Dark Skies is just director Scott Stewart’s third feature film, and focuses on an ordinary suburban family who are rocked by an unsettling series of supernatural events. Hitting our screens on April 3rd, we were fortunate to speak to the filmmaker on the phone ahead of the film’s release.
Speaking to us from across the pond, Stewart tells us of his inspiration behind this feature, what it’s like working with young children in an otherwise adult orientated production – while he also encourages British audiences to go in to see this movie with no expectations, unaware of what you may be in store for…
You were brought up in the suburbs, did that inspire you to make a horror film set in this supposedly peaceful environment?
Yeah absolutely. I mean it absolutely did. I grew up in the suburbs of Northern California in the late 70s and 80s and there was always this air of safety and protection and security about growing up in the suburbs, but you know, it was a thin one because you’d ride your bike home and there would be an ambulance down the street in front of a house that you’ve never been in, and you don’t know those people who live there, but something bad has happened there. Or you know, parents got divorced, or kids drive drunk and get into car accidents and that happened a lot when I was growing up, so that feeling of safety and security was there until suddenly it’s not, and you become very aware that it’s tenuous…
Now being able to reflect, still living in the suburbs of Los Angeles, I have friends and we’re all getting to the age when we get married and having kids and having lives that may or may not resemble the lives of our parents as we were growing up, and how we’re doing things differently, and you have to ask yourself questions like, am I a parent? Am I able to take care of my family? Can I pay the mortgage? You try to do things the right way and be decent people and you know when you take your kids to the playground or the daycare, all these different kinds of things we all experience , at the same time while we have a housing crisis, a financial crisis that means our houses are losing a tremendous amount of value, and at the same time school is becoming more expensive and who knows what is going on with the environment, it’s incredibly hot or incredibly cold, you know, all these different kind of things.
It’s those kind of feelings that make you feel that you don’t have anything to do with that stuff and yet it can have a huge impact in your life, and it feels like we’re all just being tossed around by these tidal forces and that there’s chaos happening in our lives, even though the suburbs are meant to represent a safety and security and order, it’s all supposed to be the right way to do it, and yet chaos happens, and that, in many respects, is the metaphor of the movie…. For me the movie was always trying to grab things as much as I could, in a relatable, domestic realism.
This is a multiple of genres all rolled into one, it’s a family drama, a horror, a science fiction. Do you like the idea of having a film that can’t really be pigeon-holed?
Yeah, for better or for worse, we live in a world where movies, when widely distributed, are going to be marketed in a way that we hope will appeal to the largest number of people, and often that means they have to be related to other movies, you know, “from the producers of…”, using those with a track record of success, so of course the movie is going to be presented as being from the people who created that, but they are filmmakers just like me and want to reach out and do different things from movie to movie, so people who are expecting Paranormal Activity, that’s not what this movie is, it’s different. Sinister as well, which is really a horror movie, this is up to some different stuff, it’s real cool stuff, but it’s different.
So the only audiences who got to experience it like this were our test audiences who really enjoyed the movie, because they sat down before they had ever seen any marketing material and they didn’t know anything about the movie… They were pleased and surprised about where the movie went, it generated a lot of fun discussion amongst them, because they all felt that everything that happened in the movie stayed within the realm of something that feels like it could actually happen. People are having black-outs and losing control of their bodies, but nothing is happening that is so wildly spectacular, which to them made it all more interesting and scary as it also felt very real, and ultimately people with kids have that primal fear of something happened to their children, a predator in the neighbourhood.
So I guess the long-winded answer to your question is, it depends on what people’s expectations are coming in to the movie… If you’re looking for blood and guts and hardcore horror you should look elsewhere as it’s not what the movie is up to, it’s up to different things. I love genre movies to the point where I feel that genres are big enough that if you can do all sorts of different things, for me, as long as your honest and try to tell the story honestly, and the characters are compelling then people are going to go along for that ride wherever you want to take them.
Did you find it difficult to strike a good balance between realism and then the supernatural themes being explored as well?
