In theaters January 31st from Warner Bros. Pictures, Companion is an unhinged horror-adjacent genre exploration with a fresh, original take on the ‘cabin in the woods’ scenario. Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid star as Iris and Josh, a young couple in an unhealthy codependent relationship who are traveling to an isolated lake house to meet up with friends. What begins as an idyllic getaway goes haywire when one of their own turns up dead.
After years honing his craft in television, writer/director Drew Hancock debuts a complex feature that merges horror, sci-fi, and dark humor into a wild, thought-provoking ride at the cinema. The product of Hancock’s experience at the short film festival Channel 101 and years of writing for shows like Blue Mountain State, Suburgatory, and Mr. Pickles, Companion showcases Hancock’s knack for unconventional storytelling.
Determined to transition out of television, Hancock followed up his series My Dead Ex with a writing sample that ended up in the hands of BoulderLight Pictures, which maintains a multi-year first-look feature agreement with New Line Cinema. It quickly caught the attention of key figures, including producer Zach Cregger, the multi-hyphenate behind 2022’s horror hit Barbarian.
Some 48 hours after Hancock had written ‘The End,’ four producers were attached. Originally set to direct the film, Cregger played a crucial role in transitioning Hancock to the helm, encouraging him to bring his vision to the screen. As Companion arrives in theaters from Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema, Boxoffice Pro sat down with writer/director Drew Hancock to discuss his fearless feature debut and breaking out of the box.
You’ve been honing your voice as a writer and a director on television for years. How have those experiences shaped or informed the approach to your first theatrical feature?
I would say the biggest lesson is that I’ve made a ton of mistakes for 15 years. I learned from those mistakes and became battle-scarred. I grew and reflected on what I’d done wrong and how I could be better. It’s just the experience of working on so many great TV shows and learning from great showrunners, writers, and directors; seeing how they work and having a ground-level view of how good TV and movies are made. It was immeasurably helpful for me.
What were some of those big takeaways?
Each job is different. I have a healthy dose of imposter syndrome, which I think a lot of creatives have. You question whether you have the abilities to do that. I found myself on set a lot of time seeing directors work and recognizing this isn’t a mystical process that only a select few can do; this is accessible. You just have to have a calm head on your shoulders. It’s really just directing department heads and creating little guidelines and boundaries for your actors. I’d love to demystify the whole process and just say anyone can really do that job. It took me a lot longer to realize that, I would say, than it probably should have. But now I’m in my 40s, and I directed my first movie.
Companion is challenging to talk about because the less you know about it, the better. What was your journey like bringing this story to the screen?
The conception of the idea came out of necessity. I found myself in a position where I wasn’t getting the job opportunities that I wanted. I was living comfortably as a TV writer, but I was in this box of straight comedy. I really love genre stories; I love horror, thrillers, and sci-fi. Anything with ghosts, serial killers, or robots. That’s my jam. I had to sit down and be like, “Well, why are we not getting the job opportunities that I want?” It was really my own fault—I didn’t have a writing sample that represented my voice, which is sad to say, having worked in the industry this long.
I sat down and was like, “Okay, well, put your money where your mouth is and write something.” I generated a bunch of ideas, and Companion was one of those ideas. That’s probably why there are so many different tones and what makes it so hard to market. I treated it like this might be the last thing of mine that anyone reads, so let’s just try throwing everything at the wall. Let’s make it a heist movie. Let’s make it a thriller. Let’s make it a relationship drama. Let’s add some comedy and just see if this weird cocktail of tones and genres would work as a cohesive whole.
One of your favorite films is Fargo, and I think that’s a good context to talk about Companion because it defies and blends the lines of genre in the same way.
Fargo is like my barometer, my North Star. If you read that script—the dialogue and character descriptions—it could easily come off as a cartoon. They’re just kind of absurd. As a location, it has an otherworldly accent; it just feels weird. Then you add Carter Burwell’s score, which is almost operatic in a way. It makes it so much bigger. Then you add Roger Deakins’ beautiful cinematography.
It’s this mishmash of all of these things coalesced into an oddity that just adds up. I love that you can’t put that movie in a box. You can’t say it’s this or it’s that; it’s everything. I’ve always loved that. With the Coen Brothers, all their movies are kind of like that. They’re almost experimental in the ways that they play with tone.
Companion works in very much the same way; it’s not just one thing. The tone, the pacing, and all of the genre elements come together—Companion isn’t going in a box either. Did you stay fairly close to what you wrote during filming? Did you find new things on set? What was that process like?
I don’t want to paint a portrait that the first draft is what we shot. I went through many, many, many terrible drafts, and it just got better and better. By the seventh or eighth draft, it was like, “Okay, this is what the movie should be.” From that point forward, it really didn’t change. I think that the biggest thing that got excised comes from my tendency to overwrite. I don’t put a lot of trust in my abilities as a writer. Sometimes I have characters say too much; what they’re feeling. You get in editing, and you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t need that. That’s said with a look, or that’s already implied.” You don’t have to have a character saying what they want, what they need, and how they’re feeling all the time.
