For his directorial debut, Michael Sarnoski gave us something unexpectedly emotional: a tale of Nicolas Cage desperately tracking down his lost prized pig. But for his Pig follow-up, Sarnoski is taking a real leap – stepping up in scale and scope, and wrangling a bigger budget, in A Quiet Place: Day One. Following up John Krasinski’s films about an attack from audibly-enhanced aliens, Sarnoski’s prequel will take us back to ‘Day One’ of the invasion – first depicted in small-town form in A Quiet Place: Part II, and now transposed to one of the biggest, loudest places on Earth: New York City.

While the stage is set for an all-out cacophonous monster attack movie, Krasinski hand-picked Sarnoski for the job because of Pig’s subtleties. “When [Krasinski] first brought me onto the project, his directive was, ‘Can you bring some of that Pig touch to the A Quiet Place universe?’,” Sarnoski tells Empire. “What he wanted was to see someone else play in the sandbox that he had created. Finding those differences was exciting. It wasn’t something that we leaned away from.”

While Krasinski’s two entries – still expected to culminate in an upcoming Part III down the line – follow the Abbott family as they navigate the alien apocalypse, Day One will offer up new human characters for audiences to root for: Lupita Nyong’o’s Samira, and Joseph Quinn’s Eric, strangers forced together on the worst day of their lives. The switch-up should bring a different dynamic to Sarnoski’s film. “In the first two, family was really important,” the director notes. “And with that comes characters that have an established relationship. I wanted to explore what the end of the world looked like for people that didn’t have an established relationship, or a reason to care about each other.”

With all-new characters, an all-new setting, and an all-new genre to explore, Sarnoski’s second film is all about challenging himself. “It’s something I learned on Pig as well: don’t be scared of taking big swings and trying new things,” he says. “I could have gone into this just terrified, but I decided to just be like, ‘I’m just gonna give it a shot, hope for the best, and be daring with stuff.’” Simply put: he’s not going quietly.