Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have emerged as two of the most admired and successful screenwriters working in Hollywood today. After the combined successes of Zombieland and Deadpool, the duo has carved out a nice place for themselves in an industry notorious for sidelining its writers. And this week Reese and Wernick have returned to the big screen with their latest effort Life, a new sci-fi horror film about a crew of astronauts working on the International Space Station who discover new life on Mars… but quickly come under attack from the alien entity when they take it aboard their ship and begin analyzing it. Directed by Daniel Espinosa, Life stars Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson.
Reese and Wernick recently sat down for a chat with IGN about the film, revealing where the idea for the script first came from, how it’s a kind of long-awaited act of vengeance for one of the writers, and how the film’s ending could lead directly to a sequel. Skip down to the bottom two questions for that last part, but beware of spoilers obviously…
Full spoilers follow for Life, including how the film ends.
IGN: Where did the idea for Life first come from?
Rhett Reese: Well, this was David Ellison’s idea. He’s over at Skydance and he came to us with it, this idea of a new life brought back to the International Space Station to study that begins attacking the crew there. So he came to us with that, and we went away to work on it as we do, and came up with the story and the characters and the alien and what it looked like and how it interacted with the weightless environment. So we then pitched it back to him, and he loved it, told us to go write the screenplay and then we made the movie. So we all owe it to David.
Paul Wernick: He pitched this idea to us of these astronauts looking down on Earth through their space station window, and looking down 200 miles below and seeing home and yet not being able to return. That was the image that really inspired us. It was that haunting image of being so near and yet so far, and really that was the reason we went off to go make the story and the screenplay.
IGN: How detailed were you in your creation of the alien “Calvin” and his design?
Reese: We took our research from deep sea creatures, like the octopus, so we really loved the idea of this being a creature that was made of a single kind of cell, one that was very diverse in its ability to different things -- the kind of creature that didn’t have organs or blood vessels or differentiated that way in any way, but was just kind of composed of the same identical cell that could function as a nerve cell and a muscle cell and an eye cell all at once. So then ultimately we did our best to design it on the page, but then we had a creature design team come in and flesh out what it would actually look like with the director. So then they were the ones who made the final decisions on what Calvin would look like.
IGN: Obviously, the cast for this film is very impressive as well. When you were writing the roles, did you have the actors in mind beforehand?
Wernick: Well, Ryan’s always -- we call him our muse, you know. We love him and always have his voice in our head whenever we’re writing. We’d be so fortunate to have him in each and every one of our movies moving forwards. Our relationship goes back since 2009, so we’ve really been arm-in-arm partners for a very long time, so we always love Ryan. You know, this cast as you mentioned -- this kind of film usually devolves into or are classified as B-movies, and this isn’t the B-movie I know. This is really an A+ cast. We were so fortunate to have Jake and Rebecca and the entire ensemble -- [it] really elevates the material in a way we could never have imagined or hoped.
IGN: You both have gotten to tackle some very different and tricky genres throughout your career, but was horror always one you wanted to play in?
Reese: Yeah, no, we love the horror genre. You know, I was the little boy who just got terrified of movies like The Shining and Alien, and I just wanted to see if, you know, we could go in a direction where our goal wasn’t to make people laugh necessarily, but rather just to raise the hairs on the back of their necks and to really make them shudder with horror. So we really tried to put the pedal down.
Wernick: This is nine-year-old Rhett’s revenge on all the filmmakers who scared him to death as a child. We’re hoping to do that for the next generation.
IGN: Do you have any plans for a sequel or ideas for one? It certainly seems like the possibility is there.
Reese: Absolutely. You know, part of the fun of the first movie is that they think they have it contained and then it breaking out, and then again they think they have it contained and again it breaks out. You know, we think that little cycle could definitely repeat itself on Earth, as the military and governments of the world try to contain this thing before it spreads. And now, you know, it’s in the ocean and good luck there. But yeah, we would love to pursue it beyond this if it’s a success, so we’ll have to hope people go see the movie!
IGN: How determined were you to make sure the film kept its unhappy ending? Was there ever any pushback from the studio, or was everyone always okay with it?
Wernick: Yeah, everyone really embraced it. Again, creatively it felt like a left turn and I think people do love that [in] movies in where you [think you] know right from the first frame … exactly how it’s going to evolve and each step along the way and how it’s going to end. It’s fun as creative folks to take people along for this ride and then really pull the rug out from under them. I think just in a world where studios are always looking for franchises that it did set up the idea that this could potentially be one. So I think, you know, it’s definitely a creative risk. But we’ve made our career off of creative risks, and we’re hopeful that people do love it.
Life is in theaters now.
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