Taking place in a near future, when normal life on Earth has been decimated, Arcadian follows Paul (played by Nicolas Cage) and his two sons, Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) and Joseph (Jaeden Martell), have been living a half-life – tranquility by day and torment by night. Every night, after the sun sets, they face the unrelenting attacks of a mysterious and violent evil. One day, when Thomas doesn’t return home before sundown after visiting his girlfriend Charlotte (played by Saltburn’s Sadie Soverall), Paul must leave the safety of their fortified farm to find him. A nightmarish battle ensues that forces the family to execute a desperate plan to survive.
We spoke to Arcadian’s director Benjamin Brewer about working with Nicolas Cage (who he worked with before on The Trust), how The Goofy Movie of all films inspired the movie’s terrifying night-dwelling creatures and creating a grounded apocalyptic future.
How did you first get involved in Arcadian?
The two producers on the film, David Wulf and Braxton Pope, and I were working on another project that I had written and was going to direct (and am still hoping to do next), and they had this film. They had a director on board who left for some reason and so they were like ‘we need a director. Do you want to read the script?’.
I had made a film with Nic [Cage] called The Trust that me and my brother directed, and so I was like, ‘I love Nic. I’d love to work with Nic again’. Also, it was a visual effects-heavy thing, and I had designed the visual effects for Everything Everywhere All At Once with a small group of collaborators who I then started a company with.
I thought it had some great opportunities for a scary movie, but also one with this great heart about a family. I also really identified with the brother story because me and my brother are super close, and so I thought, well, that’s a story I actually know.
It was pretty fast. I got the script in September and we were shooting it in November!
What was it about the script that stood out to you?
I never thought I’d do a post-apocalyptic thing but there are some of those movies I love in particular. I’m a huge fan of Mad Max: The Road Warrior – I think it’s just a perfect film.
I felt like The Road Warrior understood what was rich thematically when talking about the end of humanity. Max in that movie sits at the fulcrum between man acting like animals and man acting like civilised society. I love that. So when this showed up, I saw that in the script there was this other theme that you could actually externalise through the end of the world, which is two boys growing up into their adolescence.
So all those emotions you have when you’re 16, when you’re dealing with making choices for the first time that have real world consequences. I was like ‘oh, here’s a great, contained story where I can make another one of these thematically rich metaphors using the bleak landscape’.
How would you describe the post-apocalyptic world in Arcadian?
After Covid, I just thought why not make a movie that shows a banal-looking apocalypse, like a whimper, not a bang, end of existence?
It’s a fun place to just give general guidelines… I remember talking to the department heads and saying ‘everything’s just incredibly grounded’. We should take no licence. I mean, I love Mad Max. I love leather daddies on motorcycles, that’s great, but I thought, ‘no, let’s just reflect the time we’re in’.
I think more of a reference is Children Of Men. Alfonso Cuaron was entirely trying to pull imagery of what’s happening around the world, and just bring it into the UK.
My costume designer had this great sense of how fast-fashion would survive. I think our dream was that one of them would be wearing a SpongeBob hat because, you know, whatever keeps you warm, whatever’s around. What they were wearing had to be stuff that you could wear and not get pneumonia.
I don’t want to get in the way actors. Actors really love their wardrobe, they love their set, that they’re in their spaces. They can pull a lot from it. So I wanted to make sure all that stuff was helping them to just be these people, instead of encumbering them with lore that didn’t matter.
How closely did you work with Nicolas Cage to create his character in Arcadian?
Having worked with Nic before, he pulls from all kinds of creative resources. He has an encyclopedic mind when it comes to films, but also culture and art in general.
You’re a facilitator because his character is his department. When you make a movie with Nic, you’re making a movie together. I love facilitating what he wants to do with something.
I remember our first conversation about the character and I threw something out there that was kind of wild and he came back like ‘no, I really want to play the way I am as a father. I want to play this with influences of my own father’.
That was the frequency. I had responded to the brothers and wanted to put a lot of my own relationship with my brother into them. So we were weirdly perfectly aligned from the beginning.
But there’s a lot of personal stuff that got thrown in there on top of the script. Nic and I would stand in the backyard at the set and just talk about growing up and our dads and talking about him as a dad, and then we’d shoot the scene. There’s a ton of stuff that was, for lack of a better term, written like two minutes before we shot it, just to imbue it with personal touches.
So was there any improv going on while shooting?
Nic is a complete professional and the closest that you get to improvisation is something that I like to do, which is rehearsing something before, and then you’re rewriting on your feet, and then you shoot that.
Only once have I ever rolled the camera on something where there was no saying what might happen. Because in general, his acting craft is of massive preparation. So a lot of the stuff that shows up in his work is highly premeditated. Every gesture, every thought…
Obviously I’ve worked with him before and seen how he breaks down his lines and scenes. It’s basically on a word-to-word level. It’s that surgically precise. Even some of his most wild-seeming stuff! Like in my first movie [The Trust], there’s a scene where he pushes Elijah Wood up against the wall and screams ‘open it’ in his face and I had written ‘open it’ 11 times in the script, and in every take he did it exactly 11 times!
He’s not the type of actor where you’re like ‘oh, he’s over there doing something, we have to follow him’ and I truly don’t want to work that way.
You try to create a safe, professional, creative space, which for Nic, that’s his thing. He comes in, he works, he respects what everyone’s doing, he’s listening, he’s engaged.
How did you go about creating the creatures in Arcadian?
It was definitely a very iterative process. I was lucky in that I declared at the beginning I wanted to design them myself and design them with my brother, who is now a designer and sculptor at a company called Mondo. I thought it would give this film a really interesting angle, to have the monster be something that is truly authored by the director and not a committee process.
I’d never designed a monster for a movie before, so it took a long time to get it to a place that felt really scary. That monster is just me and my brother trying to come up with what would be scary. I was trying to pull influences from things that scared me as a kid. I remember this one sequence in A Goofy Movie where Goofy’s son has a nightmare he’s becoming his father, which I thought, ‘well, that’s very relevant’. I just remember there are just a few moments in that movie with these giant teeth. I decided that there was something terrifying about Goofy, and that the creature should have that!
This was all centred on the sense of, what if this weird thing had emerged just to get rid of people? No matter how silly it might look, it’s just designed to capture people. So I had this idea early on of ‘what if it’s evolved these markings on its snout, that if it tilts its head down, it looks like it has a face? And it bunches itself up to try to pretend it’s a person, and it’s just this absolute horrific facsimile of a person but it’s trying to do its best to trick people?’
The scariest thing you could see in a monster is a little bit of humanity in it. You can transform empathy. If you gave people empathy for the thing, it would make it uncomfortable and scary…
Arcadian is in cinemas on 14 June
