Don’t Move stars Finn Wittrock and Kelsey Asbille spoke with ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese about the tense thriller movie. The duo discussed the nuance of their roles, the big twist early on, and more. The film is now streaming on Netflix.
“A grieving woman hoping to find solace deep in an isolated forest encounters a stranger who injects her with a paralytic agent. As the agent gradually takes over her body, she must run, hide, and fight for her life before her entire nervous system shuts down,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Finn, the first 14 minutes of Don’t Move seemed like such a nice story, and then you just have to go and ruin it. What did you like most about the setup of this film? Because it plays so great.
Finn Wittrock: Well, that was my hope and still is my hope is that people watch the first 15 minutes knowing nothing about the story and think it’s a romantic comedy.
Kelsey Asbille: Yeah. It’s a rom-com.
Wittrock: Maybe if they stopped there, they’d go, “That was such a sweet film.” That was sort of the challenge of the whole thing is I really didn’t want to tip the hat at all about what was coming and really try to be as earnest and as in the moment as possible. Because when I first read the script, I really didn’t know what was gonna happen from page to page. I think our goal was kind of to make that the experience of watching the movie too. It was really being in the moment you’re in and then being shocked by the next thing that happens.
Yeah. You nailed it the whole time. I was like, when is this gonna be a horror movie? I was really just thrown for a loop.
Kelsey, you get injected with this drug, and your body is shutting down. How is it finding the physical nuance for those scenes? Because I was just so impressed by how you were able to show this inability to move and the variations of it.
Asbille: Oh gosh, thank you. It was a team effort. I was really nervous about going in, and I relied so much on the directors. Because you don’t know how the paralysis translates on screen versus what doesn’t. But I think that also our cinematographer was amazing, Zach Kuperstein, and so the camera really mirrors Iris’s movement. So I think that’s helpful for the audience to know what kind of stage she’s in emotionally and physically.
Wittrock: It’s great. If you watch it a second time, you can really track the camera and it’s literally following her ability. In the cabin, when she can’t move at all, the camera never moves at all. It’s all stationary shots. Then, as she sort of slowly gets it back, the camera starts to move a little bit till, by the end, it’s more frenetic.
Asbille: Yeah. So, really, the camera did everything.
Wittrock: Camera did it all.
Tyler Treese: Finn, when it’s just you and one other actor for so much of the movie, I assume such trust builds between you two as partners, right? Because you guys really are getting into a lot of crazy situations.
Wittrock: I’d say that’s true. I think it’s a good thing. I think we did. You trusted me? I trusted you.
Asbille: Yeah, we, yeah, we were just saying it really is. He was my dance partner in this.
Wittrock: Sort of a dance partner that doesn’t move too much.
Asbille: Right, right, right.
Wittrock: But we did dance. It was a good dance. It was a lot of time in a car together. It was cool to kind of find the nuance and find the arc of that and how their relationship changes. It is obviously an adversarial relationship, but there is a kind of bizarre understanding between them and a kind of recognition of each other. Not to say it’s happy, but there is a connection there.
Asbille: Yeah. Because I’m still most of the time, I just liked watching. I just got to watch the performance too. It was great.
Wittrock: I performed for her.
Kelsey, were those real bugs crawling on you during that one scene?
Asbille: Oh, my goodness. No. I had these really funny little dots all over my face that they then put CGI ants. We were in a true kind of undergrowth of this tree. So there were some creepy crawlies in there, which was… I’ll say that wasn’t my favorite.
Wittrock: One of the only CGI moments, though, in the movie. Most of everything you see is very practical. That was, I think, the Sam Raimi of it all. We wanted to sort of do everything in a very old-fashioned, practical, real way.
