do what animals do. And we never used, like, a CG cat in this movie for that reason — you always want to feel like there’s a reality to that which can’t be faked. 

It’s the same with watching people eat. There’s something that, I remember, even as a kid, I think it was in the ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ movie, when you’re watching Brad Pitt just eat tons of food the whole time, and you’re just like, ‘What is this feeling?’ There’s just something that you can’t — that’s just real. He’s just eating a hamburger. You’re always trying to sell reality in movies, but something about food and animals, you just don’t second-guess it because there’s something so fundamental about that.”

“Day One” isn’t a heist movie, and it doesn’t have the same breezy sense of effortless cool that Soderbergh’s film captured, but “Ocean’s Eleven” did help Sarnoski realize that, in a world now dominated by computer graphics and artificial intelligence and Photoshop and forgeries of all kinds, there are only a few things left that can’t be convincingly faked, and one of them is eating.

We spoke more about “A Quiet Place: Day One” on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:

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