Gareth Edwards: British Cinema's Renaissance Man

Gareth Edwards is a cinematic Renaissance man. For his debut feature, Monsters, he is credited as its director, writer, production designer, cinematographer, and its visual effects artist. Rumours that he also provided the craft services are unconfirmed, but with a crew of only four – his two leads, Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able, editor Colin Goudie, who doubled as boom operator, and himself – and a tiny budget – £15,000 is the sum doing the rounds on the blogosphere – I wouldn’t be surprised.

His film, which garnered much deserved praise on the festival circuit, is difficult to categorise. Its setting is a bizarro Mexico where the perennial pests are no longer mosquitoes or hurricanes, but enormous tentacled aliens that were deposited across the country six years ago when a NASA space probe carrying samples from Jupiter crash landed. Part love story, part screwball comedy, part American foreign policy allegory and part travelogue, it follows charmingly sarcastic photojournalist Andrew (McNairy) and his boss’ beautiful daughter Sam (Able) as they make their way back home to America during high creature season.

Edwards has found that there’s a fine line between being original and being unsellable. “Producers want to know, ‘What’s so different about this? Why should we bother doing it?’”, he tells me. “So you explain exactly why it’s different. Then you go make it. And then you come back and the marketing people say, ‘Oh my God, what have you done? This is different. We can’t market this.’ It’s a hard one.”

The film’s cinéma-vérité camera style has brought comparisons to the shaky-cam shenanigans of District 9 and Cloverfield, but Monsters is a square peg in the round hole of the bombastic action and breakneck editing of 21st century sci-fi. Its CGI creatures are rarely on the rampage – they tend to be just over the horizon, or roaming deep within dense jungle. Edwards instead prefers to focus on the push-pull courtship between Sam and Andrew or on pantheistic panoramas of Mexico at sundown. Imagine if Terrence Malick were to make a bucolic Godzilla, but with a brood of bashful 50ft octopi replacing the eponymous rambunctious reptile, and you’d be half way to picturing the dreamy road trip that Edwards’ protagonists take through alien infested Central America.

Conflict in Monsters comes not from alien attacks, but from the minutia of day-to-day inconveniences caused by the migrating creatures. “I think it was Hitchcock who said, ‘drama is real life with all the boring bits taken out’. I was trying to put the boring bits back in,” says Edwards. “I love the contrast between something as insane as a giant four storey alien creature and the mundanity of trying to buy a ticket or fill out a form to travel across the infected zone.”

Though the creatures are seldom on screen, their presence is never far from the audience’s mind. The uncanny world that Edwards creates is saturated with reminders that the extraterrestrials are fully integrated into the fabric of daily life. What’s remarkable, though, is that the design of this dystopian near future, like the film’s dialogue, is improvised. “There was a list of things I wanted to be in the film, including graffiti and murals on the walls, and cartoons featuring the creatures on TV. I just didn’t know where they were going to go,” Gareth explains. “So when we were driving around filming I just kept looking for places where I could include this stuff post-production; so if there was a TV I’d shoot it, any blank wall I’d film there. The tricky part was incorporating the characters and the story. So I’d be filming the actors improvise the scene, waiting for the perfect moment where I could go off them into the sky, say, and put in some military helicopters later. It would drive the producers crazy because they’d be watching the raw footage and there’d be this brilliant little scene that’s really emotional and I’d just move the camera away to nothing and they would think: ‘What’s this guy doing? He’s the world’s worst director.’”

This high level of detail is woven seamlessly into the fabric of the movie’s world, allowing image and soundtrack to reveal as much of the story as dialogue. “I like it when there are two layers to what’s going on screen: there’s visually what you’re looking at, there’s what you’re thinking about, and there’s what you’re hearing, and I like the idea that if you’re hearing something, you’re seeing something else,” Edwards tells me. “I’m not into films that are just, ‘I’m talking so you hear me and then you talk and I see you’. There’s a role for the audience as well: they’ve got to fill in the gaps; they’ve got to invent this world in their minds. When filmmakers fill it all in for you because they’re very excited about showing you everything, you feel a bit redundant... but maybe that’s just my excuse for not showing the creatures very much”.

This self-deprecation masks what is most impressive about this debut: the sheer confidence of vision with which it has been made, and the abundance of talent of the man who made it. That Edwards is from a filmmaking culture where new directors tend to reach for the kitchen sink instead of the stars makes it even more impressive. “I never even thought about doing a different genre. I love sci-fi. I grew up with it. I’m from the Star Wars generation. It’s the default genre for me,” he says enthusiastically. But he explains that it wasn’t just about throwing his considerable CGI skills (before directing Monsters Edwards had a buoyant career as a visual effects artist) at the screen, either. “It was important that the film works without the computer graphics. What we filmed was the skeleton of the story; it works emotionally. The effects just elevate it,” he says.

Edwards' independent spirit and technical know-how might draw comparisons to tech-savvy directors like James Cameron or George Lucas. But Monsters contains several telling moments of homage that make clear his cinematic mentor – Steven Spielberg. “There’s some Spielberg in there, for sure,” he confesses. “But in a weird way it’s kind of like kids who rebel against their parents. I see Spielberg as my hero, but when I got the chance to make my film the last thing I wanted to do was copy him, so I went in completely the opposite direction and tried to make the art-house version of that kind of movie. But it’s kind of like the world: if you push so hard in the other direction you come back to where you started. I only realised this in the edit when I was watching thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is someone so trying to be like Spielberg.’ At first I felt a bit guilty and embarrassed, but then there are so few films out there that are harking back to the 70s and early 80s era of films that I love that I thought: ‘you know what, I don’t mind because I wish someone would put this type of film back in the cinema again.’”

You too can hark back to this era from 3 December, when Monsters goes on general release.