Skylin3s, the third movie in the Skyline series, closes FrightFest Halloween Digital Edition on 25 October taking the franchise off Earth to another world. Lindsey Morgan returns from Beyond Skyline, and is joined by Rhona Mitra, James Cosmo, Jonathan Howard and Alexander Siddig for the action adventure, written and directed by Liam O’Donnell, who chatted with Paul Simpson in the week of release.

Thanks for a really enjoyable movie. I watched it over the weekend and I have to say my heart was in my mouth at the end. The final sequence in the loading bay worked because you’re invested in the characters. You’re still wondering if they are they going to make it!

That’s awesome to hear and that’s the sequence I’d say is the one I’m most proud of. It was so hard to do because it was in the back end of the schedule. So while making the movie I had this growing pit of dread – I’ve got four days and one second unit day to make this whole sequence work.

Each day of this movie was so challenging because we’re not working with the biggest budget and we have to make the most of everything, but then I would go home at night and think about this. You have to shoot in different corners in different sections to block it out schedule-wise so that people won’t be in the background of the other shots and that we can use them in different places. It was an incredibly challenging exercise and it was very satisfying to see it all come together.

Is there a reason you left it to the end of the schedule? Because it sounds like one of those things that you almost want to get the damn thing out of the way.

Yes, the reason was the schedules are never what you want them to be. (Laughs)

It’s like they say: no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Exactly, that’s exactly it. That armoury set was one of the last sets that was built. Whereas our tent village out on the back lot was a much easier first set to create so I think we shot a lot of that stuff first and a lot of the warehouse. Downtown London was early on in the schedule and the bigger more intricate sets like the spaceship were on the back half.

Obviously you set up some elements of this at the end of the second film with the time jump there. Did you know roughly what you had in mind for this movie at that point or was it just “This moves us out of that timeframe, we’re into a whole new set of problems… but that’s next week’s problem”?

A little bit. I’d say during Beyond Skyline’s main shoot there was this little inkling of an idea because we had such an international team of badass stunt guys on that movie from Iko [Uwais], Yayan [Ruhian] to Frank [Grillo]. We had a bunch of great suit actors from South Africa and America so the idea of an international team of badasses taking on the aliens was something I was sparking to at that time.

Then when we did the wraparound shoots with Lindsey, which was the last thing that we shot from Beyond, I thought this could be a whole other movie. I was just really inspired by how gifted she was and I loved the dynamic between her and her brother Trent. Those were the two ideas, and I think within three months of doing that last day’s shoot I had a treatment for what part three could be.

How much did the final film differ? Not in tiny detail but in terms of the main structure.

It’s pretty much exactly the structure from the pitch in May 2017; I was actually just looking at it again. Some of the bigger changes were the dynamics of the relationships and characters getting consolidated. I think at one point Leon’s character, played by Jonathan Howard, was two different characters. There was a character in the first act then a character on the ship and making that all one really helped create an arc between the two of them and tie the whole movie together.

Those are the sort of things that you would normally go through from pitch to shooting script but then there was stuff within the shooting script that I was changing along the way, much to my actors’ chagrin.

Beyond Skyline had such a long post process and I did so many pick-up shoots in that. There’s a flashback scene in Beyond Skyline and originally it was a mind meld. The alien and Frank mind meld and they explain everything but it was just too abstract and didn’t work. We ended up using some of the footage for some of the sequences where Trent comes to later. So we had to do a reshoot there to create a flashback.

Some of the lessons of that were, I would just know during Skylin3s when different scenes weren’t going to make it – “if that scene’s not going to be in the cut then we’re losing this little bit of the motion or exposition so let’s cover that a second time in this different scene”.

Luckily I had a great team of actors that were just game for that sort of constant improvisation and alt versions of the scene. That helped out because we didn’t do any pick ups for this one. Everything was just the main unit shoot because we were doing it as we went.

You say improvisation: did you actually give them revised pages for it, or were you saying “This is what she’s feeling, he’s feeling; just go for it and see what happens”?

It’s somewhere in between. I’ll give you an example: at the beginning of this movie there’s a scene where Jonathan takes Lindsey in a truck to the General’s bunker. There was a scripted scene outside where he leads her into the truck but we’d spent too much time in that environment. I knew that it was going to get cut. Being in the truck was supposed to be a second unit day where we would see them in the truck pull up, but once we got to this place I was like, ‘Hey guys, I wrote this on my iPhone on the way over, here’s a scene that I think could work’ and we just sat in the back of the truck and they improvised. They didn’t even have mics, so I held the mic and a bounce board in the back seat and recorded both of them, and our DP was in the front seat. It was a very bare bones simple scene but I knew that we needed to get that emotion from the other scene that wasn’t going to make it, into there.

Yes, you’ve got the motion of the characters moving and the emotional moment.

Exactly.

I think that’s one of the things that sometimes genre films can forget is that you can actually walk and talk at the same time.

(Laughs) Well, I was going to say we’re as guilty of that as any other, especially in the first movie just because of the budget. I agree it is one of those things that you have to constantly be watching out for, constantly trying to change the environments and move things forward. That’s something I’m very hypersensitive to.

