Paul W.S. Anderson, master of the ridiculously violent, has been working on his George R.R. Martin adaptation In the Lost Lands for seven years by his estimation. “It’s been a labor of love,” he says, and he means it in more ways than one. The project came to him via his wife and longtime collaborator, Milla Jovovich, who was taken with the idea of playing the story’s key protagonist, a powerful and persecuted witch named Gray Alys condemned to grant any wish that’s asked of her. The film, based on a Martin short story (first published in the 1982 anthology Amazons II, later republished in Dreamsongs Volume I), takes place in a postapocalyptic wasteland where the medieval collides with the modern and the mythical: There are retro crusader knights with sunglasses and sniper rifles; giant skeleton demons; abandoned reactors and factories repurposed into places of worship; rivers filled with skulls and fields spurting fire. Through this gorgeously devastated landscape, Gray Alys travels with Boyce (Dave Bautista), a modern-day cowboy who guides her on a quest to find and capture a werewolf. Anderson isn’t a big studio guy. Even when his films have taken place in fantastical places — such as the postapocalyptic Resident Evil series or the 2021 production Monster Hunter, which occurs in an alternate dimension — he’s tried to find locations from which he could build out these worlds. But for the crazy setting of In the Lost Lands, he and his team had to devise an entirely new system of working, utilizing tech that didn’t even exist when they first started planning the movie.
How did you wind up adapting a George R.R. Martin short story?
The inception of the film was Milla. I’m a big fan of Game of Thrones, and House of the Dragon also, but Milla is the avid consumer of fantasy and myth in our household. She’s read Lord of the Rings probably 50 times. At a startlingly young age, she’d read all the Greek myths. And she’s a huge, huge fan of George’s. She was approached by Constantin Werner, our co-producer and writer, who had these three George R.R. Martin stories under option. Milla felt it was amazing, for multiple reasons. Firstly, it’s George and he writes the best dark characters and has the best plot twists. And the other is that she was excited to play a magical creature. Gray Alys is a witch, and while Milla’s played a lot of extraordinary people in her movie career, a lot of them are manmade. (In The Fifth Element, she’s been created in a machine. Resident Evil, she’s a product of cloning and the T-virus.) She’s never actually played a magical sorceress, a character that potentially has been alive for hundreds of years, who is cursed to grant people wishes, knowing that those wishes won’t really deliver what people want. And the loneliness that that must lead to, knowing that you can’t really get close to anybody, because everybody that you get close to is doomed.
So Milla was very involved in the development of the screenplay. It’s actually the first time she’s taken a full producing credit on any of our films. Constantin and I would deliver a draft, and she’d clip us over the back of the head with it and go, “Too much action! Where’d the characters go? Where’s Boyce and Alys?” So we were trying to get that balance correct. Then we would give it to George and get his notes on it, because it was very important to all of us to really deliver for him. It’s the first movie he’s had made since Nightflyers back in the ’80s.
What was it like dealing with George?
It was a little intimidating, because he’s George R.R. Martin, and also, he’s got this persona — he’s like a wizard when he comes to visit you. I met George physically for the first time when I got him into the cutting room while we were making Monster Hunter. It was an early cut, and I wanted him to see how I worked. So we sat and watched a bunch of Monster Hunter and went for dinner afterwards. “What does George R.R. Martin drink when he goes for dinner?” He drank a smoky old-fashioned, which is an old-fashioned with a lid on it, so when you take it off, it’s got all this smoke spilling out of it, which seemed suitably Westeros and operatic.
We had a really creative interactive relationship, which culminated in me flying to Santa Fe to show him the finished movie. He’s got his own theater there, the Jean Cocteau, a nice little art-house theater that he saved. People forget that George started working in film and television. He was the showrunner on Beauty and the Beast with my mate Ron Perlman from Monster Hunter. A lot of authors don’t want to know anything about the nuts and bolts and the complexity and the difficulty of the film and television process. But George is very experienced in that world.
So anyway, I went to Santa Fe to show him the movie, and I got to say it’s the most nervous I’ve ever been in a movie theater. As you know, I’ve had a lot of test screenings, and some have been very stressful. But sitting there with George, showing him the finished film, wondering, Is he going to like it? I was tense, man, my stomach was in knots. And then at the end of the movie, the lights come up and George turns to me … and he loved it. I think it was my best moment in a movie theater ever.
