Building the Perfect Beast for Skylines

How do you make an alien more terrifying, three films in to a series? Especially when the first film revealed that the interstellar invaders were harvesting human brains to run their slave machines? That was the challenge for the makers of Skylines, in cinemas and available on VOD this weekend.

Liam O'Donnell's third film in his alien invasion epic made its Austin debut as part of the Other Worlds Film Festival, and at the time we talked with the writer/director about how the surprise success of the first film, Skyline, had birthed a trilogy (with the potential for more interstellar action to come), and how he had set a new course with every film. Now he discusses building the universe of Skyline, the evolution of the aliens, and the complexity of knees ...

Austin Chronicle: Going in to the series, how much of a sense of the ecology of the Skyline world did you have? Did you have a worldbuilding bible?

Liam O’Donnell: I feel like, for the benefit of my career I should start lying and say, "It all came to me in a moment in the shower." But no, it's all been organic. You're in the dark, and you have a flashlight, and then you start moving through the cave - that's how it works for me. When you get back into additional drafts, additional edits, you can flesh things out and connect them more and more.

So some of it, from the beginning, was coming up with this really cool way to invade, and tailor it towards our protagonists' POV of the city. ... The first thing was really just the lights coming down, and having the aliens win was the thing about the first Skyline that we were really excited about.

We liked the Russian Doll aspect of aliens inside of aliens, and brains inside of aliens. I played a little bit with that in part two, and in part three, even with the new villain, the matriarch, I wanted the faces to be animated in the second one but we didn't have the money to do it, so it was kind of a Power Rangers-y hard plastic face. I thought it would be cool in this one if we opened that and we see that it's armor, that's why it's not moving, and there's a more organic face on the inside of the Harvester aliens.

I got a flash back, because Jeff Nichols was announced for the A Quiet Place sequel, and he was a friend of our executive producer on Skylines, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones. They have a close relationship, he's produced all his movies, and he read an early draft of Skyline, and we had a really good notes session because he's such a smart writer. He was the one that went, "Push that ending. Go farther into it, let's get more on the ship, let's get weird." Of course, that's become a really divisive thing, but I loved it. One of my favorite parts of that film is the ending.

So the biggest challenge with part three is the actual worldbuilding. You can get away with glowy bits of shit to explain things in one and two, but in three we really had to start nailing down things. "This is the core drive, this is what gives them their retooling ability, which is something you saw in part one and part two, and now we're in the guts of this stuff." So you can still have a lot of fun, and it's very flexible, but I felt like part three was the one where I had to do the most worldbuilding. There's not as much misdirect, sleight-of-hand, "Don't look over here, we're going to look this way." We really have to lay the cards on the table.

AC: Creature costumes change in a franchise - like the aliens in Alien had to be different from the one in Alien because the suit was too bulky and expensive to produce in the numbers they needed. Across the three films, what were the biggest aesthetic and practical differences across the Skyline designs?

LO’D: I think the big hero designs across all three films are the spaceships and the Tankers. The Tankers were just a home run. ADI, [Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis] and their team, designed them for us and it was just gorgeous from the first time we saw it. I don't even think we had the tentacles coming out of the claw as something in the script yet, but they just had this enormous claw that looked like it needed to have tentacles come out of it. So some of those things are found through the design process.

With the ships, we wanted to do them almost like a single-celled organism on a massive scale, and I think those have just looked great across all three movies.

The thing that fell off in the third one, and it was about controlling costs, were the drones, the little tentacle squid ones that were used a lot in the first two movies. I felt like I had done everything I wanted to do with them in the second movie. I blew a couple up, we'd hacked them to bits, we'd had a lot of fun with them. So we put the tentacle part of it and put it on to the Matriarch, so we had this new alpha Harvester character who had a little bit of everybody's strength. So that was the new suit that was designed for this one by Allan Holt's company, Movie Monsters, in L.A., and they created this whole monarch chest plate and back to her head, but it's built on top of the fairly similar Harvester design.

The bigger change was with the pilots. We took the pilot suits from Beyond Skyline, we sent them to Kreat FX in Spain, and they refurbished them. They stripped them all down, repainted them, relined them, and brought them back to life, which was great.

The biggest change was another Allan Holt suggestion, which was to update the stilts in the legs. If you ever saw the gag reel in the credits in part two, Jeremy and a lot of the stunt performers were just falling over like crazy, because they were wearing these really springy stilts that only had one point on them. They allowed for some really interesting movement, especially for the more athletic performers, but I tried them on when we first got them, and walked around a gym in Indonesia for about 30 seconds. I was like, "OK, cool, I want to get out of these things right away." I fell over like everyone else does, and it's falling four foot onto your knees. These new ones, it's more like walking on high heels than on a platform, so there's a little bit more pressure on your ankles but it's much more controlled.

Skylines is in theaters and on VOD starting Dec. 18. Read our review here, and part one of our interview here.