Elevation | Director George Nolfi on monster metaphors, original scripts and writing Star Wars

Ahead of Elevation’s UK release, we talk to George Nolfi about monsters, the state of original screenwriting, and his plans for Star Wars.

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Since his career began over two decades ago, writer-director George Nolfi has brought a level of thoughtfulness to his genre movies. In The Adjustment Bureau, his 2011 directorial debut, he adapted a Philip K Dick short story as a philosophical sci-fi romance starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt – something that might have wrong-footed audiences expecting an action thriller in the vein of earlier adaptations of Dick’s other work, most obviously the ultra-violent blockbuster, Total Recall.

Prior to that, Nolfi’s spec script, Honor Among Thieves, was bought up and re-christened as Ocean’s Twelve (2004) – director Steven Soderbergh’s smart, sparky all-star heist comedy. Nolfi also lent his writing talent to The Bourne Supremacy (albeit uncredited) and The Bourne Ultimatum (credited).

On paper, Nolfi’s latest film, Elevation, is a familiar-sounding monster B-movie. Our planet has become infested with gigantic, deadly creatures which kill humans on sight. Seemingly indestructible, their only weakness appears to be their inability to travel more than 8,000 feet above sea level. Realising this, humanity’s remaining survivors now live in small mountaintop communities in places like Front Range, Colorado. 

What distinguishes Elevation, however, is the quality of its characters and the actors that play them (Anthony Mackie, Morena Baccarin, Maddie Hasson), and the way the story (written by John Glenn, Jacob Roman and Kenny Ryan) emphasises human ingenuity rather than firepower or brute strength. True to form, Nolfi – who studied political philosophy before breaking through as a screenwriter – sees his film’s indestructible monsters as a metaphor for human-made catastrophes, and how our scientific curiosity is both our Achilles heel and our potential salvation.

As Elevation makes its streaming debut on Amazon Prime UK this week (the 8th February to be precise), here’s what George Nolfi has to say about monsters as metaphor, the state of original screenwriting, and a small Star Wars writing assignment he recently signed up for…

As well as being a monster movie, Elevation is a really good character piece. It’s about them using their intelligence and science to survive, rather than brute strength, which I appreciated. I wonder if that’s something that attracted you to the story. 

Yeah, definitely. As well as thematically, [I was drawn to] the notion that human beings can create their own destruction: metaphorically, all the stuff we do to the world can come back and haunt us, whether it’s nuclear weapons or climate change or AI. 

I viewed the monsters as… [they represent] what we have done to ourselves, and that’s a product of our mind. And yet, our minds are the only way to combat the thing that we’ve created. I found that sort of oxymoronic or dualistic notion to be interesting. 

Then the characters I felt were interesting, distinct people. It was interesting to me that you have one character [Anthony Mackie’s Will] that’s just completely driven by the desire to save his son at all costs. He actually risks the people who are with him – he makes every decision to save his son. 

Then there’s another character [Morena Baccarin’s Nina] who’s got a big secret, and is obviously the person whose study is what’s going to help us solve the problem. I found Katie [Maddie Hasson] interesting as well. You know, she’s a person who was sort of stuck up there: what does that mean to be socially isolated? Because part of the filmic sort of look, and the environment of their refuge, was to create the notion of almost a Garden of Eden. It’s incredible looking up there. I mean, in real life: the air is fresh and it’s beautiful. So they have everything they need, but they don’t have civilisation. That’s a little long and rambling, sorry!

That makes perfect sense. It’s interesting, because with the Reapers, you don’t find out specifically what their motivation is for wiping out 95% of humanity. Did you and your writers come up with a motivation behind the scenes? One that’s not necessarily revealed to us?

There is an answer. We made a conscious choice to leave that as a question. I don’t know if there’ll be an Elevation 2 or not, but if there is, there’s definitely an answer, and it has to do with the last shot of the movie. 

I was talking to [producer] Brad Fuller, the other day, and he was talking about the shoot in Colorado, and how there hadn’t been a film shot there in years. What was the thinking behind that location choice?

I have a young child, and a lot of movies of this sort would be filmed in Eastern Europe, or you’d just find the lowest possible price and location for the crew. But what I fell in love with when I read the early versions of the script was that it’s very geography-centred. Basically, the western part of the United States, the Rocky Mountains and their offshoots, is the only place you can get above 8,000 feet. So no one would have survived on the East Coast. 

