Interview With Director Paul W.S. Anderson (In The Lost Lands)

Paul W.S. Anderson is an auteur like no other: best known for his videogame adaptations, Anderson has been at the forefront of digital formalism for the better part of the century. His works have garnered him a loyal fanbase, with Anderson’s early 2010s output becoming the catalyst for the emergence of the “vulgar auteurism” movement. These days, it feels like Paul’s approach to filmmaking is a dying art: unmistakably kinetic, proudly sentimental, and notably old-fashioned in his action-over-words mentality. After almost 5 years since his last venture into the realm of videogames, Anderson’s latest work finds him operating on a decidedly different wavelength: In the Lost Lands sees the filmmaker adapting George R.R. Martin’s short story as a metal, expressionist action-horror fairytale. Ahead of the film’s cinema release, I sat down with Paul W.S. Anderson (on his birthday!) to discuss his wide array of influences, the pleasures and pitfalls of digital experimentation, and the newfound academic interest in his aesthetics.

Dimitri Kraus: Your films have a very distinct visual language. What was it like to apply this digital aesthetic to a George R.R. Martin story, especially when compared to your videogame adaptations?

Paul W.S. Anderson: What really appealed to me about George’s story was that he’d written, what I felt, an adult fairytale. It was a fairytale with a very strong message — “be careful what you wish for” — but it was like an old school Brothers Grimm-style fairytale or a Hans Christian Andersen-style The Little Mermaid where the Little Mermaid dies at the end. It was a dark fairytale and it was a fairytale for adults. And I thought: “How do I represent that on screen?” While also being aware of the existing George R.R. Martin universe, as people are familiar with Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Westeros is out there! We wanted to expand George’s world, instead of being Westeros-adjacent. Of course, the creation of Westeros is very important — it has a very strong visual language. So the question was: how can I, as a filmmaker, find a completely different visual language in the hour and 45 minutes of my movie? It needed to differentiate us from Westeros, but also embrace the dark fairytale that George had written. The look of Lost Lands really came out of that, and I felt like “I can’t go shoot in the forests of Ireland or the glaciers of Iceland — they already did that!” Also, with Monster Hunter I’d gone to the ends of the Earth to shoot that movie, with the crew living in tents in the middle of nowhere in Namibia…

DK: Which is, by the way, a very striking film!

PWSA: Yes! I’m very, very happy with the look of that movie! But I thought “I wouldn’t want this to look like Monster Hunter all over again, just with Milla and Dave”. So the idea was to give it a very painterly, fairytale look. I said to all the heads of department: “This should be like the graphic novel that Hieronymus Bosch never wrote”. Because what I love about Bosch’s work is that his paintings are heavily detailed, and there’s the center of the frame… but then also if you look at the bottom left hand corner, there’s an awful lot going on — some of it deeply unpleasant. And it’s one of the things we worked really hard on in Lost Lands: to give every image a kind of painterly, detailed, textured look. So if you were to freeze frame it when it comes to video-on-demand, each one of these images is packed with detail and imagery that, I think, is incredibly striking. And that was really the jumping off point, to make it like “Hieronymus Bosch come to life” — not a still image, but a moving one — that plunged you into this nightmarish fairytale world.

DK: Now that you mention Bosch, I can definitely see the parallels. Certainly reframes the way I viewed some of the imagery in the film.

PWSA: Yeah, I mean I’d hope that you could take stills from In the Lost Lands and hang them on an art gallery wall, and it’d be a really satisfying art show! But, it’s moving pictures, and by utilizing that painterly background we did a very kinetic action-horror movie in the foreground.

DK: I kept getting reminded of Soldier while watching Lost Lands, because I think both films share a very strong Western influence. What keeps you coming back to the Western genre?

