io9: What's new about this horror film, why did it stand out to you?

Karyn Kusama: The humor comes from Diablo's vision of the world and I felt like the horror came out of the relationship. Which I thought was a really interesting idea, the idea that this toxic friendship could be the emotional foundation of the horror. A lot of times I think we watch horror movies that by default have a female character. But this movie - it's interesting to see that the so-called monster Jennifer is female, as is the heroine.

I really liked this relationship between the two girls, it's something many people experience. Was this always the foundation of the movie?

It was always supposed to be a relationship rooted in the past, rooted in childhood. And the toxic element of it developed between them as a sort of emotional codependence and role playing in which Jennifer always played the Alpha female in control and Needy was always willing to be her tagalong or sidekick and was subservient to her. I think there have been comedies and teen movies that explore that idea. But in this case that relationship is sort of realized into something pretty dark.

I really can't imagine anyone else playing that Alpha character - was Megan Fox always in mind?

She was an element to the movie very very early. Even before the producers came on.

She's pretty perfect for the role, how did you help her find her inner bitch for this character?

Well I'm sure all of us would love it if we could all find our inner bitchiness. She just relished the opportunity to have fun with that, she was very, very funny with that. But I really enjoyed working with her. She was very thoughtful, smart, very prepared. She brought a lot of humor to the role that I wouldn't have necessarily known she could do because that was something she hadn't done in Transformers.

There's been this new study out that says women watch more horror movies than men. Do you think that's accurate? What do you think about that?

I think actually women were probably always going to horror movies, we just weren't measuring it as religiously as we do now. I think it's a human condition to identify with being scared. There is something about the narrative of flight and survival that I think is very compelling for women. I find it very compelling. I don't watch all of the horror that's out there, because one, there's so much of it and two some of it is a little less emotionally engaging for me than others. I think there is something about watching women, well women and men, but often times young people fighting for their lives - it's a very compelling story. It's a way to deposit all of our anxieties about our own life. Particularly if those anxieties are more mundane but they feel like life and death. It's a way to articulate those anxieties in a safe place like a theater.

And this movie's focus on female relationships will probably bring out more female horror fans.

I feel like there have been plenty of horror movies where the main character is female. A lot of them that I really love. But this is one of those movies where the movie and the horror grows out of the female relationships. And I think that's pretty interesting.

And that relationship is pretty toxic. These two are friends but Jennifer, Megan, really goes after her friend. Can we talk about why you wanted this kind of a dynamic? Why is Jenny so angry with her best friend?

It's funny I was just talking about this with Megan the other day in another interview. And she had always approached this character as someone who was jealous of her best friend, Needy. Jealous of the attachments and the relationships that Needy has in her life. And that somehow there was some subconscious desire to take that away from her.

They dress very different as well. Small spoiler, at the formal Needy looks very 80s in a big pink dress with bad hair and make up while Jennifer has a lovely gown. Whose idea was this and why?

Diablo had always written that it was a really bad dress. By the time I was working with the costume designer I had shown her a lot of reference material, a lot of pretty terrible 80s prom dresses. The worse they got the better the look became. I always wanted her hair to be big and poofy and her makeup to be a little over-applied. I think our costume designer nailed it.

But why make them so different on the outside too?

I think the whole point with Needy was that she was an expression of some more 80s sensibility and that everyone else had been more attuned to the fashions of the times. Needy is a little more nostalgic in life, but also a little less tuned in to the relentless [fashion] magazine culture.

But Megan really was covered in blood half the time too. And the gore was pretty good.

There's a scene where she's literally scooping blood out of the carcass of one of our characters. I really wanted it to look as if she was at a fountain of youth and instead of drinking water, she was drinking blood. So I wanted it to look like she was slurping that blood and drinking it down. We could only get a couple of takes that were working because we had live rats in the scene at the same time which is a whole other absurd nightmare, especially rodents which are not highly trained animals. Meanwhile she's drinking this unholy combination of some kind of stand in for blood and corn syrup so she can ingest it. I felt like by the third take I was waiting for her to just puke into a pail. That scene was pretty painful for her because she was swallowing everything.

The side characters in this film really helped ground the movie in reality. Adam Brody was great and seriously disturbing in an off-putting way.

The great thing about Adam Brody he manages to keep things very charming and personable so it takes a while to really see the depth of his ambition and psychosis. There's a coldness to his single mindedness once he starts to reveal what his plan is and what he's done to Jennifer. So in an interesting way Jennifer gets to be the monster and he gets to be the villain.

When he looked towards the camera at the character Needy, it gave me chills.

It's funny because when we screened it and a lot of those looks generated really big laughs. And I wonder if that's just because people were nervously anticipating what's to come.

I'd bet it's also because they aren't used to seeing him that way either.

