Interviews
A Visit to the Edit Bay Part 2: Interview with ‘Skyline’ Cast and Crew!
After giving us a preview of footage from their upcoming film Skyline – set for a Nov. 12th release date – directors Greg and Colin Strause, along with stars Donald Faison, Brittany Daniel, and David Zayas, sat down for a Q&A with a roomful of journalists at the offices of their Hydraulx visual effects studio to answer questions about the process of making the heavily-anticipated film. Topics included the Brothers’ disdain for big-studio filmmaking, what makes their film different from other alien invasion flicks that have come before, and when we can expect the sequel to begin shooting (already?) Details inside!
“Normally you’d have to go to the studio and then have to get [it through their] head casting people…then you need to [go to] all the junior executives to approve. Then the co-president, who has to go to the chairman. It’s just f*cking amazing how many assholes it takes to get a single decision made.” – Co-director Colin Strause on the casting process
The mood among the key players was light and celebratory as they described the unlikely success story of their low-budget independent, a success no one could have predicted several months ago, when the film was just a blip on the Hollywood radar. And now, in only the last couple of months, the film has against all odds become one of the major event movies of the fall season.
“Our feeling – and we’re kind of in this little isolated place where we are“, said Greg, “is that we’ve seen our kids out walking around Hollywood wearing a Skyline shirt and people will stop them and say, `Oh my god! I can’t wait to see that. It looks awesome!’ That seems to be the response that is trickling back to us.”
“This thing could have literally just sat on a shelf“, Colin added later. “This could be our own little personal movie we’re watching here. We had no idea. We knew what we were hoping for, but it was a giant gamble. We just kind of sat around and greenlit the movie ourselves at that lunch and said, `F*ck it. We’re doing it. Let’s go.’ This thing could have ended a thousand different ways.”
Luckily, the Strauses – whose AvP: R was considered a disappointment, both commercially and with fans of the series – had a strong ally in director Brett Ratner, a friend of theirs who saw something in the project after the brothers screened some initial footage for him. The mega-director became a champion of the film, quickly screening the footage for financier Relativity Media, who ended up acquiring the film. Relativity then managed to convince Universal (with which Relativity has a co-financing deal) to snap up domestic distribution rights. It was an unusual path for an effects-driven action movie to follow; normally, those films are developed at the studios from the ground up. We’ll see what happens opening weekend, but Skyline‘s growing buzz – not to mention a plum release date of the type normally reserved for Harry Potter sequels and major Oscar hopefuls – definitely begs the question of whether we’ll now see a rise in “event films” produced outside the studio system.
“Yes“, said Colin unequivocally. “And we’re not going to make another studio movie. We’re going to always do this. And Universal has been great for marketing. You need studios for distribution. But for us it’s the creation process. Movies can get really expensive. We’ve worked on 74 movies, I think, and we’ve seen hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on those films. To us, we know how to make movies. We’ve done it. We’ve seen how many times people have f*cked up going the wrong way. We know how you can make that process better.”
There’s definite poetic justice in the fact that Skyline, now being distributed by one of the longest-running Hollywood studios, actually grew out of the Strauses’ frustration with the old way of doing things, an attitude that reached full bloom during their notoriously rocky relationship with Fox during the production of AvP: R. After what Colin described as a “shitty meeting” concerning another project sometime last year, he and Greg finally decided they’d had enough of the traditional model and, after some prodding from one of their agents at CAA, made the decision to strike out on their own.
“He said, `You guys should try an independent“, said Colin of the agent in question, who had earlier worked on the hugely successful independent Paranormal Activity. “‘Something you can actually control. Do your own shit and don’t have anyone else tell you what to do. It’ll be pretty liberating.”
And it was.
“It moved fast because there’s no one else to talk to“, Colin continued later. “It’s literally Josh [Cordes, the co-screenwriter], Kristian [James Andresen, a producer on the film], me and Greg and that’s it. When we were doing casting, it would just be the five of us in the room. We liked someone and that was it. Normally you’d have to go to the studio and then have to get their head casting people through. Then you need to [go to] all the junior executives to approve. Then the co-president, who has to go to the chairman. It’s just f*cking amazing how many assholes it takes to get a single decision made. It’s the most frustrating part of the whole thing because you can’t f*cking do anything. Then they wait until the very end and you’re stuck with whoever you get. We wanted to do something a lot different with this.”
The project certainly did come together quickly, considering the Brothers shot a teaser test on Thanksgiving Day 2009 before quickly moving into production this past spring. As noted by Colin above, casting without the interference of a studio cut down on the length of time that would normally be required to get all the players in place, not to mention the fact that they didn’t have to worry – as they likely would have with, say, a Fox or Universal calling the shots – about casting star names in the lead roles.
“One of the cool things is, for example, David [Zayas’] role“, said Colin. “We actually wrote the role for David. It was the most awesome thing that we actually got David in the movie… from day one, we were saying David would be f*cking perfect for this. And that’s kind of how we tuned the character. And it worked out. It was such an interesting
process. We literally told all the actors to come over here and we did the casting just down in the conference room. It was real intimate and real simple and the whole process lasted less than three weeks, I think.”
