'Save Yourselves!' Writers Wrote the Script for Lead Sunita Mani (Video)

Sundance 2020: Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s sci-fi comedy is about what happens when two people shut off their phones during an alien invasion

Sunita Mani was always going to be a part of Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s sci-fi comedy “Save Yourselves!” So much so, that the writers wrote the script for her, and named the character after her.

“I’ve heard about this project for a really, really long time and I have worked with Alex for a really long time and so I got to read iterations of the script,” Mani told TheWrap’s Beatrice Verhoeven at the Sundance Film Festival. “I was attached immediately.”

“We wrote the script for her,” Wilson said, while Fischer added, “Her character’s name is Su.”

“But I didn’t really know that!” Mani said.

“I know, we didn’t really tell you,” Fischer responded. “And then John, I don’t know, we weren’t really interested in John [Reynolds] for a long time and then for some reason we ended up …”

“No, no,” Wilson interjected. “We saw John in ‘Search Party,’ we loved him and he’s very, very funny. We couldn’t see anyone else in the role after that.”

“Save Yourselves!” is written and directed by Fischer and Wilson, and stars Mani and Reynolds as a couple who head upstate to disconnect from their phones and find themselves. Cut off from the world, they miss the news that their planet is under attack. The duo got their inspiration from asking themselves, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” and the movie was born.

“What’s happening in real life is worse. The slow death of the planet is more dramatic, but we went with the four-day end of world,” Fischer said.

Watch the video above.