NYCC 2010: Gareth Edwards on His DIY Movie Monsters

Matt Patches: So you’re on set, running the camera, shooting on the fly. What about directing the actors, do you have a particular style in order to balance that with everything else you have on your plate while filming?

Gareth Edwards: You put the camera down for those bits, because it's a heavy camera, and you put it down, and you have a conversation and it can last however long it needs to last until everybody is happy. Everyone had to be happy on this, it was never a case of "Just f*cking do it. Just do it." It was never going to be that situation. So we would stop and we would talk about it until we were all in agreement about it. I can't for the life of me remember those conversations. I can’t remember what I said at any point about any scene, I was just relaying the movie in my mind to them, and trying to say whatever I needed to say to help them see it the way I saw it.

Matt Patches: Did you ever feel locked in to your original vision or was there room to breathe, potential for spontaneity?

Gareth Edwards: That’s what I love about the ad-libbing approach, is that you would picture it, and then it would go a bit off what you were picturing and it would be exciting because you think, “Oh this is a bit different, this is cool, how do I get that and incorporate this?” It would always end up better, it’s true. Your mind will default , no matter how imaginative you think you are, your mind will default to subconscious things, like whether its movies you’ve already seen, shots from films...It's like a language you’ve developed, an archive of images you just store. And you subconsciously pull them when you have an idea for a shot or a scene, you’re pulling from that bank. And, so it’s fundamentally going to be like something you’ve already seen. And when you ad-lib it, or you try to break it, or shatter it by throwing some random things in there that are going to f*ck it up, it starts to become something you haven’t pictured or you’ve not seen before. And that’s really exciting.

Matt Patches: Was there room to stretch in effect-heavy scenes? [Minor Spoiler Alert!] I’m thinking about the scene in which the two characters are trapped in a car while the aliens roam outside.

Gareth Edwards: I mean in terms of things you didn’t plan on in that sequence...that was probably one of the most planned sequences. Yeah, but it wasn’t planned as in I had a storyboard or anything. What happened was, it was planned as in...there was something that no one can see. So I’m having to shout or explain where this thing is and what it’s doing. Especially to people who don’t speak English so well, it’s more Spanish, everyone had to understand, this is the sequence of events, the creature comes out, it does this, and then this happens and that happens. So everyone could store it in their head so we could all replay it and imagine it when it wasn’t there. So that was pretty planned.

Matt Patches: Is there a scene in Monsters you hadn’t planned on? I imagine you working on the fly and picking something up because, hell, you’re there, why not shoot it?

Gareth Edwards: So that’s the thing. There are so many examples, it feels wrong to pick one. There’s a scene where we’re walking along and the idea is, okay, what we’re going to film is we’re with these guerrilla fighters and they’ve got guns. We’re walking along and they’re going to take you somewhere, they’re going to take you back to the camp and as we start walking, in the middle of walking, “Oh, stop, stop, stop, we can’t carry on.” “What’s the matter?” “I’ve seen cows in the way.” And it was like “Oh, f*ck.” And that would be a negative; we got stuck because some cows are in our path. And it was like, “Well this is cool, how can cows be in our movie?” And so then you go, “What if they mistake the cows for the creature? Like they make the noise?” So we sort of built this scene around the cows like there and then. That ended up in the film.

All kinds of things like...there was a vulture just sitting on a post, so I'm trying to film the vulture and I'm getting as close as I can before he flies away, and I keep getting closer and closer, and I finally get right next to him, and he still won't fly away. And I actually want him to fly away because the shot would look best if he flew away. So I had to scare him and then he flew, and then in the computer, because we got this great shot of a vulture flying off, it was like, "Right, I'm going to put a sign on that post," so I put this "No Trespassing, Border of America: sign. And it just so happened that when we were filming another scene, completely in a different country, there were vultures in the sky that took off. So it was like, "Okay, great, we can have this vulture take off and we can cut to them in the sky." And it feels like it's all planned, and it's really not. It's all just sitting in the edit, trying to figure out how the hell to write a movie, but in the edit, without pens and paper.

Jump to:

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