‘Leave the World Behind’ Director Sam Esmail on ‘Friends’ and Rogue Teslas

Sam Esmail sacrificed his hearing while making his new apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind. You see, in the Netflix adaption of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, there’s a noise so terrifying that it incapacitates the entire country — and Esmail had to get it just right.

“As a filmmaker, I was so excited to explore that aspect because sound is everything to me,” Esmail says. “There’s a fine line of making a sound haunting without actually having the audience get up and leave. I pushed it so much initially in the beginning that, and this is true, I actually permanently lost some hearing in my right ear. And because of that, I saved the audience.”

The folks in Esmail’s movie were not so lucky. The film follows the Sandford family as they embark on a Long Island vacation in a sleek Airbnb. Amanda (Julia Roberts), Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their two kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) are just settling in when the house’s owners, G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la), show up with the news of a massive New York City blackout. 

Tensions arise off the bat, as the Sandfords don’t quite trust the Scotts — in some parts due to ingrained racism — but this isn’t your usual Airbnb horror flick. As it turns out, the blackout is the least of everyone’s problems: oil tankers are beaching themselves, planes are falling out of the sky, and animals are ditching their normal migration patterns. The world, it seems, may be ending — and the two families need to decide to work together or strike out on their own.

Esmail spoke with Rolling Stone about bringing a book to the screen, end times, and the Friends theme song.

I’m a huge fan of the book your film is based on. What did you think when you first read it?
Well, I was terrified. I was on the edge of my seat. I probably sat in silence for about, I don’t know, five minutes. Weirdly, I was in an Airbnb with my family. This is peak Covid, so we wanted to just spend some time away. I took about an hour to read it all in one sitting. And it touched upon so many things that I found so relevant to what was going on. This idea that people can easily lose sight of their common humanity in the face of [danger]. Obviously, that was playing out in the real world. 

I just think Rumaan, in writing that book before the pandemic, touched upon something that was so essential to the way we have to live in modern society. And then, of course, his writing. The characters are so beautifully drawn. And one of the things that really struck me was this idea that he was kind of writing this disaster thriller, but really within the confines of the chamber drama. And I found that combination really compelling.

When did you decide that you wanted to make it into a movie?
When I got sent the book, obviously there was a sort of intention to consider it as an adaptation, but I didn’t want to think about that on my first read. So after that afternoon, I revisited the book and wanted to read it through and think about it as an adaptation. And I saw Julia as Amanda almost immediately, right away. 

But prior to reading the book — I’m a huge fan of the disaster genre — so I had this idea percolating in the back of my head about trying to construct a sort of disaster thriller centered around a cyberattack. Because I think cyberattacks — even though they’re out in the public consciousness — there’s something ominous but equally mystifying about them.

When I read the book the second time, because Rumaan kept the disaster element so vague, I immediately thought I could graft my cyberattack concept onto it, and it really wouldn’t change the mystique about the disaster or the crisis. And that then opened up the cinematic canvas of the story. It just started to all click into place that, “Oh, I see a movie here.”

It’s not a movie that’s going to be completely faithful to the book, but philosophically I never adhered to that, anyway. I think if you’re going to take something that works so well in the literary medium, it’s going to require a lot of changes to have it work in a cinematic one. So after that second read, I started to see a movie that could stand on its own and tell the same story that I think Rumaan was after in the book.

I remember when the movie was announced, I think Denzel Washington was initially attached because the character was compared to him in the book. What changed?
First of all, I’m a huge Pelican Brief fan. [Alan J.] Pakula is one of my favorite filmmakers and I just love that movie. And to have Julia and Denzel back together — that was really exciting for me. Scheduling conflicts got in the way, so Denzel couldn’t do the movie. 

But having done the film now with Mahershala, at this point, I can never imagine another G.H. I think he’s so great in that part. And the whole thing about G.H. is that I’ve always pictured him as this sort of Hitchcockian leading man, that sort of Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart, sort of savvy, but with an everyman quality to them. 

