Director Gareth Edwards tackled 'Monsters' with low budget, no script

At the Toronto International Film Festival, members of the media interview people from all over the world, but it's rare to interview them while they still have their luggage.

Gareth Edwards was at TIFF to talk about his new movie, "Monsters" (opening tomorrow), and the Daily News caught up with him in the bar at the Hyatt Hotel, moments after he'd arrived from London.

Fortunately, Edwards was able to sleep on his flight. With "Monsters" appearing in so many festivals, he's become accustomed to snoozing on planes.

"I think I've flown more in this past year than in my whole life combined," he said.

His film, starring Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able, is a low-budget, metaphoric, sci-fi suspenser in which a cynical journalist must lead his boss' daughter through dangerous Mexico to the "safety" of the U.S. It's not as easy as it sounds - a portion of Mexico has become an infected, quarantined area following an alien invasion.

Shot for around $200,000, "Monsters" is essentially a one-man show behind the camera - Edwards not only wrote and directed, but served as cinematographer and production designer and did the special effects.

As we began to talk, Edwards mentioned that he was a Coke addict, specifying the soft drink over its uncapitalized powdered form. When the waitress came to take our order, he found it amusing that I differentiated between Coke or Pepsi.

"Only in America," he said, laughing, "do they care about cola like they do wine in France. They'll correct you if you order the wrong brand. They'll ask if you want it on tap or out of the bottle. In England, if you say Coke, you just get whatever they've got."

Q: You've been working on "Monsters" for a while. When was it shot?

A: September 2008. For about six weeks. We shot it without a script, and we did this scene-by-scene outline. It was a risky thing to do, and I wanted to leave some money in the budget as a safety net to go back to Mexico and reshoot anything that didn't work out.

. . . After we edited for four months, we found we were missing little pieces and we had a couple of scenes that we thought we could get better if we had a second chance at it. We were about to go back to Mexico City . . . and the swine flu broke. We were getting really worried phone calls saying basically, "Forget it."

Q: Your experience before this was exclusively in special effects. Was directing always the goal?

A: I went to film school and wanted to be a director. You grow up with this illusion that you go to film school, you make a short film, Hollywood sees it and they call you up the next day and ask you to direct a $100 million blockbuster. Weirdly, that didn't happen - I still can't quite get over it.

What did happen was that my flatmate was studying computer animation, and it seemed like an amazing tool - if no one ever gave you a chance to make a movie, you could potentially achieve something with much higher production values and solve a lot of logistical and creative problems, if you knew how to use computer graphics. So I basically dived into computers as a way of doing something myself. I sort of thought it would take me about a year to get really good at it, but it took more like a decade.

I always saw myself as a filmmaker who was pretending to be a visual-effects person, but you realize that everyone else sees you as a visual-effects person who suddenly has aspirations of being a filmmaker.

Q: There are many odd images in the movie. How much was real, and how much was CGI?

A: I was always on alert for anything up in the sky because I wanted to shoot some real stuff and not have to CG it all.

If it's military, it's probably put in. As for the boats, some are CG and some aren't. Wherever we were, at any time, we kept saying to the people we were with, if you know of anything strange or weird, just a little bit odd, or visually interesting, anything, it doesn't matter what it is, just tell us, and we'll go there.

Q: What you did was sort of the opposite of storyboarding. You let your environment affect your story.

A: Say you see a target on the wall and a bullet hole in the bull's-eye - there are two ways of doing that. One way is to paint a target, fire a bullet and try to hit the bull's-eye. That's the way I think most films are made. With ours, we fired first and wherever the bullet landed we'd paint a bull's-eye on top. It makes you look a lot cleverer than you really are. We were just seeing what we get and then we made that into our film.