Interviews
‘Live and Let Dive” – How That Intense ‘V/H/S/Beyond’ Skydiving Segment Came Together [Spoiler Interview]
Now streaming on Shudder is V/H/S/BEYOND, which pushes the popular anthology franchise firmly into sci-fi territory with new bloodcurdling tapes that explore everything from aliens to horrific science experiments run amok. Among them is Justin Martinez’s high-octane skydiving horror segment with an alien twist, “Live and Let Dive.”
Martinez, one of the founders of the filmmaking collective known as Radio Silence, has been with the franchise since the start, having co-directed and handled VFX on the segment “10/31/98” on V/H/S. The filmmaker/VFX artist lent his VFX talents to the last three entries of the franchise and served as VFX supervisor on V/H/S/85 and V/H/S/99. For V/H/S/Beyond, Martinez conceived of his intense segment’s story with writer Ben Turner and makes his solo V/H/S directorial debut, putting his VFX and anthology experience to thrilling use.
The segment sees a group of friends embark on a skydiving trip to celebrate a birthday, only for an alien invasion to send the plane crashing into an orange grove. It’s only the start of the extraterrestrial insanity, with “Live and Let Dive” escalating the insanity and potent jump scares.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Martinez about his highly entertaining and suspenseful contribution to the latest entry, where the filmmaker broke down everything from the short’s conception to production. Consider this your warning: plot spoilers ahead.
There’s no question that even conceptually, “Live and Let Dive” makes for an ambitious effort. The entire short is set in broad daylight, leaving nowhere to hide when it comes to the aliens and the level of VFX required. That meant that while Martinez came up with the concept long ago, he wasn’t sure it would work.
He explains, “I’ve had this in the back of my mind for quite a while; it’s been years. I love found footage, and I’m always trying to find the next thing to do in found footage. I’ve always had this idea to do something in the skydiving space because they’re always recording. They always have cameras on their heads. I mean, skydiving is already terrifying. So, plenty of bad things can happen. But to take that and just elevate it.”
“I didn‘t know if it would be aliens or what because I love doing creature things. I always imagined I would do some sort of creature movie with the skydiving format, and V/H/S came along and we were trying to figure it out. And obviously, this one’s sci-fi themed. So, I leaned into, well, let’s do something with aliens.“
“There are a lot of pieces to this one,“ he continues. “It was a very ambitious project from the beginning. Even after the pitch, I was a little scared to pitch it because I knew how hard it would be, so I kept it in my back pocket for a while. I pitched another idea and then came back around to this when that idea wasn’t really working. The producers and Shudder, their jaws dropped, and they’re like, ‘Can you do that?‘ The first thing I thought of was, ‘Well, I can do all the VFX.’ Can we produce it, you know, we’re going to need an airplane. At the time, it was set in a cornfield. So you know, we need to find a cornfield.”
Of course, the final version doesn’t take place in a cornfield at all, but an orange grove. Production timing prompted a location shift, but that quickly proved fortuitous for Martinez.
He details, “You know, it’s funny. I feel like I lucked into that location because, yes, it was a cornfield initially in the script, and we were having a difficult time finding a cornfield. Corn just doesn’t grow at that time of year. It came down to the wire. We’re at the point now where we need to shift location ideas. They were shooting ‘Stork‘ out at this location called RSI. I went out there. They just so happened to have these orange groves, and I knew what I was trying to achieve with the cornfield was the idea of this being a daylight thing. I need to find a way to hide aliens in the daylight, you know. That’s why corn existed for me. I just need a location that matches that.
“We got to that orchard, and I looked around. It felt right, right away, because this is different. It felt different. I also knew I needed to throw a rock at an alien in the script, and I was like, there are no rocks. And I saw an orange. I said, we’re throwing an orange at an alien. I shouted it out, and everyone started laughing. I’m like, no, I am serious. We are throwing an orange at an alien. This is going to be amazing. And it just rolled from there.”
One crucial key to ensuring Martinez could deliver on his daunting, ambitious short was planning as early as possible. The filmmaker tells Bloody Disgusting, “Those were the big questions early on; how are we going to get some of these elements together? I jumped in early on designing the alien because I knew that even from my own criticisms, VFX and CGI are really tough in this format, especially if it’s going to be a daylight thing, and so I needed to give it my best shot. I wanted it to look as practical as possible.