I was going to ask if the North by Northwest reference when G.H. was running from that crashing plane was intentional.
It’s not very subtle. Hitchcock is one of the greats. And in all honesty, I don’t think there’s a movie made in contemporary times that doesn’t show some influence by Hitchcock. I think he’s essentially invented modern-day film grammar, but clearly, his work was looming large over the film. And he’s just personally one of my favorite filmmakers.

Speaking of references, I can’t remember if the daughter in the book was watching Friends or not. Is that something you cooked up for her? For the readers, Rose is obsessed with the Nineties sitcom and just makes it to the finale when the internet goes out.
It is a very quick passing reference in the book. And then I kind of took that and ran with it and created this storyline that personally for me was the heartbeat of the film. At the time, like I said, this was pandemic times. During the early days of the pandemic, I remember how we were all very scared. We were scared for our loved ones, we were scared for one another, we were scared for ourselves. People were dying on a daily basis and we were locked in and trapped. There was this real sense of fear and anxiety. And then Tiger King dropped on Netflix and that was all we could talk about for weeks. 

As silly as that show is, I love that we as a community dropped our differences to engage with this story and to laugh with it and talk about it. I just found that very human. I love when you can mix tragedy and comedy like that because I do think the essence of tragic comedy speaks directly to who we are and to the human condition. 

So when I was constructing this story, I felt that throughout all this bleakness, to have this character, Rose, escape into something comfortable — I thought that was just something that felt like a kind of universal touchstone.

Did you anticipate in making the film that it would end with that amazing music cue? When Rose finally gets to watch the finale in a neighboring bunker and the theme song plays?
Oh, yeah. When I was telling you earlier I was reading the book the second time —that’s the ending I came up with when I finished the book. And once I saw that I almost couldn’t unsee it. Is there another way to get to an emotional catharsis that makes sense with this movie? Nothing ever felt right except for ending on Rose’s journey.

I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the visuals in the movie — planes falling out of the sky, an oil tanker plowing through a crowded beach. That must’ve been quite the effort to get those right.
I think the thing that grounded me was that, unlike most disaster films, our characters are not heroes in the traditional sense. So they’re not thrust into the middle of the action and they’re not overcoming incredible obstacles to circumvent whatever disaster they’re facing.

This sort of approach that we took, and really, I know it’s not in the book, but it stems from the spirit of the book, is that these characters are incapable of being heroic in these times. And I think that to me just is more relatable. I think most of us feel that way. 

For example, in the beach scene, it’s this sort of slow-motion trainwreck that’s coming at them. And their initial reaction is confusion. They’re not sure what to do. The simplest thing to do was just to get up and run, which is what they eventually do, but it’s their disbelief that this could actually happen that causes it to be a last-minute escape/getaway. And I sort of love that because it’s almost despite themselves that they get out of the way. 

You also had a scene where a bunch of Teslas turn on their self-driving functions to block the roadways. Did you get permission from Tesla for that?
No, I did not. Look, I wrote it in the script. I asked my amazing props guy, Bobby, to bring a bunch of Teslas out on the street. We shot the scene. I edited it in post, I showed it to Netflix, I crossed my fingers. And to this day, no one has said anything to me. So yeah, I’m hoping the movie comes out and no one will say anything.

Finally, I wanted to ask — obviously when you made the movie, things had not yet escalated in the Middle East. You have a scene where Ethan Hawke’s character encounters a drone that appears to be dropping anti-American messages in Arabic — and later, another character who heard about similar messages, this time in Korean. Can you talk a little bit about that piece of the movie — the disinformation element?
Honestly, I tried to follow the guidelines out of the playbook of how coup d’etats actually work, especially when it’s a foreign actor. Propaganda misinformation has been used before contemporary times. It’s an old tactic. I just took that and magnified it and heightened it to this situation.

For me, what was particularly risky about it is that when you get the first flyer and it is written in Arabic, the movie sort of lets that linger. Is this now announcing who the villain is in the film? It’s inviting you to follow that misinformation. 

I noticed the audience’s reactions around that in the film; their own biases started to get involved. But later, when you realize that other flyers with different languages are being dropped, you start to see that component. So it plays on your own biases and your own beliefs about who our enemies are, who could be behind this, as much as it does with the characters. And I love that. I always love it when you can remove the barrier between the audience and your protagonist.

