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ver the course of eight short films and three features, Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov has built a repu- tation as a master of blending mayhem, horror and action with sharp humor. His new feature film, They Will Kill You, stars Zazie Beetz alongside an ensemble cast, including Patricia Arquette, Myha'la, Heather Graham, Tom Felton and Paterson Joseph, and is a blood-soaked, high-octane horror/action/comedy in which a young woman must survive the night at a demonic cult's mysterious and twisted death-trap of a lair to avoid becoming their next offering. The LA- based Sokolov graduated with a master's degree in the physics and technology of nanostructures before turning to film- making. In addition to directing, he also co-wrote and executive produced They Will Kill You. Behind the camera, Sokolov assembled a creative team that included cinema- tographer Isaac Bauman, editor Luke Doolan, VFX supervisor Marc Smith and colorist Alastor Arnold. The New Line Cinema film premiered at this year's SXSW film festival, followed by a theatri- cal release by Warner Bros. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, he talks about the challenges in- volved, and his love of editing and post. What sort of film did you set out to make? "The main goal was to make a fun movie that surprises on multiple levels. First, it's a genre mashup, and it starts like a clas- sic horror movie, and then it changes into more of a wild action comedy with some supernatural elements. It also has some spaghetti Western standoffs and some anime beats, so it's a very post-modern movie, as it refers to different genres and different types of movies from all over the world, and it has a lot of plot twists and emotional twists. So you take the audience through this journey to the end, and the big challenge in post was: How do you build up the pace, and integrate the sound and the music with all the vari- ous tones? And how do you invisibly lead the audience through these big tonal changes so it all feels like one movie?" What did prep entail, and what were the main technical challenges of pulling this together? "We shot this in Cape Town, South Africa, and it was a normal prep — about two months. I'm kind of a nerd in terms of the process, and I prepare a lot. I do a lot of homework, and I do storyboards for the entire movie. Every scene is storyboard- ed, so I can discuss it with the DP and all my production heads. Then, when we got to Cape Town, we found our crews, and the stunt guys take the storyboards, as even fights were storyboarded, and they work from there. Then we changed and tweaked them as we shot. And I walked the production designer and his crew through the storyboards, and we discussed sets and built sets to make the storyboards work. Same with camera and grips. Basically, your main goal is al- ways, 'What will the audience feel in this moment when they watch the movie?' And then I think, 'This camera movement will help that.' And you come up with some specific camera movement, and that camera movement requires specific equipment, so I have a bit of an engi- neer's mindset behind it, but it's fun." Tell us about the shoot. "We had 45 days, and 90 percent of the movie is interior, set inside this build- ing, our main location. We had a ton of sets and built everything, and that was the main reason why we went to South Africa, because you can afford much more in terms of construction. We built all our sets simultaneously on six different stages, and we just moved from one stage to another. The sets were massive and quite complex, like the one with a crawl space under the floor, where we had a massive chase sequence. This whole set was built like a Lego set, and we had all these sections, around six-feet long, so we could move them around to change the geometry of the space. "And we had a big fight in a restroom, which required fire protection, because there was a lot of real pyrotechnics. And at the same time, there was a lot of wire work, and this whole set slowly caught fire as we progressed through the scene. And then the fire alarms and sprinklers go off and flood everything, so we also had to be water protected, and we built a whole drainage system. So that approach helped to make most of it in-camera and practical, and then we did a lot of VFX in post to add stuff. Then we had a few exterior locations, and shot five days outside, so we did a lot given our time and schedule." Where did you do all the post? "Here in LA, at Pacific Post. I love the whole post process, especially all the ed- iting. I cut both of my first movies, I love editing, and I know how to cut a movie. And it helps you a lot when you are both the writer and director, because as I work on the script, I already know how it will be edited, and you can feel it when you read the script that it has a specific pace. So, you can be very specific with KIRILL SOKOLOV - THEY WILL KILL YOU MIXING GENRES FOR NEW LINE CINEMA'S LATEST FEATURE O DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 10 POST MAR/APR 2026 BY IAIN BLAIR Zazie Beetz and Kirill Sokolov, on-set.