(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros / Sela Shiloni)

Writer and director Drew Hancock’s debut feature Companion is one of those movies that’s best seen knowing as little as possible about it. Taking its cues from psychological thrillers, sci-fi stories, slasher flicks, and even romantic comedies, the filmmaker has threaded the eye of multiple needles at once.

It starts on familiar footing: Sophie Thatcher’s Iris and Jack Quaid’s Josh are a seemingly picture-perfect couple heading off for a remote weekend getaway with friends. It’s the beginning of a thousand similar stories, only for Companion to reveal itself as something entirely unique. It’s a hard movie to talk about too much without giving the game away, but what can be revealed is that Hancock can’t wait for audiences to see it for themselves when it hits cinemas on January 31st.

“It’s crazy,” he admitted of how it feels knowing the project, which was first announced in February 2023, is finally gearing up to arrive on the big screen. “I use the word surreal a lot because it’s a very surreal experience. It’s been almost exactly four years since I came up with the idea. From a place where I didn’t even know if this movie was ever going to get made to getting it made and getting a theatrical release. Yeah, it’s just crazy.”

The fact the teaser and full-length trailer have been viewed over 17 million times combined indicates that there’s a lot of anticipation for Companion. That said, not every director is obligated to check how many times the promos for their work have been watched. However, Hancock isn’t one of those filmmakers.

“Oh, believe me, I know,” he confessed. “I checked those view counts. It’s very important to me; I want to make sure that people are aware of this movie. And so, I kind of check YouTube a little too much, I would say. It’s exciting that people are seeing the trailer and the teaser, and it’s gaining momentum. People are talking about it. For an original movie that’s not based on any kind of pre-existing IP or being a sequel? Yeah, it’s special to see that it’s catching on.”

The aforementioned trailer did give away one major element of Companion: that Iris is a robot. Hancock acknowledged that it was a “pretty decent-sized reveal” but stressed that it’s not exactly a spoiler. “There is so much more,” he said. “There are twists, turns, and a tonal pivot that reinvents itself every ten, fifteen minutes”. If anything, he’s underselling it dramatically.

Plenty of viewers will go into Companion knowing that Iris is a robot, but few will leave without being surprised at least once. For a first-time director, touching base with so many disparate genres and combining them into a razor-sharp, smart, and scathing blood-soaked debut that also has plenty to say about the trials and tribulations of modern relationships is as impressive as it is ambitious, but where did it all come from?

“Strangely enough, the logline just popped into my head, fully baked,” he explained. “I was looking for something to write that represented my voice. Literally, the day that I decided to sit down and start thinking of what my next project to write was, these two sentences popped into my head.”

What were these sentences? Short, sharp, to the point, and largely reflective of what Companion ended up becoming. “Three couples go to a cabin in the middle of nowhere. One of them finds out they’re a robot about to get shut down, and things go haywire.” It was a fertile burst of creativity, even if it took Hancock by surprise: “I don’t know where that came from, but yeah, I’m glad it did.”

Backed by Barbarian director Zach Cregger’s production company BoulderLight Pictures, there was early talk that Cregger could potentially direct Hancock’s screenplay. As it turned out, he was already so immersed in building the world of Companion that he outlined himself as the perfect candidate, regardless of the fact he’d never helmed a feature.

“I always say that I’m a realist; I just wanted the movie to get made,” he offered. “Sometimes, when you’re a first-time director, that can hinder a studio from saying yes or no to it. So when I started getting interest from BoulderLight and Vertigo, I was willing to take a step back and be like, ‘Yeah, let’s just, you know, whatever, to get this movie made. Let’s do it.’ And if that means me not directing it, that’s fine.”

“Luckily, Zach Cregger became involved, and I worked with him polishing the script. And there was a brief moment where he was thinking of directing it,” Hancock confirmed. Fortunately, his enthusiasm was too infectious to ignore. “I think I was needling him a bit too much about how he would shoot it. I was always looking at it from a filmmaker’s perspective, and I think he very, very wisely and graciously realised that the best thing he could probably do is just to step out of the way and let me direct it, and he would shepherd it and mentor me throughout the process. So I owe everything to Zach Cregger.”

Hancock has extensive experience as a writer, director, creator, and even actor across film, television, shorts, and web series dating back almost two decades, but features were always the goal. As he put it, “I found myself in a position where I wasn’t being offered opportunities for jobs that I wanted, and that’s where Companion came from.”

He decided to bet on himself, and his desire to “sit down and create something that reflected the movies that I enjoy” paid off. Speaking of which, with sci-fi, slasher, thrillers, rom-com, and even shades of the heist caper thrown in for good measure, Companion plays in many different sandboxes. It wasn’t his intention to craft a deliberate genre-bender, though, but an organic part of the creative process.

