Interview: Carter Smith on ‘The Passenger’
Carter Smith first emerged onto the scene with his equal-parts provocative and evocative 2006 short, Bugcrush, a haunting, deeply disturbing study of sexuality and consent that firmly put his name on the map. So much so, that Smith was hired by DreamWorks to direct their $25M adaptation of acclaimed horror novel The Ruins in 2008. From 2008 up until 2022, Smith had only directed one other film – 2014’s excellent and emotional psychological thriller Jamie Marks is Dead, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim, prompting many fans of his work to wonder what exactly the filmmaker has been up to all those years.
It seems, however, that Smith is finally back for good, with two films releasing in 2023 alone, the first of which was Swallowed, a dark, twisted thriller that also serves as the perfect follow-up to Bugcrush in terms of themes and visuals. His latest film, and the second to release in 2023, is The Passenger, a film produced by Blumhouse Television that has just been released on VOD. A gripping, surprisingly moving psychological thriller, The Passenger stars Johnny Berchtold as Bradley, a recent high school graduate who works at a local fast food restaurant, where he is targeted by his manager and co-workers alike. One day, Bradley’s mysterious co-worker Benson (Kyle Gallner) snaps, going on a brutal, violent rampage that ends up changing the course of both of their lives as they know it.
It’s a taut, tightly-paced rollercoaster ride of a film that is elevated by Smith’s careful, empathetic direction and the performances at the heart of it, both of which are undoubtedly amongst the best of the year. But it’s the chemistry between both actors that really makes the film soar, thanks to an overall well-written screenplay that dives deep into the core of what makes both of these men tick. The duality between the characters, Smith says, is also what drew him to the script. “It’s the relationship between the two of them at the heart of it,” says Smith when asked what made him want to direct the film. “I’m a genre fan. I love horror. I love all things bloody and messy and scary, but at the end of the day, if I don’t care about the characters that are going through this stuff, I won’t care about the film. Plus there’s the fun, road movie elements [to the film.] But at the end of the day, it’s a character piece about messed up characters that are finding a tender sweet spot with each other that not only surprises them, but also surprises us as an audience.”
Similar in tone and character dynamics to other recent two-handers like Always Shine and Queen of Earth, both powerful acting showcases for their leads that demonstrated their range and capabilities, The Passenger lives and dies by the performances of its two main actors, a sentiment Smith more than agrees with. “The two of them were just amazing together,” he gushes over his two leads. “They were just so good. From the very first time we got them on film, I knew that it was going to be magic.” However, in order to ensure that the film would work on any level, Smith knew how important it was for him to get the casting right for both of the film’s central roles. “Johnny [Berchtold] put himself on tape. I watched his tape that he sent in and I was blown away,” says Smith. “I was like, ‘That’s Bradley, that’s the Bradley to beat,’ from very early on. So many of the choices that he made in that tape were so spot-on. I could tell that his instincts were super spot-on, and that this was the type of Randy that I was interested in exploring.”
And while Berchtold manages to perfectly capture the meek, introverted nature of the guilt-ridden Bradley, the character of Benson is a more complicated one. Dark, unpleasant and off-putting, it’s only thanks to Gallner’s larger than life performance that audiences will easily be able to connect with him despite the atrocities that he commits throughout the film’s runtime. “When I read the script, I sort of found myself falling for Benson in a way,” says Smith. “Like actively rooting for him and wanting things to be okay for him even though you know they really are probably not going to be okay considering what he’s done. There was something so conflicted and so complicated about that. I felt it would be really fun to dive into that.”
Because of just how important the character of Benson was in the script, Smith knew he had to find the right actor for Benson for the film to work at all. “I’ve been a fan of Kyle [Gallner] for a long time,” he says. “I knew that he had this ability to flash between menacing and tender. I just knew that he could capture the scary side of Benson that was bubbling just under the surface but that he could also be sweet and brotherly. That’s an interesting and kind of difficult mix, to be honest, but it’s Benson as a character. It would also have been pretty easy to go over the top with him, too, and that was something that I really didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to go into crazy Nicolas Cage territory, you know? I mean, I’m a fan of that in its own time and place but I didn’t feel like this film needed that. It needed more of a subtle approach to what was going on under the surface.”
And while both Swallowed and The Passenger were met with mostly positive reviews from critics and audiences alike upon release, that hasn’t always been the case for Smith and his films. Initially met with middling reviews and a less than stellar box office performance when it was first released, The Ruins has recently been undergoing a re-appraisal of sorts, with fans of the film coming out of the woodworks to share their love for their film on everything from social media to podcasts to YouTube videos. Smith says he is amused but also flattered by the sudden resurgence for the film. “Where were all these fans when it came out? Everybody says they love it now but when it first came out, we got nothing,” he says, crediting the newfound love for the film to podcasts. “I think we have podcasts to thank for that because there wasn’t an arena for people to actually discuss it when it came out. I only started realizing once people were having in-depth, hour-long conversations about The Ruins as a slasher movie that people actually liked it. It makes me happy because I spent a lot of time after that film feeling like a failure because it wasn’t received the way that I hoped it would be.”
However, now that he’s put out two films in the world in the same year, both of which were more warmly received, is Smith back for good? “Hopefully, now that these two films are being released back-to-back, we’ll get some momentum and it won’t be that long before the next one,” he says. “And also now, after making Swallowed with a crew of eight people like a true micro-budget film, there’s no excuse to not make a film because now that I know how to make a film on such a small scale. There are so many great super indie, small-scale films, like The Outwaters and Skinamarink, that are getting made now and getting seen now, which I think is super exciting.”
The Passenger is now available on VOD.