The sci-fi horror Dark Skies is imminent.
To mark the occasion, Sarah Dobbs spoke to director Scott Stewart about its making…
Both are equally terrifying.
Judging by the rest of the film, the second option is far more terrifying.
But nothing massively spoiler-y, hence weve left them in.
You wrote and directedDark Skies how did you come up with the idea for the movie?
It came from a few different places.
Am I a good parent?
Am I going to be able to pay the bills and pay the mortgage?
What if Jon Benet Ramseys parents had said that a ghost strangled her in the basement?
Everyone would immediately be like String them up!
Why even have a trial?
But what if those characters were telling the truth?
And thats where the kernel of the idea came from.
I feel like it enters the realm of metaphor a little more interestingly.
but the experiences dont leave them.
If they move house, the experiences go with them.
Or people confuse extra-terrestrial experiences with religious experiences.
I think the idea of abduction comes through more strongly with aliens than it does with supernatural stuff.
Would you call the movie sci-fi or horror?
Maybe Im in the minority but I always call it a psychological thriller, or a suburban thriller.
Its definitely a scary movie; people sit in theatres and theres plenty of screaming and jumping.
Its like bad things happen to good people, and chaos happens.
Teens drive drunk and crash and die.
Maybe its bankers, maybe its governments, maybe its Mother Nature, who knows?
The movie is trying to get at those ideas, those kind of collective fears.
The climactic scene takes place on Independence Day; why did you choose to set it then?
And then it kind of evolved that way.
And the suggestion is that the greys are fully aware of all that stuff.
The same way as everyone else!
He read the script and he really liked it and was game for doing it.
But the thing that JK and I talked about was that theres a fatigue to him.
We dont win against the force of nature.
You dont win against a force of nature, you just learn something about the world.
The whole project happened quite quickly, didnt it from pitching it to writing it to actually shooting it?
How long did it take?
Well, we shot the movie last August and here we are in theatres, so very fast!
I wrote the script the prior summer, and
[BEEP.
Line goes dead]
Hello?
I wait, in silence, wondering if the aliens got him.
He eventually comes back.]
Where were we oh, yeah, how long did the movie take to make?
Finally whats your favourite Jason Statham movie?
My favourite Jason Statham movie?
I likeThe Bank Job,is that the period one?
Scott Stewart, thank you very much!
Dark Skiesis out in UK cinemas on 5 April.