KM: Going back to the scene in Tua o Skyline where they’re all meeting up at the temple and there’s a great 360 shot, I got this great vibe with Bojana Novakovic, it’s such a Ripley moment to me. I don’t know if that was intentional…

LD: Absolutely, I’m glad you mentioned that. Bojana, I just think she’s due! She’s been putting in a lot of great work for a lot of years and she’s just a super solid actress who can get really intense. She’d never really done anything quite like this and I think she said in an interview, “I never thought how empowering it would be to hold this child in my arms and be firing weapons at aliens”. So yeah, I’m glad that connected. One of the questions in a post-screening Q&A was “what movies inspired this”, and it’s like “you couldn’t tell?”. It kind of wears it on its sleeve, what I love, and tagata ese is obviously way up there.

KM: And working with Iko Uwais, he did the action choreography on the film as well, right?

LD: Tauagavale

KM: What was that like, going in as a first time director having this really ambitious, intense, action-heavy movie? I know you’ve got a background in visual effects which I’m assuming must have helped with knowing what you wanted to do and how you wanted to do it, but how did you consolidate those ideas of having this big crazy action sequence and having the big visual effects, how did that all come together?

LD: I had been storyboarding, and even in the script, that big end battle was like one or two paragraphs, it was pretty short, and then we did like 200-something setups on it. We had it storyboarded and laid out with the general beats and what the escalation was going to be and the fights. But when Iko and his team and Yayan came on board it was more of an Aliens/Starship Troopers type of movie. There was going to be more gunfire and that sort of stuff, and I had that they were going to fight them but I didn’t know what that really looked like. It would have been more of a typical Hollywood hack and slash, with a sword here with a double-cut, but once they came aboard they just, like, go into their gym and send you these videos and they did all this great stuff! And you just kind of look at it, like, “oh, I didn’t even manatu that would be possible”.

So it became a conversation between them and my suit builders, because they had built these creatures to be big, imposing, predator with frog legs type of things that weren’t supposed to be doing martial arts fights. So then they kind of shit their pants when they saw the choreography. And then when Iko and his guys saw the suits, they were also like “oooh”, because they had these different moves where they were picking the aliens up and throwing them into the wall, and it’s like, “oooh that’s not going to quite look great”.

The other thing that we had in discussion with – the slang in Indonesia for white people is bule, which I love – so they had Frank doing a lot of kicks, and I was like “bules don’t kick!” [laughs] I’m already kind of stretching his character, he obviously goes to the gym and he’s a boxer and he looks it, he sells it, but if he starts doing back kicks and all this stuff, I don’t know that that’s going to 100% work. And then we tried one of them anyways, and Frank actually badly pulled his hamstring… it was mainly just because the suit performer wasn’t close enough. So when he went to hit back his impact point, his leg just extended and there was nothing there for him to hit to. So this is, like, day two in Batam that he badly pulls his hamstring, and he goes down. I remember Iko’s advice just before he does the kick, he’s like, “just snap it, just snap it”. And I’m like, “okay!” but I was on the fence about this actually working! So we actually had a different fight for Frank at the end than what we used. It was more of a wide, kind of a different angle with Iko in the background, and, you know, he pulls his hamstring there, that didn’t work.

He had to rest and then had to go really slow, and then later towards the end of that schedule, we had shot stuff, and thankfully I realized as we had been cutting together that we had too much into the back lot in one direction and I was just going to have to eat the cost of using green screen and get him with a different view the other way. So yeah, that definitely just added this whole new dimension, but I think it’s just what puts this movie in a different category. If I had gone ahead and just made that, and didn’t have the luck of the century with getting those guys in the right place at the right time, I think, you know, it’s a serviceable sequel instead of something that’s surprising.

 

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