Neil Marshall Interview, DoomsDay

Comic Con is NUTS! And let me also add damn expensive. I am officially going to be uber broke come the end of it. So to celebrate my new found poverty here is our interview with Neil Marshall the director of DoomsDay from Comic Con at the press junket we just completed! In DOOMSDAY, a lethal virus spreads throughout a major country and kills hundreds of thousands.

 

To contain the newly identified Reaper, the authorities brutally quarantine the country as it succumbs to fear and chaos. The literal walling-off works for three decades – until Reaper violently resurfaces in a major city. An elite group of specialists, including Eden Sinclair (Ms. Mitra), is urgently dispatched into the still-quarantined country to retrieve a cure by any means necessary. Shut off from the rest of the world, the unit must battle through a landscape that has become a waking nightmare. Here is what Neil had to say:

 

Neil Marshall: With this one, it’s totally the opposite. We’ve just blown everything wide open. I wanted to do a huge scope, scale film. And we’ve done scenes with like, thousands of extras and you know, I was terrified going in, but it turned out to be a real joy and everything had to be bigger on this one. We wanted it to be big! And the scale that we got filming, you know, we filmed the whole thing down in South Africa, well, not all of it, but most of it, and the scope and scale that we got down there for our money was just vast. So, it looks like a hundred million movie, but it was thirty million. So. Yeah, I’m just really pleased about that. But in terms of, I guess, [indiscernible]. No idea.

Are you more confident doing what you do now?.

Neil Marshall: I don’t know, it’s, it’s a development process or a growing up process that me and my DOP and my production designer, are all kind of—gone on the same journey together, because you know, we were Dog Soldiers and sent together and we, you know, we had to work on small scale then and you know, this is—I guess we’ve been sort of maturing slowly as filmmakers, as a group, and it’s great to work with the same people again because we are on the same journey. And, you know, it’s as much of a challenge for them as it was for me, but I think we all backed each other up.

And because we work together so closely we have that shorthand that just allows us to move really quick and you know, let our imaginations kind of run wild. If there’s any kind of a style I guess, what I want to achieve is like, I’d like to do as much as possible in camera. I don’t like to rely on visual effects, although there are like, a hundred or so visual effects in this movie, that’s, you know, it’s the most I’ve ever done and I don’t like to rely on them. It’s necessity in some cases, just, we couldn’t do what we want to do without them.

But everything else, we did as much as possible in camera because I like it to look real. I like it to look raw. And that’s quite a big thing about this, all the blood and guts on it as well, it’s like, if someone is going to get hit with an axe, I’m not going to shy away from the—what actually happens, you know. It’s that—I want to keep that work, I want to keep it as realistic and brutal as possible, I suppose.

As you were saying, the influences like Robocop, ninety-nine percent of that is all CGI.

Neil Marshall: Yeah. And I also think about, in the long term, I think about practical effects, stand the test of time, every time. Now, okay, there’s some bad effects out there, but if they come off good, you know, they stand the test of time.

 What is the most challenging practical thing you got to deal with?

Neil Marshall: We had to—we built these two armored personnel carriers, these like six-ton armored tank things and the scene involves crashing one and turning it up. The description that I gave to them, I said, I want to look like a basking whale. I wanted it to kind of like, hit a car, go up in the air and come down with a crash. And it was like six tons and you know, had two V8 engines in it, stuff like that. And really were concerned about it, but the stunt guys wanted to do this most spectacular crash. And that was always going to be tricky though. It just, you know, if it just falls over, or if it just hits a wall, it’s going to look [shit]. So we got to make it do this. And they managed to get a runup and get it as fast as possible and do the spectacular crash. You know, it’s an amazing performance, so I’m pleased with it. It looks exactly like a basking whale.

Is it basking? No, breaching whale. So, yeah, that was pretty tricky. We had to—there’s a scene where we cook somebody alive, and that was pretty tricky as well. I was tempted to bring in like, you know, some really famous chef. I wanted to get Gordon Ramsey in with us, just to sort of like seeing, if you were going to cook somebody, how would you actually do it. And what would it look like.

You could have cooked him

Neil Marshall: We could have cooked him, yeah. Yeah, we would have been in hell’s kitchen. So, you know, that was quite a tricky effect to pull off. I don’t know, each one has its own challenges and the biggest trick of course, is just to make them look real. Just to make everything look as real as possible and not get too—and then the reason for doing them for real is to not have them lapse into fantastical. It’s like—the ending of the new Diehard film. You know, when he’s hanging off planes and throwing himself down things like, you know. Nobody could do that, that’s going to kill somebody. I don’t want to do that in my films. If there’s a fall it has to be—someone’s either going to get hurt, or we make a fall a certain height that you wouldn’t get hurt. You know, it has to be totally real or else you just ruin the illusion. So, we kept to that rule.

