I See You's Shocking Twists Created Quite A Challenge For Director Adam Randall
The 2019 thriller "I See You," starring the recently unheard Helen Hunt and John Tenney, is currently kicking up a fair amount of buzz on Netflix. Viewers are impressed by the film's barrage of wild twists. But, as it turns out, keeping the needle in the right place on those narrative turns through the ending of "I See You" was one of the film's biggest creative challenges.
That's according to the film's director Adam Randall, who not only had to keep the twists thick and heavy without becoming overwhelming but also had to handle the film's unusual dual-perspective structure. So it's significant that he refers to the film's ability to shock and surprise viewers without overloading them with false leads as "a challenge" to bring from the script to the screen.
The comments came in a 2019 interview between horror magazine Scream, the director, and "I See You" stars after the film's premiere at the South by Southwest film festival. Randall went deep in his answer when asked about the film's ability to keep viewers on board and engaged while staying unpredictable and surprising: "It was definitely a challenge. I think the big twists in it were in the script so I can't take the credit for those. That was all Devon Graye's doing. But how we achieved that and how we made it feel believable and satisfying, that was the real challenge for me."
Randall said getting the plot exactly right required some last-minute alterations
While "I See You" director Adam Randall gives credit for the film's plot twists to screenwriter Devon Graye, he also acknowledged that getting those plot twists to work perfectly on screen required a little bit of elbow grease. "Every time you read the script and analyzed it and broke it down, you kept asking yourself, 'How does that make sense? Surely the audience would know that!' And then there were also moments of deep clarity like three days before the shoots where I would be like, 'Holy sh**! This doesn't make any sense at all. We've got to change it,'" the filmmaker said.
John Tenney had some more insight into Randall's creative process, which seems to have emphasized collaboration. "Adam would sit with the actors and talk to them about their parts and about literally every line in each scene as there were things that came up because we kept bringing our perspectives to the story because we'd really been reading into our characters and discovering things that maybe he hadn't," said Tenney.
And even though bringing "I See You" to the screen posed a challenge to Randall, he ultimately seems to have been gratified by it creatively. "So that was really challenging, but the joy of making it was creating this puzzle and trying to envisage how the audience was going to react," the filmmaker said. " And then I'm hoping that people will want to go back and watch it a second time to try and spot things that maybe they didn't notice the first time round as there are so many little misdirects in there."
"I See You" is now streaming on Netflix.