Interview: Neil Marshall

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In 2002 a film by the title of Dog Soldiers made its debut on the festival circuit and went on to see a limited theatrical release and worldwide video/DVD distribution. It was the debut feature from writer/director Neil Marshall, about a group of hard-drinking, soccer-loving Scottish soldiers who, while on a seemingly routine training exercise in northern Scotland mountains, cross paths with a pack of lycanthropes (werewolves to the lay person), and must battle the beasts with everything from guns, knives, and grenades, to broadswords, makeshift flamethrowers, everyday household items, and when all else fails, hand to hand combat. Filled with audacious violence, a dark sense of humor, and loads of movie references (Saving Private Ryan, The Matrix, Jaws and Predator to name a few), Dog Soldiers garnered a substantial cult following among horror fans that flocked to the film like a mob of zombies to an end-of-the-world survivor with an empty shotgun and a broken leg.

Dog Soldiers also boasted an intelligence missing from a lot of genre films—the characters are fleshed out, the dialogue well crafted and clever, and the directing filled with lots of nice inventive touches. It avoided all the potential pitfalls that too many horror films fall into, regarded its audience with intelligence, and was entertaining as hell. And now Neil Marshall brings the same sensibility to his second feature film, The Descent, about a group of women who must face off against subterranean humanoid monsters (nicknamed “crawlers”) while exploring an uncharted cave in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains.

One year after a horrific car accident takes the lives of her husband and daughter, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) travels from England to North America for a girls-only weekend with her two closest mates, Beth (Alex Reid) and Juno (Natalie Mendoza). Also along for the trip are Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), the most experienced climber in the group; Rebecca’s younger sister, Sam (Myanna Buring), an American medical student; and Holly (Nora Jane Noone), Juno’s base jumping, pot smoking young protégé. While on the surface they may seem your typical educated professional women, they spend their free time as amateur thrill seekers. The film opens with Sarah, Juno and Beth rafting through white water rapids, it is obvious that all the characters have climbing experience, and now they are trying their hand at caving—moving through underground cave systems by means of hiking, climbing, and squeezing through tight passages.

Marshall understands what people are afraid of and fully explores all the possibilities lurking within the world he has created. Fear comes in many forms, and not all of it in the form of monsters: a car accident can be as terrifying as being ripped limb from limb by teeth and claws, being trapped in a narrow passage as suspenseful as being stalked by an unseen predator. And whereas the characters in Dog Soldiers bonded together in the face of a common enemy, the characters in The Descent do not leave their lives behind at the mouth of the cave. The preexisting tensions in the group do not disappear when the crawlers show up, but instead become ever more relevant, especially when secrets begin to be revealed. Not only must the women fear the dark and what lies waiting for them within, but they have reason to fear one another as well.

The Descent has all the things that make a horror film a great horror film—gallons of blood, moments that make you jump, psychological terror, things so disgusting they make your stomach turn, and monsters that are truly the things nightmares are made of. But it also has all the qualities that make any film a great film—the dialogue and performances are filled with subtle details that add layers of meaning to the story, the characters are multi-dimensional, the filmmakers recognize and understand logic, believability, and realism. The cinematography and editing are dead on and excellently paced, bringing the audience into the moment with the characters, perfectly capturing the suspense of being stalked, the agony of physical pain, the disorientation of falling, the panic and confusion of hand to hand combat. Marshall’s use of light is especially inventive: the entire film takes place in a pitch black environment, so the only sources of light are those which the women have brought with them—flashlights and headlamps illuminate pieces of the frame, glow sticks paint the frame an eerie toxic green, and flames burn it red. The score sounds like something John Carpenter would have come up with had he been asked to do the music for Deliverance—alternating between sweeping moments in tune with the wide-open wilderness, and industrial synthesized sounds that seem to vibrate off the walls of the caves. All of this cumulates to form one of the most terrifying and intense films you will ever see.

The Descent has already been both a critical and financial success, having earned numerous awards, nominations and acclaim, and performing at box offices around the world. Neil Marshall has expanded on the solid fan base he earned with Dog Soldiers and carved himself a place in horror history with The Descent. He begins production on his third feature, Doomsday (more about this in the interview below), this fall. Recently, I had a chance to speak with Marshall while he was visiting New York to promote The Descent.

