Skyline Movie Franchise Mega-Podcast With Series Director Liam O’Donnell

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on the show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started, all right today on the show. I am honored, excited, exalted to have on the great Liam O'Donnell. Liam is the director of Skyline two and three and upcoming Skyline four. You could say you're the franchise architect, so to speak, and I'm so excited to talk to you about these films. I did have to We're gonna talk a lot about your artistic, you know, efforts, But it occurred to me as I was thinking about doing this episode. You also are a rarity because you are one of the most small directors of movies.

1:17 I think it's like you and Zack Snyder, like who else what other film directors are just yoked like you. Well, thank you for having me on and immediately buttering me up that I can already tell this is going to go great. I was just asking yesterday, what's the Mount Rushmore of me? Ted directors? And if you take out all the actors that direct you know, because that they obviously stallone you know is going to be, you'd be all four of the of the Mount Rushmore's on his own, you know. Yeah, Zack Snyder has got to be up there. Michael Bay really surprisingly defined pectorals, underrated, underrated um. And he's also a pretty tall guy. He's like, he looks like a jacked great Dane when you see him in person, whereas I'm like, you know, five ten ish, so not quite the same. Um imposing, And then you know there's other people that I met, like like Joe Carnahan, who's who's a bigger guy.

2:23 Uh. You know, I don't think he would ever say he was shredded, but he's he's got a presence. You're definitely if you're at a bar fight, you'd love to have Joe Carnahan on your side. UM. So yeah, I don't know that there's there's definitely. Uh, it's more of a thing now for me. It's just part of the mental health and frustration of this business. I know, I can at least go into my garage and get something done each day. It's a good it's a good antidepressant. Yeah. Yes, um. So, look, I've said this to you privately, I happily will say publicly like, I think what you've done with the Skyline franchise, to my knowledge, is like, seriously like unprecedented in film history, Like I can't think of another franchise where you have a first film it's financially successful, but obviously it was not well received by critics, and I think it's fair to say was not received by a significant portion of the audience as well. And then you make a second film that is so well received also critically, which was fun looking at the critics, like a lot of the critics got it. And then a third film and now you're going into the fourth film like essentially like willed your way into a franchise, which wasn't necessarily obvious from the way the first film was received. So I was just really interested in that process of going from the first film to the second film, because you know, it's easy for us to say looking back at it, but it must have been a little scary going into it.

3:46 Yeah, I mean, I guess one of the ones that people compare us to are the Undisputed films, which is a high, very high praise to me. But the first Undisputed is directed by Walter Hill. And even though it's a really good movie and I think, um, so, it doesn't it's not quite the one to one that you're talking about there. And so the first movie when it was in post, you know, it had it had so much excitement. Obviously, you know, a studio doesn't spend you know, upwards of thirty million on PNA if they don't like the movie. So they did ask us to develop a sequel before it even came out, and so we had done some brainstorming on it, and it wasn't so far off from what ended up being Beyond Skyline. But we actually, i mean we got to a place where we actually met, um, you know, with an actor to play Mark, and we're going to set that character of the characters of Mark and Trent up in the first movie as going down into the subway. And so it was it was Josh Holloway. Um this was right right around the end of Lost, and he came over to Hydraulics and um, you know, had had a great meeting, but it was like, literally, I think that might have been either August or September in the movie coming out in November, and so it just became too hard to swing. And and I also would have probably been really strange to be like, why is Josh Holloway in this for a scene and then he's just never back in the movie? Uh in the beginning? Um so so. Yeah, there were thoughts then, and obviously once the movie came out, the

5:18 like you said, the reception was was fairly negative from critics and audiences, even though it made a lot of money in some territories, astonishing amount of amounts of money, like Russia in particular and in China and so um. You know. One theories of that is that like you know, I think to to more criticize myself than any other part of it. You know, maybe the writing just translates a little bit better to other languages. Um so. Um. The the it made enough, like you're saying, but there was not that like, oh, everyone wants more excitement. So you know, we would have a few meetings within the first year or so and it would come up and we still had the treatment that we had developed before the Skyline came out, so we still had this I want to say, probably you know, twelve to fifteen page treatment that I think read more like a forty to fifty million dollar movie and a forty or fifty million dollar movie compared to the first Skylines ten. So you know that that was a big, action packed kind of extravaganza and it and it ended up going in the instead of crashing into Ajia, crashed down in New York and we because that's where the characters came from in the first one. So it's much more traditional, I think in some ways. And so I think it was probably around twenty

