Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
British filmmaker Gareth Edwards is a fascinating study of DIY filmmaking. With a productive and lucrative career in digital effects for documentaries on British television (with such rocking titles as "Seven Wonders of the Industrial World," "Dive to Bermuda Triangle," and "Space Race), Edwards had an idea for a film and almost no money to make it. So with a couple of strong actors, some cameras, and almost no crew, he went to Mexico and shot one of the more original sci-fi stories of the year, complete with a underlying sociopolitical message about immigration. Once shooting was done, he did all the special effects himself, which took a great deal of time (during which, a little film called DISTRICT 9 was released).
The resulting work is MONSTERS, a film that is as much about the two lead characters' lives as it's about, well, monsters. And man is this is strong, fun, thought-provoking piece of filmmaking, which I first heard about at SXSW last March, but didn't get to see until recently. The film had a limited release late in October, and is opening in more cities (including Chicago) on November 12. And I genuinely feel that you need to make time for MONSTERS. Come on, the creatures have tentacles. What else do you need? I recently had a chance to chat with Edwards about his film, and we had a great time talking. He's funny, knowledgeable, and taps all the right reference points. Please enjoy MONSTERS writer-director-cinematography-production designer-visual effects artist Gareth Edwards…
Gareth Edwards: Hey, Steve.
Capone: Gareth, how are you?
GE: I’m good. How are you?
Capone: Excellent. I’m sure you are probably, at this point, sick of giving these interviews, since you’ve probably been doing them since…how long now?
GE: [laughs] I think it was about six months ago that we had the world premiere at the Fantastic Fest portion of SXSW.
Capone: I was there and I missed MONSTERS somehow. When I watched the film recently, I was with a friend of mine, and the first thing they said to me is that they loved the movie, “But why is it called MONSTERS?” Tell me just about coming up with that as a title. That’s a pretty definitive statement.
GE: It’s a difficult one, because I’m right in the middle of a legal battle with Gus Van Sant. I’m suing him, because there wasn’t one elephant in ELEPHANT.
[Both Laugh]
GE: So it’s a tricky one. But basically, it evolved. It’s one of those things you don’t predict the life… To have predicted this as the life of the film when we first started would have been just too crazy. At the time, I would have been happy if we just got it into one cinema at one festival and that the production company had made their money back, because it’s very low budget. The idea of it kind of exploding a little bit like they way it has is kind of a bit of a shock, and it’s what you secretly hope for, but our main concern at the time was “How do you sum up this film in one word or a couple of words?” When we were filming it, we had to have a pretend title, because if we were trying to film in a location, we didn’t want to scare people. If you try to get permission to film somewhere and you say “It’s called MONSTERS,” they think you are going to trash the place, so the pretend title we had was FAR FROM HOME, which sounds like some sort of Disney movie about puppies or something.
Capone: That’s right. I think there was a movie about geese called FLY AWAY HOME.
GE: Was that it?
Capone: Yeah.
[Both Laugh]
GE: Everyone kept looking like “Where are the puppies?” while we were filming, and essentially what happened is like when you label things in a computer--and maybe this will help explain it to anyone--but when you label everything with all of your thoughts, you are like “This is my monster movie.” Whatever this film ended up being, “This is going to be my monster movie.” I always wanted to make a film that had monsters in it, and so this was going to be. So everything was just labeled “Monsters” on everything, and then it came to sitting there and putting the title on at the front, and it was kind of like “Well, can anyone think of a better title?” We went around in circles with every single title we could think of, and everyone sort of agreed that this is the one word that gets your attention.
My counter argument was we tried to make a different kind of film; it’s not what people expect they are going to get based on purely the title, and for me that was a good thing, but inevitably we are going to annoy some people because of the way the film goes. But out of an experiment the other day, because I hear this so much, I couldn’t help it… My favorite film along these lines is JAWS, and so I just kind of thought “Well I don’t recall there being too many sharks in JAWS, so I’ll just time it.” I had a stopwatch and I timed every time you see the shark in JAWS, even the fin or anything, and every time you see any of the alien or anything in MONSTERS, and there’s more monsters in MONSTERS than there are sharks in JAWS. And there’s something incredible that I found out about JAWS, virtually an hour into the movie, guess how many minutes of shark you have seen.
