FILM

Is it a political allegory? Nope. A monster movie then? Er, not really. Robin Askew battles his way through all the hype and controversy to find out what really inspired Gareth Edwards to make ‘Monsters’.

Gareth Edwards is talking about the embarrassment of buying condoms. "You don’t want to put them on the counter first. So you get some milk and you get some bread..." Actually, he's not talking about buying condoms at all. That was a cheap journalistic trick to get you to read on. He's actually drawing an analogy between buying condoms and his decision to break the first rule of monster movies by revealing his giant multi-tentacled beastie in the opening shot. "I know everyone has secretly come for that reason. They want to see a monster. There's more to the film than that. But at the time they bought their ticket, that's what they're after. So it's like, 'OK you came for that? Here you go. You've had it. Did you have fun? Did you enjoy it? Right, now we've got another 90 minutes to go. So let's move on from that…' And there's a trick at the beginning of the film in that audiences are so obsessed with the creature that they don't look at the people. At the end of the film you realise perhaps you should have paid more attention."

Brit director Edwards's 'Monsters' is the latest ultra-low-budget feature to capture worldwide media attention. But it's very different from its predecessors in not contriving to use the wobblecam approach (although Edwards freely confesses that was the plan until 'Cloverfield' came along). At 35, he has a decade of experience in CGI, a year of which was spent with Clifton-based graphics company 422 working on projects for the BBC and other clients. He'd always wanted to be a director, "but I just got better job offers doing CGI than being a trainee director," he says frankly. "One day I saw an advert saying, 'Broadcast Designer wanted in Bristol' and I was thinking, I wonder if that's what I do for a living? I wasn't sure what it was. I just applied out of curiosity. They called me for an interview because they thought I was lying. They'd done a show with the same title as one of mine and they thought I was claiming it as my own work. I really enjoyed working in Bristol, but career-wise I had to get back to London."

Making the transition to directing proved the biggest challenge. "I'd use the graphics to bribe my way into directing," he laughs. "You become friendly with the producers when you work with them. Whenever they said, 'How much will this be?' I'd say, 'Well if you let me direct it, I'll do it for free.' I said this to everybody and they'd all just laugh it off. But one day someone took me up on it."

And so, eventually, to 'Monsters', which was shot on location in Guatemala, Belize and Mexico, with a four-person crew and two actors exchanging improvised dialogue. It's set in the near future when much of Mexico has been 'infected' by killer squid from outer space. An American couple are trying to make their way home across this dangerous territory towards a giant wall that has been constructed to keep the aliens out of their homeland. At the risk of sounding patronising, what's most surprising about the film is that it's all about the characters and the emotion, with those eponymous invaders kept firmly in the background. That's not really what we've come to expect from people who push pixels round a screen for a living. "I felt that if the first thing people said after they walked out of the cinema was, 'The effects were really cool', then it would have been a failure," says Edwards, failing to take offence at my appalling generalisation. "Everyone has this idea that computer graphics people have social issues, and it's kind of true. I think there are two kinds of geeks. There are people who have geeky interests, and I hope that's where I fit in, and people who are socially geeky. The socially geeky people can be interested in the coolest of things - they're usually DJs. Everybody wants to invite them to their party because they've got all the vinyl. But when you chat to them there's just nothing about them and they're a bit awkward socially. On the other side of the coin, you can have people who love really embarrassing films or TV shows or science fiction or whatever, but they're really witty and funny and fun to be around. Then you get combinations of the two. And I've met a few of those through this film…"

The widely quoted $15,000 budget for 'Monsters' is, he insists, nonsense, which arose from a misunderstanding when an American electronics store simply totted up the cost of the equipment used, without allowing for wages, accommodation or transport. The true cost was "in the low six figures". But the fact that he conjured up the film's 250 skilfully integrated effects shots on a home computer in his bedroom using commercially available software is certain to inspire other aspiring film-makers.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. There's the small matter of his lengthy experience with CGI. "I think that's the key. It's not the time it takes to do them, but the time it takes to get the experience. There are so many rules that you learn subconsciously over the years. The main skill for the visual effects is embedding something fake into a real background. You have to understand the way light interacts with things and the way atmospheric conditions affect things that are at a distance. It's just a lot of studying and trial and error. I was also adamant that every shot in the film should be based on me stood somewhere with a real camera shooting real people, with all the limitations that brings."

The title, he admits, is "the number one issue right now. It wasn't initially. We didn't expect any of this. We didn't expect it to get the attention it got." While filming guerilla-style without official permission, the team used the benign-sounding title 'Far From Home' ("…but then everyone thought it was a kind of Disney movie and wondered where the puppies were"). Only when the film was complete did Edwards settle on 'Monsters'. This was for two reasons: firstly to grab the attention of potential distributors who might be persuaded to buy the film, and secondly because he was in real danger of losing his monsters. "At one point in the edit, the film worked without the creatures in. On an emotional level, you could have turned it into just a war zone. No one wants to admit it now, but there was this slight feeling of, 'Do we need these creatures?' My whole reason for making the film was to do a monster movie. That's what I love. So I called it 'Monsters' and wouldn't budge from it. That way we had to deliver them."

Now, of course, punters could feel cheated by that title. "Yeah, some people have a reaction against it, like 'Oh my god - that's not what I thought I was going to get. I hate you for that!' And then other people are like, 'Fantastic! That was so much better than I expected.' So it does divide people. I take full responsibility for it."

Edwards is irritated that the film has been lazily branded "this year's 'District 9'" when there are clear differences between the two films ("I hope that soon HMV will go round putting stickers on 'District 9' saying Last Year's 'Monsters'," he jokes) and he insists that the political metaphor critics have read into it was entirely unintentional. "I wanted a universal goal: to return home. Once we cast two actors from America it was going to be a journey back to America. Because their journey got progressively worse and some of it was on foot, the choice was either Canada or Mexico. I'd never been to either. I had no agenda about Mexico whatsoever. But then when you build a giant wall and have these things called aliens, people see a massive political metaphor there. The fact that we set it in Mexico meant that it was interpreted as me being very clever. In fact, I was being quite stupid."

The allegory he was aiming for was more in the tradition of the great monster movies of yesteryear, which tapped into such contemporary fears as the nuclear age and reds under the bed. "The modern global fear is terrorism. So how would that fit in to a monster movie? Well, if there are monsters in the world and they kill people, that's bad. But what price is it worth paying to eradicate them? If you kill far more innocent people to wipe out the monsters than they could ever kill, is it still worth doing? Does it matter if they're foreign people rather than western people?"

Edwards cites influences as diverse as 'Lost in Translation', Michael Winterbottom's 'In This World' and every Spielberg movie ever made. 'Monsters' also owes an obvious debt to 'War of the Worlds', though not the version you might expect ("I love to death the Jeff Wayne album. That was one of my main inspirations"). But he insists that some of the more esoteric comparisons go right over his head. Herzog, for example. "I'm not as familiar with him as I should be," he admits. "You go round the festival circuit and people say, 'It was very much like such-and-such a film'. And I always nod because I don't want to look like an idiot, but I'm thinking 'I haven't seen that movie'."

You've seriously never seen 'Fitzcarraldo'? There's an embarrassed pause. "Am I allowed to admit that I haven't? I own a copy. My dad bought it for me. But I get so little free time to watch films. I'm going to have a big session when this is over…"

'Monsters' opened on Fri 3 Dec. For review, click here.
 

Copyright Robin Askew 2010 

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