What was the biggest note he gave you during the writing process?
I think it was really getting the correct balance between the magic and the more physical. He felt sometimes the magical powers of Gray Alys weren’t strong enough, that she was becoming too much of an action hero and that we had maybe lost that. To triumph at the end of the movie, she really needed to use her powers. Milla was also very keen on that: “Look, I’ve played a lot of badasses, and I can’t win by flipping in the air and kicking things. We’re making a fantasy movie.” When I did my first costume character design, we drew Milla’s character, and she was wearing tight leather and straps, and she had some weapons and her hair tied back. Milla took one look at that and went, “No! No, no, no, no, no. That’s not going to happen. I’m an oracle. That’s not how oracles dress. It should all be diaphanous, it should be flowing.” And that’s not how I had pictured the character at all! But the more she talked about it, I realized she was right. Then the challenge was, well, how do you make that look good in action scenes? We designed a costume that flowed so well that when she’s sliding across the floor, everything billows out behind her. It’s like Greek myth meets Batman’s cape.
I was reminded of Maleficent in the original Sleeping Beauty, with the cape always blowing like a storm around her.
It’s got a life of its own. And we had lots of people with wind machines and little hair dryers off-camera giving it this diaphanous feel. Because when we talk about Greek myth and oracles, we’re talking about illustrations in books and classical statues. But on film, when you stand there, it just hangs, so you’ve got to have constant motion and constant wind.
I think you are modern cinema’s foremost wife guy.
I don’t know. I think Charles Bronson beat me! I think he made a lot more movies with Jill Ireland than I made with Milla. Maybe I’ll catch up at some point.
I know you love shooting in real, physical spaces. Visually speaking, In the Lost Lands is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It looks incredible, but clearly this is not a place that exists anywhere. How did you go about creating this fantastical world?
George’s story felt like a fairy tale, but more like the original ones — like the original Hans Christian Andersen one where the Little Mermaid dies at the end. Well, how do I evoke this dark, adult fairy tale? I can’t just go to an abandoned cement factory and shoot there again, because that doesn’t feel very fairy tale to me. Also, I was very aware that people were very familiar with Westeros and George’s work. We can’t go to Ireland and shoot in some forests or Iceland, because they’ve done that already. So, having been all over the world and shot on real locations, I said, “Let’s just create a brand-new world.” But I didn’t want to just shoot against a blue screen and then make it all up in postproduction. We started nine months before we started shooting, designing, and building the Lost Lands in the Unreal Engine, which is a video-gaming engine.
Then we developed this technology that’s never really been used before, which is where we slave the real camera to the digital camera, so that when the real camera panned around the set, the digital camera would pan around the virtual set, allowing us to have live-action compositing. This meant that the actors and the crew could see the world; it was there for real, even though it was on a monitor. This really helped the actors immerse themselves. And from a cinematography point of view, it meant that if in the world, the sun was ten degrees off the horizon line, the director of photography would know, “Okay. I’ve got to stick my light ten degrees off the studio floor,” which would tie the two worlds together. Then, in postproduction, we took the footage we created using Unreal, imported it into a traditional visual-effects pipeline, and finished it off. But I’ve never shot anything like this before. These guys were still writing the code to slave the virtual camera and the real camera together the day before we started shooting, so everyone was going, “I hope this works.”
You also often use the physical features of a location to inform the way your action scenes develop. How do you do that in this case, when you have a location that doesn’t really exist?
I tried to do it in my traditional way, where the characters interact with and are informed by the spaces, and the spaces themselves become a character in the movie. But it was a lot more work to create them beforehand. That’s why I haven’t made a movie in three or four years. On Dave’s introductory action scene, for example, we talked a lot about how George’s story had reminded me of spaghetti westerns. Two characters who go on a mission and don’t necessarily trust one another and maybe are constantly betraying one another. In those movies, a lot is done through looks and glances. That’s Two Mules for Sister Sara. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. For a Few Dollars More. So obviously there were certain western tropes that we wanted to pay homage to. One was the introduction of Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, where he raises his hat brim. That’s how we wanted to introduce Dave. It was all about that band of light over his eyes and keeping him in silhouette. “How are we going to get him in silhouette, though?” “Well, we’re going to have a collapsed building above him, and that’s going to have a shadow. He’s going to be on the very edge of the shadow. He just steps into darkness so that it’s a very bright background behind him.” Such things would normally suggest themselves to you, if you just had an underpass in the middle of nowhere. Here, it all had to be constructed and thought about in advance.