Capone: Do you see any?
GE: Three seconds. [laughs] I think what it is, is because that film becomes so much more about the characters than it does the monsters, like it’s kind of like setting a film about some sort of road movie set in WWII Europe and calling it WAR. The title is supposed to have a double meaning. I want this audience to go on a journey with the characters. At the start of the film, you are rooting for “X” to happen and then by the end of the film, you are rooting for “Y” to happen, like you did a complete flip, but you are supposed to go in looking at the poster and think MONSTERS, I know what this film is about” and then come out and go “Oh, okay it’s not quite what I thought.” And that be a good thing. I think the main thing is: “Don’t expect CLOVERFIELD 2 or DISTRICT 10 or anything like that. Go in open minded, and you might enjoy it.
Capone: That was my immediate reaction, starting to think “Does the title have a double meaning?” “Does the title mean something beyond just the aliens?” You really did make me think about it and I’m not sure that I came up with a satisfying answer.
GE: Well, thank you.
Capone: No, and there are still a fair amount of monsters in it. You mentioned the character development, and I definitely want to get into that, because that is one of the most interesting things about the film. But like any solid work of science fiction, at least the ones that I grew up loving, MONSTERS isn’t afraid to wear it’s sociopolitical metaphors on its sleeve, and I know that you are going to tell me that that wasn’t the intent, but it’s there, man. Was there anything part of you that felt like maybe you were tweaking the people that have something to say about immigration?
GE: It’s a weird one. My favorite TV show ever is the original "The Twilight Zone," the black-and-white episodes, and what I love about them is as well as them being great “what if” scenarios, they usually have an underlying statement to make about life or something, like “Careful what you wish for,” or something about how we treat other people, etc. I think it’s kind of the role of science fiction to be about something other than aliens. What I didn’t want to do is make a film that felt preachy or tried to come up with all of the answers for everything, but it’s more a case of raising certain questions. When it comes to MONSTERS, I feel like what we are saying with that title and once you have seen the movie is “Who are the monsters?” “What is a monster?” “How do you define what a monster is?”
If you were doing a film about WWII Germany it’d be like calling the film EVIL. “How can a whole nation be evil?” “How can animals be monsters?” “Maybe we are all the monsters.” For me, the political metaphor that I like the most was this idea that “Okay, there are monsters in the world, i.e. there are bad things, bad people, or whatever you want to call them--people that don’t agree with our perspective on everything.” And basically their actions will result in a lot of death, but at what price is it worth destroying them? If you end up killing more people getting rid of them then they were ever going to kill in the first place, is that a valid thing to be doing? It feels like, yeah, across the world we have terrorists that are a real problem, and I’m not in anyway saying that they are not. I don’t know what the statistics are at the moment, but maybe a quarter of a million people have died in Iraq through the bombings and stuff, and it’s like “At what cost?” It’s just a question, like “At what price is it worth eliminating that?” Do those people not matter, because they are foreign? How many foreigners dying equals one westerner dying? And I don’t know what the answers to all of these things are.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t stop these people or we shouldn’t. It’s just literally I was just trying to throw every question along these lines up on the screen, but not necessarily give the answers, just raise them. It’s much easier to do that when you have a monster movie than it is when you have a war movie, because your target audience in a sense would avoid your film if you were going to make a political film about war. If you do it wrapped in this “Hey, let’s all kill monsters”-type thing, then I think you are going to more likely touch the people that you are trying to reach.
In terms of the immigration side of things, at one point, we were going to set the film… We talked about setting it in Australia, in England, and I think if we had done England people would say. “Is it a metaphor for Eastern Europeans trying to immigrate to England?” If it were in Australia, they would say “Is this about the way we treat Aborigines?” So, I think every country has it’s own internal conflict and if you create a device that’s open enough to interpretation, then people will just read into it whatever they want, and I’m quite happy with that. I think good science fiction should allow that and so yeah. The main thing is it doesn’t have the solutions. I’m not saying, “This is what we should do.” It’s literally like “Is what we are doing the right approach to solving the problem?” “The Monsters came, yeah they kill a few people, but is bombing the hell out of an entire country going to solve the problem?” Do you know what I mean? That’s kind of what’s going on in the background of our film. But, God, that makes it sound really political, this monster movie [laughs].
