NYCC 2010: Gareth Edwards on His DIY Movie Monsters

Matt Patches: In your panel at New York Comic-Con, you mentioned that film school wasn’t a necessary step for budding filmmakers. Why is that?

Gareth Edwards: I think school is important. I think the idea of...before you jump into the wide world, going to university is a good exercise. If you want to be a filmmaker, it might well be a good exercise to go to film school. Put it this way: every time I’ve made a film or picked up a camera and done something, at the end of that I feel like I’ve learned more in that week, or whatever it was, than I learned in the last ten. So you can learn so much more by doing stuff, and I think reading books, sitting, talking about it – there’s very little you can teach someone.

The fastest way by a mile is to start doing it. Because it’s not expensive to do it now, it used to be expensive to shoot some film, and to process it, and edit it was so expensive you could only do it like once a year at film school or something, where I went. So you spend the rest of the year planning it, thinking about it, reading about manuals. Whereas now, because it’s so cheap, and it looks as good in terms of digital technology, there’s no excuse.  You could just make something every week, and to me that would be the equivalent like to going to 30 or 40 film schools in terms of the mammoth experience you have.

Matt Patches: What about the importance of writing, learning dramatics, as opposed to just going out and shooting?

Gareth Edwards: I think writing, personally...I think the word “writing” is not the right word, and I don’t know what the word would be. It’s like storytelling, and the idea of “writing” suggests you pick up a pen and that’s how ideas are formed. You pick up a pen and you put words down and that’s the most creative part of making a film. I feel like the way I work is...maybe put on some music, I go for a walk, or whatever, and I picture a scene in my mind, and I basically play the movie in my head and get really excited. There’s no piece of paper, there’s no pen, nothing, and I can picture it, and I would just go and pick up a camera and go and do it. That would be my next automatic stage. You only write it down because someone goes “what the f*ck are you on about? What is it you want to do?” and so you have to write it down, and it never does it justice, the writing, the piece of paper never does it justice because they’re picturing something else.

I wish you could do without it. Now when I say “not writing,” I don’t mean “not storytelling.” I think storytelling is an incredibly hard thing to get right. It’s really tricky, only someone who’s never tried it thinks it easy. It’s very easy when someone has told a story and not quite got it right, to watch it, or read it, and criticize it or say something that might fix it, that’s actually very easy. Getting to that 95% point where your just 5% away from it being correct, that’s the hardest bit. So I think there’s a lot of armchair critics, like I am when I watch stuff, then I have to stop myself, because I start to slack something off, and then I’ll be like, “Come on Gareth, remember how hard it is, it's really hard.”

Matt Patches: Would you ever work with a conventional script?

Gareth Edwards: Yeah, I mean, it’s a very good way to explain a story. It really is.

Matt Patches: As a blueprint for others.

Gareth Edwards: Yeah, but its not the ultimate way, the ultimate way to explain a film, is to have a film, and you just show it. If I lived on my own and there was nobody else ever around, and I never had to tell anyone what I was doing, ever, because I had no responsibility to anybody.  I would never write down a script. I might write down my ideas so I could structure it, because its down as a structural way of organizing scenes and things, but I don’t think I would do this, “Exterior night, man walks into the convention center, it’s a cloudy night, he’s feeling a bit...” It’s like that kind of thing...it’s kind of: write a book, if that’s your art form. Like, write a book.

Jump to:

How Edwards balanced writing, directing, shooting and producing Monsters

Why you're short Youtube film with dazzling special effects might land you a deal in Hollywood

Hints at Gareth Edwards' "epic" next movie (and why Independence Day kind of blows)