Deeper Impact
GREENLAND I Teasers heads on set for Gerard Butler’s end-of-the-world road trip.
It’s August 2019 and Teasers is dripping on Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin. The entire crew has piled onto a bus somewhere in the Atlanta suburbs as a flash flood washes away any plans for a night shoot. The scene that was supposed to be shot was, ironically, a “calm before the storm” moment – remembering a happier time before meteorites started pelting the Earth, triggering one family’s frantic cross-country dash to secure their spot inside a government bunker.
“It’s your typical grounded family drama comet disaster road movie!” laughs a very damp Butler. “When I did 300 I said I’m never doing another sword-and-sandals movie again… and I thought I was moving out of this type of movie as well. But this really does feel different. It’s about this one little family unit trying to survive in the middle of humanity breaking down, and it’s a very emotional ride.”
Joking about Butler’s bad driving, his love of unrehearsed takes and that time when Butler stuck his arm through a burning car window just for the fun of it (“Oh yeah, I forgot about that!
I set myself on fire!”), Baccarin was looking forward to shooting one of the film’s calmer scenes before the torrential rain put everything on hold. “In every scene the stakes are just so high,” she laughs. “I don’t even look at the call sheet any more. We’re either running or we’re screaming!”
“It’s definitely intense,” says Butler. “But tragedy can bring out the very best and the very worst in people. It’s a crazy idea, but what if something like this were to actually happen?”
Unbelievably, it did. Fast-forward a year and director Ric Roman Waugh is having to finish all the post-production via Zoom – watching as the news starts playing out scenes of panic and violence that eerily echo his own movie. “It’s been a very surreal experience,” he says, speaking from his home in Austin. “This isn’t a movie about a pandemic, but it is about how people react in a situation like this.”
For Waugh (fresh from working with Butler on Angel Has Fallen), the idea for Greenland was to make a genre movie from the inside out – naming Children Of Men and A Quiet Place as key references. “It’s this big kick-ass summer action ride, but at its core it’s a very human story that I honestly think will bring people to tears.
“We’re all dealing with so much right now, but at the end of the day, we all need to realise that it’s our humanity that’s going to make us survive for longer than the cockroaches. That’s what Greenland has always been about… I just didn’t expect to have to finish it from a couch on my laptop!” PB
ETA | 21 AUGUST / GREENLAND IS CURRENTLY SCHEDULED FOR CINEMAS NEXT MONTH.