Escape Room 2 director reveals how traps and rooms really worked

In this week Escape Game: Tournament of Champions, 2019 hit thriller sequel Escape room, series main character Zoey (Taylor Russell) returns to face off against the Minos puzzle orchestration organization, but finds himself in another set of elaborate traps. But besides the obscure game makers, there’s another force at work in designing the franchise’s killer rooms: director Adam Robitel. How do you build an escape room that’s worth the price of admission? We asked Robitel, who updated us on his devilish creative process.

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To make a sequel, I always felt like we had to sort of outdo and expand the playing field of the first movie. It was a tall order because we used pretty much every device known to man to kill people in the first movie, from fire to gravity to poison gas. And so enter and develop [Tournament of Champions], it was like, “How are we going to kill these people in nice rooms?” What’s the way we kill them that is different, exciting and visual? ”

Most of the early room developments came from my locations. We know this is the story of Zoey’s revenge. She has this coordinate that leads her to a building in downtown Manhattan. What can happen? What kind of hijackings? How do we subvert audience expectations and get them into the game in a really cool and smart way? So we tried to use spaces that people could relate to. So I thought that a subway car could be really scary if it comes off and kind of becomes a Tesla coil. We don’t do a lot of previewing on these movies, but we do a lot of blocking and figuring out what we’re going to do. I wanted Tesla’s coils to appear and then descend from the wagon, a very Spielberg moment where everyone reacts to this creature that’s on top of the ceiling.

Ed Thomas, our production designer, is amazing. We shot in Cape Town, like we did with the first movie, and for the wagon, Ed put a model online and then he and his crew built it to spec. What you are seeing is literally a New York City train car. And we only had one stretch of a station, about 200 or 300 feet long, so when you see the kids running along the station, we’re the ones recycling the same scenery four times with it. four different actors and extras and stunt people. There is so much deception.

Logistically, I pitch the different pieces in the studio. Like a bank with lasers. They were a little panicked by the lasers. We hadn’t really seen so many top-notch lasers, and we weren’t even sure we’d get there. I think we did, eventually.

The bank was a beautiful space, we found in Cape Town, a beautiful art deco bank that we refitted. The art department built a 5,000 pound safe door that they brought in and handcrafted. They had to change the floor tiles and work with visual effects to make it all happen. The bank was the hardest because we had a hard time, and usually I like three or four days doing mics, inserts and everything. That night we had to wrap up the bank and get out of there in the morning, so I had literally four hours after a 12 hour day to go jogging with my cameraman and just pick up stuff.

The design of the rooms is difficult. They must be linear. In a real escape room, someone finds a key and someone finds a thing and it’s very non-linear and you sort of put things together. With movies, you kind of have to be from A to B to C, and every room transforms. On the train, you start with a little spark, and at the end it’s a Tesla coil. In the bank, each time you step on the wrong tile, a new part of the grid appears. The first tile that Indya Moore’s character walks on was eight lasers, then the next time it’s 16 lasers, and it expands exponentially. So it was super difficult logistically.

For the beach room, I thought to myself: “OK, quicksand is really scary. At first I thought it might be an ancient temple. We did a few art concepts for it, but it seemed like the wrong movie. It was like The maze Runner. And then we were like, “Oh, what if this is like a beautiful Cape Cod beach?” Because we had the pool room and the ice room in the first movie, so we wanted nice spaces that then try to kill and eat you. So it was an iterative process through the script, to find the right spaces. The other idea of ​​the sequel is that nowhere is safe. We see Ben and Zoey are in a motel room and the ceiling collapses and tries to crush them. I wanted to try to make it seem like the trauma from the first movie had invaded their minds, in a way. Anytime you are within four walls, you can be killed.

The beach itself was convenient. We had 22,000 kilograms of sand. They built it on a giant platform. It all smelled of dead crab. And we literally had aerators under the sand that liquefied the sand, and after about a minute the actors would start to sink. And it lifts all the sand in the air and itches people’s corneas. Everything you see in this beach set … the pier itself was on a hydraulic, the crab shack was on a hydraulic so everything was done in camera.

Certainly with some increase in our visual effects teams, but it was very difficult. Part of designing rooms comes down to resources – initially when they walked in I wanted them to feel outside for a second. Well, we couldn’t keep a full CG photo-real range for the entire footage, so we needed a creative way to close it off and make it part of the puzzle. So we created this device when she takes a photo, and all the walls turn into what looks like the photo, and there is a big change in light in the space. This set was a huge piece of cloth. We photographed a beach that we photographed in South Africa, then modeled and mounted it to encircle all of the massive backdrop. It was this piece of cloth that was to be flown from London and we had it as a day before we started filming.

I always say Escape Room movies are smaller movies, not big tent movies in the resource sense, but tent movies in what they’re trying to do.

Escape Game: Tournament of Champions is now in theaters.