In 2010, the world was introduced toGareth Edwards, a first-time feature director who managed to make a monster movie on a reported $500,000 budget courtesy of his ability to craft his own visual effects. AfterMonsters, Edwards was scooped up by the studio system and has since delivered three big budget stunners -Godzilla,Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, andThe Creator. Then there’sWes Ballwho delivered an animated short film calledRuinthat was so impressive, he got the opportunity to immediately veer into studio-level franchise filmmaking. Ball kicked off his feature filmmaking career with theMaze Runnertrilogy, a series that deserved even more credit than it got from start to finish, and just recently wowed moviegoers with a top tier continuation of thePlanet of the Apesfranchise,Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. What filmmaker will take that path next? The newV/H/Smovie,V/H/S/Beyond,might have the answer.
On October 4th, or on September 20th for those attending Fantastic Fest, we’ll get to see one of the most ambitiousV/H/Ssegments yet, because directorJustin Martinezhas put the found footage POV in the hands of skydivers. Even better? He’s put the found footage POV in the hands of skydivers …being attacked by aliens.
From Radio Silence to Solo Director
Martinez directed a ‘V/H/S’ segment with Tyler Gillett & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, but now he goes solo on ‘V/H/S/Beyond.’
Martinez has contributed to theV/H/Sfranchise for quite some time. He’s been doing visual effects work on the series since 2021’sV/H/S/94,and he also directed a segment in the very firstV/H/Smovie as part of the filmmaking collective,Radio Silence. WhileTyler Gillett,Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, andChad Villellahave gone on to makeReady or Not,Scream 2022,Scream VIand, most recently,Abigail, Martinez could be gearing up for his very own moment via hisV/H/S/Beyondsegment, “Live and Let Dive.”
While spending time on the California-based set of the movie, Martinez took a brief break from filming to recap his journey with theV/H/Sfranchise:
“I’ve been doing visual effects with these guys since94, and I was obviously a director on the firstV/H/S. Every year I was like, ‘I want to direct one, I want to direct one,’ and I kept on it. Finally, one day, [producer] Josh [Goldbloom] called me, and he said, ‘I think we got a newV/H/Sgoing and we’d love to attempt to get you to direct one of the segments.’”
It probably goes without saying, but Martinez jumped at the opportunity.
When Goldbloom tasked Martinez with presenting some short form story ideas, Martinez turned to writerBen Turner. “I sat down and started thinking of ideas and I just felt like, you know what? I want to write this with someone.” Martinez continued, “I’ve wanted to write something with Ben for so long, and so I called him up, and he was available. We came up with a really awesome idea that we were gonna shoot, totally different from this, and it ended up not being the project.”
Turns out, that particular idea not panning out was the best thing that could have happened.
What If Skydivers Were Attacked By Aliens Mid-Jump?
“We were blown away with how crazy this movie could be.”
Martinez had been carrying around a genius found footage idea for over a decade. He explained:
“I love found footage and I’m always thinking, ‘What’s fun for found footage? What hasn’t been done?’ This is like 10 years ago, maybe even longer. I was actually still with Radio Silence at the time, and I was just like, ‘Man, it’d be so fun to do a found footage skydiving thing. That would be so rad.’ We never did it, and when this came around, I was trying to figure out ideas, and I was like, ‘Maybe that skydiver thing.’I actually watched a video of a guy who survived a fall and I was like, ‘This is already terrifying.’Seeing him spin in the cables, and he reaches the ground and hits the ground pretty hard, and it’s just like, ‘Oh, did he just die?’ And then you hear him trying to breathe, and, ‘Oh, he survived!’ It’s just tense, you know? The entire time I was like, ‘I’m gonna put an alien that!’ [Laughs]”
A brilliant idea, yes, but given theV/H/Sfranchise is known for economical filmmaking, it’s probably no surprise that the first question Martinez was hit with was, “Is this even possible?”
“They heard about the skydiver idea I had and they were like, ‘Whoa, can you do that?’Jaws were dropping thinking, ‘Whoa, we can do a plane crash and an actual skydive? That would be crazy.’So Josh went down the path of, ‘Can we produce this?’ Every time he came back, it was like, ‘Oh, yeah! We can do this. I think we can do this. We can figure this out.’ I was like, ‘I can fill in the gaps with CGI. We’ll do it.’ So Ben and I sat down and we wrote the first draft of it, and we were blown away with how crazy this movie could be.”