6:48 thirteen. It felt like I started to feel like all the other projects that we were developing, and I've been spending a ton of time both as a writer and a producer on some other objects just didn't feel like they had momentum. And so I kind of parlayed a few things and said, you can have this project to the Brothers because there was one that Warner Brothers was interested in. They actually ended up optioning called Alien Arc, which was a pretty great concept that I had come up with with with Greg Strous at Hydraulics. It was just pretty much just you know, a big alien zoo ship gets shot down and on Earth and all the different creatures kind of spill out all over the Earth, and so you could kind of do Planet Earth style stuff with all these aliens all over Earth. But it was one of those concepts that could have like a million different pitches to it, and no one seemed happy with at any entry point. And so we chased our tails on that for years. And I knew that the studio wanted to bring in and you know, a writer with a bigger pedigree than me. So I kind of said, well, you guys can take that to the studio and go another writer. I'm going to go and I'll just write out the script for for Skyyline too. But if I do that, I'd really like to direct it.

8:05 And so they were like, yeah, sure, okay, like kind of I don't think they kind of thought it was going to happen. It was a nice deal to make at the time, I guess, And and so I wrote that in twenty thirteen. Other things kind of got distracted. Around twenty fourteen, it was like, Okay, we're actually going to you know, bring this to market and see what happens. And I think just because of the time passing and the fact that the first one continued to make money on DVD, and and at that point we had signed an early deal with Netflix, so it was on the early streaming like instead of going to the HBO window, it went right to Netflix, which is part of Relativities kind of groundbreaking deal with Netflix at the time. So it had been on Netflix for three years, so a lot of people got to see it because there wasn't a huge library back then. This would be like around two thousand thirteen, twenty eleven two, around twenty thirteen, and then it started playing on Sci Fi Channel and like Spike TV and stuff like that, and so that was a lot of fun. Like seeing it again with the ad breaks in, I felt like I was like, Oh, this is the Saturday morning sort of version of this movie that that was it was always meant to be. It's not some big blockbuster that was gonna, you know, pack audiences into the theater and send everybody out with a big smile on their face because it's it's weird and it's got a down or ending and stuff like that.

9:31 So I thought seeing it on I'm not sure if it was Spike or sci fi was one of the moments where I was like, Okay, I'm really gonna gonna start, you know, pushing on this. And so flash forward to around twenty fourteen. We end up did taking it to cann and it sold. It pre sold really well, and that was without any actors attached. Matthew Chouse kind of came on to produce at that point, and that's when we made the press I had. I've been targeting Grillout for like a year and a half. I already wanted him for that role at that point, and uh and so we you know, we reached out to him. I wrote like a very uh, probably overly earnest and which just was a lot of me on that movie, just being like, this is the this is my life, you know, got to take a big swing, wear my heart on my sleeve type of thing. And he responded to it and we zoomed and um and and it was it kind of kind of hit it off from there. I think the last thing you said is so critical and I really felt it watching Beyond Skyline, like like it's it is felt from minute one to the end of the movie that you are pushing all the chips in and you're like, I'm fucking putting everything I could possibly put it in this movie. Even from the title coming up, it's like beyond Skyline, it's like bright now like the rockiest thick kind of takes in and right away you're sort of put in a mood. I thought it was hilarious.

11:01 This is just obviously just a coincidence. But even the credits, there was a guy whose credit was John Duke Dukasney, and I was like, even the credits are fun. And then we get into and I want to also compliment you as a writer because within the first three minutes you meet Frank Grillo. He's in a pickup truck. He's drinking mouthwash, presumably to conceal the smell of liquor on his breath, before he goes into the police station. His son's in trouble, and he tells the cops block him up, like fuck him blocking him up, he needs someone a lesson, before reluctantly accepting the favor of them releasing him. And those that little sequence of events in the first couple of minutes was that's got me in emotionally on Frank and his son. And so once I'm inemotionally and it's sort of there's a great bit which feels very much like actual Frank. I love his documentary series on Netflix where he finds out his son broke this guy's jaw with one punch and you can see that he's sort of like impressed and like sort of proud and all these little things with him in the beginning. So you're in on him emotionally and with his great strength. Is it Frank always feels like a real guy, right, He feels like a real person. He doesn't really feel like an actor. And that's essential for this movie, which is absurd obviously, like people's brains are getting ripped out and shit. And so because you have that emotional grounding in with him, then you could kind of take the journey.

