Escape Room: Tournament of Champions Interview with Adam Robitel

Sequel to the box-office hit psychological thriller that terrified audiences around the world ESCAPE ROOM 2: TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS is available to Download & Keep on October 4 and to Rent on Digital, Blu-ray ™ and DVD on October 18 from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. To celebrate here is an interview with the movies director Adam Robitel.

ESCAPE ROOM 2: TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS is directed by Adam Robitel (Escape Room, Insidious: The Last Key) and stars Taylor Russell (Escape Room, Waves), Logan Miller (Escape Room, Love Simon), Indya Moore (Queen & Slim), Holland Roden (Follow Me), Thomas Cocquerel (In Like Flynn) and Carlito Olivero (Bad Samaritan). In this installment, six people unwittingly find themselves locked in another series of escape rooms, slowly uncovering what they have in common to survive…and discovering they’ve all played the game before.

Q: When the first Escape Room film was released and the popularity went global, what was your reaction to that experience?

Adam Robitel: You know it’s kind of surreal, it still doesn’t feel real. I will be honest, by the end of any movie I make, I just don’t know if it’s any good. I just kind of hate whatever I do by the end. I’ve seen it a thousand million times and it just wears me down. So, it’s this weird process for me where I let go of it and then it becomes something else, its own animal. So, I was pleasantly surprised that it did so well. I felt like escape rooms are so popular and it’s certainly captured a zeitgeist in the culture, and I thought if we could do that justice then it might have a chance. It’s a very visual movie, each room is like its own film visually, so I was really excited by the visual language we developed. But if I told you that I knew that it was going to do what it did, I would be lying.

The other thing I would say is coming from straight horror movies with people screaming and yelling, when we did our test screenings of Escape Room, like people were not screaming, they were quiet. So every time we had a focus test, I am like this is a disaster, I hate it, they are not reacting. And what was happening was that they were watching the movie and were really focused. And so it was a learning lesson for me. I definitely take stuff in, what people like and what people don’t like, but at the end of the day you have kind of go with your own instincts about what it needs to be.

Q: To then know that people love these escape room scenarios, how did you go into making a follow up because obviously people know the setup now and so they expect bigger and better things.

AR: There were early incarnations where I wanted to tell more of the origin story of the villain, and it became clear through some feedback that if you showed too much behind the curtain, as much as people say they want to know who is behind the thing, like the Wizard of Oz, they don’t want to know. It diminishes the mystique and omniscience of the organization.

There was a lot of pressure definitely to do bigger, better and badder. I always loved the idea that the sequel basically says everything in your life, from the decisions you make, to the people closest to you, to the places you go, none of it is safe nor can be trusted. Minos has their tenterhooks in everything, and you can’t trust anybody. I thought that was a scary and relevant idea coming out of the pandemic, where we all feel like our lives were so upended and that we don’t have agency, I thought that was a cool thematic idea.

So I came up with ideas like a subway car that you think is the real world and that suddenly gets derailed. And then the train lends you bigger rooms. I think the beach is kind of crazy, the piece-de-resistance, in terms of the visuals, and also really hard to shoot in. But yeah, there was the pressure to go bigger with the rooms. But what I think is also cool is that we further develop Minos mythology. We know from the sequel that Minos is far more manipulative and chilling than we thought they were, that it’s not only about the escape rooms but that so much of what they do is manipulation, they have human assets and unbelievable technology. So, I think just makes them that much creepier to me.

Q: How difficult is it to shoot each escape room sequence now that you’ve made it bigger and more complex?

AR: Each room, every sequence in the sequel was like, oh my God… that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and then next week, it was an entirely different set with its own host of challenges. I think the train took eight solid days. And the train is a good example of how complex it got. The set was built like a real train, so there was nowhere to hide, no flyable walls and it was just really hard to shoot. The bank was logistically super challenging with the layout of the laser grid and the geography of that. The Acid Rain room had voluminous amounts of rain and all kinds of scored and damaged set stuff that had to be constantly changed. And every prop is hand crafted, you have got to figure out where they are in the set. Our production design team led by Ed Thomas, were just amazing.

In prep, I will be looking around and sketch up where can we put a camera, oh let’s put a camera track on the ceiling and oh that beam is going to be in the way and how big are the aisles of the plane? So they are all incredibly challenging. The beach set had 22,000 tons of sand. It smelled like a dead crab and every time you walked it would kick sand up in your face. I had actors with scratched corneas. The special effects team would air out the sand, every time you would see someone or something sinking in the sand it was done practically. You would have to wait a minute for it to start, then realize that the actor is sinking too quick, and reset, that kind of stuff. And then we had water, we had a massive water tank (laughs), so yeah, it’s a big movie idea on a smaller budget and it’s challenging. I definitely needed a blood transfusion or a Bloody Mary at the end of it. It was definitely hard. But I had a great team.

