If you’re not afraid of the dark now, you just might be after seeing ‘Vanishing on 7th Street.’ The new post-apocalyptic thriller by director Brad Anderson (‘The Machinist’) stars Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo and newcomer Jacob Latimore as a group of survivors trying to figure out how to sustain themselves in a world where everyone has inexplicably vanished.
This is a pretty unusual concept. What was your reaction when you first saw the script?
Newton: I really liked how spare the script was. And you could tell straight away that it wasn’t going to be looking for shocks and thrills. It was much more a kind of meditation on fear and -
Christensen: And death.
Newton: Yeah, and death. And it would rely heavily on what the actors brought to it, which I thought was… you don’t get those very often.
Did you have any idea about how you were going to get into character and approach it?
Christensen: What I liked about the script was the containment of it and how that would allow for real character exploration. We spent a lot of time in that bar. Just Thandie, John, Jacob and myself. And it really felt like we were putting on a play.
Newton: We had lots of night shoots in the freezing cold. It was like an endurance test. We had a lot of stuff to get through, so it was also everyone very keen to get the work done. So there almost wasn’t time to think about how cold it was. I love all of that.
Christensen: I think it also lends itself to the work. The nature of having to make a movie in such tough conditions in such a short period of time gave us all this sort of frantic feeling that we’re just trying to keep up with in the movie.
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