With a minimal crew, Ed-
wards shot Monsters in two chunks in Mexico, Central America and Galveston, Texas in autumn 2008 for a reported $15,000 USD. The first six weeks of filming generated 100 hours of footage, which Ed- wards and editor Colin Goudie cut down to 90 minutes over the course of four months. The director and his actors then went back for ten additional days of filming to reshoot a few sequences and capture other coverage.
Key to keeping the budget down was Edwards’
use of locals as actors. Fortunately, the Mexicans were more than willing to help a novice British di- rector make a movie starring American actors about aliens wreaking havoc in their country. “I can’t speak Spanish, so we had a translator,
and she used to do this set spiel to everybody that we bumped
into...and I got to sort of memorize it in a kind of crap way,” he explains. “There was this key point where the person looked really wor- ried, like what were we asking them to do? Obvi- ously we were going to film, and they looked really nervous. And she would be like [mimes a Spanish
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phrase]. Then she’d go ‘extraterrestrial,’ at which point they’d suddenly smile and go, ‘Oh! Okay, okay, okay!’ and we’d be given permission to do whatever we wanted. For some reason, Mexicans embrace monster movies.” Edwards’ determination to capture the mundane
nature of an alien invasion was an important factor in his approach to the script. Rather than running in fear from the creatures every moment, the pub- lic has grown accustomed to them after six years of aliens constantly being on the news. Call it mon- ster fatigue. “Picture the scenario of Jurassic Park. Wouldn’t
it be amazing if they could genetically engineer di- nosaurs? And the answer is yes, of course it would – for one generation. And then, after that, the next generation, they’d be born into a world that always had dinosaurs, and those kids would be going around the zoo saying, ‘So, Daddy, was an elephant genetically engineered?’ And you’d go, ‘No, ele- phants were always here. It was the Diplodocus that was genetically engineered.’ ‘Oh, right. Were giraffes...?’ ‘No, no. Just the dinosaurs, son.’ And they wouldn’t care! They’d all be big animals, and it wouldn’t be that special.” Although Monsters succeeds in portraying life
with alien inhabitants as commonplace, the movie is anything but ordinary in its tone. Edwards con- tinually amps up the terror, only giving us glimpses
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