GARETH EDWARDS AND WHITNEY ABLE

Monster Mash

For the British director of high concept, lo-fi genre movie Monsters, it all started with a vacation.

“I was on holiday at one point,” Gareth Edwards recalls. “And these fishermen were pulling in a net from the ocean. They were just talking to each other very normally. They were foreign and I didn’t know what they were saying. I was wondering ‘what’s at the end of this net that they’re struggling to get into the boat?’ and I ended up thinking, ‘what if there was some kind of giant creature in it?’. I thought that would be interesting, a monster movie where it was completely a part of everyday life. What if you set a monster movie at the point where most monster movies normally end?”

That juxtaposition of the mundane and the fantastical is at the core of the film, which charts the journey of a mismatched duo across a Central America ravaged by giant alien creatures. Shot in a verite style, the film was also mostly improvised, which meant that casting was key. As Whitney Able who co-stars with husband Scoot McNairy, explains: “They wanted a real life couple, and they’d seen the movie All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, which I was in, so they flew Gareth over, and he stayed on our couch for a week so we could all get to know each other.”

Edwards picks up the thread. “I flew over to meet them for five days, and I thought we’d be talking about the film, but in the end we only talked about the film for half a day. The rest of the time we were just doing things with each other, like playing board games, Scoot went to soccer and I watched him, we went to bars at night, and it was really a case of checking that we’d all get along. We had to be sure that weren’t gonna be any big personality clashes. It was an audition, but it wasn’t based on whether you can act, it was more ‘Are we gonna argue or not when we’re on this crazy holiday thing with our camera?’”

That level of cooperation was absolutely vital, as the ultra-low-budget shoot took them through several notoriously unstable Central American nations. When asked what challenges this presented, Edwards is coy, saying: “It would be easier if you asked me what didn’t present a challenge. Anything you could name, there was some kind of problem.” Able, however, is more upbeat about the experience.

“It was really stimulating,” she says. “The focus was never on our accommodation, or whether we didn’t have trailers or hair or makeup people. It was really an adventure, and that helped us focus on the project. We changed locations almost every day. We were always on the move, always in a different setting or location, constantly. So yeah, it was definitely very helpful, but it was also incredibly challenging. It could be very scary at times, but at the same time very strengthening. It forces people to be really sharp and focussed all the time. All we could do was know who we were and have our backstory down, making sure that all our ducks were in a row. It was definitely a very different way of working.”

_TRAVIS JOHNSON