As Arcadian hits UK cinemas, we chat to director Benjamin Brewer about working with Nicolas Cage and crafting an apocalyptic thriller with a low budget.
Parenting teenagers is a challenge in regular circumstances, but in Arcadian, it’s even more nightmarish. Thanks to global warming, society has collapsed and strange, terrifying creatures roam the land at night. Nicolas Cage plays Paul, father to Joseph (Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins). Thomas particularly has a habit to stay out a little too late and after one particularly late trip, Paul is forced to go look for him while Joseph stays behind.
Things go wrong. Very, very wrong.
Arcadian was made on a relatively low budget, but director Benjamin Brewer set out to make the most of it. You can read our full chat with the director below.
First of all, congratulations on Arcadian. I loved the opening scene. It was very The Last of Us.
The Last Of Us, if you had to make The Last Of Us on the laptop I’m speaking on right now. I did that shot on my laptop. It’s a new era of indie film.
How did the script for Arcadian come across your desk?
My brother and I used to direct together. We directed a film with Nic in 2016, it was called The Trust. Then I went off and did other things for a while, I was trying to put this other movie together, which I’m hopefully going to shoot next, And then Arcadian, I think the director departed it and because I have a visual effects company and a background in it, and Nic and I really enjoyed working together, they thought of me.
My brother and I are super close, we’ve worked together forever. We worked together on Arcadian to redesign the monster together, so [when] I read the script, I just really liked the brothers story and I love Nic.
The company I started had done the visual effects on Everything Everywhere All At Once. And so I thought, ‘Oh, would it be fun to follow up Everything Everywhere with another small VFX budget movie, but do more traditional visual effects.’
Nicolas Cage, what an icon. He’s also listed as a producer. How does that help getting the project not just made but marketing it and getting people to see it?
He’s very supportive of film, the filmmakers who he works with and he has excellent ideas. I think that those are the two core values of a producer. It’s hard to actually quantify everything that he brings to a film because it’s what you see in the movie, obviously, but then, great actors like Nic, they’re [also] writers, they’re filmmakers, they’re not just there to say lines that someone wrote. They make the movie what it is. I learned that working with him the first time and then working with other actors. When I’m working with someone like Nic, I’m trying to listen and try to be like an antenna and guide things.
There’s actually something in the beginning of the film that we were trying to figure out from a creative standpoint in post-production and I remember getting on the phone with him to talk it out. I had been trying some things out and he was like, ‘Well, what if it was this?’ And I remember talking to him like, ‘I wish I had thought of that kind of thing.’
The great gift of being in this industry [is] you get to work with incredibly experienced people. He’s accrued this tremendous wisdom that you can’t fake, you can’t skip. You look at that IMDb and it really is like being in the presence of someone who you’re trying to learn everything you can from while you’re hanging out.
I think any film that casts a really big star, there’s also a worry that on screen your audience is watching Nicolas Cage rather than Paul. Does that star image also come with its own burden?
I have this little mantra, which is, the movie has to be bigger than the actor in it. Like if you watch it and you’re thinking about Nic and his other movies, his other performances, the movie hasn’t achieved that escape velocity. Every year, there’s sterling examples of films that managed to house this big public figure. Filmmakers that come to mind that have done it twice really, are the Safdie Brothers. They did Good Time with Robert Pattinson and he completely disappeared in that. They also did Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler.
Great actors, their characters are their department and he’s going to explain his vision for the character. In this case, he wanted Paul to adhere more closely to his own experiences as a father and his experiences with his father, which worked for me because I was imbuing [the film with] a lot of my personal experience growing up with my brother. We happened to be totally aligned in our creative thinking about that. But it’s always going to be the thing, you have to make the movie bigger than the actor, they can’t eclipse what you’re trying to do.
What I really appreciated about the film is that you don’t really find out much detail about what caused this apocalypse. How much of a backstory did you create and share with the cast and crew, even though the audience isn’t privy to it?
I locked into the whole thing as this coming of age metaphor I really liked. I thought this is a way to externalise what it feels like to be 16 and making mistakes and learning that your actions have consequences. The monsters and all that, they represent death. It’s about kids learning about death. In terms of the apocalypse, Nic’s character at one point makes reference to climate change getting out of control. To me, that’s the great existential threat, basically humanity committing suicide.
Our writer Mike Nilon didn’t want it to be discussed. He just wanted it to be the facts of the world, so I came up with the idea that Max’s character and Sadie [Soverall’s] character should sit under a tree and play a game where they try to come up with what happened. Whether or not either of them has even a kernel of the real story there, I think it’s kind of nice to just be in the POV of kids who didn’t know anything before, they were born after it happened. It kind of makes me think of kids born after 9/11. They talk about it with this humour and it’s kind of not real to them whereas their parents have seen all kinds of horrible stuff that they’ve, as parents, kept out of their view. I think I was so locked into the POV of the kids, I just thought, all they know is that the Earth got polluted and then the society fell apart and then these things showed up.
They’re living with this inherited trauma. And you already mentioned working in VFX and you did the VFX for Arcadian. How much is that already in your mind when you’re reading the script or when you’re on set? When do you start thinking about it?
Immediately. [Arcadian] was a super small movie, but the script asked for a lot of big movie stuff and I knew what our schedule would be. We shot this movie in 20 days, so I knew that we would have to shoot it a certain way.
The monsters [were] its own thing to figure out how you’re going to do that. We did it with a combination of motion capture and animation. There’s a lot of invisible visual effects, [like] the whole sequence at the beginning, when he’s running. I had to replace all of Dublin with this invented apocalyptic version and luckily, no one has picked it out.
A fun one is [the] part in [the film] where they get in a refrigerator and the house blows up. It’s kind of a long sequence, the refrigerator is shaking and fire’s coming in, it’s flipping all over the place. Literally every single thing on screen, there is CGI. There isn’t a person, we didn’t shoot anything, I made it on this computer. Our company really specialises in thinking outside the box because we’re all directors and we’re all just trying to get it done.
When I read in the script [that] the house blows up with them in this refrigerator, I was like, we’re not going be able to afford to blow up a real house or a miniature house. None of that is in the scope of this, so you have to get creative and you have to kind of think in those terms immediately. The monster is part of it, for sure. We had two VFX supervisors. The other was a guy named Ben Burrell, who runs a company called Reactor. Ben and his team did the monster motion cap and animation, all that stuff. They were a huge boon to us.
Arcadian is now in cinemas.
