Inside ‘Songbird,’ The Pandemflick That Has Made Hollywood History

The groundbreaking pandemflick, Songbird, made Hollywood history.

“We were the first,” enthused the thriller’s director and co-writer, Adam Mason. “I’d been working on a movie for Blumhouse, and then we got shut down after five days of pre-production. I went home, very despondent and scared as I think most people were in the industry at that time, just wondering what the hell was going on. The next morning, the first day of the official stay at home measures in LA, my writing partner, Simon Boyes, called me up. He pitched me the idea that we should use this time, this collective experience, to make a movie on our iPhones and laptops, and use technology to put together some kind of story.”

“We weren’t quite sure what it was. We spent the day on the phone, going back and forth, going over ideas, trying to turn the situation into something positive. We weren’t looking for a budget or any money. We were going to try and put together a film ourselves with our friends. We came up with Songbird. It was more of a monster movie at that point, like Cloverfield, where everyone was locked in their houses, thinking it was a pandemic but then segued into becoming this other reality.”

He continued, “We sent that document to Adam Goodman, who used to be the production chief at Paramount, not expecting very much. He got back to us the very next day, basically greenlighting the movie. He was very excited and wanted to go straight away. I wasn’t expecting it. Two weeks later, Michael Bay came on board, and suddenly all of these other people got involved. It became a real proposition, a real movie.”

Bay is known for his involvement in such hit films as Armageddon and The Rock and multibillion-dollar franchises like Transformers. He also produced the highly successful film series, The Purge.

“I would say there was a lot of Michael’s DNA in the movie,” Mason explained. “For example, we had the cinematographer from The Purge movies, so visually, there is a lot in common with those movies. That is very helpful when you have to pull something like this together at such short notice.”

For the filmmaker, originally from the UK, everything slotted into place at what was considered to be the worst possible time for the film industry. Filming in a pandemic was uncharted territory.

“I think everyone is just trying to find a way back to work because the whole town shut down on that Friday or whenever it was,” Mason explained. “It was a fascinating creative process because it wasn’t just about telling a story, or any of the usual bulls**t that comes with making a movie in terms of development. Everything had to be built from the ground up in terms of safety. At every turn, we had to ask the question, ‘How can we do this?’ It wasn’t a script that we had written two years ago and then dusted off and changed to suit the circumstances. Every word of it was written with safety in mind.”

“It was so unusual, and it was creatively very freeing. It was the opposite of any experience I’ve had since I moved to LA 14 years ago. It kind of reminded me of why I wanted to make movies in the first place. Everyone just wanted to be making something, so there was a real sense of excitement and togetherness. Everyone pulled together to try and make something that did seem to be impossible at the time.”

Songbird boasts an ensemble cast led by K.J. Apa and Sofia Carson as the couple at the heart of the story. It also boasts Bradley Whitford, Demi Moore, Paul Walter Hauser, Alexandra Daddario, and Peter Stormare. Mason didn’t expect the response that he got from the cast.

“I was surprised,” he confessed. “I didn’t know what to expect. I think that the movie was buzzy enough and made enough noise back at the very beginning to get people to at least read the script. Once they read the script, I think they were very intrigued to talk to me because the script was probably, in many ways, the opposite of what I would imagine they might expect. It’s inherently a love story.”

“It’s a very hopeful movie, so generally, once actors spoke to me, I think that they were very quickly able to feel more at ease in terms of the safety aspect of it. I was very pleasantly surprised by the reaction we got. We went out to actors, and ultimately, it was a great creative experience.”

He added, “The fundamental backbone of this movie is a love story between the characters of Nico and Sarah played by K.J. and Sofia. That didn’t change at all from the page to the production. There was quite a lot of tinkering with the world-building stuff in post-production. That was entirely because of what was happening with the virus in the lockdown in real-time. We were trying to solve logic issues having this worst-case scenario of what the world might look like four years in the future if things didn’t get better and evolving all the time during post-production right up until when we finished. It is still changing.”

While others were at home, Mason was making the most of the lockdown.

“A lot of the shots, the LA city stuff, I went out and shot that myself with my drone and my camera because the world we were living in was kind of eerily similar to what was on the page,” he recalled. “There were rules of the world we created that we had to figure out. We wrote the script in three days because we were working on such a truncated schedule. The script that we filmed was 140 pages for a movie that ended up running for about 85 minutes. A lot of stuff got cut out, but that gave us a wealth of material to play with.”

As Songbird debuts on PVOD for $19.99 for a 48-hour rental, the coronavirus pandemic rages on. However, but there is light at the end of the tunnel after almost a year of disruption.

That said, the world created in Songbird by Mason and Boyes might live on past the pandemic. Could it be the Bay’s next franchise?

“It’s a world that we created that I would like to revisit, but it wasn’t like we were having lots of conversations about franchises because, frankly, we had our hands full just trying to get the movie finished,” he said. “Every single aspect of it was a huge challenge. It was unlike anything else I’ve ever been involved in. The simplest of scenes was anything but simple because of the COVID factor. So, no, we weren’t thinking about a franchise or sequels or any of those things, although I do think that we built a world and characters that would be fitting for more stories.”

Songbird is available on PVOD now.

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