The result pay off in a film that fit the tone of what Bosworth and Long were looking for in their first collaboration as producers, stars, and spouses. It’s a picture that is slightly irreverent and lighthearted in its depiction a family under siege, but still gnarly enough to premiere at Fantastic Fest. The movie’s even filled with inside jokes about living in the Hollywood Hills, but according to Minihan the plan was always to have Long and Bosworth play the typical all-American family surrounded by Tinseltown eccentrics. An irony since as the director notes, Long and Bosworth are “the same people” onscreen as off.
Says Bosworth, “We have so much fun together. We have such a blast as people that we would forget that the characters, our fictional married couple, had tension between each other. We would get lost in a scene just playing, and Colin would interrupt to say, ‘Guys, this is a couple that’s supposed to be on the rocks,’ and we’d go ‘Oh yeah, we forgot!”
Long cracks with a smile, “There’s a distance between them, but I guess I wasn’t a good enough actor to keep track of that.”
Coyotes the movie is ultimately a family affair. In addition to Long and Bosworth starring in the film, Minihan’s real-life partner Brittany Allen both appears in the film as one of those Hollywood eccentrics, a stranger named Julie, as well as composed the movie’s score—all while Minihan also edited.
“Our collaboration, when he’s in his director mode and I’m my actor mode, is very different than the late nights where we’re looking over a piece together and fixating on the minutiae of ‘oh should this jump scare go here?’” says Allen. “It takes different sides of our brain, and different ways to communicate with each other.”
It was also while editing the picture that they received an eerily prescient scare of their own. In the finished film, the mysterious reason the beasties are attacking neighbors in the night is not explained until the third act, which is also when a climactic, manmade fire begins blazing in the hills. However, in the original script the reason that the coyotes went on a rampage was due to an enormous wildfire spreading into Hollywood—a plot development shrewdly changed, albeit because of “budgetary” reasons, according to Minihan. This turned out to be tasteful in post.
