Directing and Writing Techniques for Sci-Fi Creature and World Creation
StudentFilmmakers Magazine caught up with director Vincenzo Natali, whose film Splice, debuted with critical and audience acclaim at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, picked up a nominations for Best Film and Best Special Effects at the 42nd Sitges Film Festival and won Best Special Effects.
The film stars: Academy Award® winner Adrien Brody (The Pianist, Hollywoodland, King Kong) and Sarah Polley (Dawn of the Dead, The Secret Life of Words), who is also an Oscar® nominee for Best Screenplay for Away From Her. Vincenzo Natali’s grotesquely brilliant creaturefeature Splice hit theaters on June 4th, 2010.
You storyboarded for Ginger Snaps, Johnny Mnemonic, the TV series, Beetlejuice, and many other films and shows. When you worked as a storyboard artist, did you begin your career initially wanting to be a storyboard artist first?
Vincenzo Natali: I really started as somebody who wanted to be a film director. And then when I left my first film school I went to, it was either becoming a storyboard artist or becoming a waiter. [Working as a storyboard artist] was a wonderful educational process because I got to work with a lot of different directors. And it was a very great insight in seeing how they would block a scene and how they would put together a shot list. I eventually ended up at an animation studio in Toronto called Nelvana, and I worked for about five years doing storyboards for Saturday morning cartoons.
As a board artist on animation, it’s a great comprehensive kind of role because you’re literally drawing not only the angles, but you’re blocking the action, and you’re editing the film in the essence of paper because it’s animation – so you’re coverage is animation, you draw the material as opposed to being shot. But I did that under the offices of the director. So, I would get a script, essentially go away for three weeks, and then, come back with 15 minutes of film time worth of storyboard. And then the director would make revisions to that.
So it was a wonderful process because we were given a lot of creative freedoms and in the end it was done under the offices of somebody who was very experienced. That was almost like another kind of film school for me.
When did you first begin to explore filmmaking?
Vincenzo Natali: I really come from that generation that grew up with Super 8 film cameras. It started there. I have very dear friends that still work with me who I made those films with when I was in my late childhood, early teens. And very little has changed actually. (Laughs)
Basically, the process is the same as it was when I was 12 years old. And probably my subject matter is more or less the same, I don’t think I’ve
matured that much. I always co-write. I’m never in there alone. It’s a tough, lonely business, writing.
Did you do storyboards for Splice?
Vincenzo Natali: Oh yeah, I always storyboard my own films. That’s part of the process for me actually, just to get inside the film is to start drawing it. Actually, the most exciting part of the process is, I have to hold back. I don’t start drawing it until I feel I like I’ve got the final draft of the script done. It’s like saving the best for last. It’s like the cherry on top of a cake.
I’ve learned over the years to do the boards in a way where I’m prepared to throw them away. They’re very much a step in the process rather than an end to the process. They’re really there to help me develop a visual formula for the film and help explain to people I’m working with what I want to shoot. But when I actually get on the set, I’m always ready to throw them away. Because when you enter from the kind of virtual world of
storyboards to the real world, you realize it’s a very different thing. (Laughs) I’ve been in situations in the past where in the pursuit of shooting my storyboards, I actually did a worse job as a director than I would have had I been more available to what was right in front of my face.
But having said that I think I’m a great believer in prep. I think a lot of preparation allows you to be more improvisational when you’re shooting.
What is your process for writing screenplays?
Vincenzo Natali: It’s a slow process. (Laughs) Years and years. So I don’t recommend it, if anyone can find a quicker route… I’m very concept driven. So, somebody could start with a character. My tendency is generally to start with an idea, and then, the characters kind of divulge from there.
What was your process like for writing Splice?
Vincenzo Natali: When I came up with Splice, I was inspired by a real life scientific experiment where scientists took a lab mouse and they essentially added what looks like a human ear to its back. Very strange image. I think what they were doing was developing a kind of cartilage that could be grafted into human beings. It was such a bizarre and powerful image, almost like something from a Salvador Dali painting, that I just knew there was a movie in that.
So it started with the mouse, and I came up with the notion of essentially telling a story where the scientists become more monstrous than the monster they create. It began as a short film, and I wrote it with somebody who was at the Canadian Film Centre – which is where I went to school – Antoinette Terry. After writing the short, we really felt that it should become a feature, too.
When we began writing the feature, I think it was 1997. (Laughs) And here we are, and the film is coming out. So it was a very slow process – in which, actually, I brought another writer in, kind of in the latter stages, a gentleman named Doug Taylor. But it’s always an interesting concept to me because I find that I usually end up ending the writing process where I started.
I’ll start with the script, and it’s never quite what I want it to be. And then, I go through a very long, kind of searching process where I try all kinds of avenues, and I always find that in the end, I sort of end up where I started, except somehow in that exploratory process, I found or re-found solutions to some initial problems we had. But, it never happens quickly.
The initial writing of each draft happens very quickly, but the process of getting from the first draft to the one we actually shoot inevitably takes years.
How did your collaboration with Antoinette Terry begin?
Vincenzo Natali: I wanted to write with Antoinette because the story was going to be about a man and a woman, and I wanted her perspective, and especially because in a way, Splice is kind of a bizarre love triangle. I felt that having a feminine point of view is important to telling stories in a fully rounded way. And I knew Antoinette was very good with characters. And even though this was going to be a creature film, it was also going to be a relationship story.