Sam Esmail sacrificed his hearing while making his new apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind. You see, in the Netflix adaption of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, there’s a noise so terrifying that it incapacitates the entire country — and Esmail had to get it just right.

“As a filmmaker, I was so excited to explore that aspect because sound is everything to me,” Esmail says. “There’s a fine line of making a sound haunting without actually having the audience get up and leave. I pushed it so much initially in the beginning that, and this is true, I actually permanently lost some hearing in my right ear. And because of that, I saved the audience.”

The folks in Esmail’s movie were not so lucky. The film follows the Sandford family as they embark on a Long Island vacation in a sleek Airbnb. Amanda (Julia Roberts), Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their two kids Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) are just settling in when the house’s owners, G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha’la), show up with the news of a massive New York City blackout. 

Tensions arise off the bat, as the Sandfords don’t quite trust the Scotts — in some parts due to ingrained racism — but this isn’t your usual Airbnb horror flick. As it turns out, the blackout is the least of everyone’s problems: oil tankers are beaching themselves, planes are falling out of the sky, and animals are ditching their normal migration patterns. The world, it seems, may be ending — and the two families need to decide to work together or strike out on their own.

Esmail spoke with Rolling Stone about bringing a book to the screen, end times, and the Friends theme song.

I’m a huge fan of the book your film is based on. What did you think when you first read it?
Well, I was terrified. I was on the edge of my seat. I probably sat in silence for about, I don’t know, five minutes. Weirdly, I was in an Airbnb with my family. This is peak Covid, so we wanted to just spend some time away. I took about an hour to read it all in one sitting. And it touched upon so many things that I found so relevant to what was going on. This idea that people can easily lose sight of their common humanity in the face of [danger]. Obviously, that was playing out in the real world. 

I just think Rumaan, in writing that book before the pandemic, touched upon something that was so essential to the way we have to live in modern society. And then, of course, his writing. The characters are so beautifully drawn. And one of the things that really struck me was this idea that he was kind of writing this disaster thriller, but really within the confines of the chamber drama. And I found that combination really compelling.

When did you decide that you wanted to make it into a movie?
When I got sent the book, obviously there was a sort of intention to consider it as an adaptation, but I didn’t want to think about that on my first read. So after that afternoon, I revisited the book and wanted to read it through and think about it as an adaptation. And I saw Julia as Amanda almost immediately, right away. 

But prior to reading the book — I’m a huge fan of the disaster genre — so I had this idea percolating in the back of my head about trying to construct a sort of disaster thriller centered around a cyberattack. Because I think cyberattacks — even though they’re out in the public consciousness — there’s something ominous but equally mystifying about them.

When I read the book the second time, because Rumaan kept the disaster element so vague, I immediately thought I could graft my cyberattack concept onto it, and it really wouldn’t change the mystique about the disaster or the crisis. And that then opened up the cinematic canvas of the story. It just started to all click into place that, “Oh, I see a movie here.”

It’s not a movie that’s going to be completely faithful to the book, but philosophically I never adhered to that, anyway. I think if you’re going to take something that works so well in the literary medium, it’s going to require a lot of changes to have it work in a cinematic one. So after that second read, I started to see a movie that could stand on its own and tell the same story that I think Rumaan was after in the book.

I remember when the movie was announced, I think Denzel Washington was initially attached because the character was compared to him in the book. What changed?
First of all, I’m a huge Pelican Brief fan. [Alan J.] Pakula is one of my favorite filmmakers and I just love that movie. And to have Julia and Denzel back together — that was really exciting for me. Scheduling conflicts got in the way, so Denzel couldn’t do the movie. 

But having done the film now with Mahershala, at this point, I can never imagine another G.H. I think he’s so great in that part. And the whole thing about G.H. is that I’ve always pictured him as this sort of Hitchcockian leading man, that sort of Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart, sort of savvy, but with an everyman quality to them. 

I was going to ask if the North by Northwest reference when G.H. was running from that crashing plane was intentional.
It’s not very subtle. Hitchcock is one of the greats. And in all honesty, I don’t think there’s a movie made in contemporary times that doesn’t show some influence by Hitchcock. I think he’s essentially invented modern-day film grammar, but clearly, his work was looming large over the film. And he’s just personally one of my favorite filmmakers.

