At the same time, the pair embarked on a directing career as well, helming 2015’s Vacation sequel/reboot and now the original comedy film Game Night, starring Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler and Jesse Plemons. Apparently the studio behind the film, Warner Bros., liked what it saw when the duo delivered Game Night: they’re in talks to write and direct Flashpoint, the reality-and-time-bending standalone Flash movie that could reset the DC film universe in more ways than one. We tried to pry what information we could about that project out of Goldstein and Daley while also talking about their savvy take on Game Night. Den of Geek: Tell me how this project kind of came into your orbit. John Francis Daley: Yeah, I’m a big fan of thrillers. I love surprise endings and twists and turns and to be able to straddle those two tones was really exciting for both of us, I think. Goldstein: Bateman was attached as a producer from the beginning of this and we convinced him to play Max, and then Rachel McAdams came on and we were really psyched. Goldstein: I think she’s been offered movies like Spotlight and all these sort of much more dramatic roles, but she always had, I think, this very comedic arsenal. But that’s how Hollywood works. They tend to think of you as the thing you did most recently that did well and that’s what they want you to do. So she’d just come off of doing a super serious movie, Disobedience, and so I think she was ready to do something that was a little lighter. The idea of game night is very weirdly specific. Did you have your own memories of family game nights or things like that which you kind of channeled into the movie? Daley: Yeah. I mean I would throw game nights almost every weekend for a good two years at my house. We would play Mafia and it was a chance for everyone to drink a lot and yell at each other. And what I found with it is there’s something very cathartic in that, where you get to let off steam under the context of playing. I liked the idea of setting a film around that dynamic where you have a bunch of highly competitive people, who are all in it to win, sort of thrust into this circumstance they don’t even realize how deep they’re in. Goldstein: I wasn’t a big game night person, but I was a big game player as a kid and I had an older brother who would always beat me at everything and so I think I carried some of that rivalry into adulthood and really wanted to build that into the relationship that Max has with Brooks, his older brother who’s always been successful, handsome, all that stuff. Did the script change a lot? Goldstein: We did sort of a two-pronged pass on it. One was the drama, one was the comedy. The drama that was in there didn’t really hang together logically, and was really important to us because a good thriller does that, even if you’re not following the plot, subconsciously on some level you are. If you think about a James Bond movie, you never know what the hell’s going on. You go from action set piece to the next. But for us, we at least wanted it to hang together and so that was a big re-imagining of plot points and specifics, like the whole gang going to the mansion wasn’t in there, all that kind of stuff. (to Daley) Right? Daley: They go to a big house, but something entirely different happens. But also, what helped kind of inform that requirement that we had to have it all track was when we worked on Spider-Man. The strict adherence to making sure that the villain plot track and everything that he was doing when he was going from point A to point B had logic and reason to it, because very often in superhero movies or just action movies in general, you, like Jonathan said, don’t really know what’s going on. And it’s important to us to keep the stakes up and have the audience know exactly why they’re going to every location that they’re going. That said, it gets pretty twisty and turny throughout our film, so it does require paying a certain amount of attention to what has been established as real, has been established as falsehood. Was there a lot of trial and error with that in terms of balancing the comedy and the thriller elements? Daley: No. Honestly, just to give an example, for the music, we got Cliff Martinez, who has never done a comedy before. The most lighthearted thing he probably ever did was War Dogs for Todd Phillips. But generally he’s done Steven Soderbergh’s films, a lot of Nicholas Winding Refn’s films, not the person you generally think of as the go-to for a comedic movie. Daley: That was a conscious effort on our part because we are not a fan of music or lighting, for that matter, that tells the audience that you should be laughing. We think that the joke should not at all be related to bright colors. You know, if you have a character wearing red, it’s supposed to be funny! We really wanted to make sure that we were strictly abiding by the rules of the thriller. Goldstein: I think I mean the truth is most studio comedies do not look great because there’s not that emphasis placed on that. It was important to us to have this movie have a specific look. How did you come up with the idea of the big establishing shots looking like game boards and then pushing in until they become real? Goldstein: That was something we talked about early on. We wanted to convey a sense visually that these characters are themselves pieces in a game that’s being played with them at the heart of it, and so that was a way of doing that visually. We did it with visual effects and using drones and it was a recurring sort of motif through the movie. You talked about Rachel earlier, but I also think people are going to be talking about Jesse a lot coming out of this movie. Daley: He’s incredible. I mean, he’s good at everything he does and we knew he would nail it from the get-go, but we didn’t know the extent to which he would nail it. I mean, the first day of our rehearsals when we did a table read, he said his first line and I remember looking over at Jonathan and thinking, “Oh my god, we hit the jackpot with this guy. He’s perfect because he’s not at all trying to be funny. He’s playing this character. He has inhabited this character in a way that you don’t normally see very often.” Let me make the usual awkward transition here, not to put too fine a point on it, but there was a news flash about you guys recently… Daley: Where are you going with this? Daley: Well, we’re very excited at the possibility. We’re in negotiations right now, so we can’t really confirm anything or say much about it, but we will say that we’re a huge fan of the comic book, we’re a huge fan of the character, we love that he is not your traditional super hero, like Batman or Superman who have their shit together and are filled with angst and aguish. Goldstein: Yeah, in much the same way that Peter Parker is sort of the entry level way into the Marvel Superhero Universe, they both share that quality that they’re still a little excited to have these powers and they’re newbies and all that. I was going to say, on a hypothetical basis, do you have an approach that you’d like to take? Daley: We do have a take on it, but we can’t really get into it. Are the two of you a hive mind on the set or do you delegate jobs between each other? Daley: Generally, we are a hive mind. Sometimes we disagree on things and in that case we try it both ways. It’s very important to us that we each get what we want out of a scene or performance because it only gives us more options after the fact. Game Night is out in theaters now.
