Director Tom Green talks exclusively to Cineworld about Monsters: Dark Continent

Last week, we brought you part one of Cineworld's exclusive interview with Monsters: Dark Continent director Tom Green.

The movie continues the premise of Gareth Edwards' cult 2010 movie, in which sections of Earth have been invaded and overtaken by massive extraterrestrial creatures.

In part two, Tom discusses the challenges of creating incredible special effects on a miniscule budget, and also which monster movie he'd take to a desert island... (His answer isn't what you'd expect.)

Read on for the full interview.

So Tom, in the movie you have these spectacular special effects sequences with the monsters themselves. Given the relatively low budget, how much of a challenge was it to make those believable?

In many ways it was one of the biggest challenges. The first challenge was just pulling off the shoot in 4 and a half weeks in the sweltering desert environment of Jordan. The big challenge for the effects team was that their work needed to be able to compete with blockbuster movie standards. But also I wanted the monsters to feel completely organic like they could live in our natural world.

Seb Barker, my special effects supervisor, was only 26 when he made the film with me, and his team only comprised 5 to 7 people. The effects were achieved by these guys working for over a year, 7 days a week, for the love of it. It’s a real challenge but one we’re really proud of.

There’s one scene involving an enormous tentacle creature and a helicopter. That must have been challenging to stage?

Well, we were really lucky that the Jordanian military opened their doors to us. We also managed to get a Black Hawk helicopter up. We had the scene storyboarded out and I took three flights in the helicopter itself. However, we were later hit by a sandstorm and had to rethink the sequence, so that was pretty heartbreaking!

When I started seeing the imagery coming together, I was amazed at what sheer creative endeavour and hard work could achieve. You could make this film 50 times over for the effects budget of Gareth Edwards' Godzilla. That puts it in perspective. The helicopter sequence is central and we needed to make sure it was as impressive as it could possibly be.

At the end of the day the Monsters brand is about asking: what can we achieve with these resources? Actually you can do a lot if you’re that tenacious. It’s like a short movie but on a bigger canvas.

One final question: if you had to take a monster movie to a desert island, which would it be?