So it was really just stripping back. I know that when Picasso would paint, he would say, “What’s the minimum number of lines I can use for you to understand what this is?” That’s kind of what the editing process is. It’s stripping away until everything is necessary; everything is needed.
As much as this is Iris’ story and Sophie’s movie, it’s also a great ensemble piece, and you strike me as a filmmaker that sets a very collaborative tone on set.
I’m very proud of that. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t do that, because directing is already such a lonely job. You’re surrounded by people, but you have to make all these decisions. You’re in your brain going like, “Is this the right decision? Is this the wrong one?” You have at your fingertips brilliant minds that are all specific in their job titles. Not just the actors, but lean on your costume designers, your makeup artist, and your director of photography. Everyone has interesting ideas, and your job as a director is to refine the ones that don’t really fit the story that you’re telling.
If you can come at it with a very clean directive that makes people understand, “Oh, this is what the movie is,” it makes your job a lot easier. For Companion, [I asked] that no one approach it like a sci-fi movie. It shouldn’t feel like anything other than a relationship drama. I didn’t want this movie to look like Minority Report. I wanted it to look like Marriage Story.

Although technology is at the forefront, there’s a very vintage vibe to the film that comes across particularly in the music and the costume design. How did you work with your team to create that world?
For production design, you always want to make decisions filtered through the lens of story. It’s not just a location devoid of technology because that was easier. The character Sergey is very dismissive of technology, and he’s living in the past. We didn’t have to fill [the set] with screens. It does take place 15 years in the future, but it also has a timeless, vintage feel to it with CDs and a gas-powered car. That was specific to the character.
For Iris’ wardrobe, that’s all Sophie. We’d originally talked to Vanessa Porter, the costume designer, about what Iris should look like. The interesting thing about Iris is that she’s not making any decisions herself. All of her choices are filtered through Josh, through the male gaze. He’s chosen how she looks, how she acts, her likes, her dislikes, and so on. Our first instinct was, maybe we make it kind of 90s’ Britney Spears, a very infantilized version of a female and go in that direction.
Then Sophie came in and it became very clear immediately that that wouldn’t work with her, it would be false and fake to have those kinds of outfits on her. It was her idea to spin it towards more of a French New Wave, 60s style. Once you put those outfits on her, she looks natural in them. It fits with her overall aesthetic but also has a doll-like quality to it. It feels very Stepford Wives, like she’s playing dress-up, which is fantastic. That all comes from collaboration and keeping your ears open to the best idea. It doesn’t necessarily have to come from you, but the best idea always wins out.
As a writer/director, what’s this moment like for you, having a theatrical release with your feature debut and the support of New Line Cinema and Warner Brothers?
I’ll tell you when I come back down to reality. I’m very disconnected from everything. It’s just surreal. I wrote this movie as a writing sample. I didn’t even intend to direct it. Making a movie is akin to navigating a maze. It’s very easy to stand at the end of the maze and look back and think about all the decisions that you made that were correct, that got you there, but there are so many false paths, false starts, and wrong turns. There’s an enormous amount of luck involved. People have to say yes and it’s so much easier to say no.
So for me to be standing here at the end of the maze, looking back, I can’t process it. It’s been a crazy four years since I came up with the idea. I finished writing it three years ago. We started shooting it two years ago. We edited it last year, and now it’s coming out. It’s been a blur, and it’s only getting more surreal as we get to the finish line.
I can’t wait for audiences to discover it, because January is always a great time to find a gem in theaters.
I hope so. I’m sure you’ve seen that last year the top 10 movies were all sequels. If you look at the 10 movies after that, most of them are based on pre-existing IP. I think everything except for Longlegs, so there’s not really an appetite for original ideas, and we forget sometimes that the sequels had to start somewhere. I really hope that the appetite for original ideas opens up and studios start making things that we haven’t seen before; that we have a renaissance in terms of storytelling.
I think the appetite is there. The challenge is making that connection and capturing audience attention. Warner Bros. is doing that now through some great marketing initiatives. I texted the ‘Find Your Companion’ phone number [978-878-5683]—and thankfully had the forethought to explain it to my wife.
Yeah, it’s so funny. In making this movie, I had to tell my girlfriend, “Don’t look at my internet history, because there’s a lot of research. That’s not me being curious; that is research.”
What were some of the most memorable movie theater experiences for you growing up?
My high school years were when I really started discovering my love of movies. That was happening in the mid-90s. That was just a remarkable run of movies from the mid-90s to 1999, which culminated in me working in a movie theater.
I remember distinctly, vividly, sitting in the theater seeing Pulp Fiction for the first time and being mesmerized. I was looking at my watch, not because I was bored, but because I was thinking, “I don’t want this movie to end. I want this movie to keep going and going and going because I love these stories. I love these characters.” It was weird, interesting, and had such a unique voice. That was profoundly effective to me.
I look young now, so at 15 or 16, I looked like I was 10. My friends and I would go to theaters, and I would get turned down at the box office. You’re too young. You don’t have an adult with you. So we would go to movie theater after movie theater until a theater would let us in to see Pulp Fiction. I think I saw it four or five times.
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