zero interest in CGI-driven storylines when he finally got a chance to direct his own movie. “Doing visual effects is kind of like polishing turds for a living,” Edwards says. “When something’s broke in a TV show, you’ve got to come in to add spectacle so it becomes interesting. I’m not interested in special effects for their own sake.”

Edwards’ R-rated debut feature, Monsters, which plays the Toronto International Film Festival Thursday before opening theatrically Oct. 29, uses alien life forms as supporting players but otherwise defies standard-issue sci-fi conventions.

There are no big invasion scenes or climactic earthling vs. alien shoot’em-ups. Instead, Monsters takes place six years after extraterrestrials discharged from an exploded NASA space probe have taken root in Mexico, where sightings of the octopoid life forms have since become somewhat routine.

Absent a pyrotechnic third-act showdown, Edwards keeps the focus firmly on the relationship between two young Americans, played by Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy, who sort out personal problems as they journey through the “Infected Zone” en route to the U.S. border.

Sequestered in a Hollywood conference room, Londoner Edwards, gripping a caffeine-laden bottle of Coke, says, “Our aspiration for this film was to make the world’s most realistic monster movie. If a monster really attacked these characters 20 minutes into the film, the next 90 minutes they’d be getting therapy. How could you move on if you nearly got killed or saw horrible shit happen to other people?”

Six in a Van, in Mexico

Transforming the limitations of a shoestring budget into a virtue, Edwards attracted backing from Vertigo Films after winning Sci-Fi London’s 48 Hour Film Challenge.

“We couldn’t make the big-budget kind of film Hollywood can, so I figured, ‘Let’s make the kind that Hollywood can’t because they haven’t got the balls to do it,’” he says. “They wouldn’t have the balls to invest this much CGI into something and make it a character piece, whereas if you’ve got loads of things exploding and big fight scenes and monsters everywhere, you’ve got a guaranteed return. We felt kind of obliged to do something different.”

To do so, Edwards operated his own digital video camera as he shot Monsters in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. Spearheading a travel-light/think-fast production aesthetic, Edwards journeyed through jungles, ruins and villages in a van packed with five other cast and crew members, quick to pounce on opportunities as they arose.

“If we were driving along and saw something bizarre or insane, we’d jump out and go through the treatment and see what scene we could shoot, then get back in the van and carry on,” he recalls.

Edwards also used Galveston, Texas, as a location for a key sequence after Hurricane Ike ripped through the Gulf Coast port city.

“If you Google ‘post-apocalyptic,’ a lot of things comes up that are post-hurricane areas,” he says. “We seized our opportunities and found flooded homes and freeways that scoop out of the earth because of a flood. The movie is full of these little random moments that if you’d try to create them from scratch, it would cost thousands of pounds.”

A champion of improvised dialogue, the director cast nonprofessional actors he met along the way. Initially wary, civilians warmed up to Edwards each time his Spanish-speaking producer dropped the word “extraterrestrial.”

“When we’d first arrive in a town with our cameras, everyone looked at us nervously: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’” Edwards recalls. “Our fixer would explain what we were doing and as soon as they heard ‘extraterrestrial,’ they relaxed and said, ‘OK!’ It’s like the whole of Mexico wanted to be in a monster movie.”

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Authors: Hugh Hart

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