The origin story of Drop — the new Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes thriller that sees a widowed mother’s first date upended when she starts receiving anonymous, threatening messages to her phone — began three years ago when its producers were vacationing in Italy.
Cameron Fuller and Sam Lerner were mid-dinner “in a packed restaurant and someone started AirDropping very creepy Shrek memes” to Lerner’s girlfriend Olivia Sui.
“We tried to figure out who it was the entire night, and they kept coming and we couldn’t figure it out,” Fuller, who produced the film with Michael Bay and his father Brad Fuller, told The Hollywood Reporter at the Los Angeles premiere on Tuesday. “The whole meal was about targeting the one person who was doing this. We followed the one person we were 100 percent sure it was to the pool where we could isolate their AirDrop with ours and we’d know it was him, and it wasn’t him. We never figured out who it was, but a movie spawned out of it.”
AirDrop is a feature on the iPhone that allows you to share photos and documents with nearby Apple devices, without requiring a person’s phone number. “I’m drinking a bottle of wine and I’m like, ‘This is a brilliant idea for a movie,’” executive producer Lerner recalled of the real-life dinner. “It’s the best thing that ever happened was this person AirDropping us.”
After returning home, the pair reached out to writers Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, who Lerner had worked with on 2018 horror film Truth or Dare, and came up with the idea of a threatening AirDrop barrage while in a packed restaurant on a first date.
Meghann Fahy stars as main character Violet, who is on a date with Brandon Sklenar‘s Henry while her sister babysits her young son at home. The AirDropped messages quickly escalate from memes to threats that she must kill her date or else her son will die.
Fahy, who has previously had breakout roles in The White Lotus and The Perfect Couple, took on the thriller genre for the first time with the project, as she noted, “I loved it, I would love to do more. I learned a lot. I have a very newfound understanding for what actually goes into it, even the simplest thing that you’ve seen 100 times that you think that’s so easy — it’s not, it’s actually really, really fucking hard.”
She also talked about the movie’s inspirations and that it in conversations with director Christopher Landon, it “felt very early 2000s; we talked about Red Eye of course but even Speed and Panic Room, these movies that feel like they’re happening in real time in a very small space, where you just meet the characters and go with them.”
Drop hits theaters on Friday.