What was your mission for Splice and why did you make the film?
Vincenzo Natali: I really wanted to make a creature film where the characters fall in love with the creature. I really wanted to make a movie where the relationship between the creature and creators was at the core of the story, and where that really pushed the boundaries of that relationship as far as they could possibly go. So it’s a very taboo, strange kind of landscape that we explore. And frankly, I just haven’t seen that. I think it’s been done in an exploitive way, but not in a devotional way. That was really our mandate. That was our prime directive with this film.
And that’s what made it hard to finance. I definitely found that from the point of view from the people that put up the money, when it comes to genre, they don’t like to step outside the genre. They want to play it safe. They’re actually pretty conservative. I just wanted to do something really different with this film. I wanted to go into a place that was on a new terrain.
How did you cast Splice’s main characters Elsa and Clive, played by Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody?
Vincenzo Natali: First of all, once you realize you have to cast who will be believable as young geneticists, you realize that you’re working with a very limited group. There just aren’t a lot of people that essentially pull that off.
Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody were at the top of my list, and by some miracle I got them. They were by far the most rewarding and easiest elements of the filmmaking process. To me that’s the greatest special effect to watch actors like that. And it adds so much to the believability to a film like this. We’re trying to sell some ideas, notions that are in the realm of science fiction. And also in making visual effects believable I think a performer’s reaction to the effects is almost as important to the effects itself.
Could you describe how you worked with the actors? Did you do rehearsals with Sarah and Adrien before shooting?
Vincenzo Natali: I did limited rehearsals with them. I spent time with them in real labs. My main goal was just to make them understand who the characters are and to understand a little bit about how the real technology worked and to feel comfortable with it.And then I felt in terms of specifics of the scenes, they’re very simple, actually, the movie’s very simple, [the scenes are] very intimate. As much as possible I tried to let the actors lead the action. In the past, my films have been much more formal in the concerns for that, and I guess a little more specific in terms of how I wanted it to be blocked.
This time I felt that the strength of the movie was believing that these are real people, and so I just felt that the actors should follow their instincts. So we did a little bit of rehearsal, but I tried not to over-rehearse. And they just did a lot of research and preparation. And that was really it. I’m definitely a believer that casting is 80% of the process. If you have the right people, then most of your work is done for you. And I definitely got the right people.
At any point did you have Sarah or Adrien in mind during stages of writing the script?
Vincenzo Natali: No, I didn’t have anyone specific in mind when I wrote the script. It’s interesting because it took so long to write the script, it was such an extended period of time, nearly a decade, that different actors came to mind at different times. I was very keen with the characters Clive and Elsa to write characters who while they were scientists you would still relate to as regular people because you have scientists who are actually like normal people. The tendency especially in science fiction films is to make scientists kind of robotic. I know scientists that are quite the opposite.
In fact, they’re really a lot more like artists. In fact, my whole approach to writing those characters was to treat them like that. They’re very passionate. They are on the vanguard of what they do. So they’re really rebellions and courageous. I think that my approach in writing geneticists was like how I would approach writing painters or musicians or anything like that. And in some respects it’s how I treated the casting too, so I wanted to get attractive, young but highly intelligent people to play those parts.
You worked with the cinematographer Derek Rogers for Cypher and Cube, which are also scifi thriller films, and then worked with a different cinematographer for Splice. Could you tell us how you came to work with Tetsuo Nagata for Splice?
Vincenzo Natali: Oh, absolutely. And I should point out that I love Derek, I’m sure I’ll work with him again. So this was a France-Canadian film production, and it required that certain members of our crew be from France.
And so on Splice I worked with Tetsuo Nagata. He’s Japanese, but he lives in France, he works in Paris. And I had done a short film as part of an omnibus movie called Paris, Je T’aime, and Tetsuo, who shot that, did a fantastic job, is one of France’s most highly regarded cinematographers. He won two César Awards, they’re an equivalent of an Academy Award. He’s one of the more poetic cinematographers out there. And I felt with [Splice] even though it was a horror movie, it had to have an elegance to it and a kind of poetry and beauty to it. And he definitely gave me that.
How long did it take to shoot and edit Splice?
Vincenzo Natali: I think we had 42 days of production, which wasn’t a tremendous amount for a lot of visual effects. And the post-production is a little weird because for a movie like this we cut for a certain period of time and then we put editorial on hiatus while the visual effects were being finished. And then after we had that break when we had most of the effects work done we started editorial up again and we inserted a lot of that material. And that’s actually a great way to work. I’ve had that scenario on all of my movies because they’ve all had a lot of effects work in them. What it allows me to do is just gain some perspective on what I’ve cut, which is always the hardest to do. And usually in the sensation of the ending especially in a smaller film or even a large film it happens really fast. The editing process is a lot faster now than it used to be, say 20 or 30 years ago before they had Avid. And actually, I think that hurts movies a lot because you need time – it’s like writing a book. You don’t write the thing in one draft, but you have to write it, put it in the drawer, take a break from it, and then, revisit it with fresh eyes.
So that’s what it allowed me to do. The entire post production process was about 14 months. It was quite long.