12:26 And literally I just started writing notes of just things happening and how quickly and insanely they happen. We have a brain and get ripped out. Well before before you jump into that, Yeah, I do just want to say that that was really a lot of it was all there, But that was the stuff that I talked with Frank and got the most notes from him in the movie. Even even I think the mouthwash might have been his idea, because I think we had the he was like, no, you know, from personal experiences, not that, oh yeah, mouthwash. And then you know, we had him sip alcohol. But it was better in the edit to take that out and just do the mouthwash and it's a little bit more clever. But then even within the edit, it was tricky because, um, you know, a lot of the times Frank is pretty dialed in into the choices that he wants to make. You know, he shows up with the script with all these notes and kind of pre engineering his performance into the scenes. But in these scenes, especially in the first act, he did give like we he tried a little bit different things, and there were takes where he was like really hard on Johnny who played Trentum, and they were so good that I used them on the first cut. But then I realized when I screened with people that it was like it was too much. You know, it was like it was a different movie. It was sort of like, um, you know his show. It was just like fucking wait,

13:58 what's going on? Like he's just he's like and so finding that you know, that balance of like how real and dramatic can it be? Upfront? So like you're saying, it hooks you in emotionally without its suddenly feeling like it is, you know, like a straight up drama that puts you in a different headspace. So yeah, that that is the most um I'd say, like frank part of the movie in a lot of ways. And and so then it becomes more me as it goes. What's Yeah, that's what's great about it is that it's like, all right, we're gonna give you some grounded stuff to kind of get you into it, and then it's just gonna go absolutely bananas. So I literally wrote down twenty one minutes in we get a brain ripped out. Three minutes after that, Jacob Vargas gets swallowed by like a giant alien foot, twenty six minutes in, We're in an alien ship. Thirty five minutes in Grillos becoming friends with one of the aliens, and we learned it as a machine with a human brain inside of it. Thirty seven minutes in Grillo delivers a baby inside the spaceship and now he's whole. It's a hard boiled on the spaceship exactly. It was hard not to write notes like every two minutes, and that speaks to again this idea that that's the thing that I want to stress. If anybody's listening this, by the way, it's not Seeing Beyond Skyland, like immediately go watch it because the thing is, it's so fun because it is just stuffed to the steam to the seams. There's like every two minutes you're like, what that and it's and you can't fifteen minutes in, just when you thought like

15:31 this couldn't get more fun. If you're a film and action nerd, eco waste shows up and then yeah, yeah shows up and I this is actually probably the best comment I can give you. So I'm watching it. I've seen the movie before. I'm watching its Prepare to Talk to You today, and my wife has taken a nap on the couch and she wakes up and she's like, hey, don't you have to take my daughter? My daughter to taekwondo. I'm like, fuck, I completely lost track of time. I that's so sucked into it. Again. I've seen it before. I know everything happens, but it's just it's like a ride, like once you get on it, there's no there's no pea break, there's nothing to there's no slowdown. No, and well, thank you. And it's funny because I remember Sean Albertson, who you know, is like Stallone's editor, who came on to do the last pass of the movie. And when he first said, he was just like your first act as a third act, what are you doing? He was like he was so frustrated, and I was like, you just gotta go with it, and we eventually became really great friends over this process, but he was definitely like, like, this guy's a fucking maniac. And and and what you said about echo, like that was another thing in the edit of there was a version where it opened with echo and then did the flashback, which was kind of what the opening of the First Skyline is is that it opens kind of in a flash forward and then goes back very much just ripping off lost, which you know, it was obviously obsessed with around the time of the First Skyline. UM. So,

17:06 so that was like it worked, but at the same time, there was something lost with it. Um it never quite never quite was what it wanted to be, but I think it would have. There's certain people that kind of bump when all of a sudden martial arts happened, so to start the first scene with the martial arts fight with echo and the helmet and stabbing the guy in the neck, you're kind of like, hey, there's gonna be martial arts in this movie. So I think there's some people that that have those OCD type brains would have probably liked that version better. But I think it's just a little bit more fun to just be like, wait, what's happening the movies evolving and and you know, you didn't tell me that people could you know, do martial arts in this film, and that like you're talking about like drug cartels, like it's just it's bonkers, um, you know, and it is. It is also like you're saying, I kind of think it's even crazier in hindsight that critics kind of went along for the ride, or at least enough them did, because I think the movie is more fun once you get to know me, Like I think, I think now that I wasn't really kind of out there that much. I didn't, you know, do podcasts. I didn't obviously have my own podcast to actually for everyone. But I feel like if you know me and then you watch the movie, it's actually quite funny. But if you don't you're kind of like, what the hell is this tone? What's going on here?

