By Fred Topel | Image property of Summit Entertainment.
P2
P2 is an action/thriller set in a parking garage. A crazy parking attendant (Wes Bentley) stalks a woman (Rachel Nichols) working late at the office. Confined to the space, director Franck Khalfoun originally worried about the restraints, until he started thinking about it.
Franck Khalfoun on Floor P2
"That's the thing," Khalfoun explained. "You first come up with the idea, 'I'm going to do a movie in a parking lot.' The first thought is, 'How can we ever make this exciting? It's one place. She's going to push on the door, scream and then what? What else can we get out of it?' Really when you start coming up with ideas and all of the different places, staircases and elevators and under cars and above cars, we realized that we had too many ideas and we had to take some out. It's about being creative with nothing really, the basics. I think everybody from our decorators to the production designers to the DPs to the actors had to go deep into finding creative ways of making this movie have range and be different from scene to scene. Our lighting had to change. The art direction has to change from floor to floor. You're really working with the basics to try and create a mood."
Even some real life parking lot stories had to go in the final cut. "The urban legend, which we had written in at one point and took out, was the slashing of the Achilles heel from under the car so the subject can't run away. That was in the script at some point and disappeared for one reason or another, but that's one of the great urban legends I think."
Of course, the ultimate example of a movie confined to a single location is Die Hard. "Die Hard obviously was something that we thought about, without being pretentious because that's one of our classic action movies that we loved growing up. We thought about all of those and we looked at all of those movies to see what we could take from it and most importantly, what they had already done and try to stay away from that and try to be original."
Khalfoun also fought to keep the film realistic, down to the villain being a normal looking, even handsome guy. "I know there were conversations with our producers about whether or not the monster should be a monster or whether he should be a normal guy. I've always been more on the normal guys that go crazy is a lot more scary and a lot more relatable than the boogieman. So I fought for him to be able to create a perhaps plausible relationship between the two of them. If they were taken out of this parking lot, if they were in any other situation than this one, could they perhaps end up being together. Could his paranoia, neurosis or obsession with her be somewhat justified? Of course, just because I'm a parking guy doesn't mean that we can't be together. The closer we were able to create that relationship, the more I think it made it scary when the guy flipped out on her."
P2 opens to theaters on November 9th.
For the poster, trailer and more movie info, go to the P2 Movie Page.
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