A unique, British independent sci-fi thriller, set six years after a NASA probe crash-landed on Earth, when extraterrestrial life forms run amok in Mexico and the military struggle to contain them. A jaded US journalist begrudgingly agrees to find his boss’ daughter, and escort her through the infected zone to the safety of the US border. Monsters is now playing in cinemas. Flicks spoke to British director Gareth Edwards about his debut feature…
FLICKS: Did you always intend for Monsters to turn out in the unique way that it has?
GARETH EDWARDS: I think when I started it, it would’ve been a bit more of an action film. I wanted to do a monster movie that was set years later down the line. The producers finally steered me towards the male/female situation, like a journey back home, sort of a road movie thing and so it became much more about this relationship between these two people.
I think emotionally it works stronger than if we’d gone the other route. I know that if someone said the word love story to me, I’d go “Oh, I’m not seeing that”. I don’t really like love stories or romantic films, so it had to be a film that I’d sit and watch. Lost in Translation and Eternal Sunshine – they’re the sort of films that I thought were really good relationship films.
So when you guys were travelling through Mexico, was it a very, very small crew?
Yeah, there were four of us, so I shot it, there was a sound man, there was a producer, and then there was a Spanish-speaking producer. We drove around in a van with the two actors and we would jump out here and there and shoot some scenes and jump back in the van.
Back at base we had the editor and he was digitising all this footage because it was all shot on memory sticks, so you had to delete them after you had finished the day’s filming.
So it wasn’t storyboarded or anything?
I thought when I got to make a film I’d be so anal about it and storyboard it to death, and I just learnt that it’s pointless because I never knew what the location would be until we got there. I never knew what the light would be like or what the actors would be doing. If you just stick to the storyboard, you shut off all the opportunities around.
Instead of storyboarding I’d write a shot list of pieces of information that happened within a scene that I have to convey to the audience, so I’d be making sure that I covered that at some point, but then it was just a case of like “Well, let’s see what we’ve got, what the environment’s like”, and then it was quite exciting. It feels a bit fresher because it’s based on the environment that you’ve never been to before.
I probably drove the actors a bit crazy sometimes, because in the middle of a scene, while they’re acting, I would just move the camera off them and go film a little child, or go film a dog or something. I like that idea of just exploring the environment a bit more and looking at the little details.
What about the bits with the aliens?
I didn’t want it to feel that when a creature turned up it suddenly had this different style, so I just pretended they were there, framed it as well as I could, as if I was looking at them.
It was a big problem for me then to stick the creatures in because sometimes I’d pull focus and it’d go out of focus and things like that – all the things you shouldn’t do in CGI – but I think the final result is that if you don’t kind of play it safe, you just film it like its real, then, even though it’s hard work to put that graphic in later, you actually don’t have to work so hard to make it look good because the shot is inherently realistic. It just has this realistic vibe about it that you don’t get when you CG it, or lock the camera off, or do it against a green screen.
What made you want to film in Mexico – was it something to do with a political subtext, or…
No, it was more from just going on holiday – I find holidays and travelling really inspiring, and I was just picturing this film a lot whilst I was aboard and. In a tropic climate with palm trees and dusty roads and dogs in the street and stuff, and I just really liked that environment.
We did think about doing it in Australia at one point and having it all in the outback and then trying to get back to the east coast cities, but it was a commercial decision really by the producers, that once you have American actors, then the film feels American and you can sell it a lot more around the world.
Are there any influences from other monster movies that have played their part with Monsters?
Yeah, for sure, I mean I think it’s a bit War of the Worlds in there, I like a lot of Ray Harryhausen’s stuff. I’m a big B-Movie fan.
Spielberg movies were very much an influence, early Spielberg like Close Encounters and obviously there’s Jurassic Park in there. The joke we had was that Spielberg’s films we were always 10 minutes ahead of those movies, or 10 minutes behind – our characters were always just in front or behind the big action set pieces and turning up in the aftermath or leaving before it happened, and only on occasion do they sort of end up in the middle of it.