The set was notable for a lot of reasons but one of them is that you have an all female cast and you—it wasn’t just a standard horror movie cliché. Do you have strong female roles in this as well, that sort of compliment the other—

Neil Marshall: Well, this one’s got a female lead, again, who’s a very strong character—is kind of cold. And she’s a soldier of the future and she’s lost her soul somewhere along the way. She’s a product of the system and the whole point of the story is for her to you know, redeem herself and find her humanity again. She has this kind of personal attachment to the virus, and you know, it affected her life very early on and, it’s kind of a redemptive process, this whole journey to find the cure.

And she’s played by—

Neil Marshall: Rhona Mitra.

Okay, okay.

Neil Marshall: Yeah, and she’s, you know, she’s kind of this cold-blooded killer, leading this group of other soldiers and like that. Yeah. And another thing, it’s, like, it wasn’t conscious to do another film with a strong female lead, it was just that—by chance, two scripts that are written with female leads, are being made back to back. That’s what it was.

Why Rhona Mitra?

Neil Marshall: Oh, she did a great audition. You know, she just—physically she’s just like, completely ripped. She did like, eleven weeks work of training and fight training and all this kind of stuff, and got into incredible shape for the movie. And she just absolutely, physically was perfect for the part.

She’s the actress from Highwaymen right?

Neil Marshall: She was in, oh, Highwaymen and—she’s done a ton of stuff.

Well, actually, I want to know how you usually get started, like, getting the funding for Dog Soldiers and how you got your start doing it.

Neil Marshall: It was an incredibly long and tedious process. From writing the first act of Dog Soldiers, to actually shooting it was six years. And at the end of the day, it just came down to pure luck that somebody I knew took the script to AFM and this guy David Allan  happened to be there, he had money, he wanted to make a werewolf movie, I don’t know why, he had some penchant for werewolf movies. And we had a sketch of the werewolf and he saw the script, saw the sketch and bought into it, and that was that. The rest is history from there really. And, but it was difficult getting—because at the time, it was really like, sort of the late nineties in the UK, when nobody was interested in making horror movies. And you know, whatever way would do at the moment, or have been for the past few years, just did not exist, like, the concept of the British film industry owning a horror movie was just abhorrent to them. It was just like, ‘We don’t make that kind of thing!’ So, you know, ended up being funded by Spinach Maganay [ph] Film Arkansas. Who’d have thought. And then luckily off the back of that, I guess horror picked up and so Descent was funded by a British company and that was a lot easier. It wasn’t easy, but it was easier.

So what’s next, is Outpost on the horizon still.

Neil Marshall: No, Outpost is still on the back burner. I think the time is not right to do a zombie film at the moment because, we’re kind of zombied out. You know. I think I need to reevaluate what that whole thing’s about. So, I don’t know, I’m trying to do a thing called Eagle’s Nest next. But, we’ll wait and see.

What’s Eagle’s Nest?

Neil Marshall: It’s kind of like—it’s kind of like my Indiana Jones movie, I guess. That sort of description. But, it’s a whole mix of things. I don’t—it’s still going to be very action—it’s an action movie.

Will it have fantastical elements to it?

Neil Marshall: Yeah, well it’s—to a point, a little bit. It’s just based on sort of fake history, but I’ve really embellished it and it’s going to be full of lots of gratuitous deaths, I’ll warn you.

And these sort of casts, are you working with the cast?

Neil Marshall: Oh, no, no, I’m still editing this one now, so. It’s a way off.

Are we going to see some footage from Doomsday today?

Neil Marshall: Yes. so cool. Teaser trailer, we’ll be showing that.

 Excellent. Can’t wait. Given the gore content and the cooking and things like that, are you worried about the ratings board?

Neil Marshall: You know, I don’t think we’re pushing any gore boundary you know, because it’s not that kind of film. But then again, I suppose in the context of it, it’s, well it’s not about monsters anymore it’s about real people chopping each other’s heads off, so maybe they will have a problem. I don’t know. I haven’t really encountered any difficulty with the ratings boards so far, so, we’ll see. We’ll see.

 Okay. Thanks very much.

Neil Marshall: Thanks so much.