30 Things We Learned from Parker Finn’s ‘Smile 2’ Commentary
Physical media is where it’s at, friends, because if you have the movie you can watch the movie, period. Another reason to love your 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD collection? Special features like commentaries featuring filmmakers, critics, and other film fans. After living for more than a decade elsewhere on the internet, Commentary Commentary has been reborn here at Dread Central—and as is fitting for its return from the dead, it’s now all about the horror.
Writer/director Parker Finn struck gold with his feature debut, 2022’s Smile, as it thrilled audiences and dominated the box office with its tale of trauma, demons, and evil grins. A sequel was inevitable, and last year’s Smile 2 once again landed as both a critical and commercial success. I’m in the minority of not being the films’ biggest fan—the scripts are the culprits with their messy handling of that trauma theme, the wobbly internal logic, and an over-reliance on hallucinations. But there’s no arguing with Finn’s directorial chops and some truly stellar visual effects and production design.
Smile 2 is new to disc and comes loaded with deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and more. What more, you ask? Why, a commentary from Parker Finn, of course! Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Smile 2 (2024)
Commentator: Parker Finn (writer, director, producer)
1. The big question, when it came to a sequel, was how to start—and Finn always knew he wanted to open up with the return of Joel (Kyle Gallner) as a way to continue directly from the first and connect it to these new characters.
2. Once he settled on how to bring Joel back, he also knew he wanted to present it as a oner. He warned Gallner that it was going to be intense, and the actor was more than game to pull it off. They found a house in upstate New York in the process of being gutted, and once they made some mild fixes to make it safe and functional, they got down to executing this very cool shot. The only “cheat” is a stitch edit as Joel dives out the window.
3. He wanted to introduce Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) via a talk show to help build her credibility as a successful pop star. Drew Barrymore’s show was a natural fit, as he “loved the idea to bring somebody who has some genre cred.”
4. Finn points out a little Easter Egg of sorts saying that the television set the show is playing on starting at 8:18 is actually the set in Louis’ apartment where Skye ultimately ends up. “It felt like there was something fun about this being fate almost, or predetermined that she was going to end up there.”
5. He views Scott as the “perfect storm” of a performer and ideal for the role as she manages to convey the big X-factor of a mega-star while also showing real vulnerability in the character’s private moments. Scott does her own singing and dancing here, and “it was really fun to just kind of unleash her in this film.”
6. Finn collaborated with his production designer, director of photography, and costume designer to create Skye’s world—“glossy, and flashy, and sparkly, and felt very much like a pop star’s world”—and that included going in on the motif of reflective surfaces all around her because Skye can’t escape herself.
7. Lewis was written expressly for Lukas Gage as he and Finn had recently become friends. The director knew he was more than capable of handling a character who needed to be both intense and comedic.
8. “Across the entire film, there was this goal… to avoid anything that felt too horror trope-y,” he says, adding that they wanted the fear, scares, and horror to arise from the context as opposed to obviously spooky environments. More horror filmmakers should take note.
9. While the first film’s inciting incident involved a sharp object, Finn wanted to go the opposite direction here when it came to Lewis passing on the curse to Skye. He wanted “to find just the heaviest, bluntest, most brutal thing that somebody could clobber themselves to death with.” The 35-pound weight fit the bill.
10. For the curious among you, Skye’s vomit at 24:05 was a mix of Kombucha, food coloring, and protein powder.
11. That’s an upside-down drone shot in Manhattan that then transitions into the window of Skye’s condo at the Wentworth Building. They were allowed to use the actual Woolworth building, but they had to change the name. The condo interior of which was filmed on a soundstage in Upstate New York.
12. Finn will always take the opportunity when possible to build a set over filming on an interior location. “I love the control that it gives you,” he says, adding that “you can build towards how you want to shoot it versus having to adapt a scene or a shot list into a location.”
13. The carpet pattern in Skye’s dressing room is a nod to David Lynch and the Black Lodge.
14. They shot the arena scenes at the MVP Arena in Albany, NY.
15. FInn points out how genre films often give their protagonists cell phones that won’t function—no battery, no service, etc.—but he’s a proponent of giving the character the phone, “but just don’t let it help them at all, in fact, if the phone can make things worse for them that’s even more fun.” He adds that it’s a nice challenge for horror filmmakers, and it’s an excellent point. That said, ideally that challenge wouldn’t be answered with “surprise, it’s all a hallucination!”
16. No, they didn’t make a product placement deal with Voss Water. “We wanted to find a bottle that had an interesting look… and Voss just felt like the clear winner.”
17. The film is filled with elaborate set-pieces and striking production design, but the “Blood on White Satin” dress rehearsal sequence at 58:24 “was one of the most challenging elements of the entire production.”
