Monsters had its UK Premiere at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival where its director Gareth Edwards brought home the “Best New Director” Award. It tells the story of Kaulder and Sam who are in Mexico and want to return to America. The problem? Aliens have landed about six years earlier and their journey home forces them to go through “The Infected Zone”, where few people live now the monsters have taken over. You can read my full review of the movie here.

How many people were actually involved in making this movie?Well there were the two main actors who were in every scene, then I think about…another seven crew members. I actually counted at one point, we had more drivers than crew. So it gives you an idea how small a production it was.

What was the budget for the movie? I read Gareth got the money after winning a 48-hour film-making competition? How did the movie actually get made?

Yeah, Gareth won the sci-fi competition, then spoke to Vertigo and told them about his idea for Monsters, and how he could make it for next to nothing. They loved the idea and bankrolled it. I don’t know if you know much about Vertigo, but they normally get investors in to get movies made, so for them to just give Gareth the money was pretty good, especially since it was just this idea Gareth had had in his head for a while, and he hadn’t written a script or anything for the film.

As for the budget, you know if you read the right blog, they show how it could have been made for $15,000. I’m not sure on the exact figure, but what I think we had a shooting budget of around $500,000.

So when you started filming had you got a script?

No, just a plot outline. Well two actually. One was the basic plot points, the physical locations and so on they had to get to. The other was the emotional journey the two of them went on. When we meet Kaulder he’s quite difficult to like, but as the movie progresses he becomes someone we can really sympathise with. So Gareth had these two outlines and basically decided as filming went on how to mesh these two journeys together.

The actors didn’t have any lines or anything. We’d just drive along and Gareth would shout “Stop the car”. Then he’d tell the actors which scene this was supposed to be, how it fitted into the story and got them to ad lib the lines. He didn’t give them a great deal of direction in terms of that, most of what you see the actors made up. You know, the scene where Kaulder is drunk outside Sam’s room. Scoot just completely made that up himself. So yeah, they did a great job getting Gareth’s vision onto the screen.

And how did you manage to get all the other members of the cast to deliver their lines?

The majority of the extras were just people we’d met in the street. We’d just tell them a bit about the movie and then film their reactions to lines from the actors.

There’s a taxi driver in a scene at the start of the film- was she actually talking about aliens or something else?

Yeah, she was just talking about the hurricane that had hit recently [in real life]. So obviously we’ve edited it to make it seem like she’s talking about the monsters. There’s another scene round the campfire where the extra was just talking about his own experience seeing a UFO, and again we’ve made it look like he’s talking about the aliens in the film.

There’s also a scene when they get off the train, we actually filmed that backwards. Since in the film they knock on the door at night, but we started filming at the day, the member of our crew who spoke Spanish did a really great job of making that family comfortable and Whitney who plays Sam as well – since she really spoke Spanish. So between both of them, they steered conversation in the right direction so we had the right footage we needed to make that scene work.

 I wandered over at my leisure to the Cineworld at Fountainbridge, in order to watch Ollie Kepler’s Expanding Purple World (after a brief stop in Tea Tree Tea, my pick of the festival for delicious and unusual drinks, hot or cold). Ollie Kepler  is Viv Fongenie’s second feature film, and stars Edward Hogg of Bunny and the Bull fame and Jodie Whitaker, who wowed us all a couple of years ago in Venus, but has since kept a relatively low profile.

The programme didn’t give much a way except that it was independently-produced, and featured a geek, Ollie, in love with a beautiful girl, Noreen. I must say that, with the recent raft of awkward indie pictures with not-quite love stories, I was expecting something in the same vein. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

 Ollie Kepler’s Expanding Purple World is in fact quite a dark story of mental illness and loss, charting one man’s breakdown following the death of his fiancée.  This breakdown and our experience of it is enhanced by clever editing, claustrophobic camerawork and Hogg’s performance. The unease that runs throughout the film is very well managed and several scenes had me actively squirming in my seat, however, it seems like the film doesn’t take it far enough at points.

The story starts strongly and builds well, so that by the time Noreen is killed suddenly by a blood clot, we really feel for the characters, and yet, it is this steady progression of narrative that is the film’s weakest point. Hogg’s character has a background in astrophysics, is writing a book on string theory and is undergoing some serious mental trauma but his story is told in a simple chronological narrative.  I wouldn’t claim that every film tackling mental illness should automatically slot into the expanding category of non-linear narrative films, however, I feel that Fongenie could have done something more interesting with the structure, that more accurately expressed the Ollie’s collapsing (or rather, expanding) world.

Recent films like Harmony Korine’s Juien Donkey-boy in 1999, Christopher Nolan’s Memento and even Fight Club show us how the medium of film can be used to explore trauma, mental breakdown and loss, and sadly, Ollie Kepler’s Expanding Purple World does not quite live up to its predecessors.