Jameson Kowalczyk: I guess what I want to know first is how did you get into filmmaking, how did you get to be a director? Did you go to film school, work on independent projects and sort of come up through the ranks?

Neil Marshall: Very much so, it all started when I was eleven. I walked out of Raiders of the Lost Ark the first time, and I knew I wanted to direct films. And I really didn’t look back after that. I started making films on Super 8 when I was a teenager, that led to film school, film school lead to me being an editor for about eight years, mostly TV stuff, but also a couple of features along the way. And all that time I was writing as well, and developing my own projects. And Dog Soldiers was one of those projects. I wrote the first draft of that in 1996. We didn’t shoot it till 2000/2001. And then it was released in 2002, so that was kind of my six-year labor of love. After that I got the deal to do The Descent, but that took another sort of couple of years, developing the script while I was writing other scripts as well. So, sort of a long journey.

JK: Do you remember the first film you ever made?

NM: Well, it was a Super 8 thing and it was called Duel in the Jungle, and it was myself and a mate and we had one three minute reel of Super 8 film. And it was just the two of us, we didn’t have anyone else to sort of help out, and we made it. The story was this one guy and this other guy are in the jungle and they meet and have a fight and the hero wins and goes off. But because we didn’t even have a tripod or anything, we couldn’t both appear in the same shot at the same time [laughs], so we shot it from each others’ point of view. And we filmed it in his backyard and made it to look like the jungle. And that was it, yeah.

JK: What attracts you to the horror genre?

NM: I think there’s definitely a sadistic streak in me that I like watching the audience respond to it. I like hearing everybody gasp and jump and shriek and scream and whatever. That came quite early on when I was at college. I think when I did Super 8 stuff I experimented a bit with gore, and I had certainly watched a lot of horror films throughout that time, but when I was at film school I started off doing animation, and I animated, in the context of a wider film that other people had done, I animated this one sequence of a guy’s eyeball melting and running down his face. And it wasn’t particularly well done, but we screened it to a whole bunch of students and during that little moment several people in the audience gasped, they were kind of like, ‘Uhl! That’s disgusting.’ And I really picked up on the fact that the audience responded to it. So when I did my final film, I did this twenty minute all out mayhem and chaos zombie movie with blood and guts and everything, and it went down with an absolute storm, it got a standing ovation at the TV show, and it was like, alright, I got something here, and it just seemed like a natural progression to make horror my first feature. Because it had been something I had been into since the age of five when I first saw Frankenstein on TV late at night, and graduated to kind of the eighties slew of you know, really nasty horror stuff, along with classics like The Shining, and The Thing, and Alien, and all those kinds of movies I was watching all the time. So I’ve just grown up with horror and loved it ever since. And when I made Dog Soldiers, my feeling was that at the end of the day, I hadn’t made a particularly scary film. I’d made more of a black comedy. Some people find it scary, but I really didn’t think it was a scary movie.

JK: I thought of it almost as more of an action movie. But there’s parts in it that if you have a perverse sense of humor, they make you laugh.

NM: Yeah. It was very much from the school of Evil Dead II or Peter Jackson’s Braindead where I tried to go so outrageous it was hilarious.

JK: I like Megan’s monologue at the end, I thought that was very funny.

NM: Yeah. There’s lots of bits in there that are just pure tongue and cheek black comedy, like when someone’s guts are falling out and then tell them to push them back in again, it’s completely outrageous. So after the end of that, I felt I still wanted to make a genuinely scary film, because half of horror films are those black comedy tongue-in-cheek Evil Dead II type of things, and the other half are the Aliens and The Shinings and The Texas Chainsaw Massacres and The Things, that aren’t tongue-in-cheek, that take it very seriously and deliver something totally harrowing, which, in my case anyway, I think stayed with me since the first time I saw them, and continues to stay with me. So, I tried to make the most terrifying film I possibly could.

JK: What scares you?

NM: I was just discussing this on the way over here. We saw this window cleaner hanging off the side of one of these buildings, above me, and Mark was just saying how ill it made him feel, just looking at it from down below. Heights, I don’t like heights. Certainly not tall buildings, things like that. I’m not comfortable with heights and I’m not very good with spiders, either. I shouldn’t be giving away all my secrets, somebody’s going to send me spiders or something.

JK: Have you ever done any caving or anything other extreme sports yourself?