“I started early. I actually started designing the alien last November just to try to find the shape. Then, I couldn’t land on anything. I asked around to find out what everyone thought of when they thought of an alien, like what scared them about aliens. Ultimately, talking to Brad Miska was instrumental in this design. I reached out to him to get his ideas, he sent me so many great references. The biggest thing was that he reminded me to watch Fire in the Sky again. I watched that last scene, and seeing the aliens have a human skin tone and a human feel, I was like, this is it. I need to lean into this. I don’t want to go full-on humanoid or anything. I always like things that are creepy. So, I felt like I needed to do my twist, and I literally did that. I just twisted the legs one day to see what that would look like, and it was disturbing. I get both sides. You know, your standard grays with a really weird thing that I love mixed together.”
“Live and Let Dive“ gets the adrenaline pumping early, with an intense skydive gone wrong thanks to a collision with aliens. It’s also here where Martinez’s VFX work really shines; there was no actual plane flying during production. While the crew did source a plane for filming, it didn’t leave the ground.
Martinez breaks it down: “There were talks early on when we’re trying to figure it out, can we get actors up there? Can we get a real plane? Producer Josh Goldblum had reached out to an old friend who was a skydiver, and so initially, we were thinking about it. If we shot out in Houston, where he’s based, we could. We could possibly get actors up in the air. Over time, it became a logistic battle, and it became clear that we needed to find a way to get a plane. Get our actors into a plane that isn’t actually in the air so that we can shoot most of these scenes and not be hampered by the fact that we have to fly around in the sky to get them.
“So it ended up being a mix. We got the plane at the last second. Someone had found this plane in, I don’t know, an airplane graveyard in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and it wasn’t a skydiving plane. It came down to the wire to make the decision on it because there was so much work that the production designer would have to do to make this work- the thing had been sitting for at least 30 years in the desert collecting dust. The inside of it was filled with chairs. Skydiving planes don’t have chairs. Basically, the person who owned this thing said, ‘I’ll cut off the wings. I’ll cut off the tail for you guys, and I’ll even hoist it up on a truck, and you can ship it off to your studio or whatever you want.‘ Two weeks before we were going to shoot, I still didn’t have a plane, and we pulled the trigger on that.”
Martinez continues, “My production designer, Jessee Clarkson, came through. He worked over the weekend by himself. I went over the weekend to see what he was doing. He was vacuuming it out. He did everything, pulling chairs out just to get it done because, you know, he only had five days to get this thing ready, and he did. His team did a fantastic job. I was blown away. In fact, I stepped back from initial thoughts of what I thought the plane should look like, and I just gave him the reins. I said, ‘You know what. Just make it whatever you want because you’re doing amazing. He was giving it character. He put stickers. He had people write on the walls, which I highly suggest that people go back and watch the movie just to read some of the written messages that are on the walls of that plane because it’s really fun.
How do you conclude a story that starts on such an energetic note? “Live and Let Dive“ closes out its pulse-pounding ride with an electric jolt of a jump scare, one that slows the pacing down just enough to ensure maximum fear. Martinez reveals the secret to nailing this moment.
“I decided to make all the moments that you see the alien, especially initially, very fast,“ Martinez reveals. “So it’s just like, ‘whoa, this is terrifying. What was that?‘ Because it doesn’t take long for your brain to register what you just saw. I didn’t need to have the thing up on frame for more than like eight frames at times. I leaned into that. As the story progressed, I got more comfortable with showing the alien off, but I also knew that once I started showing the alien, I needed to go even bigger. Because we had just fallen from the sky, right? I’m always trying to top that through this movie, as the biggest, craziest thing you could imagine has already happened about 7 minutes into the movie.
“I started going bigger with what the alien would do, like having things come out of its wrists, shocking people, and blowing their skin off. I need to go big with everything, and I also had told my buddy Ben Turner, who wrote it with me, that I want to make everyone think there’s only one alien in the whole movie the entire time. So everything that we write has to have in mind that we will only ever see one alien so we’re setting up that jump scare in the truck. It was absolutely the right idea.”
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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