18:23 So it is one of those things that I'm like, I'm glad that enough people just gave it the benefit of the doubt, which everyone was very surprised by. Like we thought, we thought that the critics were going to, um, you know, tee off on us again. Um. You know, I was very much hoping that that that people could could get it, But you know, I didn't have a ton of a ton of hope that that it definitely exceeded, you know, my expectations that enough people kind of caught the wavelength. Yeah. I mean there's a point in this movie where you have equal waste, Yonryan and Frank Grillo and they're all having a knife fight with giant aliens. And I'm just watching it with like a grant on my face, Like if this if you or somebody likes movies and this does not make you happy, I don't know what to tell you. Man, This is as good as it gets. Like it's and I think that I suspect for critics, and I think actually your choice to not have it at the beginning was important because what happens is again it's like you start from a place of relative reality, and then it just keeps getting more and more and more insane, and by the end of it's like drunk on movies. By the end exactly, there's a kaiju fight basically at the end of this movie, right, yeah, you know, I think you're it's you're right, and I could I could never understand. I could never. I'll be honest, I wasn't sure if it was the right choice, you know, for a long time, because you'd see that. But I do think, um, you know, there's still it's still one of those movies that if someone

19:53 gave me, you know, one hundred grand to go back and tinker with, I still would because there's little things because I I did it so many times that I'm like, I would still make a special edition. But I ultimately every time I watch it, I'm very very happy, and I do, like, I do have a big grinner across my face because it at least is a very honest snapshot of who I was at that time and what I love. So you know, that's why, and I think that's that's one of the toughest parts about this business is and one of the reasons why I'm so grateful for that opportunity is because I mean, you know, there's there's certain jobs and certain things you do that by the time you're on the other side of it, you're like, that isn't even anything close to what you know, I wanted to do. That wasn't it's not even close to the initial spark of what got me excited to sit down to write this in the first place. So the fact that that one kind of is uh, you know, still still does, you know, be proud of it.

21:00 Yeah. I mean, of all the movies I've worked on, the only two that I can still even watch are the two that I knew of my cousin, because you know, it was me and my cousin. We made them as as cheaply as we could, and we had total creative control, and we have like a mind meld. Is actually hilarious. We screened it for an audience at the theater, the first one we did, and he had put a post credits scene in and I had seen the movie probably like seven times, but I had never watched the post credit scene because I always stopped when the credits started. And it wasn't until I saw it in the theater that I saw the post credit scene, which I had not written. My cousin had had come up with it on his own and put it in, and it was exactly the type of thing that I would have put in had I thought of it. And so it's it's so rare. I mean, the overwhelming majority of movies that at least I've been involved with, I can't even look at them because you're just you just watched some upset about all the things you would have done differently, and all the you know, challenges that you couldn't figure out, and the budget issues to schedule issue. You just can't see anything other than that. So when you have a movie that you made, you put out and you can still watch, that's a huge yeah. And and and and when when there's a ton of visual effects, and like in the case of Beyond Skyline, one of the reasons was it was, you know, it was so ambitious and we didn't have really the budget to do everything that we wanted to do, so we're kind of like we'd go on these hiatuses where we would wait for hydraulics to finish the effects, so you know, you could just endlessly tinker while you're waiting like another six months. So when when you see that it was in post for two

22:33 plus years, it's it's not really because it took two years to figure it out. It was just, you know, they had other jobs that were actually paying, and we were the one that was like the drain on the company, so we had to wait until those were delivered to get our shots and then keep going and going, and then you know, things take so long, and you're watching you know, green screen stuff, and it's like that's not going to work, so you just keep crunching and crunching it down. So in some ways it was it was like the real film school for me because because it was such a long period and I had to stare at it for so long, and I feel like I kind of made the movie three times that I felt like when I went on to do the third one, it was a much more efficient process and there was a lot more stuff that I kind of I would even reshoot as I was going, because I realized I didn't get that, you know, and I didn't have that instinct as the first time director. I was like just so happy that I would finish anything on schedule or have anything in the can. I mean the first day of shooting anything as a director was the fight between Frank Rillo and Echo Eyes and just the fact that like that was in the can. I was like, I have directed a fight with Echo and Frank. Like the first day, I was like, they can't even take no, one can take that away from me. So I was like, every single little bit of progress, I was just like holding it to my chest, like please, it's precious. I'm just so happy that I got it. So I think,

24:04 you know, the then then having such a long post period and being a lot more let's say, um, you know, holding myself more accountable for what for what the work was and what I needed to make edits work. I felt like in the third one, I was like, Okay, I'm doing way too much handheld I'm doing too many moving masters handheld because I'm so insecure on my blocking and my staging that I think if the camera's moving around, then the energy is going to you know, take care of all this stuff that I you know, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. So I just was like, that was a lot of what my solutions were in beyond Skyline, and I had this amazing DP in Christopher Probes, who came up doing like Boomtown, the television show. So he was this amazing handheld operator. So it makes sense to you know, rely on the strengths of your collaborators. That's what makes each movie different. And in the third film, Skylines, which we filmed in Lithuania, my cinematographer was a great French cinematographer name Alan due Planeteer who was not a handheld guy at all.

