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.

The film is asymptotic to meaning: as the film progresses, it gets closer and closer to making an underlying point and hanging together as an overriding whole, but never quite arrives. Director Iyari Wertta flings bizarre ideas at the screen, never anchoring them in wit, plot or dynamism, while the slow pace and catastrophically low budget end up acting as obstacles in the way of any kind of engagement. The actors ham it up appropriately, in one case attempting a poor man’s Owen Wilson, but the expectation seems to be that ludicrous situations should be enough to keep us watching. With some brief exceptions – the hilarious arrival of the alien, for one – it isn’t.

Tragically, the last five minutes hint at a considerably more accomplished film, both poetic and human, with parallels in The Wizard of Oz (not to mention this year’s season finale of Doctor Who). If only Wertta had given this seed a little more room to grow.

Maybe it’s the sun, sea and cervezas, but apparently aliens can’t leave Mexico alone. Monsters imagines a world where Baja California has been overrun with giant otherworldly octopus creatures who tear down planes from the sky and destroy whole cities. Kaulder, a press photographer, needs to escort Sam, the daughter of his newspaper’s owner, back safely into the United States.

@GuyLodge: MONSTERS (B+): Surprise package of #EIFF for me. Resourceful, great-looking hybrid of romcom, tourist movie and creature thriller. It works! ~ June 25, 2010

Visually, this is everything anyone could want from a monster movie. We’re in the post-Cloverfield shakycam world, albeit from a third-person perspective, and director Gareth Edwards has made the most of his visual effects background. There are no gratuitous CG shots here: everything drives either atmosphere or tension. The octopus creatures are carefully thought out, and the moment where we discover just why they’ve been so destructive is both visually and conceptually breathtaking. At the same time, even the smallest environmental details impress: this is a well-rounded, fully-realized near-future world.

Indie movie fans might be interested to know that the film’s leads, Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy, are in a film called Everything Will Happen Before You Die, which just completed a round of funding on Kickstarter. Hopefully, they’ll fare better there – when it comes to acting and dialogue, Monsters unfortunately falls flat. Monster movies are never going to rival Shakespeare, but some of the Festival’s most wooden lines lurk within this film’s neat 90 minute package. It’s a real shame that the visual attention to detail wasn’t matched in character development or scriptwriting.

Nonetheless, if alien invasions, well-meaning B-movies or cephalopods are your thing, this is almost certainly worth a look.