It just felt to me like if we could put that on film, that that would be almost a character in the film itself, especially because nobody had shot there. And when I was considering doing the movie, I just went out by myself and and drove around from Denver and up into the mountains, and I was like, ‘I just haven’t seen this environment’, you know? You have to go back 20, 30 years. 

There are a few movies that were shot in Colorado in the last 20 years that are larger, like The Hateful Eight, but they’re not that sort of classic Rocky Mountain look. And it also laid itself out perfectly with the story, which is to say, you have urban dwellers who are stuck in an urban environment. The monsters come, they’re near the mountains. They’re just trying to get out of the city. And they go up into the mountains, and then you literally have sight lines from certain places up in those mountains, at the Great Plains. So it just worked for me. 

And on a personal level, being able to fly home on weekends: I can’t do that if I’m in, you know, wherever.

Are there specific advantages in shooting on location rather than using green screen or the volume, do you think? Do you think audiences have kind of grown a little weary of over-reliance on those sorts of techniques?

I think so. I mean, there’s only so many tools you have as the director to bring the story to life. With the story and the dialogue and the characters, you can make changes a little bit in there. But the real tools that a director has are performance, and the look that you create. And one of the major aspects of the look that you create is being on location. Because when you’re on location, first of all, it looks more real than what gets created in the computer. And secondly, the kinds of movements that the camera can do and the actors can do are different. You can move through spaces if you’re in a real space – and that’s very hard to do, if you’re trying to do that on the volume. It’s basically impossible to do it if you’re following somebody for a long time.

Being in an actual location helps you think about, ‘Well, what would you really do if you were here? What would the monster do?’ 

If the monster can travel, 40 miles an hour or something, how quickly could it get up that hill? We tried to adhere to some notion of reality. There’s a scene that takes place in roughly real time on a ski hill. And I was literally out there measuring distances and going, ‘Okay, that’s three quarters of a mile away. It’s uphill…’ that kind of thing.

How hands-on were you with the creature design?

Well, we had an awesome visual effects supervisor. Basically, I start with a notion. The notion was, I wanted to combine a predator with an insect. And then obviously, there’s hundreds and hundreds of B-movies with creatures that have been developed over the years. So you’re never going to get something that’s completely, ‘I’ve never seen that’, or at least, you’re not going to get that at the same time as something that’s viscerally scary to a human being. So ‘predator crossed with insect’ – those are two things that humans are naturally afraid of. Then you just start seeing designs and saying, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ 

A lot of it is how it moves, too. I think they did a really tremendous job with the way that it moves. It looks like there was a logic to it and it was real.

Winding the clock right the way back: you broke into the film business with a spec script. I think it was The Pathfinder. What led you to write that, and how hard was it to break in and find a home for that script?

I was actually living in England. I went to study political philosophy at Oxford, and I started writing scripts. I didn’t come from a family that had anything to do with film. I didn’t know much about it, and it was very hard at that point to even get a script to read as an example. I mean, there was an internet, but it wasn’t something that the public was using all the time. 

I had to go to libraries in the United States, and only a few had film departments, like NYU. I’d read a script, like Witness, or Lethal Weapon. And so I actually wrote a script while I was at Oxford. I got an agent, and then that script didn’t sell. Then my agent was like, ‘You have to move to Los Angeles,’ which you probably wouldn’t need to do today. 

So I ultimately moved to Los Angeles, and then I wrote a second one, which was Pathfinder. And I mean, definitely I was lucky. I was still fairly young, and it sold in a bidding war with several studios that were interested in it. So at that point, that meant that much of the town had read the script, or at least the development executives in town had read the script. And so that opened the door to a career. 

It’s always been really hard to break into the film business – especially in things like writing, directing, acting, producing, because there’s no path. You can’t find your way to working on a set and then get your hours for union and so forth. But in terms of film as opposed to television, it’s become near impossible. I mean, I don’t know how people even do it today, because there is no spec market, effectively. You can’t sell spec unless you have major actors attached, or somehow you’re connected to a comic book that blew up that you have the rights to. It’s just really, really difficult. So my heart goes out to people who are trying to get noticed today. Television is a different story – I’m not super knowledgeable about that. 

