Daniel Espinosa has had a successful directing career, with a number of wildly different genre films under his belt, but none quite match the scope and effectiveness of his latest effort, Life. Featuring one of the best casts of the year, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson and Ryan Reynolds, it tells the story of what happens when a new alien life form begins striking back and killing members of the astronaut team tasked with studying and reporting on it.
Espinosa recently had a chat with IGN about the film, where he talked about his influences and inspirations when creating Life, and why he thinks it has more in common with classic film noirs than one might expect. Read on for our full chat, but beware of spoilers…
Full spoilers for Life follow.
IGN: This is an interesting isolated, alien horror film in that it takes place in the relatively near future. Was that one of the draws for you when you first came on board?
Daniel Espinosa: Yeah, exactly. I think in many ways it has more to do with John Carpenter’s The Thing because of that, you know? Because it takes place in our reality, but that’s also what’s fun about science fiction is that as a genre it’s almost like a family, and everything is very close knit to each other. You’re supposed to uphold the rules of that tradition and reference back and forth to each other through time.
IGN: What influences or film references did you look back on when filming Life, aside from just the obvious choices, like Alien?
Espinosa: You look into like [Solaris’] Tarkovsky and the greatest sort of artist achievements in the genre. Then you look into like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Carpenter’s The Thing, but I thought it was quite interesting that science fiction has a bit of a noir element, you know? We have to take a very sort of noir-esque turn towards the ending that more resembles Raymond Chandler in space. So I thought that was quite fun, but then you also have modern masterpieces like Cuaron’s Gravity and Nolan’s Interstellar.
So you kind of take it all in, but my focus was the realism, to talk to astronauts, to contact NASA, to really build up the ISS as the ISS would actually look at the point in time where we actually would get this Mars sample back. Because you know we have time before another Mars sample and we have found water on Mars, and the probability that there has existed life on Mars is getting more and more probable by each minute, and I thought that was quite interesting to sort of look into the near future.
IGN: There’s a couple of really impressive one-takes throughout the film. What was it like choreographing and putting those together?
Espinosa: When you enter this genre, the one-take is almost part of the idea at this point, you know? I thought to myself that Gravity did such a great job at showing the expansiveness of that situation, that I thought if I did the complete opposite where I show the claustrophobia of these environments, that would be interesting. The person that I did this movie with, my cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, started off in a similar place I did in kind of social realism. He’s world famous for his long take in Atonement, so I had this fellow compadre who kind of guided me into this new realm of cinema for myself.
IGN: What was it like assembling your cast then too? Who was the first person cast, etc.?
Espinosa: I always have a good time with actors, but for me it was such an honor to work with Jake for the first time. I personally think that he’s one of the most interesting actors of his generation, and I always feel like his decisions as those characters is so interesting.
IGN: His performance in Nightcrawler is probably one of the best of the decade so far.
Espinosa: I completely agree, and the choices he made, the little choices like sitting on top of the car! Rather than the car just watching, all those little choices come from him. And I thought it would be so fun to work with him, compared to Ryan, which is the other way around. He has this sort of easy nature to his work -- when you watch him it feels effortless. So to get these two people together I thought would also be like the beginning of an iconic duo on screen together. In 20 years, you know, we could still be seeing Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal together.
Rebecca is quite an unusual actor. I think she’s more Katharine Hepburn than anybody else. She’s very unusual that way. She has that dark voice that not many actresses have, and a sort of strong sensibility about herself.
IGN: What was it like designing the alien “Calvin”?
Espinosa: I think that [scripters] Paul [Wernick] and [Rhett Reese] did a beautiful job of beginning the journey of Calvin, but what they did was just on paper, you know? So it didn’t quite exist out there yet. So I thought to myself that most people when they’re doing something like this, they just contact these two big studios, who make creatures, and they’re truly masters at what they do. But I thought what would be interesting would be take a different approach and get the scientists involved. To get their thoughts on how a being like this would develop that could have all the traits that Calvin had in the script, and see what sort of physical traits might already exist that haven’t changed over thousands of years.
We have a couple that actually exist, beings that haven’t changed since the time of the dinosaurs, and let their vision almost dictate the design of Calvin in the film. But then as filmmakers … we’ve watched so many movies so it’s hard to try and think of anything new. So therefore, I thought it was kind of fun to get out of that almost too close knit designs of previous work over the years.
IGN: With sci-fi films like this, it’s always hard to maintain a certain level of realness. How much did you and the writers work to keep the science in the film as believable as possible?
Espinosa: Tons, tons. Just the design of the ISS -- we contacted NASA just to find out what the future development phases would be, to get their perspective on what they were actually going to build. Then to contact the researchers to develop a correct program of how this would actually happen, and then we always had the theoretical physicists on set, that spoke about movement in zero gravity, about what’s possible and what’s not possible, and who works for NASA.
Then we had the astronauts who were put together with each actor according to their specific scientific background. So that’s how [we] slowly constructed this piece because I thought what was unique about it was the realism. So I wanted to make sure not go into the same world that they did in the ’70s, which while being masterpieces, are more fantasy than science fiction. Sci-fi is meant to be almost this peep hole into the future.
IGN: Was there ever any push from the studio to make the film’s ending happier at all, and what do you think it means?
Espinosa: That’s why I wanted to do the movie. I read the script and I thought it was so inventive and fun and had so much to do with an old American tradition from Night of the Living Dead to the classic noir films of the 1950s. So I thought it was truly kind of faithful to an old American tradition, but unusual in our time to see it.
So when I met the studio, I told them after I had pitched my perspective that I frankly didn’t buy that they would let me do this ending, and if that was so, then I would walk. And then they were very supportive actually; it was one of those sort of lucky coincidences where the people in power can see or were fascinated by the vision of the twists, and I think it’s also because we made it for a smaller budget. If we had put $50 million more into the movie, I think that ending would have been changed.
Life is in theaters now.
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