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Interview: Greg McLean Talks Violence and The Belko Experiment

McLean discusses the pyrotechnics of violence, toying with an audience’s expectations, and more.

Interview: Greg McLean Talks Violence and The Belko Experiment
Photo: BH Tilt

Greg McLean rose to cultural prominence in 2005 as the director of the intense, poetically violent Outback-set horror film Wolf Creek. Since then, the filmmaker has distinguished himself as an orchestrator of horror with an intense locational bent, whether it’s the perilous river of Rogue, the desert of Wolf Creek 2, or the Grand Canyon of The Darkness. In The Belko Experiment, McLean tries his hand at rendering interiors for a change, while returning to the visceral, hard-charging violence of his breakout hit. On the phone last week, McLean was jovial and enthusiastic, discussing his favorite filmmakers, the pyrotechnics of violence, toying with an audience’s expectations, and the importance of maintaining a narrative’s architecture of emotion.

I haven’t seen Wolf Creek in years, and I can still remember those landscapes. They’re as chilling as any of the violence that occurs in the film. Similarly, with The Belko Experiment, I think of those gray sheens of the office building. Which is to say that your cinema has a strong sense of place. Is this a conscious or intuitive choice?

It probably goes back to the filmmakers I love. I love David Lean, Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, Scorsese, and many others. Filmmakers who basically set up, well, sense of place really is the phrase for it, using imagery and sound and music to create an atmosphere so that you feel like you’re immersed in that place. Context is everything.

Can you comment on how you got together with screenwriter James Gunn, and how that collaboration worked?

James and [producer] Peter Safran decided to try to get the film made, and they hooked up with MGM and sent the script out to agencies to seek directors. I read it and completely flipped out over it. It was so much fun and so crazy. I loved the characters, the writing, and what it was saying. And I created a 20-page visual presentation for James and Peter and wrote an essay on what I felt the film should be and what I could bring to it. Sometimes, you read things and you think, “Oh, that could be good,” and sometimes you read something and absolutely fall in love with it. I felt like this was an opportunity for me to explore some pretty interesting territory as a filmmaker, and to show some skills that I hadn’t shown before, [pertaining to] action, interiors, and creating a very intense thriller story that has an incredibly huge cast. Those challenges were attractive to me.

Is there any singular sequence in the film that was particularly challenging?

The big execution scene in the middle [of the film] was a massive challenge. You have 15 members of the main cast, 20 or so featured extras, and maybe a 100 more extras. We had about five days to shoot it, and so the planning for that scene as a filmmaker was really intense. I storyboarded everything, and I do setup plans. I did little maps of all the camera moves, all the lens changes, and really worked out exactly how to do it. But even with that, it still doesn’t—you still gotta work out how to actually stage it. Because so much of it is about making sure the actors feel comfortable and are being supported, and are being creative in terms of coming up with what their views of the different moments are. That [scene] was a real mountain to climb.

The Belko Experiment was shot in Colombia and was very low budget for what it was. We had a big cast, very little time, and a lot of the visual effects—fire, rain, blood—that slow a film down. So, it was absolutely crucial as a director to have an incredibly clear vision of how to execute the production, or otherwise you just wouldn’t get the film shot. It certainly got intense, because we were shooting 16-hour days, day after day, week after week. By the end we just sort of crawled out of there half-dead basically, but it was worth it because I’m really proud of the film, and I thought we captured same amazing performances and some great moments.

It’s interesting that you mention the execution scene in the lobby, because it feels like the heart of the film. Another scene that I’d like to point out, where it feels like the film really takes a turn, is that murder sequence in the stairwell. As someone who follows both your and James’s work, I’m tempted to say that this is the scene where The Belko Experiment transitions from a James Gunn film to a Greg McLean film.

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Right, absolutely. You can feel the temperature change during both of those moments, because they’re played emotionally very seriously. In the screenings that I’ve been in, you can certainly feel the audience going “Okay, I’m now moving from a light, kind of interesting, fun idea to something extremely dark.” The film goes in extremely dark places in terms of what the audience is confronted with.