NM: The most extreme I’ve kind of got is mountain climbing. I live near mountains so, I’ve gone up, kind of been doing that my whole life really. But I’m not really into extreme sports. I like them when I do want to try them though, but nothing like, I’ve never done any parachuting or anything like that. I wouldn’t be jumping out of a plane at the best of times. But caving, I hadn’t done any caving since I started researching the film, and then me and the actors went caving before we started shooting. But I got the idea mainly from watching TV or documentaries about caving, photographs—it just immediately freaked me out, and I thought, that’s got to be a good setting for a horror movie.

JK: What do you try to bring to the horror genre that you feel is lacking in other horror films? What separates The Descent from other horror films?

NM: I want to bring a sense of originality… an intelligence… and certainly with The Descent a serious take on scaring people I guess. But certainly originality and intelligence, I didn’t want to do something that seemed like a remake or a rehash or something that’s been done before. I was really quite amazed that nobody had thought to set a horror movie in a cave before, it’s so ideal. I mean they probably have, there are a lot of horror movies that get made. And so that for me is it, that’s the key… and a strong sense of character and story. It was really integral to both Dog Soldiers and this, to spend the time getting to know these characters before the real horror hits, so you care. If you don’t care, you’re not going to get scared. These are the kind of ingredients I work on.

JK: How many gallons of blood were used during the production?

NM: I don’t know, I know there was a lot. I’m trying to think, somebody told me that for that particular sequence. I think there was a good 200 gallons or something like that. We were splashing it all over the place, I was in there with a bucket just throwing it across the set, it was great fun.

***SPOILER ALERT!****

JK: What’s your favorite scene or shot in the film?

NM: Not so much a favorite shot. My favorite scene I think is probably the first crawler attack, when Juno kills the first crawler. The audience is usually 100% behind Juno, and cheering and clapping, and then a moment later she sticks the pick in Beth’s neck, and it just totally flips the audience around and everything starts gasping and ‘Oh no!’ and I quite really like that sense of audience manipulation, I like that at that moment I managed to get the audience right there in the palm of my hand and twisting it around, that’s a lot of fun. As a director that’s really satisfying. I like that, I like the shot of Sara climbing up the bones at the end, when there’s just a shaft of light coming down, and some of the shots within it where it’s almost a totally black screen and there’s a quite wonderful corner of light and something going on down there that expands, and you can’t see where you are. I played with that a lot during the making of the film. It was good.

JK: Dog Soldiers had basically an all male cast, and The Descent has an all female cast, was there a difference between working with an all male cast versus working with an all female cast?

NM: I thought that there might be, I definitely thought the potential for a complete nightmare existed, but as it turned out there wasn’t. They worked in exactly the same way, totally dedicated to the film exactly the same way the Dog Soldiers guys had been, and so it was just a really great collaboration. And the were just as rough and tough and hard-drinking as any of the guys in Dog Soldiers, and so it was a lot of fun to do.

JK: What about when you were writing, was there a difference between writing for male characters and female characters?

NM: Yeah, I mean that was definitely more difficult, and I utilized a lot of my female friends to get their opinions and make sure it was working right. And then of course during the process I was working with the actresses a lot, collaborating with them just to make sure it was authentic in terms of—it was me as writer and director and the producer’s a guy as well, and we have to make sure we get it right or we’re going to look pretty dumb as a couple of guys trying to make this female ensemble movie. So we took a lot of their advice along the way.

JK: Did the script or the dialogue or the dynamic of the characters change at all during production?

NM: It became more fine-tuned. Certain scenes, specifically the scene with Sara and Beth when Beth’s dying, that scene in particular wasn’t working for me, it wasn’t working for the actors, and the night before we shot it we went out to the pub and over a few drinks we rewrote the scene totally, like on a napkin in the pub and just like fine-tuned it, totally got rid of all the junk and got down to the bare bones of what the scene was and made it so much better and the next morning I came in a typed it up and that’s the one that we shot. And that improved tenfold because of that, so that’s really what it was, it was just fine-tuning.

JK: Did you do anything special on set to set the mood or atmosphere, to make it scarier for the actors?