Yeah it's true, you have to get used to that the comedy is tied up with his very very bad intentions.

Jennifer's Body will be out in theaters this Friday.

At Comic-Con, we interviewed Neill on camera, and he mentioned his hive mind concept about the aliens of District 9. Later on, we got to press further about the entire alien world that Neill had built around his alien creatures, past the hive.

What is your own back story for these aliens? What's their home planet like? Why did the end up on Earth?

The hive mind [concept] is the most important thing to me, because I love the idea of a civilization that can build all of that technology and then, at the same time, just have a massive population that was just drones that needed direction, and were absolutely incapable of building that stuff on their own. I found that to be a really interesting concept. Also, it sort of explains why they don't turn on the humans. Individually, they may be feeling oppressed, but they don't have it together enough to form a resistance and back one another. So I found that really interesting.

I think that they do have a home planet, it's pretty far away probably in the Andromeda Galaxy, but what I like is that they'll live on the ship for thousands of years. Obviously, there's much more of a population on the main planet, but the ships will go out and get the minerals and the ore and whatever resources they need and then bring them all back home.

The other thing is that the ship was meant to clip together with other ships. So there's, like, vast amounts of resources that they're bringing to the parent planet. And the ship, when the army generals or the queen of that particular ship died off by some sort of virus or bacteria that they picked up on some other planet, that killed them off. And it didn't effect these sort of resilient, hardy sort of drone workers. Then the technology is usually the thing that they relied on to save them, but in this case it sort of screwed them because it brought them to a planet that kind of treated them pretty badly, but it was the ship that realized that, unless it gets to a life sustaining planet everything is going to die, which is a cool idea. So the ship just auto pilots to the closest one in the Goldilocks band, and it's our planet and then pulls up and hits the breaks.

Where does this leave Christopher Johnson [an abnormally smart prawn who sparks a bit of a revolution... Not to give too much away]?

I think it's taken 20 years. I think because there is a subconscious hive mind happening, really what they should do is lay one egg that has a different embryo in it that grows into a Queen or being someone that dictates direction. But I think in the interim, because they may have done that, there may be an egg out there with that, but as that being is growing, I just like the idea that he may have been a lot more directionless in the beginning. But the hive structure of their society may just pick one or two that starts to become the leader. Like the overall structure of his brain may change because the hive may want that to happen. So he starts having a direction and a goal. Which is an interesting idea and it's just enough to kick start them to be able to get to the ship to get back.

We also talked to Derrickson about the chances for a sequel to his remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and asked who would win in a fight: Neo or Klaatu?

The Earth Stood Still transmission will reach any possible civilizations currently orbiting Alpha Centauri approximately four years from now, in the year 2012.

So you're beaming The Day The Earth Stood Still into space?

I know. Can you believe that?

No, I can not. Why did you decide to do that?

I have no idea. Somebody did, and told me they did it. And then I found that out and thought, "Boy I hope I'm not the one responsible for bringing the evil aliens. I hope whoever finds it is nice."

I was going to say, is that really the message that you want to send to another galaxy? Are you happy with the message?

Yeah, very with what the movie has to say. I do think the movie is a pretty accurate reflection of human nature. It's what the original was. I tried to be faithful and true to that basic story and that basic theme.

The movie does end on a cliffhanger, you don't know what's going to happen next. Would you ever consider making a sequel?

Oooh. You know, probably not. Never say never though, how many directors have said that and then done it. I have no intention to at this point.

A lot of people are saying that the message of the film is to go green, sort of like an Inconvenient Truth. What is the message that you as a director wanted to bring?

This movie doesn't have an environmental message to it. I don't like message movies. This is a big entertaining popcorn movie. People are coming to be entertained. If it has any statement in it, it's about human nature, not about... I'm not telling the audience how they're supposed to act or what they're supposed to do or anything like that. It basically is saying, as human beings, we've gotten ourselves into some serious messes and that's too bad, that's unfortunate, and we're all paying the price for it. But sometimes that's what you have to do before you make the changes that you really needed to make in the first place. And I think that's what's happening.

Who do you think would win in a fight Neo or Klaatu?

Oh That's a good one. That's a really good question. All I know is the Earth would get ripped to shreds in the middle of that fight. Wouldn't want to be there for that one.

If all goes according to plan, this first intentional transmission of a movie can be reached at different parts of our solar system, according to the press release, Deep Space Communications Network estimates arrival times at:

(Distance from Earth – at the speed of light – and transmission time, as follows):

Moon: 0.000000038, 1.1991888 seconds
Sun: 0.000016, 8.41536 minutes
Mercury: 0.0000095, 4.99662 minutes
Venus: 0.00000476, 2.5035696 minutes
Mars: 0.0000076, 3.997296 minutes
Jupiter: 0.0000666, 35.028936 minutes
Saturn: 0.000135, 1.18341 hours
Uranus: 0.000285, 2.49831 hours
Neptune: 0.00046, 4.03236 hours
Pluto: 0.0006183, 5.4200178 hours

If the rest of the galaxy thinks were terrible people, I just want to say: I told you so. But it also begs the question, what movie should we send into space instead? The Day The Earth Stood Still opens in theaters this Friday.

