For the fourth feature in our War of the Worlds coverage we speak to Director and Executive Producer Craig Viveiros.

Craig Viveiros (right, with writer Peter Harness) is used to dealing with the more terrestrial terrors of Agatha’s Christie’s And Then There Were None and the murders of Rillington Place, but he’s buzzing from the excitement of making some classic sci-fi. Nick Joy joined him on a windswept beach in near Liverpool.

Today is an epic battle between man and machine. We have the naval fleet taking on the tripods on the beach. It’s the Thunder Child sequence from the book and we have a mass exodus of refugees trying to flee the advancing tripods. As you can see it’s a beautiful location for a vast, epic Dunkirk-esque evacuation. We will have a flotilla of ships coming to help the occupants.

That sounds fantastic. Just how important it to have worked this all out before-hand in pre-vis and storyboards?

War of the Worlds is a story I’ve wanted to tell for a very long time and when I started talking to Damien Timmer, the executive producer and CEO of Mammoth Screen, we both had a keen excitement. For both of us it was an early childhood experience of science fiction literature and have a great passion for it. For me, I came up in the camera department, so I’m very interested in the technical building of the scene as well as the emotional building blocks. For me, I enjoy the preparation as much as shooting it.

It’s a very different project to your previous work

My last project, Rillington Place, was with Samantha Morton and Tim Roth and was more of a boiler room, slow-burn character led drama. Ninety percent of the project was spent inside a set of a small house. This is very expansive, it’s got scale and you end up shooting sequences in a very bitty way, so it’s very important that you know exactly what type of emotion you need to get from the characters. You also need to know what are the linking facets that are going to tie the scene together, whether it’s a special effect here or a visual effect there, and how you’re going to use the various tools at your disposal to build the scene. For me it’s one big toy set!

How faithful is this to the Wells original?

We’re being faithful to the era, though we’re setting it a tiny bit further into the future by about six years. That’s just to bring around the simmering geo-political tensions that were around at the time. We were on the verge of the Russian Revolution and the First World War, and we were moving into the Edwardian era where the shackles of the Victorian rigidity were beginning to be set free. The suffrage movement was also talking hold and for Amy our lead character – which is another one of the main differences – her potency, power and independence are something that had to fit with the times. It was Peter [Harness – screenwriter]’s decision to move it ever so slightly forward. We can still live within the world of War of the Worlds as H G Wells had imagined it but by slightly shifting it we can mirror a geopolitical landscape that in some way has connotations of where we are today. This instability of how the world is going to unfold… we’re obviously on the brink of a nuclear war, so this is perfect material!

Was it essential for the story to be set in England again?

Yes, 100%. Wells’ initial themes were to do with colonisation and empire, and what he’s trying to say is an allegory for invading nations and taking other people’s lands. You’re not always welcome there. You won’t always fit in there. The Martians came and invaded and had these ideals of harnessing the power of humanity by invading this Earth, but then they ended up dying because their makeup wasn’t suited to fit in with the atmosphere. What he was saying is that we might have all these grand ambitions to conquer the world but we’ll never be able to be comfortable in all these territories because they’re not our own.

People might argue that they’ve seen War of the Worlds already, so what can you do to convince them that this different?

To be honest, I’m hoping that we don’t have to sell it. It is the quintessential alien invasion story. It was the first, and for me it’s such an engrossing, captivating story, and for it to be told in as close to its truest form as has ever been done, I’m hoping will be enough to attract an audience. And obviously H G Wells is such a prolific writer and author – his theories have been so prescient and he has such a huge following. The story itself had such a huge following; tell me someone who doesn’t know War of the Worlds. I’m sure everyone will tune in to see how we managed to conceive it.

Have you got enough time and enough money?

[Laughs] No! We really really haven’t. Going back to the question about preparation and planning it’s really key that we are strict with the storyboards, and everything I’ve planned is done to a tee, because there is no latitude. We can’t come back and shoot this scene over two weeks, we have to do it in three days. Today we’re battling the rain, and yesterday we were battling the wind, and I’ve always wanted to give it as much scale and ambition. Coming to a location like this where you’re so exposed is part of the downfall, but the material we’re getting is great. It’ll look amazing and people will be amazed when they watch it, I’m certain of that. I’m hoping that it will feel like a big budget blockbuster… at a fraction of the cost.

What are the technical specs of the filming?

We’re filming in UHD, shooting on the Alexa, but we’re using K35s which are a set of Canon Primes from the 70s. I used them on the last three jobs that I’ve done and they just have this magical quality. When you’re using a digital format, the last thing you want to do is put a Master Prime or Ultra Prime (lens) – a really sharp piece of glass – in front of it. It just feels too real: hyper real. So to give it that filmic look, my cinematographer [James Friend] and I use K35s and that helps to give us a lower contrast. The lens has more abnormalities on the edges which gives you a bit of a fall-off; I’m quite fond of those imperfections.

What can you tell us about the alien designs?

I worked with an artist called Dan Walker who did all the concepts for Prometheus, and The Martian [He also designed concepts for Alien: Covenant, Blade Runner 2049 and Justice League]. We did that in August [2017] and he took my initial sketches and turned them into something people could get. My initial concept was based on trying to create a Martian organism that was far more organic, as opposed to being something that is steampunky mechanised. So we went down the route of looking at natural forms in the world and how geometric shapes can form symmetry. Things that can look unnatural but are natural. There’s an interesting design to the look and feel of the tripods and the Martians.

I was very keen, because we are setting it in the Edwardian era, to make sure the Martian technology is not something that felt present in that period of time, but something that feels scary and relevant now. Looking at a steampunk Tonka Toy version of a tripod may have been scary in the Victorian times when the industrial revolution was around the corner, but now it would look a little bit silly.

How much of the aliens are CGI versus practical?

Quite a lot. We have some elements of the Martian that are prosthetic and practical and we have some practical elements of the tripod leg, but this thing is huge. It’s like 130 metres tall, bigger than Big Ben, so we couldn’t get one of those made!

How is the shoot going overall?

I’m squeezing every single penny out of this. We have such an amazing crew – I couldn’t ask for anything more from the team that I have. We are grossly understaffed, trust me. But everybody believes in the project and they see the material we’re getting – they all have a part, they’re all vested in this. I couldn’t ask for anything more. It’s challenging every day but everybody looks left and right and we’re all facing the same challenges. We’re all in the trenches together – let’s do this!

 

Follow Sci-Fi Bulletin’s War of the Worlds coverage, with a set location report, interviews with actors Rafe Spall and Rupert Graves, writer Peter Harness and Visual Effects Producer Angie Wills.