Interview: The Brothers Strause on Skyline, War of Ages

Born out of their frustration with working on 20th Century Fox’s Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, the Brothers Strause grabbed a camera (well, it was the RED), their FX house – Hydraulx (who’s created some of the better CG FX around in Avatar, Iron Man 2, and Battle: Los Angeles), and their life savings to create one of the first indie blockbusters. Killer Film recently caught up with the directors for a talk about Skyline: the production, the VFX, and that ending! Check it out!

Jon: I know you expressed some dismay at AvP: Requiem‘s Blu-ray picture quality when it was released. How do you feel about Skyline‘s picture quality?

Greg Strause: Yeah, this time we made sure the process very different. The actual Blu-ray master was directly from the final theatrical release, which was a pipeline than the fiasco that was AvP: Requiem. We didn’t have control over [that release] and we were still pretty mad about what had happen. You wouldn’t think that was possible in the world of $40 million movies, so we were strict about it this time during the meetings. We wanted to preview the Blu-ray quality before it ended up in stores. We saw it back in December and were happy. It’s funny sometimes about this. Why would they have to re-color correct the image? I don’t know, I guess it’s good to learn from those mistakes and to make sure the movie looks as good as possible.

Jon: Knowing how and why Skyline came about, it was interesting and fun to hear your commentary on AvP: Requiem and hearing your frustration. But you two were once the front runners for AvP 3, and since Skyline is this new indie blockbuster, would you ever consider doing a studio film again?

Colin Strause: Not like last time and how that was set-up, but we’d like to take the Skyline model and upscale it up, there would be some attraction to that.

Greg Strause: Yeah, exactly. We got some passion projects we have been writing with Josh and Liam and we’re starting to hype up War of Ages, and we’re finishing the script on it. It’s this big sword-and-sandal epic. We shot a trailer like we did with Skyline, so we’re doing all of the things that worked for us on Skyline, and are focusing on some of the bumps, so everything will be smoother this time. That means setting up the movie at a studio, then so be it.

Colin Strause: The hired gun approach isn’t a great place to be in.

Jon: Did you know there is an online petition to get you guys to do AvP 3?

Colin Strause: I didn’t know about that. Really?

[both laugh]

Greg Strause: We got to take a look at that! Do [Skyline's screenwriters] Liam [O'Donnell] and Josh [Cordes] know about this?

Jon: Probably not, since it has to be a few years ago and I talked to them this past November [here].

Greg Strause: That’s funny. I have to look into that. [laughs]

Jon: You shot Skyline in 42 days, but did that ever feel daunting since at that time, you didn’t have foreign sales yet, no studio help, and pouring your life saving into it, while working on other projects for Hydraulx?

Colin Strause: It didn’t feel like that, because it generated so much attention, that the filming expense was well covered. Everything fell into place. We were only in our second week of shooting when we sold it at Berlin Film Festival. A week after we finished shooting and we started to edit it, Relativity wanted it and took it.

Greg Strause: It was a nerve-racking process for the indie film maker, to when to set up distribution? Do you think too far ahead or wait until it’s done and ask for more? It’s hard, man, what if they watch it and don’t like it after buying it? Look at Slumdog Millionaire. It was bought and let go!

Colin Strause: Warner Brothers did that.

Greg Strause: Who the hell wants to see a movie about some kid in India? Pass. [laughs] You never know, man, it’s so risky and there’s no magic formula to tell them the film is going to work. People say there’s one, but trust me, they don’t exist. So that’s the kind of shit that’s hard to say, it’s this unknown factor. Luckily, it worked out for Skyline.

Jon: Well, you must also had a dream team for neighbors as I loved how you shot this at your condo.

Greg Strause: Hm. [laughs] It was surprising. We thought our next door neighbors would be the ones being really offended, but they weren’t. They were the coolest about it, but the ones on the lower floors…I guess, some people have nothing else to do than complain. We were in and out in eight weeks, so nobody got to bent out of shape.

Jon: Josh and Liam told me that the film went from 600 visual FX to about 1000. What made you feel comfortable in expanding the VFX?

Greg Strause: Some movies expand to fill the schedule, so the ending got bigger, the rooftop sequence. The ending in the mother ship was a one-day shoot, just tiny in the script.

