Script Apart: How 'A Quiet Place: Day One' Screenwriter Michael Sarnoski Creates a Strong and Simple Logline

No filmmaker pulls the rug from beneath you quite like Michael Sarnoski. The Milwaukee-born writer-director's two movies to date—2021’s Pig and brand new spectacle A Quiet Place: Day One—each has a logline that suggest lightness.

Pig told the tale of a man on a mission to retrieve a missing swine. Day One, meanwhile, revolves around a woman who, during an alien invasion, is determined to get a slice of her favorite pizza.

In both cases, Sarnoski took those comic-sounding premises and made them into devastatingly emotional portraits of people at their most human. This serves as a great lesson to emerging screenwriters: even the simplest story ideas can hold profound poignancy, and a great logline can tie it all together.

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Crafting the Perfect Logline

“It’s clearly something I’m attracted to—finding the depth of humanity in something almost silly at times,” smiled the director when I put that observation to him this week on Script Apart—my podcast about the first draft secrets of great movies.

“I think part of it is that, that’s what we love in our lives, right? We love being surprised at how when you really pay attention to something, you can find beauty and complexity in almost anything," Sarnoski said. "I think in movies, oftentimes, there is a tendency to make it bigger and splashier because that’s what’s going to entertain audiences and I enjoy trying to take it another direction. I’m sure for some people, that’s not going to be their vibe but I like being like, let’s try to refocus on something you wouldn’t normally focus on and find a connection there.”

I was bowled away by this. In my writing, so often I find myself over-complicating the central idea of my story in an attempt to be as exciting to a reader as possible.

Chatting with Sarnoski and studying his work is a reminder that, as writers, the quest you send your protagonist on can be straightforward—even to the point of sounding “silly,” as the filmmaker points out. It’s the execution of your idea that matters—finding poignant moments along the character’s journey, no matter how simple that journey is.

So if you’re writing a screenplay at the moment that feels cluttered, consider taking a leaf out of this filmmaker’s book. Who knows, you might even end up with the next Quiet Place: Day One on your hands.

Listen to the full Script Apart interview above, supported by ScreenCraft, WeScreenplay, and Final Draft.

Read More: 22 Loglines from This Year's Sundance Films (and Why They Got Festival Attention)

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