25:18 He was an excellent dolly operator, and so it kind of was like, Okay, I'm seeing what to work with. And then I got used to, I think from an indie LA guy that you know, I just called myself an LA guy Massachusetts killed myself. But I didn't make films in Massachusetts, you know, Like I started doing that when I moved to LA and we would work on like twenty four p and we would do you know, music videos and local cable commercials, and it was always sort of run and gun, go as fast as you can because you have no money. So I think that was again that sort of like handheld vibe. And and I remember breaking out the dolly for like the lab scenes in Beyond Skyline, and I was all nervous, like, oh, we're going to fall behind schedule. Dollies in my mind were money and slow and uh yeah. So in the third one, when when I actually got comfortable with that, I realized how efficient and and great it can be, and that if you you really pick the right line of where to set the dolly up in a scene that you know, you can get um, you know, six setups done without even changing the track and um, you know you're punching in on the lamps three times in each direction, and you can find all these details and you can get more reaction shots and close up shots. Which I think that's a big difference between two and three as well as at two because I'm I'm running through everything, is that there's not like a like really good, like check in with the actor like moments when big things happen. It's all just

26:51 chaos. And so that was that was something that I tried to really address in the third one, to really get those kind of you know, close up moments whenever something bad is happening. And it was just sort of that like you know, check in with rows, check in with your leads, and and you know, I kind of go back to Jurassic Park. Like, you know, everyone always talks about, you know, seeing the dinosaur for the first time, but the thing you're really reacting to is are the actor's reaction shots. No one actually really remembers the dinosaur. It's kind of a blurry Bronzaurus. It's pretty good. But Spielberg's reaction shots and the performances that he got out of them, those are what actually I think of when I think of that scene totally. I'm going to jump into the third one before we do, I do want to talk about I think it absolutely epitomizes the tone of the second one. At the end of the second one, we smash cut to credits of bloopers and it's it's your name, and it's like, I forget what it was exactly, but it was one of the guys the aliens who like tumbling over something like your name across the screen.

27:56 And I just absolutely love that choice because again, it's like even to the end, it's still so fun and not taking itself too seriously and all that stuff, well that was part of the again, like insecurity, like is this is this going to be taking itself too seriously? Which you know, I think you could level against the first movie, which I felt like, Um, the co writer Joshua Cordis and I are a little bit more sarcastic people, and there's even sarcastic line reads in the first movie that we weren't directed that way and they're kind of like very straight up and it's not quite I you know, I'm not saying that the script was perfect. It could definitely all the scripts. It's not. I think I'm a better director than than a writer, but I like my writing. I can't help it.

28:44 Uh, And so you know, like I think there was there was that a little bit, but it really just because you know, we're working on the DVD and we just caught a blooper reel and it was supposed to just be an extra on the DVD, and it ended up being so funny because we had so much shit of the Jeremy Fitzgerald, our our stunt performer falling over in the stilts. I mean, slapstick comedy. It's just always going to work. So we ended up cutting it together. The hydraulics v effects editor Chad van Horne and I and everyone thought it was so funny, were like, you just got to put it at the end of the movie and um, and yeah, it kind of just it totally worked in in in selling the vibe of like this that everyone involved was having a good time and that this was you know, coming from a from a place of fun and uh. And so one of the bloopers, Frank, I think he trips again the guy who's playing the monster, and he's right, because you're the worst like alien I've ever seen guys Like it's hard man. Yeah, and the two of them got along, um, really well, you know, like most of the the stunt guys, Uh, they worked on something previously.

29:59 Um, and so yeah, they actually they hit it off, and that was that was a big benefit because um, you know like that those are some of the days where I'm behind the monitor and you know, I think it's funnier than Frank does, and he's like why is he laughing? And I'm like, I'm not laughing at you, but like you're you know, this like New York Italian dude on the spaceship with a baby in your hand and you're talking to an alien like it's it's it's funny on itself. But if I let him know that it's funny, then it won't be funny, no, no, so he has to pay, he has to play it straight. So he's kind of like, what's this guy doing? So I got like good at like hiding my mouth and and and trying. Like I said, I was such an earnest puppy on that movie, just my tail wagging all the time. And I was like, I gotta I gotta keep that a little bit to myself. You would have had no problem.

