EXCLUSIVE: The Tomorrow War Director Chris McKay Chats Stunts, Alien Invasions, & More
Director Chris McKay makes his blockbuster debut with his upcoming film, The Tomorrow War, and we had the opportunity to chat with him about the transition from animation to live action.
On creating a complex alien invasion film: “What was really important about the scripts to me was the idea of what do you owe the future? What do you owe the world? How do you leave the world in a better place? Do you count your blessings that you have in front of you? All that kind of stuff was really important. That was the stuff that made me want to– I love genre movies, science fiction, action movies, and horror movies. That’s the stuff that the little kid in me that wanted to make movies, that’s the thing that I responded to, but also I’m caught somewhere between John Carpenter and John Cassavetes.
There’s always a little bit of the human story and the drama, I want any movie that I do – to have an original sci-fi movie that can have as a big epic scope of this and amazing performances with a beautiful cast, but also can have a little bit of heart and a little bit of something to think about, that was why I wanted to do this since it was real. The script in this cast and crew was a real gift.”
On moving from animation to a big-budget film: “There’s a lot of things you do in animation that help set the table for the stuff that we needed to do for The Tomorrow War. It starts with animatics. It starts with previews, starts with storyboards. We storyboarded in animatic almost everything that we did to prepare for that, but part of the style we wanted to do with the movie was to create situations where spontaneity could happen. I wanted it to feel a little loose sometimes, so the animatics and previews were there to set the table and give us a solid foundation, but there were times where I wanted it to feel like the movie was a little bit out of control, so there was a push and pull with some of that stuff at all times.
At the end of the day, have a solid foundation and know what you need to do and all this stuff that comes from good filmmaking practices, good animation building practices, but also be really open to what everyone’s going to provide because we had such a really beautiful, unique cast, people who brought a lot of their own stuff to the table, and it was important to me to have that texture in the movie.”
On creating the white spikes: “There’s a couple of key points in the script, there’s the claws and the fact that they were white and had spikes on them and things like that. That’s a lot of room to interpret, and a lot of room to kind of play. Obviously, there’s a couple of high watermarks as far as alien designs, it’s whether it’s the Xenomorphian alien, or whether it’s the Predator, but then there’s everything else. It’s trying not to get close to that, but also trying to find something that serves the purpose of the film and was memorable and on its face horrifying.
I wanted something that felt ancient. I wanted something that felt like it was hungry. I wanted the texture to really come through so that you would feel that that surface texture was really hard, that it had lots of chips and chunks and nicks and cuts, things like that because it had been around forever. I wanted you to feel the flakiness, I wanted the skin to feel like it would flake off, and that there were shoulders that almost felt like armor, so it could repel attacks and that sort of thing.
Those are the notes that we talked about with them. We had a bunch of great design teams working on stuff. It looked like it had a hunger, it looked evil. Then we based the female off that. That became the male and we based the female version off of that.”
The Tomorrow War will premiere on Amazon Prime Video on July 2.