Colin Strause: Yeah, it wasn’t much. In terms of the descriptions and blocking for it, we were kicking around ideas, and what was originally going to be a few seconds to a minute, turned into six minutes. Tons of effects in there: the environments, the ships, the creatures. It was very involved from an effects standpoint. The action sequences got bigger, the aerial fights got bigger, we were just having so much fun with it.

Jon: I remember the days when CG wasn’t good for daytime scenes, but Skyline has a ton of daytime effects. Can you talk about the evolution of daytime CG?

Greg Strause: One of the big things that evolved was the rendering and lighting techniques, but also the processing power. Technology was there 10 years ago, but it was so expensive, there was no way you could use it. There would be no way you could get your job done. As computer got faster and faster, a lot of what we do still takes the same amount of time, we just get to turn on a lot of the bells and whistles to help, that we couldn’t 10 years ago.

A lot of the lighting and the blue bounce from the sky is new stuff, that we can use now. The dust getting sucked up into the air looks realistic now, and we can do it without thinking about what would it take to compute.

Jon: I liked the film by the way, but one of the more fun things to read on the Internet was about the ending. I’ve seen some radical notions going from “worst ever ending” to “we hated it“, then others like the Biblical references, it’s just a blast. Did you think that the ending was going to create that much Internet chatter?

Colin Strause: We always joked that the ending was a bit ballsy and risky, but I wasn’t thinking about the absolute pounding we would take from some of the reviews! [laughs] We got a lot better response from industry people, who thought and admired the ending since it was risky. The general public was like “give me my $8 back.” They were like, how come we didn’t win? Where’s Will Smith? [laughs] On the other hand, if we did the normal, studio cliched ending, people would have been saying we did the normal, studio cliched ending. You know what I mean?

Greg Strause: It was like we wanted to say “f*ck you” to those endings. We wanted to take it to a new place to set up the next film. The movie was about losing. Since it was an indie, we sort of made it like a prequel. Normally, you would have the money to shoot differently, but we didn’t. We couldn’t shoot the huge movie first. Maybe it was marketing, because when you see the trailers the audience is expecting it to be like a $100 million movie. But it doesn’t behave like a $100 million movie, it’s this rinky, dinky indie thing.

It through people for a loop. All these were an experiment since we didn’t know this thing was going to get released. I like the movie, but we knew we were going to take a hit on something. It was an experiment that made $70 million worldwide now. We worked three years on War of Ages, where as Skyline was written like barely in a month.

Jon: It’s interesting, because something like Spielberg’s War of the Worlds had this cliched, been-there-done-that second half and ending…

Greg Strause: One thing is, and I don’t want this to sound like we’re knocking our actors because we really liked them, but some certain movies who have these cliched endings, get a pass because of a name actor. They’ll buy it. You get judged differently when your an indie. A normal movie could be shitty but based on the actor, it gets smoothed over. We seen this in the reviews, too. This is the reality we had to deal with it.

Jon: I had to deal with it too, since I liked the movie and didn’t hate it as others did. Audience’s expectations are a damned thing. If these expectations aren’t fulfilled, they hate it. It’s head-scratching.

Colin Strause: Some of it is the marketing, too. If it was sold as a million dollar indie with us losing, instead of Will Smith-like action film, it would have set up the expectations differently. But a lot of the marketing, you hear people yelling “we gotta fight back!” There’s no fighting back in the film!

Greg Strause: It’s a Catch-22. “Hey, guys, come watch us lose!” It doesn’t get the public there. It did 70 times its shooting budget, so…

Jon: Is there any reason why the short trailer you guys made to sell the film isn’t on the blu-ray or DVD?

Greg Strause: [deep sigh] It was music rights, I think.

Colin Strause: Yeah, we would have to go out and buy all of these music rights. That was the main thing, but we looked into it. It was going to cost us like 200 grand. Shit, that was fifth of the shooting budget just for this thing to put on the DVD [laughs].

Greg Strause: There was some famous songs that we used on that trailer. We spent a lot of time to make the trailer good, but to license those? It would’ve been significant money. It’s a learning process, but with War of Ages trailer, we’re making sure this teaser trailer can be shown on the Internet without rights issues.

Skyline is out now on Blu-ray and DVD from Universal Home Entertainment.