Armed with two actors, a producer, a translator, a sound guy and a budget of less than $100,000, director Gareth Edwards set to make a feature-length film which would have him traversing from Central America to the United States border. Monsters is an interesting example of guerilla filmmaking. Besides the two actors, everyone else and all the locations were improvised from what was there on the day of shooting. Using careful Photoshop techniques and special effects, Edwards molded the movie to be what he wanted it to be about. The result: A “monster” movie that is much more than about those creatures that go bump in the night. [youtube id =”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IshZoIwz_o”&w=450%5D Michelle Castillo: Monsters reminded me a lot of the first half of District 9. There’s a lot of social context behind it. Were you trying to talk about the immigration debate? Gareth Edwards: I’ve never been to Mexico before we sat down and landed to start filming that movie so I had no agenda about Mexican immigration or anything like that. It was really not part of why this film was happening at all. Inevitably, it creeps into the movie because it’s so teed up, the metaphor of the wall and everything, it would apply to any country we went to. There’s always some internal politics in any country about two sides of something, so I think wherever we shot the film someone would have gone, “Ah you’re commenting on our internal problem!” The one allegorical political thing that did interest me was the idea of labeling something a monster, calling it evil and then feeling like we have to eradicate it because it kills people, right, which is fine. But at what price do you kill a monster? If you are killing, in terms of eradicating it, if you end up killing 100 times or 1000 times more people than the thing you are killing ever kills, is that worth it? Or is it acceptable because it’s foreign people and not western people? So those sort of debates, I know … Continue reading Filmmaker Gareth Edwards Talks About His Monsters