‘In The Lost Lands’ Director Paul W.S. Anderson On Crafting His Post-Apocalyptic Western
Filmmaker Paul W.S. Anderson is known for crafting weird and wild stories in the genre world. From Event Horizon to his take on Resident Evil, Anderson loves building worlds and constructing tales of epic proportions. And that’s on full display in his latest film, In The Lost Lands, a Western epic based on a short story by George R.R. Martin.
In the film, “A queen sends the powerful and feared sorceress Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) to the ghostly wilderness of the Lost Lands in search of a magical power, where the sorceress and her guide, the drifter Boyce (Dave Bautista), must outwit and outfight man and demon.“
We sat down with Anderson to talk about getting George R.R. Martin’s approval, Milla Jovovich’s love of fantasy films, and spending three years building his lost lands.
Dread Central: I’m curious how you came across the short story by George R. R. Martin and how that whole process came to be
Paul W.S. Anderson: Milla, Milla, Milla. It’s all about Milla.
She’s the avid consumer of fantasy literature in our house. I’ve read Lord of the Rings, I’ve read The Hobbit several times. I just haven’t read it as many times as she has. She reads so much. She’s always been an avid reader and not just of fantasy—of everything. She reads a phenomenal amount, but she loves fantasy, and she loves George’s work and has for a long time. There’s a reason why Kit Harrington was in one of my movies. She’s like, “Great, cast him, and then we can ask him about Game of Thrones.” [Laughs]
So she was approached by Constantin Werner, our producing partner and also the writer of the script for In The Lost Lands. He had optioned three short stories by George R.R. Martin that were all about twisted love. One of them was In the Lost Lands, and Milla said, “This is great. We need to get involved in this. She hit me over the back of the head with the short story and said, “Get going.” So that was my incept”ion point. That was how I started working on it.
Milla was very involved in the development of the film. She’s taking a full producing credit for the very first time on any of the movies we’ve done together. She really pushed the whole thing into life. I very much credit her with it. We spent a long time developing the screenplay because we had to build it out from the short story.
Her concern was always to keep the focus on the characters because that’s what George had created. It was so wonderful with these two great dark central characters who had secrets and who were lonely. They were characters that Milla truly loved. So we had to build out the movie, obviously put more action in it, have an antagonist, have more of a ticking clock with them being chased. But she wanted to keep the focus on Boyce and Alys because, for her, that was the heart of In The Lost Lands.
So Constantin and I would deliver a draft of the screenplay and she’d hit us over the back of the heads with it and go, “It’s great action, but where did the characters go?” Back to George’s story, we have to please George. When we finally got the script good enough for Milla, we would then show it to George, and he would give us his comments. So that’s why it was quite a long development process, but one that I was really pleased with because I think the story is amazing.
And I have to say, although George read the script, I was still so stressed when I flew to Santa Fe to show him the movie in his theater.
DC: Casually hanging out with George R.R. Martin in his theater.
PWSA: It was the most stressed I’ve ever been in a movie theater. And I’ve made a lot of movies. I’ve tested a lot of movies. But to show the movie to George, I suddenly thought I was going to have a heart attack or something. Normally I’d be totally relaxed, but I was really stressed because it was so important to please him.
At the end of the In The Lost Lands, he slowly turned around to me—he’s very dramatic, George, I love it—and he just leaves this dramatic pause where I have no idea what he’s going to say. And then he goes, “I loved it.” He loved the movie. He thought the adaptation was one of his favorites among anyone approaching an adaptation of his work. So we did our job, we made him happy. I always figured if we can make him happy, then we can make the fans happy.
DC: That’s got to feel so good. It did. No matter how many movies you’ve made, it’s still a terrifying prospect waiting for the approval of one specific person.
PWSA: I went from being the most stressed I’ve ever been in the theater to the happiest I’ve ever been in a theater.
DC: I’d love to hear about the world-building because I really love the Western post-apocalyptic Christo-fascism vibe you have going on all throughout In The Lost Lands.
PWSA: Well, it’s a well-worn genre, the Western post-apocalyptic, Christo-fascism genre. [Laughs] I felt that George had two things that struck me about the In The Lost Lands story. One is that he had written an adult fairytale with a great theme, “be careful what you wish for”. I love fairytales, but the original fairytales, the dark ones like Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid where she dies at the end, that’s what George wrote.
So I felt like I needed to build a world that reflected that because it was an adult fairytale, it needed this kind of fairytale look. At the same time, it was a work by George, who people are very familiar with. It’s got a lot of things that people like about his work: the dark characters, the twists, the creatures. Plus, this isn’t Westeros. I needed to kind of build a world that was new and fresh that expanded the George R.R. Martin universe, rather than just feeding off what already existed.