It’s always a difficult balance, I mean, you just go with your gut. For me, formalistically all I did was just focus on character, character, character and the actors were literally just about performance. Unlike my other movies that were very stylised, in this movie I did exactly the opposite. I had written the script and I knew what I wanted… If I could make the family feel real and alive and their behaviour feel idiosyncratic and there’s a lot of improv in the movie, that the audience would relate to them more and feel more jeopardy, and be much more afraid for them as things started to get more intense and scary and threatening for them throughout the movie.
So much of the horror elements in this film seem to be that of dread and suspense – it’s not necessarily what you see but more what you think…
Yeah for me I feel that the scary movies that I’ve always liked, the things like Don’t Look Now, or The Mothman Prophecies, particularly when you’re dealing with aliens and how the film portrays them, there is always the question of whether the narrators are reliable – what is really happening to them? The idea of an irreducible ambiguity that these things happen, and you can’t reduce them. While there is an explanation, sometimes you can’t completely explain them. That keeps things happening in the realm of your mind, which is always going to get to a scarier place than necessarily any concrete thing that we put on the screen, although you do have to deliver – people have got to jump out of their seats, so I always liked that and I like the slowly turning screw, the anticipation of the scare is quite a bit more delicious than the scare itself – just as long as you’re sure you’re delivering some good scares. Overall just creating a general feeling of dread and anxiety is what I was after in the movie, because that’s more what it’s about.
Although being the writer and director of this film – are you able to get scared by it when watching it back? Do you jump out of your seat?
That’s pretty tough. You try to. We work very meticulously at the timing of exactly when the first bird hits the window, I’m a visual effects artist as well so I pre-visualise all the effects in the movie myself, some of them wound up as final shots in the movie, I ended up doing a lot of the work myself. I would spend hours and hours and hours thinking, does the bird hit on this frame…? Or this frame? We would do it and we knew we had it right when we would go back in our seats a little bit, then we’d bring our assistant editors into the room and not tell them what they are going to watch and then play it and watch them say “woah!” and then you go, I think, in our tiny, limited test group, I think we’ve got it. Then of course you see it with an audience… They scream and they levitate a bunch of times throughout the movie and they laugh at the right places too, and that is super satisfying. You hope that you can experience with them in that way, but it’ll probably take me a while, I’ll have to put it a side for a good while and then re-watch it at some point to see if the effects actually scare me – but it is hard when you’re that close to it and you’ve seen it a thousand times.
Your films, thus far, have explored a darker, more supernatural world. Is this a niche you can see yourself exploring further, or do you have other genres in you? A comedy, or romance, for example.
Absolutely, 100%. Although I am sort of known for this stuff so people look to me for this stuff, but I’m working on a comedy right now that I’m working, a music film, I’m working on something in television that is about a really interesting piece of British and American history in World War Two that people aren’t really aware of, and you know, it’s more about themes that draw me to stuff than genres.
I read that the speed of which Dark Skies went from being script to shooting was incredibly fast in comparison to other projects – that must have been really refreshing as a filmmaker?
Yeah I have worked on two movies in the past where we have stayed in post for a year and a half on each film. The first two movies totally overlapped and it was kind of odd as there was a writer’s strike, but we were working on Legion when I shot Priest, so I had shot and edited Priest entirely before Legion even came out, so in some respects I call Priest my first and a half movie and Dark Skies fully the second movie because I wasn’t able to go through the whole process and learn all the lessons and evaluate what I liked and didn’t like about them and the overall process of making movies with a studio and all those different kind of things… This one was so refreshing because I wrote the script over a summer, not the last summer but the summer before, handed it in in September and they said “great, we want to make it.” The only delay was that I shot this pilot that took months because it was so big so I came back from Toronto in June, and then I started prepping Dark Skies. We shot it in August and here we are in theatres all around the world. It forces you to be a lot less precious about things and also not to over-think them and maybe trust your instincts more, and I really liked that, there is a natural momentum and energy that I think does aid the creative process. Sometimes you want to stew on something, but there is a time and a place for pure momentum, just get it out there.