We all know the classic B-movie bait and switch. You get a poster with all these amazing things in it, and then you watch the movie and it’s just six people running around a house. One thing I appreciate about your movies is that you always deliver on the sizzle. When we see the map of the Lost Lands, and we see that there’s a place called Skull River, we know we’re going to see a river full of skulls, and it’s going to look awesome.
The journey better be worth it, and not just because of the destination. Creating whatever environments we really wanted was a great freedom, but also a great amount of pressure because nothing’s being dictated to you. It’s not like you’re in Cape Town in South Africa and they go, “Well, these are the locations. Here’s ten, pick three.” It’s only bound by your imagination. One of the things I’m really excited about is if you fast-forward, the whole movie changes color as you go through it. You would think from the opening, Oh. It’s going to be one of those monochromatic movies where it’s all brown and gray. But then, as they go on their journey, all the blues start coming in, and all the reds, and the greens. You really do go on a journey visually as well as geographically.
You mentioned Sergio Leone movies and other westerns. To what extent do you start off with visual inspirations? Are you giving your team paintings or other references to look at?
Absolutely. A year before we even started building these landscapes, I was exchanging a wide array of images from graphic novels and paintings with visual-effects supervisor Dennis Berardi and his team. We kept returning to, “This is the graphic novel that Hieronymus Bosch never did.” What I love about Bosch’s work is there’s so much detail and texture in it. And with Lost Lands, if you can stop the frames in Skull River or the Fire Fields and look around, there’s a lot of detail in there, just like there is in a Bosch painting. For example, in the city under the mountain, we’re in the mines and we’re in the palace and we’re in Gray Alys’s tower — because she’s a witch, and witches should live in towers. But where does the food come from? And if you pause the aerial shots of that big hole in the ground, you’ll see off to the edges, there’s all the fields where they grow the food. It was a pleasure to work with these artists who built out the world beyond what I had originally imagined, and beyond the dictates of the story. That’s what I loved about movies when I was younger. They evoked a world where you could imagine more of it.
All your films, I find, are very fast. And this one is, too. Was there ever a temptation, or even a note, to make it more expansive, to make it longer — to spend more time building out this world or giving us longer action sequences?
We built it out so much from the short story already. In the original, they went on a mission, but the mission was over pretty quickly. I’ve discussed this with George as well. His problem with a lot of adaptations — and I’m not saying necessarily of his work — is that it’s very hard to take 500 pages or six books and deliver one satisfying movie, no matter how long that movie is. That’s why short stories are great to adapt. Still, in my mind, the best Stephen King adaptation is Shawshank Redemption. What’s good about George’s short story is that it was lean, and it had a great twist, which then suggested the movie had to have a certain pace to it. You don’t want the audience to forget what the movie is about.
In previous interviews, I’ve asked you about the secrets to staging certain types of action scenes. I’ve asked you about the secret to a good gunfight, and the secret to a good beheading, and the secret to a good explosion, and so forth. I’m going to ask you a couple more. First: What’s the secret to a good sword fight?
Not poking people’s eyes out, obviously! We don’t really have that many swords in Lost Lands. We do have lots of bladed weapons. It’s become a signature in my movies that Milla carries two weapons. It’s two pistols, two machine guns, two swords. In Resident Evil: Afterlife, she had that ninja getup, very samurai-inspired. And then it started with the swords, and then the shotguns on her back as well. We’ve made quite a few movies together, and it gets harder and harder to find that. In Resident Evil 3, she had the kukris, which I was pleased about, because no one really uses those. So, I was thinking, Wow, what’s she going to have here? And I was very pleased about the scythes, because they’re originally for cutting wheat, so it’s agricultural, but when you think about scythes, you think about the Grim Reaper.
