I always wanted to do a very fun, adventurous kind of car chase, and the opening of 'Ruin' is essentially like the 'Star Wars' trench run.
Everything is always against you when making a movie, and if you don't have a solid blueprint that the entire team can get behind and understand and then execute, then you're going to be lost on the set.
When you're out there trying to still figure things out, it can just slow things down. So you have to kind of think on your feet, and it makes it kind of fun and exciting and challenging at the same time. But more time is always better for any movie. I think any director would probably tell you that. Any filmmaker, really.
Movies are made in the scriptwriting process and prepping and preparations for the shooting process.
We storyboard a lot, but I love when we are just going in there and just, almost on the fly, making stuff and discovering moments. It's just fantastic, where you can really go in there and be creative and everything.
The script is so key to making a good movie. But everything is against you when you're making a movie: the logistics of putting a crew out where you need to go, whether the light is fading; if the weather's not right, something's wrong.
My job is to kind of nudge them. Who said it, where, like, '90% of the job is casting,' so all I do is try to come to set and focus on getting all the best shots to cover the story; that's really it.
When you keep things responsible and manageable, you can make some interesting movies that you maybe couldn't make otherwise.
I always knew the script was important, but I didn't realize how important until you get out there and just deal with the issues of putting a movie together. It's amazing that anything works, to be totally honest.
I had this project called 'Ruin' in my head for six years or so. This really big, really ambitious sci-fi thing. It's kind of my 'Star Wars'. I'm trying to achieve what 'Star Wars' did for me as a kid.
My background is in VFX, and I know from experience that the best VFX are when you have something real in the frame that you can either extend or work off of. It was really important to get as much as possible in camera, for real.