18. Finn had the pleasure of destroying the dressing room himself with a baseball bat. It’s unclear if he took that work from a union member.
19. He gave a speech at CinemaCon a few years ago, and he recalled being reliant on a teleprompter for what you’re saying. The fear of that breaking stayed with him, and he leaned into that idea to make Skye’s life so much more miserable.
20. Ray Hudson, the character who died in the car crash with Skye one year prior, is played here by Ray Nicholson. He’s Jack Nicholson’s son, so of course Finn took the opportunity to “do a small homage” to The Shining with Ray’s costume palette.
21. There’s some specific animal imagery used around Skye throughout the film including the rabbit, the snake, and the tiger. Finn says it’s a small thing, but fun to lean into, and the idea is “that Skye is all three of those animals at different moments.” Curiously for a character named Skye, none of these animals can fly.
22. Finn’s not above recycling effective bits with minor tweaks as evident in the beat where Skye is watching Lewis’ video about the shadow in the corner of his room. It’s an echo of the sequence in the first film where Rose keeps listening to Laura’s audio file because she thinks she hears a voice. “The hope was that if you got scared by the WAV form scare in Smile that if this scare also gets you, that you might be like ‘dammit, I can’t believe I let that get me again.’”
23. He acknowledges that some audiences may have come into Smile 2 hoping to learn more about the entity and its mythology, but “I tend to be of the belief that things are much scarier when you lean into the unknown.” So yes, that means those of you looking for answers are shit outta luck… for now, at least.
24. They did five takes of the oner that starts at 1:21:22. But, they only had three plates of glass due to be smashed in the bathroom. He stopped two of the takes early, but the other three ran all the way through. Yes, that does mean she had to chug five bottles of water.
25. “I really wanted to treat this entire sequence almost like a Cirque du Soleil performance from hell,” he says, of the fantastic set piece involving her dancers-turned-smilers invading her condo in synchronized fashion.
26. The beat where Skye’s mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) suddenly shifts into a smiler at 1:33:22 was inspired by a sequence in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings when Bilbo sees the Ring after many years and lunges for it. “That always scared the shit out of me.”
27. Finn points out one of the film’s many hidden smiles at 1:47:40 created from cables and lights.
28. The sequence in the abandoned Pizza Hut sees Skye finally reach the point where she’s able to stand up to the entity, control her own destiny, and take her own life. It’s too late, of course, and the smiler being is simply letting Skye think she’s won so it can break her and take her over. “I wanted this to feel like, when she realizes she’s on the main stage, to feel like a slow-moving train crash that we’re sort of trapped and forced to watch.”
29. He always knew that he wanted the smiler’s true form to emerge in a different way with Smile 2, and Skye’s stomach scar was the obvious choice. As to the creature design itself, “I’m a big fan of manga artist Junji Ito, and I was really inspired by his work, and I wanted to do something that felt like that level of body horror, of just gleefully demented, disgusting strangeness.”
30. “I always want to start practical and put as much in front of the camera as I possibly can,” and to that end, legendary f/x artist Alec Gillis—who also crafted the smiler creature and the film’s other gore gags—made a practical version of Skye’s face, mouth, and throat being peeled open by the smiler. It ultimately didn’t work, but they used the models to inform their effective-looking CG take instead.
Quotes Without Context
“I love working with Kyle Gallner. I think that he’s just the absolute bee’s knees.”
“Every time I watch this scene he just makes me laugh so much.”
“One of the inspirations for this scene was actually Boogie Nights.”
“I love walking that narrow lane between something being frightening but also nervous maybe to the point that you’re laughing because of the absurdity of it. That’s very much Smile in a nutshell.”
“This was a lot of fake blood, real tears, and real snot landing right on an optical flat in front of the lens, and our first AC was very much a trooper having to constantly clean that off between takes.”
“We did not actually throw an 87-year-old woman off the stage.”
“That was lychee and prosciutto as her eyeball.”
“I’m sorry, Staten Island, it was just low-hanging fruit.”
“Pizza is just as funny as Arby’s to me.”
The End
The Smile films are horror stories built on hopelessness and characters who lack agency, and that’s where they lose me as a genre fan. My tastes aside, though, you have to respect Finn’s commitment to his ideas and the artistic ways in which he brings them to life. Smile 2 is a beautiful-looking horror movie, and his commentary reveals a filmmaker who thinks through every aspect of his production while surrounding himself with extremely talented people in their own various fields. He doesn’t mention anything about continuing the story with a third film, but even with my misgivings on the details, I’d still love to see where it goes after this film’s potentially apocalyptic ending.
Categorized:Editorials