There are some big roles in Dark Skies played by kids – most notably Dakota Goyo as Jesse – what was that like as an experience for you as a director? Was it difficult to direct children in what is effectively an adult orientated film?
It was really interesting. Dakota is very experienced and he turned 13 in the middle of our shoot and then we have Kadan Rockett who is six. Dakota is quite experienced, he has just come off Darren Aronofsky’s film where he plays young Noah and stars opposite Hugh Jackman in Real Steel, as the co-lead of a big movie, so he is experienced, but like all kids at that age, every year he is a different person and he’s changing and he was becoming a teenager and had all of those qualities.
We looked a lot for kids and when we discovered him we were so excited as we just felt it was right, he’s got this incredible face with big eyes and yet he feels very real. He doesn’t live in LA, he lives in Toronto, he’s got a very traditional life there and goes to school and doesn’t seem affected by Hollywood in any way. When he arrived he just wanted to ride the bike that we had for him as he didn’t have one at home, and listen to his music and ride his skateboard and I wanted him to just be himself. Our set was very actor orientated, we were allowing improv and we had multiple cameras shooting at all times, and a lot of the time – unless it was a a specifically orchestrated suspense sequence – we would always get the actors in front of camera as quickly as possible and let them decide where they wanted to go and how they wanted to behave… We did this with Kadan specifically and he knew the whole script by heart, and on the first day of rehearsal he knew the whole script whereas the others would flick through and think, this kid knows all of his lines already and we don’t, and he’s six!
The risk with that is that he is too rehearsed and he’s not relying on years of craft and technique, so what I figured out on the first day of shooting is that he, like any six year old, has only a limited amount of time of focus and then he gets distracted because he wants to play, so we would aim all of our cameras at him and do all of Kadan’s work first. I wouldn’t yell action or cut, I would just start rolling and I wouldn’t even tell Kadan we were rolling, they were just talking to him, and give him toys and to try and get at that naturalism and try and get his real behaviour, because it was going to be much better than anything he could do as an actor. I tried to do that with everybody… It got to a point where they became very unaware of the cameras and that was what I was really after. I felt that the more realism we would get in there, the more relatability, the more idiosyncrasies you’d have in their performances the more the audience would care about them and feel fear for them when things get scary.
Having someone as experienced as J.K Simmons on board must have been really helpful, not only to the younger members of the cast, but to yourself in just your third feature film?
Oh you know casting is everything, and this was another benefit to making a small movie – we were cast dependant and we were fortunate that our first choices came in, and you always feel very lucky when your first choice reads your script and wants to do your movie, but we didn’t cast on name recognition, we just picked who we felt were the best roles for the movie and when it came to casting Pollard, I wanted somebody who was going to bring a very different sensibility and the temptation for those roles – the one who comes in and explains things – is to hire a British stage actor, somebody with an excellent accent to our American ears, and do a great job explaining things to the audience and making it all sound like poetry – and I really didn’t want to go in that direction, I had done a lot of research, looking at blogs and websites of people who are supposedly experts in alien encounters and alien experts, or helping people who have had their experiences, and I started to look into what these people seemed like and I wanted to make an amalgam of them and we looked at a very small number of actors that we felt would be right for the part, and we sent the script to J.K. and he responded right away and we were very fortunate because I just love him, he is incredibly versatile….
He always brings a prickly edge to everything and he uses it to great effect in comedies but it’s also very effective in dramas, and he brought a little of both to this role. When he came in, he is very, very precise and we spent days decorating his apartment, just colouring it with clippings and books and stuff and it’s almost like the apartment of a serial killer – and he went through all that stuff and knew exactly what his props were and he put everything in exactly the place that he wanted it. He was very particular about his wardrobe and all that kind of stuff, and I so appreciate that as a director. It just makes your job so much easier, because he knew exactly what he was doing, and his performance is just wonderful.
So no space for Paul Bettany in this one then?
[Laughs] No, no space for Paul. Paul and I are very close friends and he read the script early on as I gave it to him because we’re friends and to find out what he thought, and we talked about it a lot. I’m sure Paul and I will work together again, but right now we are just trying to support each other in what we’re doing in our various different movies.
