00:08I thought it was really interesting that the movie, it's quite small scale and quite intimate
00:12really. It largely kind of takes place over one night, apart from the introduction, it's
00:17one family, kind of one event. Can you talk me through, you know, the kind of thinking
00:21behind keeping things quite small scale and intimate like that?
00:24It just seemed to be what the film wanted. The first draft was written during COVID,
00:28during that whole lockdown. As you know, it was a very unsettling time, very discombobulating
00:33to spend all day indoors and have this. As you remember from that time, it also felt like
00:37it was going to go on forever. I couldn't see the end of it. After three months of being
00:42in the house, I was like, is this just it for the rest of time? And so my wife, who
00:47I co-wrote
00:47the film with, Corbett, she and I put all our anxieties and frustration about that COVID into
00:53the script and it felt right for it to be isolated. I remember I used to walk the dog where
00:57I
00:57live in Los Angeles. I'd walk the dog around my neighborhood. It was so desolate and eerie.
01:02It was like 28 days later. And I'm listening to this music as I'm walking the dog and it
01:06was all that vibe was seeping into the script. And so to me, it just felt right for it to
01:11be a family isolated.
01:13It's funny you kind of mentioned 28 days later. I thought it kind of played off almost like
01:17it was a twist on a zombie film, just the way that it all kind of unfolds, which is not
01:22really how you normally think of a werewolf. You normally think of them kind of as a bit more
01:26supernatural. Can you talk me through that, you know, creating this a bit more of a grounded
01:32idea of the werewolf or the wolfman?
01:34Yeah. I mean, when I took the job and was like, I'm going to do this, I was just thinking,
01:38what's my way in? That's what felt interesting to me. It's kind of my style. It's what I did
01:42with Invisible Man. I was like, can I make the idea of invisibility not seem outlandish,
01:47but seem like something that could happen? Now we're at the point with self-driving cars and
01:51all this where I'm thinking it is around the corner, you know, invisibility. These science
01:56fiction concepts can just suddenly appear in your life. So with this, I was thinking,
02:00okay, what's my one degree of reality? And I felt like disease was a good thing. And also,
02:05disease felt like the right way to go because the story of transformation, the thing that
02:10sprang into my head was the bodily transformation that someone who's suffering from a degenerative
02:15illness, you know, whether they're suffering from multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's or anything,
02:19any nerve damage, someone who's suffered a stroke, that seemed to really mirror the werewolf
02:24transformation. So that was really the thinking behind it. It does feel like there's a lot of,
02:28I guess, unanswered questions throughout the movie. Like, we don't really know where this
02:32infection came from or why there are these group of hunters seem to live and contain whatever's going
02:37on in this forest. Was that something that you wanted to imbue in the movie, a bit of mystery or
02:41kind of letting audiences figure it out for themselves? Yeah, I did want a bit of mystery in there.
02:46You know, you have to decide how much am I going to give to the audience, how much not. I
02:51find
02:51personally horror movies scarier when there is a lot left off. You know, one of my favourite horror
02:57films of all time, if not my favourite, is The Shining and another movie about a family of three
03:02in an isolated location. But so many unanswered questions in that film and it becomes, for me,
03:07those unanswered questions have added to my love of that movie and what I take from it. I'm always
03:11looking for hints. And so, I think it's that type of thinking, yeah. Is there any other, I mean,
03:16you've talked about The Invisible Man, now Wolfman. Is there any other kind of like creature feature
03:20thing that you would want to reinvent in this new way? The classic monsters, I've always thought,
03:24just as a film fan, I would love someone to do a modernised version of Jekyll and Hyde. So,
03:29I think that's such an interesting story with the protagonist and the antagonist being the same
03:33person. But as far as creature features, I still think, having grown up in the VHS era,
03:39I would love to do an alien film. The thing that I love about aliens and extraterrestrial species,
03:45you know, is the room that you have. There's no rules. You can literally do anything. We humans
03:50have created this little green man mythology, but it's completely owned by us. The films,
03:54like the last 20 minutes of 2001 is where I would want to lean because it's like whatever is out
04:00there is not going to be something we can, it's going to be beyond our comprehension. So,
04:05that is something that haunts me, making a truly unique alien life film.
04:09There was some really, I thought there was some really interesting scenes in the movie. Was there
04:13any that, you know, you particularly really enjoyed filming or that really kind of, when you were
04:18filming it, you were like, this is going to be pretty sick.
04:20Yeah, there's one scene without spoiling it, you'll know what I'm talking about. There's a scene
04:24involving an insect. The main character is hearing something and I really loved shooting that and I
04:29just felt like we've got something unique here. Part of what you were saying before about the
04:35transformation slowing down and presenting it more as an illness as opposed to one big mic drop of a
04:42scene. That jigsaw piece of that, I was really excited about.
04:46What kind of research did you do in terms of bringing, like, werewolf mythology to the screen
04:51in a new way? Like, you know, where did you kind of start from?
04:53Well, I thought about all the werewolf films I've seen, but I was almost using them as
04:57a guardrail of where not to go. You know, like, that's been done and done well. I'll never beat
05:03Rick Baker's makeup and Arian, who did the makeup on this movie, he would agree. He's friends with
05:08Rick Baker and he doesn't want to compete with it. So, I actually based my research more on real life
05:13conditions, researching Alzheimer's, researching dementia, ALS, Parkinson's disease, just the sort
05:20of steps and compacting them. You know, when you're suffering from one of these illnesses,
05:25it often takes years and it's very slow. I'm actually squishing it down into one night.
05:29So, it was this weird parallel track of slowing it down, but also reflecting something in real
05:33life that happens much slower. So, I hope that I achieve that weird balance. So, the film is
05:38breathless, yet it feels like you're going on this journey.
05:40Yeah. I think that's a fair way to describe it.
05:44Okay, good, good, good, good.
05:45By the end of the movie, I was like...
05:47Bye, bye, bye.
05:48All right.
05:49Bye, bye.
05:51Bye.
05:52Bye.
05:54Bye.
05:58Bye.
05:59Bye.