NM: Well, I kept the crawlers and the actors apart. Totally. They never saw any designs or sculptures, they never met the guys who were playing the crawlers or anything at all. The first time that they encountered a crawler at all was during a take in which they encounter the crawler for the first time during the film. Because we shot the film in linear order, story order, we were able to do that. And what it did was two things, it built a palpable sense of tension within the group that they knew I was going to spring something on them at some point, and they knew according to the script it was going to be pretty grisly, but they just had no idea what. And so they were constantly like, the buzz was, ‘When are we going to get to meet the crawlers, Neil’s going to stick on in the cave with us at any moment.’ And then it got a totally genuine reaction within that shot, with them walking around and seeing it for the first time. So that paid off, it was quite a lot of fun to do that.

JK: What inspired the look of the crawlers?

NM: Mostly it was logic more than anything. In my mind the logic that I applied to them was, as far as I was concerned, they are an offshoot of the human race, so like the rest of us… when the rest of us left the caves, we were all cavemen and the rest of us left the caves and evolved and became what we are now, this lot branched off and stayed in the caves. And they evolved to live in the dark, which meant they went blind, their skin pigmentation changed, and they use sound and smell and almost like a sonar thing, like bats, to move around and hunt, and readapted, so crawling and climbing they are very light and very fit, and just applying all that to it. I gave this list of things to the guys who were sculpting and designing them and then they came up with a whole series of like, possible looks for each individual one, based around the idea that they’d have to have bigger ears and flat nostrils and closed up eyes and things like that. And I went around and said, ‘That one’s good, that ones good, that one’s good.’ And that’s kind of how they got picked. Because it was just the faces that were being designed, everything else was the actors, with body paint and KY Jelly. They only prosthetics were on their heads.

JK: How many hours of make-up work did it take for one crawler?

NM: It started off at five, and I think by the end of the shoot they got it down to three. So they speeded up the process.

JK: Are there any differences between the version that was released overseas, and the version being released here in the U.S.?

NM: Yeah, there’s about a minute difference in the film. There’s roughly a minute cut off the end of the film, which changes, hugely, the implications of the end, how it ends. A lot to do with physical geography more than anything else. But it also has an emotional impact as well. And really that came about because I was given the opportunity to do it. I toyed with this idea way back when I was editing the film in the first place, and I decide to go with the original ending that was in the script, that we has set out to make, but I had this idea in the back of my mind, and I was given the opportunity to do it in the U.S. release. Also because the UK ending had a really divided audience, quite evenly down the middle, some people loved it and some people hated it. So I thought, lets try the other ending in the states and everybody was up for it.

JK: What’s your next project?

NM: I’m just about to start production on a project called Doomsday—it’s my 3 D trilogy, Dog Soldiers, Descent and Doomsday—which is a post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure. Kind of like in the vein of Escape from New York and Mad Max, something we haven’t seen for a while. Should be a lot of fun.

JK: When do you go into production on Doomsday, and when do you expect it to be released?

NM: Casting begins as soon as I get back, pre-production in the beginning of September, shooting around Christmas and the New Year… end of next year, maybe it will be released.

JK: You shot The Descent I think it was December through February, do you like shooting that time of year?

NM: It’s not really by choice, just by pure chance I’ve ended up shooting both features at that time of year. This time I am shooting that time of year, but I’m shooting in South Africa, which is summertime there, so… I don’t know, coming from the north of England I’m not used to the heat. But no, it’s not really a choice to be shooting that time of year.

JK: What was the budget for The Descent?

NM: Three and a half million pound.

JK: What’s the budget for Doomsday?

NM: It’s going to be approximately thirty million dollars.

JK: So…

NM: It’s quite a jump.

JK: Are you nervous about that?

NM: Yeah. [laughs] It’s a hell of a responsibility. So yeah, I’m sort of nervous about this movie.

JK: How many drafts do you go through when you write a script?

NM: On Dog Soldiers, I think the version that we shot was draft sixteen. But that was over six years, so… on Descent it was draft seven. One of the scripts I’ve just written, they seemed pretty happy about it at draft two, so maybe it will change as I go on.

JK: Have you written many scripts?

NM: Yeah, because it was nearly four years between Dog Soldiers and Descent, I had time to build up a backlog of scripts, so I wrote about four different scripts then. And they’re right across the board—there is another horror film, there’s a medieval heist movie, there’s a World War II thing, there’s all sorts.

Lionsgate Films released The Descent on August 4th nation wide.