Capone: But you know what? It’s okay. That’s a beautiful thing that has run through horror and sci-fi for decades, and I don’t know that that’s ever scared anyone away. You mentioned DISTRICT 9 before, and there are some comparisons beyond the political similarities. Like you said, each nation has it’s own conflicts, but even the way that you have it set up at the beginning that these aliens are part of the culture now, as opposed to the ones in DISTRICT 9 that have been sort of strangely integrated and segregated in the South African culture. The signage you’ve got is brilliant. And both films are set at a turning point in this strange relationship between the humans and the aliens.
GE: Yeah, I think Neill Blomkamp is a bit of a genius obviously and I’ll be queuing up for his next film. But we were in the middle of Mexico filming this when they first announced that they were going to make a film called DISTRICT 9, and it just took us a hell of a long time in post because I was doing the visual effects myself. I was really nervous when DISTRICT 9 came out, because I was thinking “Oh my God, it’s going to be like our films, and we are going to not be able to release ours or something.” And I was very relieved when I watched it, because yeah the similarities that you talk about are true, but the experience of watching it is completely different. So I was very relieved with that, but yeah, to be honest if we had the tiniest fraction of the success of that film, we would be over the moon, so any comparisons I guess are welcome.
Capone: You were a digital effects artist for some very interesting films, not films that I think a lot of people associate with digital effects from what I’ve seen.
GE: Yeah, well my connection mainly was with BBC and the factual department, which is basically the documentary department, and the drama department basically had this snobbery about using computer graphics--they didn’t embrace it; they didn’t like it; it’s not what they do. Because they do so many science programs, the documentary department is always having to use computer graphics to explain complicated theories like with solar systems or whatever.
So, there was always this relationship with doing CGI and doing documentaries, and then slowly these sort of mockumentaries started happening where they are like fake documentaries. You have a job with "Walking with Dinosaurs" and things like that. And strangely, the factual department of all of these companies in the UK were much more at home and much savvy at using CGI than the drama people, and I felt like the drama has been playing catch up over the last few years, to catch up with where the documentary people have been for a long time and so it was actually easier to have a career within documentaries doing CG than it was drama, and unless you are going to get into feature film, and I was doing most of it from home from my bedroom and it was just friends I was used to that were working on shows that were like Discovery Channel shows.
Capone: Sure. That’s a fascinating background. And strangely enough, there isn’t a real emphasis on effects in this movie.We’ve got a movie coming out soon called SKYLINE that’s basically made by a bunch of guys from an effects house, and clearly that movie is just 90 percent these mind-blowing effects shots. With yours, that’s not the emphasis. Was that kind of important, or was that more work for you if you wanted to make it more effects heavy?
GE: The reality is it’s both. My really bad analogy that I have used to explain that is I think it’s probably like being a gynecologist for a living, doing visual effects. When you see it all day long, it stops turning you on. Like a lot of people think visual effects is really sexy, but with me it’s like “Can’t we talk first?” It’s because I’ve been in situations where, to be honest, the visual effects are half trying to save a program or a film that doesn’t quite grab you enough on it’s own, and so you are having to go bend over backwards and work till the early hours to cover the problems of someone else, because they didn’t write an engaging story or whatever. So you pay such a heavy price when you are doing that that when you get a chance to make a movie, you think “Well I really don’t want to be that guy. I really want to get the story right and I want to get characters that you care about.”
In a way, I wanted the film to work possibly without any CGI, to get it working on an emotional level. There is a connection between the monster elements in the film and the journey that the characters go on, so it does need to be there, but there was this one moment where we joked about not putting any creatures in it at all, but I felt that was an indication that things were going well, because it kind of worked. We got accepted into Fantastic Fest’s screenings at SXSW with Tim League, based on a cut of the film that had no graphics in it really at all. There was no real creature stuff, and all we had in there was text, so every time there would be a creature shot, we would just say “Creature silhouetted by lightning” or something, and the cut of the film worked with just text, and Tim saw that version, and he accepted the film without any of the visual effects done.
