One of the most enjoyable things about attending SXSW as a film fan is when a movie surprises you in a positive way. There are so many choices to pick through when the schedule is released, it is easy to get coaxed into staying in a comfort zone with genres that one is familiar with. Occasionally, though, someone or something pushes you into taking a chance on movie you might not otherwise see. When the film lives up to and exceeds expectations, the reward for the experience is sometimes richer than when I see I know I'm going to like.

Shuttle falls into that category. On the surface, it would seem to be garden variety as thrillers go. Jules (Cameron Goodman) and Mel (Peyton List) have arrived back in their hometown airport after a girls-only vacation. Having no one to pick them up given the late hour they board an airport shuttle just looking to get home. What they get is a second trip they never bargained for and one far more horrific than they could have imagined.

After taking in a midnight screening of Shuttle, I got to sit down with Anderson and co-star Cameron Goodman, to talk about making thrillers that are laced with realism to augment the experience, playing with expectations, and how in the case of some actors, size really isn't everything.

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Enrique Gomez: This particular sort of film has been done before to differing degrees, but your set-up for your particular riff on the genre is pretty unique. How did you get started with this?

Edward Anderson: I'm one of those people...it never starts with one single thought, it tends to be an amalgamation of things. I'm very interested in the world and what's happening in it, so I'll tuck stuff in the back of my head and then I'll be doing something and put two or three things together, suddenly something will pop out of it. I was on a shuttle bus one day coming back from the airport, and I started having these paranoid, interesting thoughts about...I love movies, a normal day turns bad kind of thing. I'm not a fan of those fantastical movies where things like that could never happen to me, like...

Cameron Goodman (mock serious): Like Cocoon?

EA (laughing): Well, yeah like Freddy Kruger or whatever. It's not that they're not good movies, but I like movies where I go, "I am that guy," I have this kind of a day, this happens to me, what would I do? This is a normal day when I thought of it, and I thought, "Two turns here, who knows what could happen?"

CG: Those are the only kinds of horror/thriller genre films that I even watch. They're so real, they're scary for what could really happen to me.

EA: Obviously a lot of this film is set on a moving vehicle, and it's not to say this hasn't been done before...

CG: Not to ruin it for you, but...(smiling) Shuttle is set on a shuttle.

EA: Yeah, it's called Shuttle. Big reveal. (Cameron starts laughing)

EG: Well, you know Speed was originally going to be called Bus, but that didn't test market well.

CG: Oh my god, is that for real?

EG (seriously): Yes.

CG: Is that a fact?

(I can't hold the straight face, she really believes me for half a second. Edward shakes his head like a bemused parent)

EA: No.

EG: No, I'm joking.

(Cameron and I start laughing, and if memory serves she playfully swatted at my arm in mock indignation. Edward smiles with us, then gets things back on point)

EA: There's Collateral which is largely set in a taxi. Dead Calm, one of my favorite movies is set on a boat. These are all like minded films, but we go in another direction entirely. Collateral becomes a crime drama, Speed an action film...this is more a dark thriller.

EG: As we spoke about before we got settled here, you want to say as little about the story as possible...

EA: Without being boring...

EG: ...and without breaking any of the big reveals, but you really did ground this much more in reality than these movies typically are.

EA: I appreciate your saying that, that was the goal. I think any time you claim to make a movie that's set in "reality", you set yourself for people to say "Pffft." (as he rolls his eyes in disbelief)

CG: I think it holds up to the test, though. I love good writing...you don't get much of it in L.A....heh (her laugh is both rueful and a little bit exasperated), I'm sorry to say. But I can speak for Peyton on this too (referring to co-star Peyton List, who I met briefly), we were both excited to do this project because of the writing. It's so three-dimensional, the characters are so real. There's nothing fake about either one of them, they feel like real people. Even the villains, you feel like you know them.

EA: Obviously it's dramatized because we want it to be entertaining, it's not a documentary. We want it to feel real as much as possible, and that's why the ending is what it is, because we want to be true to reality.

EG: For myself, the ending was one of the things I liked the most about it. It takes some real balls to make that kind of closing to this story. It's hard to phrase without giving too much away....There are two different ways these kinds of movies go, either good or really awful. This sort of splits between the two, and that's something I respect most about this film. I think it's about 45 minute mark that I started to realize I was invested in both Jules (Cameron's character) and Mel (Peyton's), but also in the other people on the shuttle as well. That helped you plant some of your red herrings very effectively. There are some things you set up that go in different directions that you set up very well.

EA: You can watch this on a few different levels. You can watch this on a high concept level, kind of escapist horror. You can watch it more on that secondary level, paying attention, caring about the characters with still the "OOOOH, AHH!" moments. Because a lot of those movies with those moments, you don't really care about the characters. They do some token character development at the beginning, but for me I felt like given the kind of movie we hope this turns out to be, it only matters to you in the end if you really care about the characters. So we spent a lot of time dimensionalizing them. They were so great in the performances. We tried really hard to give all the six main characters as much dimension as we could.