“I think I came and met with you guys and you said, `Do you want to do it?’“, laughed Brittany Daniel. “And I said, `Okay!’”
Unfortunately for Faison – arguably the most recognizable name in the cast – the process didn’t come so easily. A major problem, as he put it, was that he’s mostly become known for acting in comedy roles, including his best-known stint as Dr. Christopher Turk on the long-running T.V. series Scrubs.
“You guys all have great stories“, he said, referring to Zayas and Daniel. “You came and they pretty much offered you the role. I had to audition for this bad boy. Twice! I came in the first time and said, `I’m just going to try to do my best to make these cats laugh.’ In all these alien movies, there’s always some type of comic relief. So I went on the audition and I tried to make every line a punch line. It was clear that that was not what they were looking for.”
Faison, who went after the role in an attempt to quash perceptions he can only do comedy, ended up winning the part after being granted a second opportunity to audition and subsequently dialing down on the hijinks.
“If you go to see a movie like this, you’re expecting to see Will Smith and Bruce Willis“, he noted. “Or Sylvester Stallone fighting the aliens. Something like this gives all of us an opportunity as well. People who don’t make $25 million a movie. So that being said, it’s great that it gives guys like me a shot to do something that I’ve always wanted to do and that was to feel like a badass action hero fighting aliens.”
As for the aliens, the Brothers described how they initially came up with the idea for the invaders’ unusual method of attack several years ago, but locked it up in “mental storage” until it finally occurred to them again around the time they’d hit their breaking point with the studios.
“It was the idea that aliens would actually lure us out of our houses and places of refuge by using this kind of mesmerizing, beautiful-sounding light“, said Greg, who described himself and his brother as longtime sci-fi fans. “So that was sort of the nexus of the whole thing. I didn’t have a story wrapped around it. That’s where [co-screenwriter] Liam [O’Donnell] and Josh did such a great job. But it was this cool concept that we called `The Sirens. It was an idea based off the siren singing that would draw the sailors and crash their ships into the rocks. We asked, `What if aliens did that? That would be a really cool MO for these guys. And the minute we’re outside, whoosh! They abduct us.’ That was really the starting point for us.”
Asked by one journalist in the room what made their project different from every other alien invasion flick that’s come before, the Brothers nodded not only to the concept of “vacuuming” the human race off the face of the planet, but to the fact the scale of the piece is so much larger than other films at the same budget level.
“It’s not like it’s just attacking one city“, said Colin. “Pretty much by act two, 99.9% of everyone is gone. There’s an interesting scale to it where it’s not like something where it’s a little battle and can you fight back? It’s basically, you’re wiped out. How do these people survive the next day or so if 99% of the world is gone? And it’s such a simplistic way that everyone is taken that [the structures around them] stay untouched. It’s not like cities are destroyed or anything.
“And also the building is like having box seats to the end of the world“, he noted perceptively. “That’s one of the cool things that, when we went into Greg’s place, we were talking about. We were sitting in his living room and you think of, like `Terminator 2”s nuclear bomb going off, it would be sweet to watch it from right here. You’re going to see the shockwave.”
But are we going to see the gore? While earlier I described a decapitation showcased in one of the bits they screened for us, the Brothers nevertheless indicated that the film will likely end up being PG-13 – a rating that will hopefully satisfy their craving to reach a wider audience.
“We’ve done our really dark, really gory movie“, said Colin. “We didn’t want to repeat that with this. We have a broader audience and we don’t need to kill seven-year-olds. We got that out of us.”
“When we originally wrote it, it was such a small budget that we were just going to do it `R’“, added Greg. “Then we wrote the script out and, because of the way they were taking everyone’s brains and everything, we thought that it really doesn’t lend itself to `R’-rated violence. It’s technically `PG-13′, but just because there’s no blood. It’s all in the way that [the aliens] atomize flesh and tissue. It’s more that sort of style. What they do is not an inherently gory thing. They’re literally snatching people and decapitating them. It’s that sort of style of action. It’s not creatures cutting people in half. But it’s still some creepy ass shit.”
Even if the film does end up being stamped with an `R’-rating (I’m assuming the MPAA won’t be able to issue a decision either way without first seeing a final cut of the film), the Strauses needn’t worry – given the combo of teeny-tiny budget and blockbuster-scale marketing campaign, it should easily make back its money regardless of the rating. Which brings us to the sequel, the rights to which were being pimped out by sales agency IM Global at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
“Once we got the first draft in, we were playing around and addressing our own internal notes and going through the development process, [and] we were saying, `This is kinda fun and cool’“, said Greg. “You never want to end it at that. There’s a commercial side of it, but then there’s just some ownership that develops around something that, once you see it through from treatment to script, you just want to keep going with it. We’ve had a lot of fun with it.”
“[Part 1] ends in such an interesting, weird, dark place, too“, added Colin.
Say what you will about the film once it’s released (good? bad? will it matter?), it’s looking like a follow-up is all but assured at this point.
Said Greg: “We’ve already got almost a forty page treatment of the second one done that we plan to shoot in the spring.”
In other words, the directors who only three years ago were essentially blamed for killing one franchise (AvP) have managed to spawn a new – and potentially bigger – one. All from the comfort of their own home.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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