Dan Berk and Robert Olsen are a dynamic duo in the world of filmmaking. The two have collaborated frequently for a plethora of movies, most notably 2019’s Villains, which tackles the subject of amateur thieves breaking into the wrong home. Their newest release, Significant Other, blends genres, including horror and science fiction, in order to tell a unique story. Joined by their Villains star Maika Monroe and Jake Lacy, this film truly comes alive in the depths of the Pacific Northwest.

Berk and Olsen recently joined us to discuss their film.

An Idea Born Out of a Pandemic

Hiking woman puts hand on tree.
Paramount+

MW: You’ve both worked on several films together. How did collaborating with Significant Other get started?

Robert Olsen: We do everything together, we never really work separately. We’ve been working together for ten years now and so this project started like a lot of our projects do. [It came] out of some piece of locational necessity, so we started writing this in the heart of the lockdown, trying to put in all of that. We wanted to write a movie that was makeable in those times. So what if everything was outside and there’s two actors – those were the bare-bones elements that we started with. From there, we started pitching ideas back and forth. Okay, maybe it’s a couple, and if it’s a couple, how will the themes deal with that? We originally just wanted to go and do it in a very bare-bones, indie way, where we go out and find a tiny little bit of money, go out and try to get Maika, and all that. Luckily the script kept getting more interesting, and our reps suggested that we tried to make it bigger, more studio version of it. We listened to their advice, and they were right: we ended up working with Paramount, who gave us the budget to make the movie we wanted to make.

MW: You’ve both worked on this script from beginning to end. How did the script develop throughout the development process?

Dan Berk: At the beginning, we wrote the first draft of this script with a big twist that was at the beginning of the movie. It sort of just revealed right away and the rest of the movie was talking in the woods. Then we came around to the idea of figuring out how to preserve the twist element and bringing the narrative around it – that was the biggest switch in the development. As far as set pieces or sci-fi elements – as you’re getting closer to pre-production, those things tend to evolve quite a bit. Every day of prep, we had a more granular idea [after collaborating with the department heads] of what it would look like.

Robert Olsen: I also think different sci-fis, different horrors, have an antagonist or a monster that you’re building the whole movie around. This was a little bit different where the antagonist was a little bit born from the theme. There were things we wanted to say about love, about people who are in different positions of wanting a certain level of commitment out of their relationships. This isn’t a movie about the methodologies of that antagonist, it’s kind of clearly more so that the antagonist was more so a reflection of the theme.

Related: Key & Peele: 10 Skits That Allude to Jordan Peele's Penchant for Horror and Sci-Fi

Filming Challenges and Favorites

Woman stands in front of man.
Paramount+

MW: You mentioned how the movie is set in the Pacific Northwest. Anything can happen when shooting outdoors – did this occur when you were shooting Significant Other?

Dan Berk: We shot this in the fall, in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of the rainiest times you can ever experience. We built the schedule to keep the days light enough, so we could pause to wait for rain. We actually got really lucky with that, because the times that it did rain, it wouldn’t show up on camera, or we were rolling, and as soon as we would call cut, there would be a downpour. We got really lucky, we ended up coming in one day earlier on our schedule. The crew was very talented and used to shooting in the woods. Every single technician in this movie had done ten different movies or television shows outdoors. We were in good hands, and it was a pretty smooth process for what it was.

MW: What were your favorite kind of scenes to work on?

Robert Olsen: There were scenes we shot that were very new for us as filmmakers, such as the proposal scene. We were up on an actual cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in high winds, and our actors and crew needed to be anchored to trees. The shooting itself was pretty crazy, but scouting different cliff locations with no defense against the elements, and we obviously realized we couldn’t shoot in certain locations. We were really out there. All the locations in the film are what they appear to be; we worked with the topography of the land. None of it is built sets.

Significant Other will be out exclusively on Paramount+ on October 7, 2022.