But a good sword fight? I think, going back to Three Musketeers, it’s really not so much about the clashing of swords and the choreography for me, just like a gunfight is not really about the bam bam bam. It’s about the lead-up and it’s about the attitude. I remember in Three Musketeers, when Mads Mikkelsen was facing off against D’Artagnan on the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral. Logan Lerman was smaller than him, so Mads was more physically intimidating. Mads was like, “I just don’t want to be the bad guy.” And I’m like, “Mads, but you are the bad guy.” And he said, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But how am I going to be cool?” Mads has very good instincts. And it started me thinking about spaghetti western gunfights, and I said, “Well, why don’t you just lower your sword? Don’t intimidate him.” Because in the original script, he was on a high guard, and he was physically intimidating. But lowering your sword, it’s like when a boxer just lowers his gloves. Like, “Come on. Hit me.” It said so much about the attitude of Mads’s character. It was his version of Neo doing that in The Matrix. And it was infuriating for Logan Lerman’s character. So it’s really all about the attitude.
How about the secret to good telepathic action, where someone can make things move with their mind? You did that in some of the Resident Evil films, and you do it in Lost Lands as well.
I think it’s important to have physical interaction between your mental powers and the world around you. That’s something that I learned from manga. If you look at Akira, these characters all have immense mental powers. And if somebody is standing on the other side of the room, they could fling that person against the wall or make them explode. But in really great Manga, what they do is, I don’t just look at the other person and they get flung. It’s boring. I look at them, and then the floor between me and them explodes, and you see a physical manifestation of the mental powers. Then whatever power is tearing up the floor hits that person and then flings them against the wall.
I think that’s always been my approach to psychic powers: to have some physical manifestation of it. I almost forgot that on Lost Lands, and Milla had to remind me. In her tower, there’s a moment where she has a vision of the werewolf. We’re talking about it beforehand and Milla’s like, “Yeah. I’m going to have the vision while I’m levitating and I’m going to be hanging in the air.” And I’m like, “You’re levitating?” “Oh, yeah. When I have the vision, I’m levitating, like it says in the script.” It never said anything about levitating in the script! I’d made it easy on myself. Our shooting day was going to be: She’s going to be sitting in her chair and close her eyes and have a vision. I’d forgotten all about my theory. So I didn’t contradict Milla, obviously. And then we had to bring in a rig and lift her up. Thank goodness, though, because the fact that she’s levitating and then all the papers in the room are also rising up around her, visually, I think it’s magnificent.
What’s the secret to a good twist?
You work with George R.R. Martin! That made it easy. I read that short story, and at the end I’m like, “If we can pull this off, if we can get to the end of the movie and people haven’t seen that coming, that’s great. That’s a real water-cooler moment.” Twists are hard. Talk to M. Night about that. For every good twist, there’s five bad ones.
Sometimes people think a twist has to be a total surprise and not at all hinted at beforehand. But I find the best twists are ones where there’s a voice in the back of my head noticing something, but it isn’t quite able to consciously articulate it — and then the twist comes, and suddenly everything locks into place.
Yeah. We lay a lot of ground for the twist as well. When you finally realize what it is, and you look back at the movie … Hopefully, if you watch the movie a second time, you see it in a whole different way.
Did you watch the recent Resident Evil reboot?
I didn’t watch it. I didn’t read the screenplay. I did receive an executive producer’s check. Thank you very much. My favorite kind of producing!
When I interviewed you about Monster Hunter, it was still at the height of the pandemic, and the film’s release was quite limited. Were you happy with the response to it?
It made a ton of money. Obviously, it was crushing that I’d made what I felt was a really cinematic movie that should be appreciated in cinemas, and then all the cinemas were closed. But the audience it eventually got in all of the ancillaries was pretty phenomenal. It’s got a big, big audience. So on some level it was a disappointment, but then it’s always nice that people have seen it and love it. That’s been a feature in my career. Sometimes I’ve had great success opening weekend, and sometimes it’s taken a while. I was just thinking about it in the shower this morning. I still remember the headline on the Hollywood Reporter when Event Horizon was released. It was “Non-Event Horizon.” Like, “Argh!” It still hurts! But I’ll take the audience wherever it comes — whether it’s in cinemas, whether it’s on video, on demand, whether it’s ten years after the fact, or whether it’s on Friday night.