Monsters starring Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able is written, shot and directed by BAFTA award-winning CGI animator Gareth Edwards.
Produced by Allan Niblo and James Richardson of Vertigo Films, and distributed in the UK & Ireland by Vertigo Films.
Having carved out a very successful career as a BAFTA award winning & EMMY nominated visual effects creator for the BBC, (series including ‘7 Wonders of the Industrial World’ and ‘Space Race’), Gareth Edwards decided the time had come to embark on his own feature and capitalise on his, by now, well-honed CGI skills, and combine it with the simplistic approach he had always wanted.
Edwards explains. ‘Because there's so much competition out there and so many people want to be film makers in our generation, I didn’t feel as if an opportunity was going to come to me.
"And I didn’t want to have to wait for someone to come along and give me the money or permission to make a film. So I was just trying to think of an idea that, if I had to, I could fund and create myself, without a big crew and it could be made as cheaply as possible.’
Gareth came up with a plan for how to shoot a film which would tick all these boxes whilst on holiday, where he not only realised that his CG eye never took a break from work, but that by using everyday situations and locations and building a story and film around these could be his way forward.
Edwards spotted some fishermen in the Maldives struggling with whatever was on the end of the line, whilst he imagined a huge tentacled monster surfacing from the water. Monsters was born.
‘I sat watching the other fishermen laughing and taking the mickey out of the poor guy struggling with this net and thought it would be brilliant if a giant tentacle was attached.
'I thought if only I had my camera I could just shoot it there and then. There’s so much production value in exotic locations where you don’t have any complications; you can shoot what happens and then manipulate the story to fit once you get back to the computer’.
By this stage Edwards’ agent had approached Vertigo with various ideas and reels and both Allan Niblo and James Richardson had little doubt they had struck upon someone with a talent and reputation not just for visual effects and ideas, but also for his approach to storytelling.
Richardson explains. ‘Gareth's UK agent had sent us examples of his work that were all about disaster films, like hurricanes and floods etc. He’d also done a one minute short for the Sci-fi channel which we looked at and got incredibly excited by.
'He clearly had a talent not just for the CG stuff but from what we saw in this one minute competition entry was his ability to handle drama incredibly and build incredible atmosphere.’
‘What blew us away even more’ continues Niblo, ‘was not just that he had come up with all these effects, but that he’d done it on his own laptop. There was no studio involved, no big post production facility, it was just incredible.
'So we asked him if he wanted to make a feature film with us.’
Edwards picks up the story. ‘After my inspiration with the fishermen on holiday, I wrote down how I would approach making a film like this rather than a specific storyline and Vertigo loved the idea. We then spent 3 months coming up with a story until we were all happy.’
Having grown up with films like Jurassic Park, ET and other Spielberg classics, Edwards wanted to make ‘The most realistic monster film ever’. He also wanted to make a love story that didn’t make him cringe as well as a sci-fi movie where the premise wasn’t totally unbelievable.
‘I did some research on one of the moons of Jupiter called Europa which, scientists say, has the highest chance of there being life on it and NASA apparently wanted to send a probe up there to
try and bring something back.
'So I thought if they did, it could easily crash and bring with it micro-organisms which could then infect the area it ends up in. In our case the Mexican Ocean.’
‘I wanted MONSTERS to be set after most monster movies normally end’, explains Edwards, ‘so, six years later, when life just goes on and there are these creatures affecting in a certain part of the world.
'It's a seasonal problem to do with the migration path that these things go on which happens earlier than normal this particular year.
For photographer Andrew Calder (Scoot McNairy) it’s the chance he’s been waiting for to get those big money monster shots. But when his boss’s daughter Sam (Whitney Able), is also caught up in it, her father demands that Calder helps to bring her home.
'What starts out as a straight forward task, gets worse and worse and essentially we end up on a road movie where we go right through the heart of this problem as they try to get back to
America.’
Monsters is out now.
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