Mena Suvari stars as Maggie, a single mom of a teenage daughter who has taken one wrong turn after another, leading her to live hand-to-mouth in a rundown motel, working at a self-storage facility. Living in fear and desperate for money, Maggie makes the ultimate wrong turn that could prove fatal, as she becomes entangled in a struggle for stolen diamonds that have been hidden at the storage facility.

Locked In’s writer-director, Carlos V. Guiterrez, calls it a classic film noir: “I was trying to design a thing where this character who's basically good makes one error, and that error causes the rest of the film to happen.”

The inception of this film began in Gutierrez's actual storage facility. 

“Like most people, I have a self-storage unit that I use and I walked in there one day, and I actually got lost going from one floor to another and couldn't access my floor. Then the elevator kept just resetting to the bottom. I felt trapped. When I finally got to the front desk, there was no one there. It was past six o'clock. And I'm like, what if I was actually not able to leave this building? So, that sort of just stuck in my mind as an original location. I love locations. I've actually started scripts before based solely on locations. And what I do is try to find who is the most interesting person that you can put into that situation.”

Gutierrez’s writing process on Locked In began with writing the character bios.

“I force myself to start with the bios of who these characters are. I've never had an issue with coming up with story. It's very easy for me to come up with the obstacles that these characters are going to face, and who's going to do what, and then how do you pay it off? Red herrings, foreshadowing... To me, that's the part I enjoy, by far, the most.”

From the bios, he then switched over to outlining.

“I've gotten to the point where the outline is so long and so detailed. I put everything that should be in that scene in there: dialogue, character description... An entire scene might run a whole page. And I do that so it offers me that roadmap. It's so wild because I work on it incessantly, that by the time I start writing the draft, I almost kind of forget about it. But it's always there in case I get lost.”

His fluidity and openness in the writing process allowed Gutierrez to take a major note from one of the film’s producers, which changed the story entirely.

“This is where being open to notes is a big deal. I had one of our producers, early on in the process, say, ‘Hey, you wrote the child as a six-year-old boy, why don't you make it a girl? What do you think about making her a little older, a young adult? I think you'll get more out of the relationship arc in the story of a mom and a daughter, than a mom and a six-year-old boy. Obviously, all she's going to end up doing is protecting him, but there's no real relationship back-and-forth.' That was a big note and that actually informed a lot of the script and helped it a lot.”

While he did not have specific actors in mind whilst writing, the casting of Mena Suvari in the lead role could not have been better for the character.

“I wanted people to judge Mena’s character at the beginning and say, ‘Oh, I know who she is. She's this very religious, kind of uptight person.’ The immediate thing that clicked for me was—what if she really wasn't? What if she changed because of something that happened? Who would she be? How can we pay that off at a later point in the story? And that's for me, really interesting," says Gutierrez. "It's underestimating characters. And I think people, in general, underestimate each other. We meet someone, we judge them immediately, and then we say, ‘Well, I think I figured this person out,’ and you don't really know their story. So, I think that's a big part of the motive, obstacle and intention. The biggest thing for me is she wants something, somebody else wants it too, and how they're kind of polar opposites in that situation. And I'm compressing the time, which is just putting them in a storage facility overnight.”

Using the audience's judgment really came into play as Suvari is very much ingrained in the collective memory as the teenage role she played in American Beauty. 

“She worked for the character so brilliantly. It was almost like the film was designed for her Someone who was this, and then has now become this… You had to have an actress that was believable in that position. Mena was willing to really go there and embody this person whose life was kind of crushed in a way. And she's restarted her life, but it's not going so great.”

He approached the film's action scenes by reading a lot of great action scripts, first.

“In terms of action writers, you know, Tony Gilroy [the Bourne trilogy]; you can't really get much better than that. Contemporarily, Michael Mann writes some amazing action. I read a lot of scripts that felt in the same vein... I think what I've learned from reading a lot of these scripts, and even just listening to podcasts like Final Draft, is that you don't have to be so specific because there are people whose job it is to actually develop that. And I learned that with my stunt coordinator, who was the stunt coordinator on Joker. He was telling me, ‘Just give me what you want to happen in this and I will come up with the machinations of it.’ So that was really a double whammy of a learning curve for me, just to say, 'don't worry so much. Just get to what the intention has to be'—someone has to get beat up and then someone has to get down the hallway.”

Guiterrez also has some words of advice for any writer-directors who may be preparing to make their first feature.

“Read your script over and over and over until you literally know every line of dialogue. I think it's incredibly important that the actors, when they come to you as a director, also trust that you, the writer, knows what's going on in the script and what the subtext is to the lines. Knowing the lines of dialogue and why they're there is a big part of why the actors do what they do. The higher the caliber of the actor, the more questions they're going to have for you. And really understanding that a scene is not just a scene. You can't just have a scene that, you know, somebody hands off a piece of information and leaves and that's it. There should be something more to it and how can you layer those little things in there. As a director, I would say, do your homework, really know the film you want to make—really have that clear in your head.”

Locked In is available to watch on VOD now.