And really nervously, like we got off of the plane nervously to come to the festival. We met, and he was very polite and he kind of chatted about other things, and then finally he sort of said, “So did you finish the movie?” And I couldn’t help but sort of joke with him and say, “Yeah, you know that text that you saw?” He was like “Yeah.” “It’s a much better font now! It’s all embossed and chromed. You're going to love it.” I think if he hadn’t done that; if he hadn’t had the balls to do that, we wouldn’t be where we are now. There were so many people in that room like Magnolia Pictures, who is distributing the film now, and I ended up getting a Hollywood agent who was in that room, and it’s all gone crazy based on that one screening, so I’m quite indebted to those guys.
Capone: That’s great. That’s kind of funny to hear that you tried to mess with Tim's head a little bit. I don’t want to focus on this, but I am kind of fascinated with your creature design. Why are tentacles just so universally loved by people designing aliens? It’s very retro. It’s a classic design. Can you talk about why you went that way?
GE: I like the word “classic.” I’m going to use that from now on. It’s better than “generic.” For me, I didn’t want to get into that trap of… I sort of felt CLOVERFIELD put too much pressure on itself to design the ultimate creature. That’s what everyone was talking about with that movie, “What’s it look like?” And it’s such an insane amount of pressure to put on your creature design, and so for me, I wanted this to be, I’ll use the word “classic,” because I like what you said.…
Capone: It’s yours, you can have it.
GE: We’re not trying to re-invent the wheel or come up with something completely new. In a way, I was thinking of things like "The Simpsons" you know, like when they have an alien invasion.
Capone: That’s what I was thinking of too, actually. [Laughs]
GE: In that I wanted to go to the most default thing that everyone in their mind thinks of, but then do a photo-real version of it, because our film is really not about revealing the creatures. You kind of see them within the first 30 seconds, and then the film goes off on a completely different tangent. I think the most important thing was that they have this task in this movie which is they’ve got to be scary, but beautiful and it’s kind of a contradiction in terms. That was a real struggle. I was having to do maybe two shots a day of visual effects and I got my first creature shot and two months went by and I hadn’t done a single shot, because it just took me forever to nail the design, because what looks good on paper doesn’t look good in 3D, and what looks good in 3D doesn’t look good when it’s lit and what looks good when it’s lit doesn’t look good when it’s in the shot. So you keep having to go back to the beginning and redesigning it and literally kind of evolving it, like it was a real animal. But, yeah, I’m pretty happy with the final look of them, especially towards the end sequence.
Capone: I don’t want to give anything away, but that gas station sequence--I actually wrote down “Beautiful moment.” It’s a gorgeous scene. It makes you realize that the whole film had been leading up to that discovery, and you are basically presenting us with an image that, done incorrectly, could make the audience laugh once they realized what’s going on. It’s actually really beautifully done. I was actually wondering about the stuff on the trees, that effect.
GE: Yeah, yeah the spores. We called them “spores.”
Capone: I was going to call them that too, but I wasn’t sure that’s what they were. Was there any indication that those things would come off of the trees and then go into water. Was that the idea?
GE: I’ll leave it up to whatever anyone thinks. I always feel with those sort of things that, I know as little as the characters in the film know. I turned up with the camera like with them, and we saw what you saw. So I don’t have a definitive answer, but yeah they grow in the trees, and the idea is once they are large enough, they would probably just make a run to the nearest stream, which there is one right by that tree where we filmed.
There’s a funny story about that, because there’s a funny story about that, because the actors, as part of the shoot, we also went to a festival called “Day of the Dead” and it’s in the movie, all of these candles and everything. While we there, there were all of these market stores that were just selling lost of crazy weird stuff and this guy was selling these little kids toys that flash on and off different colors, and I was like “You should just buy one of these tiny little crappy toys.” It was like “How many you’ve got?” He was like “I’ve got about 20,” and I was “We’ll take the lot.” And I took all of them, and a few days later basically when we did that scene, I used duct tape or whatever and we stick them to the tree all over it and switched them all on, so all of the lights that are flashing, you can actually see the lights flashing off an actor’s face. It was really embarrassing, because we are trying to do this profound moment where they realize something about where they are, and what they're looking at these stupid kids toys gaffer taped to the tree. I think the actors constantly felt like they were in the world’s stupidest movie and no one was ever going to see it and everything we were doing was just stupid. [laughs] So, yeah, there’s a fine line I think when you do anything like this between it totally working and it completely failing, and it felt like we were always on the edge.
