Like so many people living in the greater Southern California area, Justin Long and Kate Bosworth are no strangers to coyotes. The genre power couple, who previously met on 2022’s House of Darkness, often see the furry little guys in their Los Angeles neighborhood—not to mention bobcats, mountain lions, and a surprisingly wide array of wildlife.“We have bears that go through our trash all the time,” Bosworth admits with a wry smile. “I’ve come nose to nose with a bear in our neighborhood that I nicknamed Sugar, and we [run into] him quite often.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Yet it remains the coyotes who capture the media and pet owners’ imagination. John Mulaney did an entire episode about them being a common concern in the first episode of his Netflix talk show, and the occasional attack on someone’s dog can become national news.“We lived below the Hollywood sign for many years and know many neighbors who have lost their dogs that way,” says Colin Minihan, a filmmaker who was quite intrigued when a screenplay by Tad Daggerhart and Nick Simon named Coyotes crossed his desk. It was a semi-common problem, but one just absurd-sounding enough to seem ripe for as many laughs as scares.“Kate had read the script first,” Long tells us. “And the script was very fun. There’s a B-movie element to it… We also grew up watching ‘Spielberg Presents’ movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, movies like Gremlins and Arachnophobia, so there’s a little bit of that.”There was also a chance to reckon with their own fear as pet owners.“We think about it especially with our cats, because our dog is quite large,” Bosworth explains. “He’s an 85-pound big boy named Happy. He plays with coyotes, in fact. He frolics with them. There’s coyotes that live on my parents’ street in Los Angeles, and he goes to their den and calls them out. He’s so big, he’s like Marmaduke, they’re not going to take him down. But our cats are like little victims.”Nonetheless, it is the Arachnophobia level of camp that appealed to Bosworth and Long, who enjoy treating the material with a wink. After all, Long himself campaigned with PETA in the past to stop hunting coyotes in the northeast for their fur, and is quick to point out about this movie that “people have a lot of misconceptions about coyotes. We didn’t want to do our part in vilifying them. We just want people to know these are coyotes where something has happened to them. They’re not typical coyotes.”To put it bluntly, these are horror movie coyotes, right down to how they were ultimately designed by Minihan and company. In the finished film, the creatures onscreen better resemble wolves—perhaps of the lycanthrope variety—than actual coyotes.“One of the challenges of shooting in Bogotá, Colombia is we couldn’t actually fly coyotes in,” Minihan explains. “Second was talking to trainers about traveling a coyote, and how they function on a film set. They don’t, they’re scared little guys. You could bring three of them to set, and you might be able to get one of them to do an A-B action, which is walk from this point to this point. But there’s no world where I could photograph real coyotes from LA that would snarl, short of going and stalking them… So we built puppets and had multiple puppets that the actors could interact with and just designed as ferocious a being that we could come up with.”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.“We live in Pasadena,” says Minihan. “And I watched Eaton Canyon burn down while I was editing this at three, four in the morning until we heard the police on the intercom say we have to evacuate our house. I know the same happened for Justin and Kate. It’s just weird our life imitating art so closely together.”It was also a moment that still found its way into the finished film.Says Minihan, “I wanted to find a way in the edit to honor that moment… so I walked around Altadena, totally destroyed, with an old 16mm film camera and shot imagery that I was heartbroken by, and made that part of the opening credit sequence of the movie.” As a consequence, it would seem fires are still responsible in some way for that carnage that unfolds in the story. Even when embracing B-creature feature fantasy, it’s impossible to ignore the real crises occurring in the natural world.Coyotes opens on Oct. 3.The post Coyotes’ Justin Long and Kate Bosworth Channel Real-Life Terror into Horror-Comedy appeared first on Den of Geek.