Q: Can you choose a favorite room?

AR: You know, they all look beautiful. You go through the shoot looking at it a certain way and then they do the color and you are like this movie is really beautiful and you have a new appreciation. So, I appreciate them all aesthetically. I loved the acid rain, the way it looks. The train, because I think the train was something that I saw in my head, and I wanted to start this movie high octane and I am really excited about it. The bank is also glorious.

Even the motel sequence, we did that as a oner and it was so cool. We had a piece of the ceiling that would lower the hydraulics all the way down from the wide shot to literally crushing Logan Miller’s face. And it was sort of like an homage to the first movie where he was crushed in the library but in that sequence we relied on frantic edits and cuts. So now it’s like this ceiling coming down, and I said I don’t want to do that with cuts, we did all those cuts in the first movie because we had to. And we had to block it and figure out where he would go and where the camera operator is and as he is lowering, oh God, the camera operator is going to get crushed by the ceiling, so then we had to figure out how to cut out a piece of the ceiling so that it can be raised as it is lowering and not kill the camera operator. So, I’ve learned a lot from these movies, let’s put it that way. (laughs)

Q: The fans will be very excited that you brought back leads Taylor Russell and Logan Miller to Escape Room: Tournament of Champions. What was it like for you to have them back as the anchors for the sequel?

AR: I mean, it’s fantastic to have a continuity. Taylor and Logan are amazing actors and the audiences loved their characters. You work really hard with these movies to try to build a relationship with the audience and to come in immediately with this emotional drive of Zoey (Taylor Russell), so hellbent on proving that she’s not crazy. Ben (Logan Miller), in the first movie is a schlub, a drunk, smokes, his life is a mess and they would never be friends in real life. But because they went through the trauma of the first movie, they are bonded together. I love that idea. I think that makes for a really fun protagonist pair. Ben knows that she is like Lois Lane, she is going to go right into the hornet’s nest because she has revenge blinders on. At the end of the day, these movies are supposed to be thrill rides and if you have protagonists that the audience care about, that’s an asset.

Q: Did you challenge them a little bit more with the action this time around?

AR: I think Logan probably has a voodoo doll of me in his house somewhere because I put him through hell and back. If he is not being crushed by something, he is falling from some height into a whirlpool of sand, or he is in a freezing cold-water tank in Budapest. Some actors really like to do action and I certainly did some stunts in my day. I would love to be hanging on a wire for three hours with crotch burn, but some people don’t. You have to be a bit of a therapist and a bit of a coach and hopefully they get through the day without tearing something. But they were great and patient with an often arduous and chaotic process.

And the other actors in the ensemble, were working with such great vibes and they brought so much to it. Indya Moore had this awesome moment where they were corralled by lasers in the bank and the other players had to guide them off. The searing pain of that laser burn really set the stage for the bank and the tension. And then Thomas Cocquerel gets quite beat up when he’s walking those bank tiles and going through the sand. Holland Roden had done a lot of stunts on Teen Wolf and she was game to do anything. She got sand in her eye and frankly everywhere because she literally had a full-on sandstorm in her face and she was still game to go back and do it again and again. Carlito Olivero, who is a dancer, came in and there’s a part that’s quite shocking really and he sold the hell out of that. And so they were all game to kind of come in and they knew it was going to be like a boot camp.

Q: What’s wonderful about the new cast is that you could easily imagine them starring in their own Escape Room films.

AR: Yeah, you want people to embody, I use the term gravitas, but you can feel like they have been through something already. And I think they all brought that sense of seriousness to the work. This movie is different in a way because the rooms themselves aren’t tailored to their backstory, so I think some people might go “oh I didn’t know as much about the ensemble as I did in the first movie”, because the rooms themselves are tailored towards a reveal. In this movie, that is a secret.

But it was important to me to find people who just had a real sense of presence. And the idea of trauma, the idea of how you respond to trauma. They were all so devoted to carrying that pain with them. They’d each gone through their own war in a sense. I also really wanted interesting faces, like who is going to look cool in this space together and vibe well together. Diversity and representing the real world are always important to me but I always cast the best actor for the role. Someone who comes in and just inhabits the character in an utterly unique way and this cast killed it. And the sequel is kind of a girl power movie in a way. Bad things happen to the dudes, but the girls, without spoiling it, have more tricks up their sleeve for ways of dealing with the rooms. The dudes end up fighting and just being dudes. Because Zoey is such a Mensa level player, I always felt like the puzzle maker has a fixation on her. Like the way Hannibal Lecter has his Clarice Starling. He, she or them, has a fixation on Zoey, like a toy. And I think that would be fun and something to explore in future movies.

