How much support did you get from Vertigo, then?
Yeah as soon as they said let’s do it, it was a Vertigo film. So it all happened here. I had a friend that I’d worked with on another project called Jim Spencer, who came on as a producer, he was the main guy organising everything. I came in every day and we organised everything from here, had story meetings, it all came out of Vertigo and they were very supportive. We edited here for about eight months, in a room opposite from where we are now. It’s funny to look back on it now, I mean I love editing, I think it’s my favourite bit, because it’s where the editor is operating the equipment. So I have this luxury of just making suggestions, he has to actually do it. And it’s beautiful because when you’re writing it’s all your problem, and when you’re filming it’s your problem – if you don’t get it right, it’s going to be shit. And when you’re doing the effects it’s completely your problem. So it’s great to have this little eight month period where I get to sit on a sofa or a chair with one of my best mates and just chat about films. I bought a load of posters for the wall, and we had War Of The Worlds, classic Fifties ones, African Queen, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Wicked Encounter, It Came From Outer Space and Casablanca. Just a strange mix, because our film’s like that.
So I take it you’re a science fiction fan?
Massive, massive science fiction fan. I’m a massive fan of Fifties science fiction, and the Sixties. I love B-Movies, and I love television from then. I’m not so much a fan of modern science fiction.
Not much that you watch at the moment?
I’ve got to be honest, I can’t think of much that I like that’s modern, in terms of TV or film. I obviously like some, but there’s something about the Fifties and Sixties because it’s old – it’s got an archived look to it, the footage looks different, the film stock looks different, it feels like it’s come from another world. Stuff that’s modern and clean and beautiful and precise, for some reason I just don’t think that’s science fiction, or related to science fiction. I loved The Twilight Zone, the original is my favourite TV series ever, and I love that fact that it’s in black and white, and I love the fact that it’s not spot on, and it feels like it’s been transmitted from some other dimension. It feels like it shouldn’t be here, and when I was doing visual effects you make a tweak and you wait for it to update, so you have all this strange little downtime in your mind where if you think about something else you get distracted. So I put films on, but if I put a film on that’s too interesting or too distracted, I won’t get any work done, I’ll just end up watching it. So I basically had to put something on that I could tune in and out of really fast. I put B-Movies on, so I must have watched The Thing From Another World, This Island Earth… if it got to the end I’d just put it on again because I was watching it in bits, so I’d watch a film ten times in a day or something. I could quote every line of Forbidden Planet by the end.
It’s probably my favourite film.
When I first watched it, I wasn’t totally levelled by it. The first time I saw it I was a bit like, ‘Yeah, okay’. But it’s funny, over time I’ve come back to that film more than others. It’s the place that I’ve fantasised about living in, having that kind of house.
On Altair IV?
Yeah, in the desert somewhere. Obviously I wouldn’t lock my daughter away in the cupboard.
In the production notes it said that when you were casting, you were looking for an actual couple [for the lead roles]? Why was that?
I think it’s probably doing a disservice to them by saying that I wanted a real couple. At the very beginning of the whole process I didn’t want to use actors, I wanted to use real people and film it like a documentary. And then slowly, piece by piece it went off that, but I still wanted it to be as realistic as it could possibly be. I thought that even if we don’t get real actors, we’ll get a real couple, and even if it all goes wrong then that won’t fall apart, we’ll have a genuine dynamic. The film hinges on the chemistry between the two, and I didn’t want to risk not having any. So it was really fortunate that Scoot [McNairy] had just started dating Whitney a few months before the film. They were still having sex – they don’t any more, they’re married.
How much of their performance was scripted, and how much was improvised?
A lot of it was improv, I don’t know exactly what the breakdown would be, but something like 70 per cent. Even though it was improvised though, there’d still be specific points to hit, so while it wouldn’t be ‘Say this’, it would be ‘At some point in this scene, I think we need to learn this about you and we need to try and do this’. Sometimes we would go off-piste a bit and I’d be like ‘Oh my God, that’s so much better than I pictured it.’ We ended up with 100 hours of footage when we came back, like a documentary, and we bolted together the important parts, which ended up at around four-and-a-half hours. Then basically spent the next eight months crunching it down.
Is there a slight political angle to it?
Yeah, people read into that. There are political things in there, but I think that science fiction… to get a bit serious for a minute, when people want to make a point, what they tend to do, or what I do, is take it to an extreme. Take it into a stupid experience, because if a thought still works when it’s cranked all the way up to 11, if it still holds true, then you know it’s right. And what science fiction does is allow you to crank things up to 11. So you can say let’s take things to an extreme, let’s make things fantastical, how does this feel now? Does it still feel like I’m doing the right thing? What I didn’t want to do was say ‘It’s like this’. And out of all the analogies, the one I wanted to come across the most was the War On Terror. I personally believe, and it looks like it’s true anyway, is that you don’t solve things by trying to destroy them. If you say ‘I want to eradicate this thing, I’ll bomb the crap out of it, that’ll solve the problem and stop people hating us,’ it’s actually the entire opposite. So in the film, the more you try to destroy these creatures to save everyone, the more you might end up killing everyone. I like the idea that perhaps more people in the film die from the military and the attacks on the creatures than have actually died from the creature attacks. And the creatures are just animals, I didn’t want them to be good or evil, they’re just trying to survive. But like I said, I love The Twilight Zone, and every one has a moral point to it without feeling like they’re preaching. I find in life when there’s an article, or you’re in a pub having an argument or discussion with someone about a philosophical point, I’m always in my mind picturing the science fiction films or the Twilight Zone episodes that proved that point by taking it to the extreme. And so I feel like it’s the job of science fiction – good science fiction, proper science fiction – to do that. I gives you the platform to say things out loud that you might otherwise not be allowed to say out loud, and make points that normally go under the radar a lot. The thing is, with this film, is that it’s about love but it’s also about war, and disaster areas, and the third world, and how we don’t give a shit when we don’t live there. These are all things that I wanted to explore, but without definitively saying these people are good, these people are bad, it’s just human nature. We don’t really care about things until we’re in it. To me, science fiction is about ‘what if’. It’s about ideas, and a lot of modern science fiction is about space ships firing lasers, and that’s not ideas. That’s not thought provoking. And one of the criticisms that this film will have is that there’s not enough explosions. But I think it deserves to be science fiction, it is the ‘what if’ scenario, and it allows you to think about things that are in the real world, in a different way.
And your next project is something with Timur Bekmambetov?
Yeah.
Is it science fiction?
It is. I can’t talk about it. We’ve released a log line, well not a log line, but we’ve released a little pretentiously pointless statement, which is that it’s an epic human story, set in a futuristic world without humanity. I’m trying to write it now, but trying to find the time between promoting the film is insane. This is going to go on until at least December. I’m trying to chip away at it, and I really want to do it. It’s a film that I really want to do, I’ve had it in my mind for the last ten years, and it looks like I might have a chance to do it. It’s very epic, it’s more ambitious than Monsters, but I’d like to keep it at a budget level so that we can keep control of it. We can avoid the studio pressure to tick all of the boxes.
Monsters is released on 3 December through Vertigo Films.