Capone: You mentioned you wanted it to feel like you had just dropped down when the characters did. That’s kind of what you did, isn’t it? You were sort of shooting on the fly and improvising. Is something like this even possible to schedule, let alone storyboard?
GE: Yeah, I didn’t storyboard anything. That just went out the window instantly. We scheduled in the sense of “We will shoot in these locations on this these days,” but we didn’t know where the locations were, like we would try to find a harbor on this day or we were trying to find a train on that day. If we turned up and it didn’t look right, we would maybe just abandon it and do something else and find another harbor another day. And so it was very flexible, because it was such a tiny crew, and we all shoved in one van. It was not a problem when something went wrong, because it wasn’t costing us much money, and I wanted it to have that realism that you can only really get when everyone’s not sure what’s going to happen next. All of the dialogue is pretty much ad-libbed, and so they’re not sure what they are going to say, and they are not sure who’s going to talk next or what’s going to happen, and I think it kind of filters through into the film. There’s this sense of “you can’t really predict exactly where this film is going to go,” because we didn’t really quite know when we were making it.
Another bad analogy is that the way films are normally made is you paint a target on the wall, which is your script, and then you stand back with a gun and you shoot it while trying to get a bullseye, which is like shooting with a camera. What we did is we shot first, so we shot into the wall, and then wherever the bullet landed, I painted a target on to make it look like we had been really lucky. It was like “Just shoot whatever and then when we are in the edit, we will figure out how it fits into the story, and then we’ll use CGI to embed it into the world.”
Capone: I love the idea that if you had gone to a specific location a day later, it might have been an entirely different series of shots.
GE: Oh yeah. It’d be different shots. It’d be different people in the movie. It would be a different dialogue. Yeah, I think if we went back and redid this film, say all of the copies got burned or something, it’d be a completely different movie, completely different. But I think it still would have been as good a film, however good that is, but it would have been the same quality. The key was to just be open minded, and I kind of half thing that’s the key for the audience to go see it as well, like park any expectations about CLOVERFIELD or DISTRICT 9, and just sit and watch this sort of road trip and just see if you like it, because I think it’s so hard to sort of sell it as what it is. It’s quite a strange one.
Capone: I understand you may have something lined up already for what’s next for you after this?
GE: Yeah. Straight after like SXSW, a trip I had to do is--you kind of have to do--I went out to L.A., and you go meet everybody, not literally, but it feels that way. I must have done 50 meetings in two weeks. It was relentless, and basically the filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov who's doing ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER with Tim Burton. He was really kind and very supportive of MONSTERS. He really liked it and so he’s basically financing me to develop my next film, so that I can develop it and control it in a way that it’s the film I want to make, and so that’s what I’m trying to work on in my spare time when I get a chance. I think I’ll only have a proper crack at it once this film is released.
Capone: Are you going to be able to recapture whatever it is that you did that made MONSTERS feel so unique, in the way you shot it and the way you put it together? Could you possibly feel comfortable working in a more conventional environment?
GE: That’s the whole thing and that’s why we are trying to do it separate. That’s why Timur was keen to finance it. I think what will make it good is to learn form MONSTERS, and use the best parts of what having a lot of money can give you and the best parts of what having no money can give you and try to combine the two to create an even better film. So I’m with you; I totally agree. If we'd a penny more on MONSTERS, it would have probably made a worse movie. I definitely am not being distracted by that.
Capone: Well, good luck with your lawsuit against Gus Van Sant too, by the way.
GE: Thank you. I’ll tell you how it goes. And then I’m working on THE WIZARD OF OZ. I'm angry that you don't see him until the end of the movie. [laughs]
Capone: Alright, Gareth, it was great to talk to you. Good luck with this.
GE: Alright, thanks a lot. Cheers.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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