I was going to ask a little bit about that. Elevation is an original film. You’ve mostly made original films, rather than big franchises and things like that. So do you feel like there’s an appetite for originality in Hollywood still? 

I think it’s really, really hard. I have been driven by a desire to try new things. One of the most important things in terms of, am I going to direct something or not is, will it be a new experience? Am I trying something new? But I would say, 90 to 95 percent of the actual money to make movies and market them is spent on things that are already brands. And whether that’s a sequel, which came from something original… I mean, Fast And The Furious is a multi-billion-dollar franchise that came from a B-movie, basically, that the studios don’t make anymore, right? 

Obviously, the streamers have a very different economic model, because they don’t have to market their movies in the same way. If Netflix makes a movie, they can just say, ‘Oh, this came out well, and they can put it in front of 100 million subscribers on their home screen.’ And so that’s a big advantage. 

But obviously, I’m writing a Star Wars [film] next. So I do understand where the film industry is going, but I always, if something interesting comes along that is original, my heart is sort of drawn to that. 

Obviously, there’s only so much you can say about Star Wars, because you probably signed a million NDAs. But what do you think you can bring of yourself to such an established franchise?

The way I approach it is, you look at what’s come before you, you look at the broad ideas of what they want to do. Meaning: Lucasfilm, Disney, Sharmeen [Obaid-Chinoy], the director, and then you do what a writer does, and try to try and put beats of a story together. Try and imagine characters, and then you present that with an understanding that it needs to honour, obviously, a long, incredible tradition. 

I mean, I’m about the millionth person to say it, but I would not be doing what I’m doing if it weren’t for the first, 1977 Star Wars. It blew my mind as a six year-old. So I feel incredibly honored and lucky to be a part of that, even in this – so far – small way.

I think you come up with ideas and then naturally, that’s bringing a part of yourself to it. You know, I find this character interesting. I find this theme interesting, and as long as you’re placing it within the rules of the universe and the basic notions of what the story is about, which, obviously I can’t go into too much detail on, but there’s a little bit public about it.

I mean, I’ve just started here, but I’ve found so far that [Lucasfilm is] super open to, ‘Well, what’s going to work as a story that’s going to tie back to what we had? What’s going to send us somewhere interesting to go in the future?’ 

So it’s a long way of saying, you bring yourself to the ideas you present.

You’ve studied philosophy and politics. I guess you can’t help but bring that to your work as well, as you did in your earlier scripts.

Yeah. And if you think about George Lucas, the six movies that he did, and the universe that he created, it’s actually very steeped in broad notions of politics, right? It’s not talking about today, per se, but there’s the Empire’s Nazism slash Roman Empire. The democracy of the Roman Empire collapsing and becoming an empire and the perennial story of human beings organising themselves and against chaos, and then the tools that help human societies tamp down on chaos becomes oppression. 

So that is really very core to what I think George Lucas was trying to talk about. And one of the wonderful things about science fiction and Star Wars – which is more almost science fantasy or space opera, but alternate worlds – is that you can raise the deepest issues without it feeling like a philosophy class, or a political science class, or something I read in the newspaper today. There’s nothing about Star Wars that should be, ‘I read this in the newspaper, what they’re talking about.’ 

Yet it can be about real things, deep things.

Absolutely. I’m nearly out of time, sadly. But I just want to quickly ask, how do you feel about The Adjustment Bureau almost 15 years on – do you feel like that’s endured? 

Yeah, I’m really happy to say. Probably once every couple months, somebody sends me an article from some publication saying, ‘Top 10 films that you didn’t realise came out in the [2010s]’ or whatever. When people ask me what I’ve done in an airport or whatever, and I’ll mention a couple things, I’d say one out of every four or five people really will say, ‘I love that movie. That’s one of my favourite movies.’ 

So there’s obviously people that I think expected like an action thriller, because it was Matt Damon and I had just done The Bourne Ultimatum. But for people who take it for what it is, which is a philosophy-infused, romantic story, then it’s really, definitely endured, and I love that. 

George Nolfi, thank you very much.

Elevation will stream on Amazon Prime Video from the 8th February in the UK.

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