“This Is an Extremely Expensive Movie If it Was Done by Someone Else”
Martinez’s visual effects skills are what made “Live and Let Dive” possible.
One ‘V/H/S/Beyond’ Segment Rocks a Brilliant Concept — And We Know What It Is [Exclusive]
The upcoming installment of the long-running horror anthology series includes segments from Kate Siegel, Justin Long, and more.
A crazy found footage horror movie concept is a beautiful thing, but it hinges on having the right filmmaker to execute it. Fortunately forV/H/S/Beyond, “Live and Let Dive” and Martinez were the perfect pairing. Martinez himself even knew it:
“I actually think this is an extremely expensive movie if it was done by someone else. That’s just honest. Josh, when he brought me on and they wanted to do the skydiving project, he said,‘You’re the only one who could do this.’That’s from his mouth. And I was like, ‘Probably.’ [Laughs]”
A limited perspective, yes, but after spending a couple of days watching Martinez work on the film, I’m inclined to agree.
For an 18-minute piece, “Live and Let Dive” came with a wealth of filmmaking challenges. Martinez would have to start his story in the air, showing a plane breaking apart after being attacked by aliens and his main characters parachuting (or free-falling) to the ground, and that’s only the first half of the movie.
“Initially I thought that falling through the sky and getting all that stuff would be hard, and then we started figuring out, ‘Oh, we can get a real skydiver to do a bunch of that.’ And then I was like, okay, the next hardest thing is the plane has to fall apart. Our guy has to fall out of it. We’re not gonna shoot that for real, you know? There’s debris, they hit something, there’s this crazy chaos. So that started to hurt my brain to figure out, ‘Can I do this?’”
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The actor who played the Predator in 2022’s ‘Prey’ has also been added to the cast.
Martinez did indeed pull it off by creating a 3D model of his plane. He continued:
“I work in a program for this kind of stuff, for destruction, called Houdini. That test entailed rigging a CGI airplane to be able to be broken into pieces. And, at that point, you’re just sort of simulating it. You run it, you ram it into something and you just see what you get. It’s almost like crashing a real vehicle into something to see what happens.I probably spent like three or four weeks just crashing the plane into things to see how it broke and to get it right.It was a long process to watch simulations, but when I had the one, I was like, ‘That’s the one. That’s the break-apart I want in the way it kind of spun around.’”
Finding the right simulation was a feat in and of itself, but Martinez’s work on that particular moment of the film couldn’t end there. This is a found footage story. Camera placement (and purpose) is of the utmost importance, and Martinez opted to give himself a little bonus challenge while figuring that out. He decided to present “Live and Let Dive” in a single shot from a single point-of-view. “I want it to play as one shot. I don’t want to cut. I’m not cutting to other cameras. I’m not doing any other camera.I’m doing one shot for this whole movie.” He added:
“At the end of the day, if everyone watches this from the beginning and feels like they just watched one long shot and it was all this action that they saw — at one point, you know, he survives and I’m like, ‘If I am sitting in an audience and everyone starts cheering after he hits the ground, I’ll be happy because that’s only the middle of the project!”
You’ve Never Seen Aliens Like These
“I’m not a guy who puts a guy in a suit in and does all those running shots.”
The second half of “Live and Let Dive” presents a whole new set of challenges. While Martinez didn’t want to go into too much detail regarding his aliens, he did offer some insight into how he settled on the right design. “I actually asked a lot of people, ‘What do you think of? What are features of an alien in your mind?’ And I sort of pieced that together and I said, ‘Okay,now I’m going to find a way to twist it.’”
Martinez made due on that promise to “twist” how most picture an alien. Again, we don’t want to spoil the details just yet, but I’ll assure you, you’ve never seen anything quite like what Martinez whipped up here. Not only is the end product downright wild looking and deeply chilling, but it also feels uniquely Martinez.
“I’m not a guy who puts a guy in a suit in and does all those running shots, so I was like, ‘I’ll have to animate feet,’ and it just wasn’t working. So I’ve landed on something that moves around on two feet really fast. Think maybe a dinosaur, you know? Like a velociraptor. It’s not a velociraptor, but it can move in that speed, but it’s an alien.”
Eager to hear even more about the making ofV/H/S/Beyond’s “Live and Let Dive?” Stay tuned! Not only will we have additional material to share from my set visit, but we’ll also have interviews with Martinez and the entireV/H/S/Beyondfilmmaking team from Fantastic Fest 2024 for you very soon.