Speaking of references, I can’t remember if the daughter in the book was watching Friends or not. Is that something you cooked up for her? For the readers, Rose is obsessed with the Nineties sitcom and just makes it to the finale when the internet goes out.
It is a very quick passing reference in the book. And then I kind of took that and ran with it and created this storyline that personally for me was the heartbeat of the film. At the time, like I said, this was pandemic times. During the early days of the pandemic, I remember how we were all very scared. We were scared for our loved ones, we were scared for one another, we were scared for ourselves. People were dying on a daily basis and we were locked in and trapped. There was this real sense of fear and anxiety. And then Tiger King dropped on Netflix and that was all we could talk about for weeks. 

As silly as that show is, I love that we as a community dropped our differences to engage with this story and to laugh with it and talk about it. I just found that very human. I love when you can mix tragedy and comedy like that because I do think the essence of tragic comedy speaks directly to who we are and to the human condition. 

So when I was constructing this story, I felt that throughout all this bleakness, to have this character, Rose, escape into something comfortable — I thought that was just something that felt like a kind of universal touchstone.

Did you anticipate in making the film that it would end with that amazing music cue? When Rose finally gets to watch the finale in a neighboring bunker and the theme song plays?
Oh, yeah. When I was telling you earlier I was reading the book the second time —that’s the ending I came up with when I finished the book. And once I saw that I almost couldn’t unsee it. Is there another way to get to an emotional catharsis that makes sense with this movie? Nothing ever felt right except for ending on Rose’s journey.

I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the visuals in the movie — planes falling out of the sky, an oil tanker plowing through a crowded beach. That must’ve been quite the effort to get those right.
I think the thing that grounded me was that, unlike most disaster films, our characters are not heroes in the traditional sense. So they’re not thrust into the middle of the action and they’re not overcoming incredible obstacles to circumvent whatever disaster they’re facing.

This sort of approach that we took, and really, I know it’s not in the book, but it stems from the spirit of the book, is that these characters are incapable of being heroic in these times. And I think that to me just is more relatable. I think most of us feel that way. 

For example, in the beach scene, it’s this sort of slow-motion trainwreck that’s coming at them. And their initial reaction is confusion. They’re not sure what to do. The simplest thing to do was just to get up and run, which is what they eventually do, but it’s their disbelief that this could actually happen that causes it to be a last-minute escape/getaway. And I sort of love that because it’s almost despite themselves that they get out of the way. 

You also had a scene where a bunch of Teslas turn on their self-driving functions to block the roadways. Did you get permission from Tesla for that?
No, I did not. Look, I wrote it in the script. I asked my amazing props guy, Bobby, to bring a bunch of Teslas out on the street. We shot the scene. I edited it in post, I showed it to Netflix, I crossed my fingers. And to this day, no one has said anything to me. So yeah, I’m hoping the movie comes out and no one will say anything.

Finally, I wanted to ask — obviously when you made the movie, things had not yet escalated in the Middle East. You have a scene where Ethan Hawke’s character encounters a drone that appears to be dropping anti-American messages in Arabic — and later, another character who heard about similar messages, this time in Korean. Can you talk a little bit about that piece of the movie — the disinformation element?
Honestly, I tried to follow the guidelines out of the playbook of how coup d’etats actually work, especially when it’s a foreign actor. Propaganda misinformation has been used before contemporary times. It’s an old tactic. I just took that and magnified it and heightened it to this situation.

For me, what was particularly risky about it is that when you get the first flyer and it is written in Arabic, the movie sort of lets that linger. Is this now announcing who the villain is in the film? It’s inviting you to follow that misinformation. 

I noticed the audience’s reactions around that in the film; their own biases started to get involved. But later, when you realize that other flyers with different languages are being dropped, you start to see that component. So it plays on your own biases and your own beliefs about who our enemies are, who could be behind this, as much as it does with the characters. And I love that. I always love it when you can remove the barrier between the audience and your protagonist.