by Andrew Dex
After a successful decade in the TV realm, taking on huge projects such as Game of Thrones and Lost In Space, director/writer Neil Marshall has now fully returned to the movie format, to bring us some more of his classic horror style! Collaborating with actress/writer Charlotte Kirk (The Reckoning) once more, Neil is back with The Lair, a monster-filled movie based in Afghanistan. Confirmed by Neil as a distant cousin to Dog Soldiers, The Lair sees Neil amp up on gore, action, and gallows humour like one-liners…
STARBURST: This is your latest collaboration with Charlotte Kirk. Can you tell us about how you first started working together and how this then led to the creation of The Lair?
Neil Marshall: I guess we first started working together when we were just literally sitting around talking about ideas, stories we’d like to tell, films we’d like to make, and things like that. The first one that originated was actually the film that we did last year, a film called Duchess, which we’ve shot, but it hasn’t come out yet. Then after that, we wrote The Reckoning, and then we wrote The Lair. That came about basically because of COVID. At the time, we were stuck in LA, and a friend of mine approached me and said, “I know some friends who have a house in the desert; maybe we could put a little crew together and shoot something around this house in the desert? Would you fancy that?” And that came and went very quickly. It was a nice idea, but it never happened. But something stuck in my head like, “Well, during COVID, maybe we could shoot something in the desert? Maybe it could be like about some home invasion or something like that!” As always happens with me, what started out to be a very low-budget, simple idea of like a home invasion in the desert, suddenly became, “Oh, it’s in Afghanistan, and it’s Aliens! There are underground complexes!” I started throwing in ideas from other scripts that I had had for ages about this underground lair and stuff like that. Bit by bit, it just expanded into this B-movie, war movie, alien movie thing. So yeah, that’s how it came about.
Can you tell us about what Charlotte brought to The Lair as Capt Kate Sinclair, and what kind of military training she had to do for the part?
I was trying to get her to go up in a tornado, but we didn’t manage to arrange that, but otherwise, we found an RAF pilot who she did a lot of research with. She interviewed, talked to, and got a sense of the language and the whole vibe of the thing through that. Then we did a lot of action training for the film, fight training, and weapons training which is the main thing, because, as I discovered when making it, because it’s an all-British cast, not many British actors have experience handling firearms. You go to the States, and like every actor, at some point, has done a cop show, or a movie, or something like that. They’ve all handled firearms at some point. Over here it’s a lot less prominent in the industry, in some cases, it was an actor’s first time even seeing a firearm, let alone even handling one. So we had to go through some rigorous training with all of them, through like a boot camp of military training, and weapons training, and stuff. Charlotte did all of that as well. Obviously, she cut off all of her hair, stuff that actors do for their roles. Just to give a different look from The Reckoning and things like that. She really got 100% into the role.
The start of the movie instantly felt like The Thing, with the music and the way it was shot. Can you tell us about the movies that inspired The Lair, and maybe how you wanted the overall tone to feel for the viewer?
The overall tone I wanted to feel like a classic B-movie, I grew up with those great B-movies like Alligator, and later on, things like Anaconda and stuff like that. They’re great monster movies, but they’re just meant to be entertaining. They’re not striving for any kind of pretensions at all, they’re just meant to be fun and entertaining, and I love those kinds of movies. I thought that I just wanted to make a full-on B-movie, with monsters, and soldiers, and larger-than-life characters, with things like that in it. So that was kind of the origin of it. Then obviously, I’m inspired by movies like The Thing, certainly. Both versions. The original, and the Carpenter one, obviously the Carpenter one, is a lot darker and more serious, but the first one is like a classic B-movie in its own right. And Aliens, anything with soldiers, so, and I call it a distance cousin to Dog Soldiers because it kind of exists in a similar universe, with soldiers fighting monsters, it has that kind of vibe to it. So that was the thing. I wanted to make something that was just fun. My previous film, The Reckoning, had got bogged down in maybe being a little bit too serious, trying to tell a worthy story. I think it does tell a worthy story, but after doing that, I was like, “No, I just want to have some fun and give the audience some fun, let’s explode some heads and do lots of fights and explosions, and stuff like that.”
In a similar vein to say, Aliens, where you’ve got Hudson and his humour-filled one-liners, there’s a similar feel with The Lair! How do you balance outrageous one-liners like that with a plot that is actually, truly terrifying?
I think the lines only work if they come from the character. Like, they have to emerge from the character because Hudson was that guy. So anything he said makes sense for his character, so it’s the same for this, and it’s the same for Dog Soldiers, and it’s the same for everything. It’s like, the best kind of humour in these situations emerges from character, and I find that people under extreme duress, and extreme pressure, sometimes their sense of humour inherently shows through it. It’s gallows humour, it’s trench humour, which I really love, and it’s a very kind of British thing as well. But yeah, that kind of gallows humour. I think it’s really funny. And then giving some of the best lines to the least obvious candidate, the Afghan freedom fighter guy who is like cracking some of the most choice lines.
Great! So can you tell us about how the look of the Ravagers originally came together, and what did you really want to see from them on-screen?