CG: This won't be the last time I say this...we've been working so hard to keep the ending under wraps and one of the things that's helped us is that this isn't a topic that's discussed very much (the nature of the ending) in our culture. So nobody's going to think of it before it happens. Even if you happen to guess the ending before it happens, you can still watch this film and enjoy the foreshadowing, the double meanings, the surprises. There is not an activity, item or sentence that doesn't have some other meaning or irony to it as the film goes on.

EG: How hard was this shoot on you, Cameron, because based on what you see on screen, I would imagine saying you got quite a workout is probably underselling it by several orders of magnitude.

CG: It's hard to do that. I was working with some amazing actors who having been doing this a lot longer than I have, and they knew how to cope with it better than I did. But I really threw myself into it, knew I wanted to commit 120%. It's my first lead in a film, which I felt very passionately about. I wanted it to be real, I lived every moment of that film. I never let myself go for a second, "Oh, I'm just going to pretend to cry, use fake tears." Scenes where my face is kind of obscured and you can't really see it, I'm really sobbing.

EA: Just to jump in, a couple of things that come to mind. You know Cameron is a very small person physically...

(Cameron laughed at the comment, but it is something I noticed right away. I stand 5'4", and I dare to say it might be possible I was taller than she)

EA: It's just a statement of fact.

EG: No, it's something you don't get on the screen because of the environment the film takes place in is so cramped to begin with, you don't have any real reference of scale.

EA: So there's a couple of scenes inside the shuttle where, within the scope of the scene she's acting so hard, she broke a seat, she knocked out a window...

CG: Oh, I forgot about that!

EA: But she's working so hard, she's actually doing damage to our shuttle with her small frame. So I have to say I was impressed with how physical it was for everybody.

CG: And that was no means just me. And that whole experience...I found that the spring after, I was doing a lot of very serious drama because I was still in this depressed area of emotions (from the work on Shuttle). So it wasn't until a couple of months later that I was able to do comedy again because I was back on track. Because comedy is a very different kind of energy.

EA: I don't know if I said this last night (at the Q&A), but we shot the film basically in order. There were a number of reasons, continuity, limited funds, etc. But one of the things that was helpful and was part of the plan was the emotional arc of the characters. Because we knew they were going to be in this gradual arc of descent, emotionally and physically. I think it was extremely demanding as it was shooting in continuity. Shooting out of continuity might have been a little bit of a nightmare.

EG: One of the things I thought of when you mentioned Cameron's physical size...I don't know if you saw Ellen Page's first movie Hard Candy.

EA: Loved it. Brilliant dark thriller.

EG: We seem to be in the minority on that, as I agree with you. One of the things I like about the movie is the way the film is framed, you lose much of the sense of how big a difference in physical size Page has in comparison to Patrick Wilson, and that works for you, Cameron, and Peyton's character in the film. Because the setting is so cramped, you feel like yes, the driver (Tony Curren) has the weapons and the advantage initially, but when you have a chance to try and turn that...

EA: It becomes dynamic...

EG: So the give and take that goes on throughout the movie becomes more believable than if the film happened in a much more open setting.

CG: And I love that...maybe I sold my character as not being terribly brave, but both these girls are. When you see girls in movies a lot...I heard Edward talk about this earlier...you see girls give up a lot, you see the damsel in distress a lot. You see the bimbo, you don't really see terribly strong females. Ellen Page is a good example of a strong female.

EA: She's tiny, and you're right. I remember when I saw Hard Candy, I had no concept of how small she was. That was just shot in a house, our film is shot in a shuttle van, ironically a very large one, but once you get the cameras and equipment and 20 people, it suddenly feels very small.

EG: You shoot a lot of close-ups and suddenly you feel like, "Where can you go?"

EA: It's funny, we pushed to make it feel claustrophobic at a certain point, that was the goal. But we looked at a lot of films to see how we would go about shooting on just one location. Really it's not, but it is. So we looked at the classic films like that, like 12 Angry Men, which is all set in the jury room, and the way they divided out the space, how the camera evolved over the shoot in terms of the lenses, proximity, the angles, the set design. We tried to look at the films that did that to try and make everything evolve from the first time they walk on until the end, so that it does get more dramatic as time goes on.

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Just as with the film, after spending time with Anderson and Goodman I came away with a better appreciation for the things that I didn't expect. Anderson had another film he'd written screening at SXSW, Flawless, which has already netted a studio release later this month. My expectation is that Shuttle will garner a similar release eventually, because it manages to pack everything one would expect from the genre (scares, tension, mayhem) with the addition of things one would not normally look for (genuine efforts at character development that have meaning, some basis in reality in the moments when things aren't going to hell in a handbasket).

The blend works well here, both for the artistic efforts on screen and the real individuals who made it happen. I will gladly take those kinds of surprises whenever I can get them. Even if those surprises do lead me to think twice about getting on the shuttle bus at Bergstrom on the way to my car.

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