PWSA: Well, when I was growing up it was one of the dominant forms of cinema — there was a new western every week coming into cinemas. And then westerns fell out of favor. Yet those western tropes of storytelling, because they’re very strong, have always continued. And when I read George’s short story In the Lost Lands, it struck me immediately as this dark adult fairytale, but it also had the feeling of a western to me. Especially, the feeling of spaghetti westerns where you have two characters who go to a hostile landscape on a mission, not quite trusting one another. As the journey unfolds, they betray one another, but eventually learn to respect and maybe even love one another. And that’s a very spaghetti western trope, it could be the description of For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, or the male-female component of Two Mules for Sister Sara. That really excited me, and I felt it was organic for George’s story. It gave me the freedom to build out those western vibes in the film, which, of course, I love! ‘Cause it’s hard to make just a full-on straight western, but to use the strengths of the western — the landscapes, the imagery, the way you juxtapose individuals against the landscapes — these are things I grew up with that I love, and it’s always a pleasure to put that into the film’s visual language.

DK: It’s interesting that you mentioned the importance of interpersonal relationships. Your works have this recurring theme of reclaiming one’s fate, fighting for the people one holds close because of that rare human connection in increasingly dystopian, hostile worlds. Would you say that’s a reflection of your approach to the process of filmmaking?

PWSA: I like telling personal stories against a very big background, and I like trying to tell those stories with very little dialogue because I think cinema is a very visual artform. I’d always been drawn to these movies that I loved when I was growing up where the characters didn’t say very much, but they felt a lot. And if you learned about a character, it was always through action. Quite often, these were very broken people who you could, as an audience member, pour your emotions into. They became vessels for you. When you think about the kind of actors who were big movie stars when I was a kid… Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood. These were guys that did not talk a lot, and famously, they were all actors who would get a script and then cross out all of their dialogue. They could do it all with just a look, and it really worked for them. I think in my cinema, I’ve definitely tried to walk down that path, to have characters that have deeply held feelings: they’re broken, they want to put themselves back together again, but they’re not gonna sit down and have a therapy session about it. It’s all discussed at the dining room table, and they’ll do it with their fists. It’s very much a throwback to the kinds of movies I loved when I was growing up: whether it was the westerns, or American gangster movies, or the French interpretation of those films like the Jean-Pierre Melville movies that took American gangsterism to a completely different stylish level. And then the movies of Walter Hill, where he took Melville’s work and then brought it back to America with movies like The Warriors, The Driver, and 48 Hrs. Those are the kinds of films I grew up loving, and that’s the kind of area I feel the most comfortable working in. And it’s why I like actors like Milla and Dave: they put a lot of thought and emotion into their work, even if they’re not saying very much. It’s why I love doing close-ups of them. There’s a lot of sadness behind Dave’s eyes in this movie, which I love, and the same with Milla. These are people who are very powerful, and on the outside very-very strong, but they’re all fractured and broken and there’s something missing, so they are desperate to fill that void.

DK: We’ve already briefly touched upon this, but there’s a certain kineticism to the way you stage action that’s become increasingly rare in contemporary action cinema. In the case of Lost Lands, what struck me the most is, as you said, emotion manifesting through physicality. What was the biggest challenge when trying to bring these characters to life through that approach?

PWSA: The thing I was probably most stressed about was that… if you read the short story, it’s all about the relationship between Boyce and Gray Alys. And Milla, for the first time taking a full producer credit on one of my movies, was very involved in developing the screenplay. As Constantin Werner and I were working on the screenplay and we’d show her the drafts, she’d go “Great action! Great action! Where did the characters go?” This is a movie that’s got action in it, but the heart of the movie — unless we want George to clip us around the back of our heads with a copy of one of his books — lies with Boyce and Gray Alys. We can’t lose these characters, they have to be the heart of this story. And she was 100% correct, as that was the story we were telling. But Milla and Dave only met in Poland when we were shooting the movie, so it’s one thing to have the relationship and chemistry on the page, but is that gonna really happen in real life? That, to me, was the biggest challenge. And the biggest relief for me was on the third day of principal photography. For the first two days we shot Dave’s intro scene, which is like the “western gunslinger with the two-headed snake” sequence. I knew that was gonna be amazing ‘cause I knew Dave would kill that, it looks fabulous and it’s a great piece of the movie. But the third day was just Milla and Dave lying down beside the campfire and talking. That, to me, was a great day, because it was so clear that both of these actors had nailed the chemistry between them. It was wonderful to just have a scene where you’re totally into it, and you’re just listening to people talk, the emotion that’s flowing between them… and then also the things they’re not talking about, ‘cause it’s clear in that scene they’re both holding back some terrible secret.