30:48 You would never know. I know that would have been that, that would have been ideal. But it is. It is a little bit like yeah, once once the and and and we had this on the third one as well. With is that she was kind of like what are you doing the first two days because everything's super serious, and then once she kind of like got it. It was then she starts adding her own one liners and and kind of but she never she never played it like comedic. She she understood that like it's it's not parody, like it's not a fucking Sharknado movie, but it's not a comedy. But also like you can't treat this like it's the like you know, like this the super super serious drama. Either there has to be this sort of fine line and it's not even the tongue in cheek. It's like the tip of the tongue. It's just a little bit.

31:42 And so it takes a while to find that with each actor. And um, so yeah, Rona the first day, which is like in the third one, you know, her first day is the stuff at the beginning of the movie when she's in the lab, and then you can kind of see by as the movie goes on, she starts like grabbing people's cigarettes and smoking them, and she's she's kind of she loosens up, and by the end she's like pitching me one liners and asking me. She's like, shouldn't I say something at the end of this And I was like, you know, I had a one liner, but I deleted it because it was too cheesy. And she's like, give it to me. And I'm like, you know, no respect for science and she's like, I love it. It's a lot more line I can do that, And so yeah, it is all about kind of finding that with each with each movie, with each actor. What's so cool as you go from the second movie to the third movie, Right, So the first movie obviously is very very the scope of it at the beginning is very small and real, right, we're in this building on second movie immediately is insane, but we're still sort of earth bound, right. And then the third movie, now we're in like Star Trek, Star Wars, Starship Troopers. Right. It's it's almost like each movie is its own different genre. And that's part of why I'm so curious what you're gonna do with the fourth movie. But it's cool because you go in, you turn on the third movie, and you know, it's like the promise of the end of the second movie you immediately delivered, like we're in space. It's spaceships everywhere. We're going for it. And and also great casting. You have Alexander Sadiq who's like way overqualified. It's like Ben Kingsley

33:15 basically is in the movie, right, this guy could be doing like king Lear and and you have all these great actors, and then you're you are doing something which I have to assume is on one twentieth of the budget of a Star Trek movie or maybe one d um you're doing in between those two. Yeah, I mean it's really small. Um. I never I always try to answer this honestly to people because I'm shown like versions of numbers, but I don't have any real like concept of what is actually being done. I just in my head, I have this calculus of like what I know we can and can't do and how to execute it. But the actual numbers, like you know, they everyone could be lying to me. I don't know. I just do the best I can with what I have. There's a part in the third one, so it's basically like um aliens start Trooper some StarCraft. I don't know if you're a StarCraft nerd like me, I don't know StarCraft, but definitely, I mean, look, part of the reason for that one was, which is it's pretty incredible. I still can't really believe that one exists. You know, that we're able to do a third movie without really any of the major actors from the second one coming back.

34:35 You know, Lindsay wasn't in the original cut of Beyond Skyline. It was something that you know was working when when Sean came on and we recut it, and it was like, you know, it would be great to have, like everyone wanted to know what happened to this little girl because if they just walk off into the sunset at the end, which at the end of the Temple Battle of Beyond Skyline, which was the original ending. People are like, is she gonna wither away and die in the next twenty four hours? Like she she grew you know, three years and three days or whatever. So it was like, Okay, I've got to answer some questions and put people at ease because we're asking you to care about this little girl and then you know, we're not giving anyone assurances there. So that's where that wrap around for Beyond Skyline came from. And I was a fan of the one hundred and I just kind of was like but it was also because I had already shot the little girl. I needed someone that had the same you know, big brown eyes really and so I was going through IMDb and I was like, oh, yeah, that that girl from one hundred.

35:38 She I feel like she not only does she have the same look as this little girl that you know that I've already shot, is she's got a weird energy. That weird's not the word, but it's like this authentic energy that fits with Frank. I can't I couldn't explain it, but I just felt like they they fit together, and so, you know, you know, sent her like a trailer of the finished movie, like, Hey, do you want to be in this Frank Grilla movie. We're gonna shoot for a day in Gardena at Hydraulic Studios. And so she showed up and I didn't know at the time. She told me afterwards that she had did food poisoning the day before and so she was really, you know, out of it, but total trooper. And I loved her energy with the alien when they were interacting at the end of the movie and had their kind of their banter, and I felt like, again trying to access tone, I felt like she got the tone right away, and I was, Oh, wow, that that could be something. And now I'm writing for Gregg and Colin Straus, who are the owner's Hydraulics. They're like the two biggest Aliens fans in the world. So I'm like, Okay, how am I going to convince these guys to pay for, you know, another script and put their money behind another project. I'm gonna, you know, make something that is tailored to what their tastes are, which is these guys love men on a mission Aliens type movies. So that's where that kind of you know, those whole things came together is what the idea would be for part three, and everything