“The very first draft of the script was what I’ve been calling Black Mirror-lite. It was very dramatic and didn’t have any humour. The heist element wasn’t even part of it yet. And I realised, ironically, since this was supposed to be the project that reflected my voice, I was denying my voice at first. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that I was like, ‘Make it all the things you want to make it.”

Armed with the mantra that Companion “could potentially be the last thing I write,” Hancock’s renewed approach was simple: “Why don’t we just do everything? Every kind of movie. Just throw it in there and see if it works.” On paper, it’s risky to pivot from relationship drama to revenge-fuelled rampage and back again, but throwing everything into the blender only served to create a refreshing and delicious concoction.

To that end, Far Out will be demanding a share of royalties should Companion ever be marketed as a Coen brothers-esque remake of The Stepford Wives, with the caveat that one of those Stepford Wives just happened to be a Terminator. “Can I just steal that?” Hancock asked. “That should have been my explanation of the movie this entire time. I love that.”

“Because there are so many genres and tones that we’re balancing, you really needed to have a throughline that made it not feel like when you’re watching it, it’s whiplash,” he elaborated. “At its core, I always talked about this with department heads, the DP, the actors: this is just a relationship drama. We treat this as a relationship drama. Don’t worry about what kind of movie it is, in this moment.”

Sure, it’s got shady Russians, gruesome murders, flashbacks, non-sequiturs, resonant commentary on how the lines between humanity and technology are continuing to blur beyond recognition, and what it means to be alive, but at the end of the day, Companion is “the story of a woman realising that she’s in a bad relationship and she’s gaining empowerment through self-discovery,” according to Hancock.

That simple statement provides the backbone from the first scene to the last, and while the film was in production, Hancock instructed everyone involved to “never think about anything other than that as we’re making it. That’s our prime directive, is to make that movie.”

It seems relatively straightforward, but it required a complex performance from Thatcher. For the first half of Companion, Iris doesn’t even know she’s not human. When she does, everyone in her immediate vicinity is either conspiring to kill or manipulate her for their own agenda. It requires several individual emotional arcs, and that’s without even mentioning what happens when the shit really hits the fan.

“You’ve hit the nail right on the head,” Hancock agreed. “This is really two roles in one. You have the docile, passive version of Iris, and you need to buy that she’s weak and unwilling to rise above and stand up for herself. And then there’s a literal moment in the movie where she flips a switch, and she becomes something else. She becomes more empowered, and it’s almost like she’s a badass action star.”

By his own recollection, Hancock saw roughly 300 self-taped auditions, but nobody captured the duality he envisioned. Some could do the shy, meek, and retiring side of Iris but weren’t believable when she became the aggressor. On the other hand, there were others who were so convincing at being badass that they couldn’t convince as the docile version of Iris.

As the first cast member to board the production, a chemistry read with Quaid was integral to the process, and only one name took the director’s breath away. “It was just immediately apparent that it was going to be her or the movie is not going to get made,” he said of Thatcher. “Because she’s Iris.”

Quaid’s performance is another one of two halves, requiring the affable star to play a doe-eyed and lovestruck romantic lead in the beginning, only to gradually reveal himself to be a much more sinister, sneering, and manipulative presence as things progress. In a way, the actor channels both of his parents by starting out as Meg Ryan before evolving into Dennis Quaid, which once again entitles Far Out to a slice of the royalties.

“If I repeat that, I’ve never heard that before, and if I repeat that, I’m stealing that from you,” Hancock exclaimed. “Because I’ve never thought about how he’s perfectly like a Meg Ryan to Dennis Quaid arc. That’s fucking amazing.” It was an element of the performance that hadn’t even dawned on him before speaking to Far Out, but casting the rising star was a lot more serendipitous than the arduous process of tasking Thatcher to bring Iris to sentient life.

“I hadn’t even really thought about who I wanted for that role,” Hancock shared. “Our agents are part of the same agency, and he had gotten the draft of the script slipped to him; he read it, and he set up a meeting with me, and immediately we met at a coffee shop. He sits down, and I’m looking at him like, ‘Oh my god, I just love this guy.'”

In the most complimentary fashion, Hancock viewed Quaid as perfect for Josh because “he’s so charismatic, and you need someone for that role to be likeably unlikeable because right out of the gate he’s saying awful things to her.” One concern was “the danger you could get an actor that you just want to punch in the face immediately,” a quality the second-generation star fortuitously doesn’t possess.