These movies, because they’re low budget, if we’re going to build a set I have to use it multiple times but I’ve got to burn it down or change it, add alien arms to it, so the next time you see that set it’s not just the same set.

I think that applies even on a big budget film – you basically redress your sets as much as possible.

Exactly. I would say the same thing but it wears people out. ‘What do you mean we have to redo the set every day?’ and I’m going ‘Every single day we’re going to take every single element that we have and we’re going to create an entirely new pocket in this corner’. It is common sense.

I did look back to older Star Treks and movies like Aliens. That’s how they made them then; they didn’t have CG budgets, they didn’t have endless greenscreen. I did a lot of green screen in Beyond and I didn’t want to find myself in the same situation.

Most of our sets are what I like to call diorama sets where it’s got a back and a side and you can shoot most of it this way and if you want to go epic you’ll switch your coverage and you can have a big green screen expanse in the other direction. That helped control our VFX budgets and scope.

Sid [Alexander Siddig] did a lot of that for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

He did teach us how to do the rock! We actually had a bit of an extra beat when [the group for Earth] first come up to see Cobalt [the alien planet]. They were on the bridge; we had a whole asteroid sequence and he taught everybody. ‘Everybody just watch Sid, he knows what he’s doing!’

He was definitely an incredible resource to have on this movie. This master actor ripping through this dialogue and able to completely reset, change things and do whatever we asked of him, especially towards the end when I would let him go really unleashed. There’s some alt takes we have that are even crazier, I would just be… ‘Can you do it a little more delicious?’

In terms of the casting on it, obviously Lindsey was from the previous film, but how much were the people who hadn’t worked on it before aware of the previous movies?

That’s a great question. I know Jonathan who played Leon had been in a TV show with Frank Grillo although I don’t think they ever shared scenes with each other, so he was very aware of the franchise. I think all of them did their homework.

Then Rhona, she was like, ‘Whatever you want to do sweetheart, we’re here’. So for her, it’s not like she’s going to be examining the encyclopaedia of the Skyline universe. She can do this stuff in her sleep and she comes in ready to work and challenges you. You have to have your own homework done before you start tangling with her but she definitely was game for everything.

As we were going and as we got more comfortable she’d say, ’Do you have anything for me here?’ She really does enjoy a one-liner and I wasn’t quite sure if she wasn’t going to at the beginning! She started busting out these one liners and having more and more fun with it to the point where she’d say ‘Do you have anything for me?’ and I’d say ‘I actually do have a one-liner that I was too embarrassed to write into the script but I’ll whisper it into your ear.’ And she said ‘Oh, that’s a Roger Moore line, I can make that work. No problem honey.’ And bang.

So really it depended on the actor but they all were down to play and that’s all you can really ask for.

Comparing this with Beyond and the original, what was the biggest challenge for you creatively?

I guess it is just doing a complete genre departure. The first two are invasion apocalypse movies and this one is complete world building – like I said it takes off from Beyond but it is a lot from scratch. Things that you could pass off as weird details in the other two movies you have to nail down in this one and set everything up in that first act so you buy into this big space adventure.

That was a very new challenge for me and something I’d never really done – but what I love about these movies is there is that freedom to do something new each time out. So that was the big buy in, the big ask: can we take this thing that has been built for these “run from the alien” movies – run and gun, just barely survived, we just barely build way up to fighting back in the second one – to now. This is entire world building – an entire future Earth and creating this whole planet of Cobalt – then really exploring the weirdness of the aliens and some of their origins, and the way that all of this intertwines with Lindsey’s character. I’d say it was just taking a leap of faith that the audience was going to go along with this, another big genre departure.

With the best franchises in the genre, they do. Unless you’re going for something like Bond, where you’re basically following a template and everybody will scream if you go off the template.

(Laughs) Yes. I love the Bond movies but what I liked about these is the status quo has never been protected. The end of the first movie everybody gets their brains ripped out and put on ships and at the end of the second movie, [we confirm] that really happened. That was even a discussion at one point: could we somehow come up with a way to get people back into their bodies? I said absolutely not. I think what’s so fun about this is that it’s forcing people to deal with the fact that these human brains have now been put into alien bodies and you have to still recognise them as human. So if we were to shy away from that it would be, to me, a pulling of the punch so I never wanted to do that with these.

What’s the odds of the trip to the destination mentioned in the final lines of Skylin3s – i.e. a fourth film?

It’s really up to the audience each time. I didn’t think that there would be a sequel but then Beyond overperformed on digital and Blu-ray and DVD.

One of the arguments I had with the distributor was they put our tanker alien in front of a huge burning city on the DVD. I said that’s not really the movie, and they said, “Trust us, people like big aliens and huge burning cities.” And they were right – I guess that’s the main reason I’m here right now with the third film.

Because of how flexible the genre is, where we end up in Skylin3s with this cast and the tone we have created, I feel that it lends itself to a lot more adventures so hopefully we get to come back.

The world premiere of SKYLINES will close FrightFest Halloween Digital Edition 2020 on 25 October: https://bit.ly/3notjMI

Thanks to Witchfinder PR for their assistance in arranging this interview.

Click here for our interview with Alexander Siddig about the film