Q: These films also introduce strong female characters who are not helpless at all.

AR: It was conscious. When you are killing people off in a movie like this, ultimately, they all typically become cannon fodder. Because we had Zoey and Ben as the anchors from the first movie, we decided instead of the obvious choice of balancing the sexes as they died, which would be a typical approach –- We thought it was cool to say, no, that’s not the way this game is going down. And again, you don’t have much time in these movies because they are so fast. There’s a beat on the beach where somebody succumbs and there’s no time to mourn. Because the stakes are so high and the threat on the beach is following them into that crab shack, it’s like you have got to keep moving. Personally, I always gravitate to strong female characters. I just think they are underrepresented and they can be both action stars, but also intellectual. I think Escape Room is a nerd power movie in a way and I am really happy about that.

Q: Escape Room is intense but not gory. What was the decision to make these films scary but not go for the blood and guts?

AR: Look, I love those movies. I love Saw, I love Cube, I love Final Destination, I love R-rated horror. When I came in on Escape Room, the producers quite literally told me we want to make a PG-13 movie that we can show our kids. And that was the given. And at first, I was like, I would really like to dissect somebody with a laser, but I thought okay, let me work with this obstacle and work it to its advantage. Hitchcock would show the audience a bomb under the table, and then you would have a conversation and then the audience is sweating. (laughs) You are not relying on the gore, which I don’t begrudge those movies, but that was the mandate that was given to me, so I had to kind of work within that parameter. And I’m glad I did. And there’ve been a lot of people who have come to me and said to me I can’t watch Saw, I can’t watch Cube, but I can watch this movie and have fun, I can watch it with my kids. So that was the marching orders really.

Q: What kind of universe are you building with the Escape Room franchise?

AR: I think the sky’s the limit. I think you would get tired of just doing set pieces, it has to expand in different ways that are not obvious. I would love to anthologize it and go in a lateral direction where we do an origin story for the villain. Another pitch I thought could be really fun is you open with Minos customers who actually watch these death rooms, at some posh viewing party and then they get thrown into the game.

So, there’s a lot of different avenues, whether or not it goes into the Sci-Fi realm, I wouldn’t necessarily do that, but what I do like is this idea that we don’t have agency over our lives. And I think tapping into that on some level is really creepy and it can go in different directions.

And we look for patterns as humans and I think you see it in our country, where half the country believes one thing and the other half, believes another. We are in this weird time where a movie like this tap into all of those conspiracy theories, the Illuminati, the FreeMasons. Literally when our first movie was released, the trailer came out and the first print commentary was like this ten-page thesis on all the Illuminati symbolism in our movie. And while may have been subconscious, it reaffirms this thesis that our nature is to see and find patterns. I think this explains why the movie did so well, harkening back to your first question. And so, these types of movies really invite you to look for stuff. It would be fun to continue to lay breadcrumbs and to go into the J.J. Abrams world. We can go in many different directions in terms of what is reality, have they even left Chicago.

Q: What was it like to shoot the film again in South Africa?

AR: I shot the preponderance of both movies in Cape Town, South Africa. Cape Town is an amazing place to make a movie. It’s probably one of the best in the world in terms of crews and value that you get. And it’s been amazing, it’s definitely hard and you are away from your family and you are away from your loved ones, but I equate it to going to war in a way, with your infantry. I had Ed Thomas the production designer, I had Marc Spicer my DP, Phil Whaley my line producer, and then you become like a little tight group.

It’s tough while you are in it, but then someday you wake up and you are done. I am really grateful for Cape Town; I want to give them a shout out. We also shot some pickup days in Budapest, Hungary and they were amazing too. There were amazing crews in both Budapest and Cape Town and I have to give them some love.

Q: Have you ever liked doing escape rooms? Is this one of things where it’s like something you hated and you wanted to make a movie about it?

AR: Honestly, I think my biggest fear now is like a Zoom waiting room, where you are stuck in a Zoom meeting. (laughs) I’m not very good at escape rooms, to be honest. I was the guy in the corner breaking out in hives while the writers solved the room. So it will be interesting to go back after doing these movies and see if I got any better. I am not promising anything, but we will see.

Escape Room 2 is out now to Download & Keep and will be available on Blu-ray, DVD and to Rent on Digital on 18th October.