See How They Run Director Tom George On How The Blend Of Genres Came Together

thegamer.com:

See How They Run is, in multiple ways, a movie out of time. Murder mysteries are experiencing a mini revival, with Kenneth Branagh's Poirot movies and Rian Johnson's Knives Out, but like westerns or sword and sandal dramas, they are largely relics of the past. Mid-sized movies have also been shrinking in number recently, a reality exacerbated by the fact Disney seemed to feel lumbered with See How They Run after the acquisition of Searchlight that came with scooping up Fox. Most pointedly, See How They Run is literally of a different era, with the plot taking place in the 1950s. However, as director Tom George explains, certain presentational choices highlight the movie's displaced nature, taking cues from modern cinema and '60s capers to give See How They Run a unique tone all of its own.

"The split screen came from this idea of split points of view, which are built into the story," Tom George tells me when I ask about the choice to have multiple shots on screen at once. "You always have the detectives interrogating or questioning a suspect and trying to get that read on them. It's about people watching each other, in both a dramatic and a comic sense, so it felt like that motivated the sort of use of split screen. For me, I kind of initially thought of [split screen] more as being out of the period, so more of in the '60s films like Bullit came to mind."

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Bullit hits the mark of what I saw in the flick, as do the likes of Charade, which was my own first thought for the technique. It's not just a jazzy piece of stylisation though, but a more pointed and deliberate choice to draw audiences in. "It starts in quite a simple way that we use it and then it becomes