Companion spins so many stylistic, tonal, and genre plates in the space of a single scene, but it was a tightrope that Hancock was always aware he was walking. Putting it down to the editing process and multiple screenings to give him a sense of pacing and what was or wasn’t working, the filmmaker had to thread the eye of the needle to find the best version of his film.

“That was the toughest needle to thread, I think, in the editing process,” he acknowledged. “Walking that delicate tightrope of like, ‘Let’s not give the audience whiplash, let’s ease them into each tonal shift’. It should feel like a new movie, but it shouldn’t hit them over the head. It’s easy to give everyone the directive, ‘Treat this like a relationship drama; let’s not shoot the movie to make it look like a sci-fi movie or a thriller’. But then, when you have all the materials, and you’re trying to put it together, that was the toughest part to do, to master the tonal shifts.”

Not only are there multiple tonal shifts to navigate, but it’s all happening within the confines of a batshit insane genre movie that also has plenty of thematic subtext people can identify with or relate to, whether it’s toxic relationships, the adverse effects of long-term loneliness, or social media’s idealised version of what life should be, a sweet spot that Hancock felt comfortable hitting in the midst of Companion‘s chaos.

“I think that comes from a place of needing to relate as a writer to all of your characters,” he mused. “And so, all of their insecurities are tapped into your own insecurities. Because we’re all humans, and we’re all similar to each other. We all have similar obstacles and weaknesses, and tapping into that makes them feel like they’re not coming from these one-dimensional mouthpieces for a theme. Theme comes last. It’s really more about, ‘Are these characters experiencing relatable emotional experiences, and are they reacting to them in a way that people can see in themselves?'”

Another way to describe Companion is subversively familiar; audiences familiar with rom-coms and horror will see a meet-cute, the new girlfriend struggling to ingratiate herself into a long-established friend group, and the ominous, isolated house where everyone gathers for the weekend where the action takes place. Hancock is fully aware that all of these things border on cliche, and he relishes the chance to take the tropes everyone knows and tear them apart both figuratively and literally.

“That’s my favourite thing to do. I like to take the familiar and then spin it on its head. The most perfect example in the movie would be when Iris breaks up with Josh, and she says, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’. It’s a line you’ve heard a thousand times. And I even got some pushback from people reading the script being like, ‘This is a little obvious’. I’m like, ‘No, it’s not obvious because it’s a robot breaking up with a human’. It’s never been done before. I’ve never seen that line be used in that context. If you’re going to do something that’s been done before, how can you subvert it and make it different and fresh and interesting?”

With so much going on once all hell breaks loose, Companion, in essence, boils down to a relatively simple narrative crux: Josh is planning to use the weekend getaway as a means to sever his ties with Iris. Obviously, that’s a massive oversimplification, but one of two anchors Hancock constantly returned to.

“If you think about the movie like kind of binary, you have Iris’ story and Josh’s story,” came the response. “Iris’ story is rooted in the signposts for someone dealing with a toxic relationship and how she gets out of it, and kind of hitting that throughout.” Josh’s story, meanwhile, is “a little more rooted in our relationship with technology.”

Digging deeper, Hancock wanted to explore “what would happen in a world where our phones look like human beings, and how that would affect us.” Pointing to Josh specifically: “He kind of objectifies everyone because he can’t tell the difference between Iris and his friends. It’s a future I hope we don’t get to, but you can see it now. The social media experience dehumanises everyone. What happens when your phone looks like a human being? How are you going to treat other human beings, not just robots?”

Just because his debut feature is out of the way, Hancock isn’t about to let himself be swallowed up by the Hollywood machine. The writer and director suggests that he “wouldn’t like to force myself to be in a position where I’m just making something for the sake of making it.” If he were hypothetically presented with a blank cheque to make anything he wanted at any cost, it’s not an offer he’d be willing to accept.

“Sometimes we forget that we’re making movies to make more movies, and so they need to make money. And so the bigger the budget, the harder it is to eke out a profit that justifies you making more things. Sometimes, I think we’re in a position right now where a lot of movies are treating money irresponsibly, like these gigantic movies on Netflix that are like $150million movies. To me, I don’t want that much money. That’s so much pressure.”

Companion didn’t break the bank compared to the majority of releases to emerge from a high-profile studio like Warner Bros, and that’s where Hancock is happy to remain. “We’re at a weird time where the mid-budget movie is dying,” he said. “I think all of my favourite movies exist in the mid-budget range. I think it’s really sad that those are the movies that aren’t getting made because those are the risky movies. Those are the ones that are a little out there. Sorry, went on a little rant there.”

There’s nothing wrong with going on a rant, especially when it’s about something as important as safeguarding the future of cinema.