Teeth! Mostly. Yeah, I kind of wanted to. You take away things like eyes and stuff like that and just leave, essentially, teeth. They’re alien, so you don’t really know how they see or sense things around them. It’s like, “Let’s just leave that to the imagination”, and I thought, well “Let’s give them a kind of built-in body armour of, like, skin that’s as thick and as tough as Kevlar; we can shoot them a few times, and they’re going to get up, and come back again.” So there are a lot of elements behind the design process, like when the guys would design the whole thing, I was like, “Can we do this, can we do that?” There’s a specific phobia called trypophobia, a fear of textures that have lots of holes in them. You’ll see it online; it’s like certain textures that have lots of holes in them. People have a real phobia of it, and it makes them want to vomit. So I thought, how could we apply that to the creatures, so their face came from a thing, where it’s just like, loads of holes, and things come out of the holes, and stuff like that. So the design idea there was if they look so repulsive, then some people will have a physical reaction to it, so that’s pretty good.
You’ve always been a huge fan of practical effects. That is quite clear from the projects you’ve worked on. So, we have to ask, what do you love the most about working that way, and what has practical effects brought to The Lair?
It’s just that ability to have the creature in the room with you when you’re filming it, and interacting with the actors, interacting with the light, interacting with the dust, and the dirt, debris and god knows what else is flying around on set, and you get happy accidents. You get things happening that if you contrived it in CGI, then everything would be perfect. Whereas you get happy accidents of things bumping into things, reactions to things. Which I love about practical effects. It holds up on camera because it is there, it’s not faked in any way, and so I just kind of used the same technique that Guillermo does on his movies, where you do like 90% practical, and then enhance that practical with some CGI stuff, be it like blinks, eye movements, things like that. In my case, it was with the mouths, I wanted the mouth to open wider than it possibly could, so we did a few CG shots, where we extended the jaw and put an extra set of teeth in there and things like that. But those are the only kind of CG enhancements to something I’ve done practically on set. The other thing is, I don’t know how many ravagers you thought there were in the film, but we only had two suits. One hero suit and one backup suit. So we managed just to do editing, and a couple of visual effects duplication shots, to make it look like there were a lot more. When you find out that James Cameron only had eight Alien suits for Aliens, it’s like, right, you can work wonders!
You put this movie together in Budapest. Can you elaborate on what it was like to work there and how you went about making it feel like the middle of Afghanistan?
That’s the thing, you wouldn’t look at it and go, “Oh, that’s Budapest.” We just worked in Budapest on The Reckoning, so we knew the infrastructure there, and we knew there was a good kind of tax credit and incentive to go there. I was dubious at first because I was like, “Why aren’t we going to Morocco, or why aren’t we going to Jordan or somewhere like that.” They were just too expensive at the end of the day, so we went out to Budapest, I was a bit cynical, and we started doing a tour of all of the major quarries near Budapest. Outside of town, we found these really massive quarries, and in the summertime there, it was like 40 degrees heat anyway, so we had the sunshine, we had the heat, and we had the dust and the quarries, and then just with some very clever visual effects, set extensions were added into the surrounding desert for the shots that needed it. I mean, the actual fort, we built that on top of a hill, next to a quarry. It was surrounded by green fields and things like that. In the movie, we managed to make the few shots that you can see in its situation. We replaced all of that with desert. These visual effects guys are phenomenal. I don’t even ask how they do it, but if it looks good, I’ll take it!
What was that particular scene when the team are examining the Ravager like to work on, and is there anything special you did to capture it?
I don’t know if I’ve seen many films like that, but at some point, I just thought, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if this Ravager that was there with its guts hanging out, suddenly woke up, and attacks them, right when you least expect it.” So I thought that would be a lot of fun, and then when we shot it, we ran it several times, it was absolutely hilarious, that moment when it gets up, and everybody is running, diving, bumping into each other, screaming, and shouting. You’ve got somebody trying to hit it and blow it up, stuff like that. We ran that as a master shot from a few different angles. Each time it just got more and more hysterical and hilarious. I wanted that energy in the film; I wanted that, from going into a very quiet scene, as you said, this is one that very much is a homage to The Thing, like the autopsy scene, where they’re pulling its guts out, and all of this stuff, they think “It can’t be alive now” and then boom, it suddenly comes alive.
And going on from that, and this might be a tough question, but what was your personal favourite scene to put together in The Lair, and why?
Well, I do like the scene we just spoke about. It was a lot of fun. I kind of liked the madness in the elevator at the end because it was an idea I actually conceived of for The Descent: Part 2, which got rejected for budget reasons or whatever. So I kept this idea in the back of my pocket of being stuck in an elevator that is hooked up to the winch on a car, and then the elevator gets stuck, and it drags the car into the elevator shaft, and everything is kicking off in the elevator before the car crashes down the elevator shaft, and I thought that that was a lot of fun. I just like that idea of like lots of different things going on, and one thing leads to another, leads to another, etc.
You and Charlotte have a couple more movies coming up together. At this point, is there anything you can tell us about these upcoming projects?
So yeah, we shot Duchess last summer, it’s all finished, and it played in Cannes. We’re just looking for a distributor on that one at the moment, that’s a violent gangster movie, and then we’ve just finished filming a thriller out in Malta. It’s like a slasher movie, an erotic thriller kind of thing. So we’ve only just finished filming that, and we are editing that at the moment.
THE LAIR comes to Blu-ray, DVD, and digital on July 17th