So I knew I couldn’t go to the woods in Ireland or the ice flows of Iceland to shoot because people have seen that. I needed to create the Lost Lands and make them fresh and exciting. That was our inception point for building out that world. It’s why I decided that we were going to shoot on a sound stage and build all of the worlds beforehand. I wanted something to look different, but I didn’t want to be shooting against the blue screen, not knowing what that world was. The problem with a lot of blue screen movies is that they shoot the actors, and then they develop the world afterward, so the actors in the world never really fit together properly.
So what we did was a year and a half before we started principal photography, we started talking about the world and creating the world. Then we built the entire world, all of the locations beforehand digitally. On set, we built the mid-ground and the foreground. So anything the actors interact with was really there, but the backgrounds, the landscapes, the world of the Lost Lands only existed in a computer.
But because we built them beforehand and we had this real-time compositing, the actors could see on screen exactly what the world looked like and what they looked like inside of that world. That was incredibly helpful to them because if you think about the scene where Milla and Dave were on the burning oil fields, for example, you can tell them you’re standing in front of a lake of oil, and there are these spouts of flame going 50 feet into the air. But words can only evoke so much. Whereas Milla and Dave could look at the imagery and go, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m looking at. Of course, now my expression and reaction will be different.”
DC: Wait, that’s amazing, though. I was always curious about that disconnect with using a blue screen and having to figure out what the whole world looks like. That’s amazing to hear that you reverse-engineered that.
PWSA: A lot of work that would traditionally be done in post-production, we did in pre-production. But the advantage was two-fold. One was for the actors; they could see the environments, and they could see themselves in the environment.
But it also helped the crew as well, because the camera operators knew how to frame each shot. Quite often, if it’s just a blue screen with some tracking markers on it, you have no idea where the spouts of flame are. How big is the cross in the church? How much do I have to tip up to see that? But also what it did was from a lighting point of view—I wanted the movie to have this very kind of painterly feel. So the director of photography could go, “You know what? I see the environment. The sun is 10 degrees off the horizon line. I’m going to put my light 10 degrees off the studio floor.” And then the two things merged together.
So it really puts the actors in the imagery rather than feeling a separation between them. And the imagery, obviously, it’s not a real world, it’s a stylized world. But they very much exist within that world because all the environments existed beforehand.
DC: That’s amazing.
PWSA: And that’s why I haven’t made a movie for three years because I’ve been doing this. I’ve been quite literally In The Lost Lands.
DC: Your cast is obviously incredible. But I really loved Arly Jover in this film, and I wanted to hear about casting her because she’s such a good villain.
PWSA: She’s amazing. I’ve known her for a long time, but she’s known Milla forever since they were kids, basically. Arly’s been in a whole bunch of really cool movies from Blade onwards. And originally in the screenplay, that Enforcer character was a man. But I was talking to Constantin Werner about it, and I’m like, “The leads of the movie are Milla and Dave. When they go head to head, it’s serious because it’s Dave, it’s Milla. They’re both such forceful presences. But who is going to be the guy that they are going to run away from? They’re going to spend the whole movie running away from some guy. Who am I going to get that’s more powerful than Milla and Dave?” And then I thought, well, maybe it shouldn’t be a guy.
It’ll be different if it was a woman they were running from. So in the script, we flipped it. It was great that she was Spanish because that gave her character a slight Spanish Inquisition vibe. Her performance evokes that, which I really liked. Plus, all the imagery was really meaningful for her. And she had the most beautiful long hair that Milla was outraged we cut off.
DC: Oh, she cut it all off?
PWSA: She shaved her head, yeah.
DC: But I love that look, though.
PWSA: It was funny with the hair because Milla was there. She knows Arly. Milla felt she was there to protect Arly. So we trim Arly’s hair, and I’m like, “I think we should go shorter.” Arly was always down to go shorter. She knew the shorter we went, the more striking it would be. Also, although she hasn’t done a huge amount of action movies, Arly used to be a dancer. So you can see she’s got that kind of elegance and grace. She really knows how to carry herself. I think she’s great, I’m glad you like her. I love her in the movie.
DC: I love the whole cast. But, something about her is very magnetic.
PWSA: Yeah, she’s amazing. And you are scared of her. She’s powerful. You feel if she catches up with Milla and Dave, she’s going to fuck them up.
DC: Before we wrap up, you make so many incredible genre films. What keeps bringing you back to the genre?
PWSA: I think it goes back to my childhood. I didn’t read as much as Milla, of course, but I read plenty and it was all this kind of genre. As a filmmaker, it’s the opportunity to have control over the world creation. You go do a contemporary thriller like a Jason Bourne movie or something, you’re on the city streets where cars look like cars and hotel rooms look like hotel rooms. I’ve never made a movie like that. Every movie I’ve made has either been in the far future, in the past, or in some kind of stylized version of the present day. I’ve never done a movie where people talk in hotel rooms and get into cars. I like that world creation. It harkens back to the early days of cinema when you were creating these amazing worlds.
In The Lost Lands is out now on VOD.
Categorized:Interviews
