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Filmmaker Gareth Edwards Talks About Shooting His Guerilla Sci-Fi Film Monsters

Most monster movies require big budgets and big sets. Gareth Edwards wanted to shoot his sci-fi thriller like a guerilla documentary to make if feel more real, using real locations and unrehearsed actors, adding in the CGI gadgetry later. He and his crew traveled through Mexico and Texas, making Monsters, a romance and parable about terrorism and immigration.
By Peter Simek |
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It is rare for a filmmaker’s first feature film to be a sci-fi epic, filmed in multiple international locations and featuring 40-foot walking monsters, forests infested with glowing alien eggs, and a fanciful concrete wall that divides the United States and Mexico and rivals the size and scale of the Great Wall of China. What’s even more incredible is achieving this otherworldly wizardry with a budget that was, in blockbuster movie terms, next to nothing.

But that was British filmmaker Gareth Edwards’ design. He shot his new film Monsters, which opens at the Magnolia this weekend, on location in Mexico and Galveston, Texas. The long-time visual effects engineer had a dream of shooting a science fiction fantasy like a guerrilla documentary, mixing special effects with raw locations and action, with the hope of producing a very real feeling movie.

The film stars Richardson native Scoot McNairy, who plays a photojournalist located in Mexico at a time when aliens have populated large sections of the northern zone of the country, leaving death and destruction in their path. He receives an assignment directly from the publisher of his magazine: find the publisher’s daughter Samantha (Whitney Able) in Mexico and bring her back to the States unharmed. What follows is a long (if occasionally tedious) journey through the infected zone that is part romance and part suspense thriller. The film also pulls in themes of fear and terrorism, and, although Edwards claims it was unintentional during an interview with FrontRow, Mexican-American tensions over immigration.

We spoke with Edwards about his movie and creating the world for Monsters in the forests of Mexico and the hurricane-ravaged streets of post-Ike Galveston.

FrontRow: Where did you get the idea to film a sci-fi movie in such a stripped-down manner?

Gareth Edwards: I just got to the point where I had to make a film or I was going to burst, and I was completely prepared to go spend my own money and go do it. But I was looking for an idea that was kind of slightly commercial that I could shoot on my own. And once I got the idea for this monster movie set years down the line – therefore people weren’t like reacting to the creatures anymore, they were just part of everyday life – then I thought, ‘oh yeah, I could shoot that myself.’ But what happened was as soon as you have a slightly commercial idea that was very cheap, the first meeting I had with Vertigo Films, they said, don’t worry Gareth, you don’t have to spend your own money, we’ll fund it. And then the conversations went along the lines of them wanting to spend more money and me telling them not to.

FR: So it was important to shoot it guerilla style?

GE: I liked the idea of filming it like a guerilla-style documentary crew, because it would add an element of realism to it. I think there is just something you can’t fake about being in a real location; it is full of random details. I wanted the actors not to look like they were acting, and I wanted the script not to look like it was written. I wanted it to feel like it was out of control and just happening.

FR: It sounds like you created a lot of obstacles for yourself to make the film?

GE: I spent the last 10 years doing computer graphics, and you learn strange lessons doing that every day. One of them is you essentially sit in front of a whole bunch of dials that control an image. If you approach it and say, I’m going to break this image, I’m going to whack it all the way to fully black or fully bright and then I’m going to pull it back from being broken until it slightly works, you get a completely different result and often it is better than anything that you anticipated. And so I found that I did my best work when I try to shatter or destroy something. Anything that didn’t break would make it stronger. In each scene there is at least one moment that was born out of a random, happy accident. But happy accidents happened because we were trying to create accidents all the time. We were kind of like on a suicide mission with the film.

FR: How did you go about finding locations? How many of those were happy accidents?

GE: We tried to put together a fair bit of them. In reality, I think as far as I can remember, there were probably only a handful of locations out of hundreds in the film that were actually chosen beforehand. We would just aim for the right places, the right coastlines. Even I, I remember going on Google Earth, and people take holiday snaps and put them on Google Earth, so you can basically go down the coastline and look at everyone’s photos until you see something.

FR: What was it like shooting in Galveston after Hurricane Ike?

GE: That was the end of the trip, and we had to be very careful because people were still picking up the rubbish from their houses. It had only been a few weeks earlier, and we did contact the film council, and we asked if this was OK. And they were like, ‘no, come and spend your money. We need people to come back here.’ It was surreal. It really was like driving around at the end of the world in that place.

FR: Of course, being in Texas and making a movie about aliens and a wall between the United States and Mexico, there are lots of overtones about immigration and terrorism. Were those conscious?

GE: The one’s that were conscious were terrorism. The completely accidental one was immigration. Wherever we set this in the world we would have had a giant wall and we would have had aliens. We were going to do it in Australia, and they would have said, ‘oh, is it about the Aborigines.’ And if you did it in England, they would have asked if it was about Eastern Europeans. So I just think that is inevitable no matter wherever you go. Because we were so open and the environment and the people kind of infect the film, I guess it did kind of take over the film a bit, and I didn’t in anyway think too hard about that, maybe because I’m English. It just was not on my agenda.

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