CAPTIVE STATE
CAPTIVE STATE I How do you get a high-concept alien occupation film made in the era of superheroes? Director Rupert Wyatt reveals all…
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes helmer Rupert Wyatt on his alien invasion film.
Science fiction may have taken over the movie world, but with sequels, prequels, adaptations, reboots and preboots (they’re a thing) being the big money spinners, original sci-fi movies are an increasingly rare proposition. Rupert Wyatt is no stranger to franchise filmmaking – he helmed 2011’s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes – so the “privilege” and chance to build a world with his new film, Captive State, was not lost on the Brit director.
“The fact they bet on me – I’m just very lucky, I guess,” acknowledges Wyatt, talking to Teasers over the phone from his home in Hudson, New York. “Not just in terms of being able to get something made of my own in this genre. But looking to subvert the genre and do something a little bit different.”
Rather than tell a well-worn story about first contact (though “we see an aspect of that in the prologue”, according to Wyatt), Captive State is set a decade after the invasion and colonisation of Earth by a carbonbased species, here to strip mine the planet’s fossil fuels. The director and his wife Erica Beeney (The Battle of Shaker Heights) wrote the film on spec, and shopping the fully realised script around any production company that would take their call was key to getting it made.
“That’s the best way to get a film like this off the ground, primarily because it’s easier for them to say no than yes,” Wyatt explains. “When you have an existing script and a filmmaking team that wants to do it, and we’re all able to stand behind a particular budget number; that galvanises people to back it, because it puts the responsibility of the success of the film on our shoulders, not theirs.”
It was Participant, Amblin and Focus – “Companies within the studio world that allow films such as ours and the Arrivals to get made” – who backed Wyatt’s vision to the tune of $25 million; a healthy budget for an ‘independent’ feature, but peanuts for a sci-fi with Captive State’s scope. If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, Wyatt and Beeney adopted an unconventional “hypernarrative” approach to the film, which meant that rather than one protagonist, there are half a dozen (including Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders, plus John Goodman, Vera Farmiga and KiKi Layne) on both sides of the divide – resistance and collaborators.
“In the blue-collar working-class communities where people have the least to lose, that’s where the agitators come,” explains Wyatt of the film’s dissident group, Phoenix. “We see the faces of those fighting back, the people on the street that have everyday lives and normal jobs, but ultimately are, in many cases, the outsiders of society; the underclass, the dispossessed, the ostracised.”
The film will also give a voice to the humans who collaborate with the invading force, without necessarily judging them. “The ones with money, with jobs – invariably, they tow the line, but it’s not as black and white as ‘I’m in it for myself’. It’s more about the weight of responsibility and retaining law and order,” says Wyatt, who draws parallels to the occupation of Paris in the Second World War. “The police force, for example, is a collaborator force in our story. Does that mean every policeman is working with great relish for an alien occupier? Most likely not. That’s interesting, character-wise.”
It may be a world away from talking apes and prison breaks, but Wyatt identifies a clear parallel between Captive State and his previous work. “I love characters that rage against the machine,” Wyatt attests. “I love the emotion of breaking free of an institution, whether it be the first film I made, The Escapist, or Planet Of The Apes – there’s always that idea of the Spartacus story.” Army Of Shadows, The Battle Of Algiers and Z were Wyatt’s highbrow inspirations, the filmmaker adopting a similar “neorealist approach, but [set in] the future, so with that the occupier would become a whole other species.”
There’s a good reason that the species has gone unchallenged by the combined might of Earth’s military forces for a decade – they would wreck us. Teasers has glimpsed the film’s opening moments, and the memorably grisly fate that befalls anyone who defies the strict cordon around Chicago. But while the aliens play a major part in the story, they will literally be on the periphery for much of the runtime.
“When the coalition arrived in Baghdad in 2004, did they move into apartments and integrate? No. They built green zones, and sequestered themselves behind the walls in order to administer governance to a city they were not belonging to,” Wyatt muses. “So I thought, ‘Maybe [the aliens] have taken over part of the city, and created this green zone – which we’re calling the close zone – and separated themselves from the human population. So we very rarely see the actual alien occupiers.”
Occupation, Iraq, green zones… the potential for a political reading of Captive State is not lost on Wyatt. But despite early trailers pushing connections to the Trump White House, Wyatt claims, “It was never intended to be a polemic on the current administration in America.” But he does concede that the film draws on global political shifts.
“There’s a degree of increasing authoritarianism in this country, and across the world. So there’s a relevance,” Wyatt says. “But it’s certainly not looking at the notion of what it means to be a Republican with the idea of them being collaborators, and good old liberals being the resistance fighters. That would be a little bit too partisan – and I’m certainly not that person.” JF
ETA | 29 MARCH / CAPTIVE STATE OPENS LATER THIS MONTH.
‘I LOVE CHARACTERS THAT RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, THAT BREAK FREE’ RUPERT WYATT