37:13 kind of spawned off from there. Like you said, we just immediately did the continuation of the end of two. Originally that was like a ten page sequence, and I realized, you know, if I just make this a narrated thing, I could cut all of this like expensive stuff that explains things in between, and so crunched all that way down and um and yeah, and kind of it definitely allowed me to have, like you said, you're you're you're making sequels, but you get to scratch completely different niches, you know, the stuff that in Part one and Part two. You know, one of the problems of those movies is that the enormity of the global event that is happening just dwarfs any character drama or bullshit. And so like I had scenes in one and two, um that some that got cut from two that were important character scenes. But when Trance like talking about how his mom died and it's like, dude, the whole earth just died, it was just sort of like like, you know, this is a great SOB story for like like twenty four hours ago, but like everyone that we know is dead. So it just it became, you know, it's kind of a roadblock for some of the kind of traditional drama writing that you want to do.

38:32 So what I liked about Part three, like right from the beginning, is you know, bringing the characters together and and I could do some of those type of scenes because the world has been settled and and and and now it's kind of about the world building. It's about the characters. It's just a completely different exercise. So the fact that anyone was was able to like go for that ride, and and the fact that that got made I think it becomes even crazier to me in hindsight because at the time I'm like, no, this is a this is a perfectly logical extension of where we're going. And then you get some perspective and you look back and you go, wow, I don't know how we possibly got that movie made. I have to ask you before we're out of time. There's two things in the third that just floored me. The first one is your midpoint, right, which is where she gets to like the master alien, and he you had this effect the creature design is incredible, Like his mask like comes apart and you see his like actual like freaky face underneath, and he's basically like, we knew you were coming, like we were waiting for you to get here.

39:35 You've essentially played right into our hands. And it was such a it's a it's a really good dramatic turn structurally, and it's also such an effective bit of creature design that was really bowled over by. And then the other thing I want to ask you about, there's a part towards the end where it's like they dropped this bomb on the planet and you're watching and you're like, well, there's how could they possibly get out of this? There's no way she's on the ground. How could you possibly get all this spaceship And they leap frog like lily pads on this like pieces of debris that are coming up from the planet, and I was watching like it was like it was so it was such a thrilling and like insane. So both of those I thought, just as pieces of filmmaking were so effective and I was just so curious about, like how you did that. In both cases, Well, it's the first one, well thank you again. And the first one is is goes with the kind of the Russian doll concept of the creatures in this movie.

40:31 Like even in the first one, a lot of people don't catch it, but there are pilots that are driving the what we call the big tankers, you know, the big kaiju in the first one when when David Zais gets killed spoiler for a you know, twelve year old, thirteen year old Movieum. But so so we kind of always were like, there's things inside of things and and there's fun to be had on that. And so in part two, you know, you see this this alpha tanker comes up on the ship and immediately the face opens and the shepherd character jumps out, and now we see, okay, these things are you know, I switched the designs around a little bit so that we could do them as as as perform super performers, um, you know, for costs, but also that's it makes it a little bit more of the throwback to you know, predator and aliens that that that I love. UM. And so in part three, one of my frustrations of part part two, you know we talk about the things that you want, is that like, um, the the masks were supposed to be animated in some ways, like some of the tentacles in the mouths were supposed to move, but we just had no money to do it.

41:39 So part of me was thinking, well, I could I could just retcon that to be that that's not really their face and their faith that that's actually a helmet that you're seeing and that their real face is underneath and so and then it was like, well, what does the face look like? And I wanted to kind of give a tribute in some ways to the kind of traditional gray alien that like, these are these are the gray aliens that you know, one of the more popular versions of that from you know, X files to the nineteen fifties, and so I kind of wanted to look like, what would a more realistic version of that UM look like? And it's still we went through a bunch of different concepts of it. It's still kind of needed to have some similarities to what the you know, original design of its face was UM. And then yeah, I think it was uh.

42:31 Lip Sync was the VFX company and Thomas Loder was my VFX supervisor, and I was really happy with the way that that came out, and it kind of again, just each one you can kind of go back and say, like, well, you know, if you're if you're upset about the faces and part two for the bad guys at least that's not their actual faces. And then you know, for the pilots, it's kind of established that these things are kind of mechanical in some ways anyway. Um, but yeah, there's still things that you want to change on that. You know. At the end of part three, um, we you know, one of the main alien characters, Trent, gets a new body, and so part of that was like, if I'm going to do another one, I want Jeremy to be able to like actually just use his own legs because it's been it's been two movies. I've him falling over, he's getting older. Um, you know, like it was like it was a great way of and that that was something that was kind of changed last minute on the day I shot the scene. Two ways. I shot the way I shot the Originally it was written that Trent died, which I wasn't quite happy with. That was something I was dissagreeing with with the producers, but they were like, you need a shock, you need you need something to really change, and I was just like, I just doesn't seem like the vibe in the movie.

