Drew Goddard Talks Bad Times at the El Royale… On a Yacht

20th Century Fox invited ComingSoon.net to attend an early junket in scenic Lake Tahoe for their upcoming Bad Times at the El Royale! There we got to see 15 minutes of footage from the film and conduct an interview on the deck of a yacht with writer, director and producer (and Oscar-nominee) Drew Goddard (The Martian, Netflix’s Daredevil, forthcoming X-Force), which you check out in the player below!

In terms of the footage, we saw one full extended scene focused on Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm) as he enters his room at the El Royale hotel in 1969. He enters his room then opens his suitcase to reveal a vacuum cleaner… but that’s just a decoy. Underneath the fake vacuum is another suitcase containing tools and equipment. Sullivan begins systematically finding and clipping dozens of surveillance wiretaps in hidden nooks all around the room, including two in the phone he uses to call his young child. He then moves to the front desk, where the clerk is passed out after shooting up heroin. Sullivan uses a key to enter a dark basement passage which leads to a hallway with two-way mirrors where he observes others in their rooms. Some of the rooms feature Jeff Bridges as a man taking out the floorboards to hide something, Dakota Johnson tying a young passed out girl (Cailee Spaeny) to a chair, and Cynthia Erivo singinga haunting rendition of The Isley Brothers’ “This Old Heart of Mine.” The song permeates as Sullivan observes the different rooms, and removes film from a movie camera used to record the guests. By the end of the song Bridges is seated in his room, mesmerized. Sullivan heads out of the hotel to a telephone booth in the parking lot where he places a call to J. Edgar Hoover!

Bad Times at the El Royale is said to take place in the 1960s at a rundown hotel, centering on a cast of characters whose own shady agendas will violently collide: “Seven strangers, each with a secret to bury, meet at Lake Tahoe’s El Royale, a rundown hotel with a dark past. Over the course of one fateful night, everyone will have a last shot at redemption… before everything goes to hell.”

Alongside Chris Hemsworth (Avengers: Infinity War, Thor: Ragnarok), the film stars Jon Hamm (Mad Men, Tag), Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski, Kingsman: The Golden Circle), Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades series), Cynthia Erivo (Widows), Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) and Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim Uprising).

Bad Times at the El Royale serves as a reunion between Hemsworth and Goddard, who previously collaborated on the 2012 horror movie The Cabin in the Woods.

Bad Times at the El Royale is set to hit theaters on October 12, 2018.