DK: It’s curious that you mention the characters meeting in that shared space, as I think space always plays a crucial role in your films. We’ve already spoken about Monster Hunter and how you shot those beautiful desert landscapes. With this one, you went back to the controlled environment of a soundstage. Do you find it more freeing to experiment with digital backgrounds, or would you say it’s a more restrictive environment?

PWSA: It’s a much more controlled environment, because you are creating the imagery entirely from scratch. Even the landscapes from Monster Hunter, you go: “Well, this is where we’re based in Namibia. This is where we can physically get to. These are the amazing rocky desert locations. There’s 6 of them — choose 3.” And then once you get there, the physicality of the location, where the sun sets… it kind of leads you down the rail, you start feeling like you’re on tracks. The location not just suggests — it demands to be shot in a certain way. If you want people backlit and looking epic, you gotta shoot that way at that time of day, otherwise it’s all gonna be frontlit and look terrible. Now, when you shoot if entirely generated on a soundstage, you can do whatever you want. If you want the sun to move right here — it can! We built all of the foreground and all of the midground, so anything the actors are interacting with is really there. Essentially, you’re building sets, and you’ve got a background that you’re building in a computer. So it was a much more controlled way of filming, and the process was a lot longer; we started building the backgrounds 9 months before we started shooting them, so that when the actors were on stage and shooting it, they knew exactly what the backgrounds were, so they were in their environments. Which I think made their actor’s job a lot easier, they were very grateful for it. You know, Milla and Dave have both done a lot of heavy visual effects movies, so they’re both used to standing in front of a blue screen and acting to a tennis ball. But if they don’t have to do that, they’re like “Ah!” There’s a great scene where Milla and Dave are standing in front of that big lake of oil, and the oil fields are burning in front of them, and there are all these geysers of flame erupting 100 feet into the air…

DK: Yes!

PWSA: Now, you can tell an actor that’s what it is, and they go “Okay, yeah, I’ve got it”. But then you show them the imagery of them standing there, real-time with the real flames, and I remember Dave going “Ohhh, now I’ve got it!” When you really realize what the environment is, it affects how you play the scene because, as human beings, the location we’re in naturally affects how we move through that space. So it was very useful to them. That’s why we spent 9 months building everything before we started shooting with the actors, and then I spent over a year afterwards finishing the movie off. We worked in the Unreal Engine, which is essentially a videogame tool, for the preproduction and the shoot, but then we imported it into the traditional visual effects pipeline to elevate the Unreal imagery. There’s a lot of stuff that Unreal can’t do particularly well — it doesn’t do flame well, doesn’t do rain, you can’t do crowd scenes — yet some of the imagery that you see in the movie is straight out of Unreal. For instance, when it’s a big close-up of an actor and the background is out of focus, Unreal is fantastic. If you’re demanding more than that, we had to layer traditional visual effects on top of it.

DK: That is fascinating, it’s been such an insightful interview. Last thing I wanted to mention before we wrap up: are you aware that your works have gone far beyond the cult film circles, with film academia showing a strong interest in your aesthetics? How do you feel about sharing that company with other digital filmmakers like Michael Mann, Zack Snyder, and Steven Soderbergh?

PWSA: I’m very honoured! [laughs] You know, I think back to the time when I was a film student, ‘cause I did a Film & Literature degree at Warwick University. Back then, film wasn’t very highly regarded. You couldn’t just do a degree on film, and you certainly couldn’t do anything postgraduate on Film — you had to combine it with Literature. So when I think about the filmmakers I was studying, the people who were considered worthy of study… by the way, a lot of them were Western filmmakers. It was Sam Peckinpah, John Ford… Listen, it’s a thrill. If the 18-year-old version of me could look ahead and imagine that, at some point, people would discuss me in academia — that’d be a real honour. He’d be blown away! He’d have an extra pint of subsidized university lager in celebration!

DK: Thank you very much, it’s been such a pleasure to chat with you. Best of luck with the release!

PWSA: Cheers!

In the Lost Lands opens in UK cinemas this Friday, March 14th.