Picturing an alien nation

Low budget sci-fi? Improvised dialogue? Giant octopuses from space? I know what you're thinking. But Gareth Edwards's first feature focuses on ordinary lives rather than cheap thrills, he tells Donald Clarke

GARETH EDWARDS, a pleasant, somewhat shy young man from the English midlands, remembers an early unveiling of Monsters, his first feature, with a mixture of horror and nausea. The picture, till then largely unseen, had just been selected for the increasingly influential South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Eager to get some sense of what uninvolved civilians thought of the thing, he arranged a public screening.

“Until then, about four or five people had seen it,” he explains. “So I was very, very nervous. The credits came up at the end – the point everyone normally claps – and there was no applause. The lights came up. Nobody clapped. I thought: ‘Oh my God. This is horrific.’ So I made my way to the bar and nobody made eye contact. But after a while I realised they were all a bit traumatised. This was not the film they’d expected.”

The story sounds plausible. Read a brief synopsis and you could be fooled into thinking that Monstersis just another alien invasion thriller. Set in the aftermath of a mass extraterrestrial visitation, the picture follows a photographer, keen to get a snap of the giant invertebrates, as he escorts his boss's daughter through occupied territory just south of the border between the US and Mexico.

Resembling enormous land-bound octopuses, the creatures do make occasional appearances, but, for most of its duration, Monstersworks as a low-key road movie.

You might almost argue that the alien visitation is background music to the picture’s main thrust: the developing relationship between the two leads. It’s a daring strategy. More than a few viewers, eager for Godzilla vs the Space Squid, may find themselves disappointed.

“It was a case of wanting to do something realistic,” he says. “If you talk to your grandparents about the second World War, they will explain that they were rarely in danger. There was fighting, but most of the time they were travelling or just trying to get on with their lives. Things were mundane most of the time.”

Edwards goes on to make comparisons with the September 11th attacks. If Hollywood had, a decade earlier, attempted to imagine such an eventuality, it would, he argues, have missed the grubby, mundane reality of what actually followed for many people.

“That experience made you slightly ashamed of watching all those Bruce Willis films. When something extraordinary happens, it quickly becomes ordinary and people get on with their lives. The same might happen with an alien invasion.”

At this point, many readers will find their minds turning to District 9. Neill Blomkamp's fine film also made efforts to show how, after some time, citizens might come to regard alien occupation as little more than an everyday annoyance. Edwards began, however, planning his film many years ago and was already in production when word came through about District 9.

"That was a concern," he agrees. "When we were filming we heard that Peter Jackson was producing this film with Neill Blomkamp and we thought: this is going to make our film unreleasable. But when I finally saw it, I was relieved. It was so different. In a way, it made it easier to sell our film. Before, it used to take me half an hour to explain the plot. Now, I can just say: 'It's Lost in Translationmeets District 9.' Ha ha!"

Raised in the unglamorous surroundings of Nuneaton – birthplace of George Eliot, don’t you know – Edwards took an interest in image manipulation from an early age. His dad worked in the computer business and, as a result, the Edwardses were one of those families who always had access to the latest machines. He went to film school but, sharing a house with a computer animator, soon got sidetracked into the world of visual effects. As he tells it, the money was so good and the work so plentiful that he started to become a bit complacent.

“I can remember looking at computer animation when I was younger and thinking: it’s good, but it will take a few years before it’s perfect. In a few years, I’ll make a film using these skills, I thought. Then a few years became a decade.”

Now established as a visual effects artist, Edwards found it difficult to "claw his way" back into dramatic film-making. Happily, we are now in an era where, if you've got a good laptop and a great deal of talent, you can make a science-fiction movie for the price of an indie woolly-hat comedy. Joining forces with Vertigo Films, an up-and-coming UK distribution and production company, he set out to make Monstersusing guerrilla strategies. Many of the supporting actors are amateurs. Happy accidents encountered on the shoot were incorporated into the final cut. Much of the dialogue is improvised.

“Oh yeah, I would say about 80 per cent is improvised,” he says. “It was all to do with making it feel as realistic as possible. I didn’t want dialogue right on the nose. I liked all the randomness. I had a paragraph written in black ink that described what happened in the scene, then, in blue ink, there’d be a description of the emotions we wanted to get across and what we wanted to learn about the characters.”

He’s an inventive chap, this Mr Edwards. Where other budding film-makers might plough their way through Scriptwriting For Dummies, worrying over a “key incident” for page 17, Gareth devised his own, impressively original approach to the art. While travelling through Mexico, he made it his business to grab interesting strangers and drag them into the action. He seems to have grasped Jean-Luc Godard’s famous dictum to the effect that, to make a film, all you need is a “girl and a gun”.

“The Mexican authorities gave us this bodyguard and he looked so cool that we tried to get him into as many shots as possible. If anybody was about with a gun we tried to get it into the frame.”

The looseness of Edwards's technique does lend the film the desired funky, organic feel. But there are also consistent, well-developed themes running through Monsters. Despite its verité energies, Monstersfeels like the work of an ordered, focused brain. Nobody could watch the movie without detecting certain political undercurrents. In particular, the film-makers appear to have things to say about the US's current paranoia concerning illegal immigration. A wall divides Mexico from the US. The barrier is allegedly in place to protect against extraterrestrial incursions, but the parallels with current right-wing demands for a similar structure – directed at another class of "alien" – are impossible to ignore.

“Erm, yeah. There were attempts at a political allegory,” he admits with a smidgeon of reluctance. “But, oddly, my main interest was in the ‘war on terror’. Here is this threat. How many people should the state kill to defeat it? Why are western lives regarded as more valuable? To be honest, we would have had the wall if we’d shot the film anywhere else. But it does work as an allegory for the immigration issue. That’s fine. I always think that what people read into a film says more about them than it does about the film. I like that.”

That sense of western governments caring less about third world lives does come through strongly.

“People said to me: ‘You have this area infested with aliens. Nobody would live there in real life.’ And I said: ‘What about hurricanes? They come along every year in the same areas and people live there.’ Some people have no choice.”

At any rate, the unusual combination of intimate drama and socio-political horror show has already drawn a lot of industry attention towards young Mr Edward. Timur Bekmambetov, the talented, brash director of Wantedand Night Watch, has signed a deal with Edwards and, when visiting Los Angeles, he can barely put his head outside the door without being dragged into a meeting.

"Yeah. It's crazy," he says. "They seem to collect meetings in LA. They have them just for the sake of having them. Several times I've walked away saying: 'What on earth was the point of that?'" One thinks of Robert Altman's The Player. The phrase " Lost in Translationmeets District 9" would, I imagine, make sense to those people.

"I hope they're starting to say Monstersmeets Monsters," he says with a good- natured snort.

I reckon he can count on it.

* Monsters opens today.