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Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto on Don't Breathe

Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto on Don’t Breathe

Dylan Minnette and Daniel Zovatto, two of the trio of young leads in Fede Alvarez’s new thriller Don’t Breathe which premiered at the SXSW film festival this weekend, come as a pair. Having worked together on and off for several years up through the ranks of young Hollywood leads, they have developed an easy on and off camera reparte which is obvious on screen even when their characters don’t like each other – such as youthful burglars Money and Alex in their latest film – don’t like each other. It’s even more obvious off screen as they start their joint interview of answering a simple question about the flavor of iced coffee Daniel has completely in unison.

Dylan Minnette: That is how we’re starting – in synch – vanilla bean frappuccino.

Daniel Zovatto: Starbucks, give me money.

ComingSoon.net: This is a different kind of thriller in that there are only a handful of parts and one real location but also that large chunks of it are silent. The antagonist played by Stephen Lang doesn’t talk and your characters as the young burglars try not to, to keep from being discovered. How do you prepare for that, how does it affect your performance?

Daniel Zovatto: He didn’t talk to anyone for two months.

Dylan Minnette: Yeah, I locked myself in a closet for two months. How was that for you?

Daniel Zovatto: Bro, I didn’t stop talking for the whole movie. This is all you.

Dylan Minnette: That’s true, then I’ll go. Uh, I knew that I didn’t want to be the one who talks all the time. No, the biggest challenge for me was knowing that I could sell it. Purely being silent, having fear on your face, I was nervous because it can look cheesy, it can look like I’m doing a bad comedy. It needed to be as real as possible and then trusting yourself. That was the challenge, selling a look on your face. And how do I come up with new fear faces? I can’t have the same face the whole movie. How do I look different and scared?

Daniel Zovatto: Did you do a lot of mirror work? [miming looking in a mirror]

Dylan Minnette: A LOT of mirror work. In between takes I’d go into my room and just look in the mirror.

Daniel Zovatto: You didn’t have a pocket mirror?

Dylan Minnette: A pocket mirror!

CS: The tricks of the trade are coming out.

Dylan Minnette: Completely.

CS: What was it that made you want to do these parts? Was it the characters, the story, Fede?

Daniel Zovatto: For me I remember reading the script and I loved Money and he was badass and someone I’d never played and it gave me a chance to mess around with a different look. Obviously I’d seen Evil Dead and I knew I wanted to work with him and I knew it was a great opportunity and that really attracted me and throughout the process he [DM] was in it, I was in it, I’d worked with him before so I was like ‘let’s do another one.’

Dylan Minnette: That was exciting.

Daniel Zovatto: How about you, buddy?

Dylan Minnette: I was so listening to your answer that I forgot what the question was.

Daniel Zovatto: What attracted you to the part?

Dylan Minnette: Oh yeah.

Daniel Zovatto: Other than me.

Dylan Minnette: Of course. First off it was Fede because I loved “Evil Dead,” huge fan of that and this was only his second movie and people were waiting for it. But also getting into Alex, and I thought it was f*cked up, I didn’t see stuff coming, and it was going to make people talk. And Daniel and I both read with different people on the same day but didn’t have the job yet so I saw him there and was like ‘I thought you were going for my character …’

Daniel Zovatto: And I was like ‘no, I’m here for Money.’

Dylan Minnette: And I thought there’s no way we’d both get it, and then we did and that’s when it was like ‘I want to go to Budapest with Danny.’

Daniel Zovatto: Which was also an interesting part because we were going to do it in Toronto and then at the last minute ‘we gotta go to Budapest.’

Dylan Minnette: Yeah, it was ‘you got it, you got it, oh and you’re not in Toronto anymore.’

CS: Was that weird? You’re supposed to be in Detroit, but then you’ve got to leave from your hotel in Budapest in the morning and get back into that. Then you’re in Detroit.

Daniel Zovatto: We were blessed in having Naaman Marshall, a great production designer, who created a great set. I mean, you can’t even tell if it’s Brooklyn, Detroit or Budapest. And for us as actors we really felt that house was Detroit. It was magical. And then we went to Detroit and that was crazy. I’d shot there before so I knew that world but I’d never been to the proper ghetto. You kind of understood why we chose that house, the way it was isolated. Gave it more life, I suppose.

CS: The movie just jumps into the story, gets you guys into that house as quickly as possible so we see a little bit of who these guys and what’s driving them, but did you know more, did you discuss more about their background? Did you have really full ideas who these guys were?

Dylan Minnette: Definitely. If the cut now is what the script was, I would have had a lot of questions, but I didn’t really need it because I knew on paper who this character was. There was a lot film, particularly a lot with my character. We were watching the film and going ‘oh that didn’t need to be there,’ ‘oh that didn’t need to be there,’ and there’s still so much left to go through. I think you will eventually see those scenes. There are still things to be learned about these characters.

Daniel Zovatto: I think for the three of us we really sat down and discussed why are we together, where do we come from, what is the history that takes us to that house and I have the capacity to bring it up to him saying ‘yo, there’s six figures in there, let’s do this.’ That was all discussed between us so that gives us something to fall back on in playing it but later like Dylan said there are a lot of scenes that weren’t in the film that don’t need to be in it. They describe more who we are, but that vagueness of it really taps the feel.

Dylan Minnette: At least for me all it was was stuff with my dad and it explains Alex’s justification, ‘we only steal things that are insurance claimable, people get their money back, they get nicer stuff…’

Daniel Zovatto: You’re a little bit more anal.

Dylan Minnette: Yeah. Exactly. It shows that Alex has convinced himself that he’s doing a good thing.

Daniel Zovatto: The innocent one of the group. And it reads that way now, you don’t need all that other stuff.

Dylan Minnette: There were romantic elements on our part [between their characters and Jane Levy in the film’s love triangle].

Daniel Zovatto: On both ends, but it’s still there.

Dylan Minnette: It’s completely there.