Interview: Adam MacDonald Talks THIS IS NOT A TEST and Zombie Horror
- 1 minute ago
- 4 min read
In Adam MacDonald’s latest film, THIS IS NOT A TEST, based on the New York Time best selling novel from author Courtney Summers, Sloan (Olivia Holt) and a small group of her classmates take cover in their high school to escape their suddenly apocalyptic hometown. As danger relentlessly pounds on the doors, Sloane begins to see the world through the eyes of people who actually want to live and takes matters into her own hands.
For the upcoming release of THIS IS NOT A TEST, Creepy Kingdom’s Shannon McGrew spoke to director Adam MacDonald (Pyewacket, Out Come the Wolves). During their chat, they discussed everything from adapting Courtney Summers' bestselling novel and working with Olivia Holt to crafting the film's nonlinear structure and creating the unique zombie sound design.
Hi Adam! It’s great to chat with you! I really loved the movie and was curious whether you had previously heard of Courtney Summers’ book before signing on for the film.
Adam MacDonald: I discovered her book maybe six years ago. I was doing research for my own pilot about teenagers and zombies and wanted to know what else was out there, and “This is Not a Test,” by Courtney Summers, came up. I read it and knew I wanted to do this because I was enamored with it. I loved the character Sloan and her journey, the zombies, and Courtney’s prose are just so beautiful.
I reached out to her directly, I DM’d her on Instagram, of all places, and told her how much I loved her book. I was very lucky because she knew of my film Pyewacket, which helped. She offered me the right to shop for a while, and eventually, I got it off the ground. I finally found a producer, Cybill Lui, who felt the same way I did, and that’s how we got it off the ground.
As we see in the film, the story is non-linear, going back and forth between who these high school characters were before the zombies and who they are now. How did you make sure everything stayed consistent?
Adam MacDonald: My OCD. I overprep, and I’m always hyper-aware of everything and how something could link with something else while trying to keep a visual language. You are also constantly having an influx of questions every day. As a director, you have to have answers, so if you overprep, and it’s exhausting to do, everything is just tightly together, so all it has to do is manifest itself on the day. You keep pushing it forward, and then you collapse when you finish shooting [Laughs].
In most apocalyptic films, we are shown that survival is the goal. But with Sloan, it’s far more complicated. How did you work with Olivia to get into the headspace of someone who isn’t sure she still wants to be here?
Adam MacDonald: That was almost like an undercurrent that was personal to her, that Rhys (Froy Gutierrez) obviously picks up on, but no one else does in the movie. Her sister, Lily (Joelle Farrow), sees it at one point, but she doesn’t realize how bad it is. She knows how bad the situation is, but she doesn’t see how broken she is inside.
For Olivia, I’m sure it was difficult; she had to carry that through the whole shoot, and that’s taxing. She knew what the movie meant to me, and she worked really hard and was very professional. She understood the story. She understood Sloane. That’s what she brought every day. We briefly touched on the subject [of suicide] when we met the first time, and why the movie was important to me. It was like her own private movie inside herself every day. She had me tearing up every other day.
I really enjoyed the sound design and found the zombies to have a unique sound I hadn’t heard before in previous zombie films. How much thought went into the creation of the zombie noises?
Adam MacDonald: I love this question! I think you’re the first person to ask me that [Laughs]. You have to make [the zombies] your own. I love Train to Busan, “Black Summer,” etc. We made the decision early on, cause in the book they have cataracts and white eyes, and I was like, I’m going to go for more sadness, I want to do something different. Their irises were full black, but I wanted to make their irises a little bigger, a little darker, so you could see humanity.
A lot of the zombie noises are my voice. What we did was, I’m letting the cat out of the bag, I thought, when there are zombies, their vocal cords are split and not working together as they should be, so they’re almost on top of each other. It’s like they’re broken, and now we are figuring out how to get them to work again. What we did was take every zombie, which took so long, but each one has its own kind of stamp. They have their own voice. After we finished, the great sound editors split the voices, moved one octave higher and one octave lower, and then combined them. They’re the most unique I could do, and it rang true cause we tried a few different things, and then we did this, and I was like, yup, that’s it!
THIS IS NOT A TEST arrives in theaters on Friday, February 20th.