Filmmaker Antoine Fuqua and actor Jake Gyllenhaal previously teamed on 2015 boxing drama “Southpaw” and more recently shot a remake of the 2018 Danish contained thriller “The Guilty” together…sort of.
Unfolding in real-time and within the confines of a frenetic 911 dispatch centre in a Los Angeles in the midst of wildfires, Gyllenhaal stars as an embittered police officer demoted to answering emergency calls the night before a disciplinary hearing.
He’s soon interrupted by a cryptic call from a woman (Riley Keough) who appears to be attempting to call her child, but is in fact discreetly reporting her own abduction.
Working with the clues she is able to provide, he throws his skill and intuition towards ensuring her safety. As the severity of the crime comes to light, his own psychological state begins to fray and he is forced to reconcile with demons of his own.
The film was shot over just eleven days and speaking with EW, the pair reveal that things almost were derailed due to a COVID scare as Fuqua came in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID a mere 48 hours before the shoot was to begin.
The filmmaker consistently tested negative himself, but the strict COVID production protocols meant he had to be off-set for the entire eleven days. So they figured out a way around it so Fuqua could continue with his duties:
Gyllenhaal: “Because Antoine subsequently tested negative for days afterwards, we decided to get a van that was outfitted with screens and park him a block away, hardwired to the stage where we were shooting. We’d FaceTime each other after these 25-minute long takes. He’d give me direction, I’d take it down, we’d do another take. We never saw each other in-person the entire shoot.”
Fuqua: “I had to have eyes on set [and] our main cameras, and a way to communicate with my actors via Zoom and phone, when it needed to be private, and I would only physically see each other from behind the studio wall. Jake would climb on a ladder and I would open the door to my van, and we would communicate. I definitely missed the close contact with my crew, but everyone stepped up and we found a way.”
Ethan Hawke, Peter Sarsgaard, and Paul Dano co-star in the film with “True Detective” creator-writer Nic Pizzolatto adapting the script. “The Guilty” set to debut on Netflix on October 1st after hitting theaters the week before on September 24th.