By adapting the first of Ethan Pettus’ novel series, PRIMITIVE WAR, to the screen, Australian writer-director LUKE SPARKE has stepped into the big time. We spoke with Luke to find out more about the ambitious movie…
STARBURST: What attracted you to the novel?
Luke Sparke: I think it worked for me in many different factors, because not only am I a huge dinosaur fan, I’m also a scholar of history. Part of our family’s business growing up here was military costumes and props. We’ve got the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, and I’ve worked on films like X-Men: Wolverine and The Pacific before I became a director. For the child in me, who grew up playing with GI Joes and Jurassic Park dinosaurs, it just appealed to me. So all these different things were coming at me when I read it, and I knew I would be the person to take this on.
How do you balance having a modest budget with your ambition?
It’s difficult. My ambition definitely outstrips all the budgets I’ve ever worked in. I’ve a very big imagination and a very big ambition to make things the biggest they can be!
My biggest catchphrase throughout the shoot and post-production is ‘the promise of the premise’. There have been too many films I’ve gone to as an audience member, where you think the trailer tells you one thing, and you leave disappointed that it never reached that. My biggest one was that if we’re going to pitch it as dinosaurs in Vietnam, or dinosaurs versus soldiers, we want to show at least scenes with dinosaurs versus soldiers! It’s always a battle, budget versus ambition, but my ambition always wins.
When you’re directing the actors with creatures that are probably not necessarily there at the moment, what was that like?
Yeah, I used every trick in the book I could. Obviously, I would’ve loved someone like Stan Winston to build a full-size T-rex, but that’s another reason why we went into the jungle to shoot it for real, because we wouldn’t be able to even put one where we’re filming in ravines and canyons for real. I used that as a way to help our visual effects team, then have to then up their skills to make sure that the T-rex matched the landscape, rather than trying to do it the other way around. But for the smaller raptors and the Utahraptors, we did have some large on-set puppets that we used, and some other guys with motion spots on themselves so we could actually have someone interacting and holding the actors down and feel like they’re actually fighting someone. Those days I could direct, and then other days there was literally nothing there and I had to be the dinosaur and jump around! Then in post-production, I was filming myself in our office, doing the motions of the dinosaurs and how I wanted the animators to do, so it was almost like a second directing version in post-production, to get these creatures to feel that they’re real.
PRIMITIVE WAR is in cinemas from November 28th. You can read more on the film from Luke in the latest issue of STARBURST – available here.