43:47 You know, I think I think, um, I think we have to bring it back. So I did, you know, I shot the scripted version, and I quickly had Jeremy come out in just a full green body suit and he did those scenes and and all of the writing there was sort of like something I scribbled down and was improvised to and and I really liked it. I thought that, you know, uh, Lindsay and Johnny Jonathan Howard as Leon was was such a great kind of director. Um, you know, like like support. I could just go to him and say like, I need something a little bit funnier here, I need something a little bit this, and we could workshop it right away and he would do it. That was like I was saying about reshooting things as I go.

44:27 He he was never It was never too big of an ask to say, like, oh, okay, so we're doing the scripted version, but I think we need I think we need to mention that bit from scene twelve because I think I'm going to cut that, So can you talk about her dad and this scene too? And and bam he would just get it. So so that that's the first part of your question, and then um, the the other one is just I mean that that's kind of like what I say about trying to make these big visual effects movies on such a small scale is that each shot has to like tell a lot, and so I try to uh you know that. I think that sequence a on a bigger movie would probably be like, you know, fifteen to twenty shots, and for us, it's just one. And so it had to be it had to kind of do a little bit of everything, and it's and we did probably forty to fifty versions of the animation before everyone was one hundred percent happy, and I did got to do my sort of uh you know, Snyder m CG zooms that I like. One of the reasons I like to do that is um one obviously AT love Zack Snyder and and I love zooms in movies in general, but um I found afterwards, if you're unhappy with it, you're getting two shots. So if you want to intercuts things even now, got two shots, and I could have gone to, uh, you know, a quick shot of them inside of the cockpit, and then I would have gotten two VFX shots out of it. But if the whole shot holds up

45:59 and it's a great awesome thing that that has a ton of energy. So that's another sort of just you know, try to be savvy, you know, because the number of shots that you have does affect budget, even though the difficulty of shots does effect as well. So you try to get as much story with each one and h and figure it out from there. So we're gonna run out of time, but just to wrap up, you're gonna really have to try to top yourself for the fourth one, because the bloopers at the end of the second one is somebody tumbling over we see your name. The bloopers at the end of the third one it's the actress who plays Rose laughing and saying fuck you, Liam, and then we see your name. So I'm very curious what you're gonna do for the fourth one. Is there anything as we wrap up that you can say about the fourth one?

46:43 Yeah? I mean the fourth one is it's already been challenging, you know. We started in prep towards the end of last year, and I went out to scout Thailand beginning of this year. We're supposed to have shot it's all what it was in April right now, so I supposed to be shooting it right now, actually finishing up. But the cast availabilities obviously, it's a very big, difficult cast to get together and for this number and for that duration, and there'll be some interesting reactions to once the cast is fully announced. But what I kind of zero in on is I felt like the things that everybody really loves the most in the second and the third are the hand to hand fights. So I wanted to rather than keep trying to chase the big CG spectacle, which we're still doing. It's not gonna we're not completely shying away from that, but I spent so much time and percentage of my limited budget, you know, building worlds and building spaceships, that I was kind of like, I'm going to try to set this one a little bit more into the real world and go crazier with the fights and razier with the action, which is something just personally I've been getting more and more interested in and educating myself on over the years. So that that's kind of the you know, the the from the outside, the direction of it, without

48:14 getting too much into the story, but it is again feels like it's a logical extension of what the teaser at the end of part three is, and that I will say it's a civil war type of movie. You know, we already went to the other side of the galaxy. We've went to outer space and so here it's more about spending time on Earth and figuring out you know, who's going to be a charge awesome. Well, listen, man, Thank you so much for doing this for the listeners as always, Thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you're listening, and subscribe for future episodes. Yeah, man, we're just looking forward to talking to you when the fourth I'm sure I we'll just call you just cackling with glee whenever it gets to watch the fourth So and I will say the first movie is coming out on a four K disc may a second, I believe, So anyone wants to enjoy that. The second one, Beyond Skyline, is still on Netflix and the third. The best way to watch the third one is on Apple TV. That has the best transfer in my opinion, and if you buy it, it also has all of the special features that we work so hard on that only a few made onto the Blue ray. So definitely go Apple for part three, Sweet Dude, and look for Liam's podcast action for everyone as well. Thank you, Thank you. With the Michael Scott and Vice Victus, we kind of break down trailers and movies and will have you know, occasional action orientated guests on and a lot of bullshit, a lot of

49:45 bullshit. All right, Thanks everybody. That's the episode for today. Next time, Hand in hand