Certain casting choices feel like a part of your plan to play with tone and audience expectation. I think of John McGinley’s casting. Some audiences may associate him with Office Space, for instance.

Right. [laughs]

When McGinley’s character does what he does in the stairwell, it feels like a definitive way of saying “this isn’t Office Space.”

Right. There are certainly some meta things going on with the casting. Even Tony Goldwyn, who plays the president [of the United States] on Scandal, the fact that it’s him being this raw does lend a different quality to [the character]. Even Michael Rooker, who usually plays the bad guy and is killing people, plays a guy here who’s really quite innocent and dies very quickly. It reverses your expectation. I think that was one of the really fun parts about the cast that we got. Not only are they great actors for those roles, but their pasts do lend themselves to interesting, creative moments in the film.

If you’re a genre fan, as I am, you expect Michael Rooker to take charge of the film somewhere in the third act.

Absolutely, yeah. It’s something that James does in his scripts, and it’s something that I love to do in my movies: Take what the audience thinks they know about movies and reverse that, use it against them.

The fate of one of your female protagonists near the end of The Belko Experiment echoes the fate of the protagonists of Wolf Creek.

It does. That kind of thing about taking the Final Girl and setting her up as the heroine, that concept goes right back to Hitchcock and Psycho.

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Mmm-hmm.

You have a star who, 45 minutes into the film, gets killed, and you create this amazing impact because your expectations are completely reversed and your emotions are being played with. That’s definitely what we did in Wolf Creek and definitely what happens in this film. That was one of the things I was really turned on by in the script, the idea that this film was playing with expectations, playing those kinds of games with the audience. That’s the most fun [part] as a filmmaker, when you can create something where the audience is completely with you and reacting in interesting ways.

Is it challenging to communicate precise behavioral escalation throughout a pressure-cooker film like this, where things must quickly shift from a sense of normality to carnage? In the editing room, did you have to make tough choices in terms of narrative flow?

I’m kind of a pre-production nut. I storyboard every frame of the film. I do plans of every shooting day and for every set-up of every scene so I can work out how I can get in and get out of each scene. I also do character arc plans for myself that I share with the actors to try to make sure that, in planning a character like Tony’s or McGinley’s, we have a kind of architecture of emotion that we can refer back to. We’re shooting out of order, and you can get confused about what emotional level the characters are at. We had rehearsals for a week or so before we shot, and those are the times that we talk through [the script] and get the big questions out of the way, and clarify specifically how they [the actors] should be playing [the characters] at each point. Once you get into editing, hopefully that planning is there, and the rhythms of the performances and the characters are on film. And they were.

The “PowerPoint from Hell” sequence near the end of the film is striking. The foregrounded violence, and the use of neon hues that have a kind of Mario Bava vibe. When the film reaches an upper register of insanity, it’s as if it arrives at an increasingly figurative place. Was this a planned progression, or you did you find it as you went along?

When we were heading into that sequence I wanted to find a way to counterpoint the physical fight with the metaphorical idea of what was going on: While we have these two guys who’re literally fighting to their deaths, the corporate ideology is spelled out behind them. The film is a metaphor for corporations who value the bottom line over humanity. Playing that scene like that was a way to have the action look visually interesting but also have a secondary level going on at the same time.

There’s an idea running through the film of moral relativity. These corporate banalities mean so little to these people that they could be utilized to mean anything.

Exactly. This corporate methodology in practice is brutal.

Your films have a distinctive relationship with violence. Is there any maxim you have about staging violence? Does anything particularly drive you when you’re working through these violent passages?

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Very much my favorite director of all time is Francis Ford Coppola. And I remember him saying about The Godfather, which was, on the page, a very pulpy, very bloody, violent film: [When] you go to do violence, make sure that you’re doing it credibly and approaching it distantly and interestingly. Because every time that there’s a violent moment on film it’s an opportunity to do something really interesting and creative. And so, for me, each time there was a violent action moment in the film, I thought about “what are the different ways this could be done? How do you make it a memorable cinematic moment?” And, sometimes, that might mean that you cut away from something so that you don’t see it. The worst thing in the world is when violence becomes mundane.

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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