Baz, you've done two movies now looking back on the past do you think that we'll ever see a new project from you that is your vision of the future?

That's a great question – I don't know about the future but I certainly would do something that is set in a contemporary environment. I might throw everything away that I've done and I think in your work you have to refresh your life, and I intend to do that once I've sort of collected my own self again. But it's a good question, I mean, future work, its been very de rigueur, a lot of it, right? Actually there are a few future-projects.... I think if you address it you have to address it in a completely fresh way. It's become a bit old fashioned. I mean the future has become old fashioned. Now is so much more consumed with it now than we ever have been before.

What would you do to make a look on the future fresh?

It would be about the task at hand, it's only about telling the story. You don't have to take a book off the shelf so much as what do I have to convey, and then you invent out. So it's a job. It's something I wouldn't just guess, you know.

Are there any epic futuristic movie that you would like to do, or make or be attached to?

I can. I'm not gonna say it becase I'm actually thinking about one. It's a few classics. I don't want to go there.

Q: Just a few hints?

No, it's too easy to guess. I shouldn't 've said it, I really really want to do some music work. Because I love music so much, and I move with everyone you know, I mean, Placido Domingo or David Bowie or Missy Elliot, you know and each one of them it's like, to me the music part of it, collaborating on music, it's the holiday part. That's the party part for me. I think now too there are so many musicals being made, I'd really like to make something that was kind of quick and very contemporary actually, to make my life a little more fun.

Would you make another Sunscreen song for the class of 2010?

I'm glad you find it useful. You know what I actually recorded the run-up to 2009 so I'm fresh out of opening titles, but I like music, I like soundtracks, I did a lot of the work on the music for this film, I had great collaborators, I actually, that gentleman over there helped me write a song with Elton John, a finished film, do some lyrics and that was enjoyable, I loved that.

What can you tell me about the significance of the Wizard of Oz in your new movie Australia?

Actually the film and the shape of it is going down the yellow brick road. It's a journey film, the wizard of oz is a journey film, where someone goes on a journey they meet all sorts of characters and they realize that what they're looking for is really inside. And that's parallel in my film but original something against the wizard of oz, but the aboriginal boy he gets the wizard of oz and his aboriginal religion mixed up. And I think that's a beautiful thing in the world when things get mixed up and make something new and fresh. I used the music to, I can't quite tell you, but it's got quite a special plot significance at the end.

So you heard it hear first — Baz wants to work on a classic futuristic movie, or is toying with the idea at least. I'd love to know what you guys think. My wonderful intern Liz suggested Jules Verne-esque remake that focuses on a side plot (and I think she's spot on). I'm all for a Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Baz musical with opulent lights and lush backgrounds.

What was the most challenging aspect of making a film that involved teleportation?

We did everything for real. We didn't use computer generated characters. You know the superhero films that preceded this have relied heavily on them, and obviously it would have been a really simple way to do the visual effects, because if you computer generate the characters, you can easily make them "jump." It's a lot more difficult to have somebody teleport when you have a real actor doing it. Part of the reason the visual effects stand out in this is because we put all that extra work in when we were shooting.

Traditionally, there have been two kinds of Hollywood tentpole movies: there's the visual effects version where you shoot it all on a soundstage, you never leave it although you "pretend" you left it to go to all these places, and you use visual effect to do the pretending for you. Then there's the version where you physically travel the world, a la James Bond or Jason Bourne, but then you don't do any visual effects in those places. You justify that by saying since we're going, we won't have to use visual effect to communicate that we're there.

We did something that was a bit unusual. We physically traveled to all these places, and then we did visual effects in those environments. We really flew a helicopter over the Sphinx and around the Pyramids. It would have been a lot easier to just generate that stuff in a computer; they're simple geometric shapes, there's just desert in the background, it couldn't have been simpler to generate. But it would never look the way it looks when you see Hayden Christensen on the Sphinx. There's a level of reality that computers just can't achieve at this particular state.

Was he actually on the Sphinx or digitally put up there?

He wasn't digitally put on top of it. We designed the shot, we pre-visualized the shot, we went to the Sphinx without Hayden and flew a helicopter around it following a very specific trajectory. Then we took the telemetry of that shot and filmed Hayden in Mexico using a cable-cam which could play back the moves the helicopter did, and then we combined these two pieces of film the old-fashioned way. It didn't require any digital creations because they perfectly matched up. Every single of grain of film is real, not something that was created in a computer. We shot the real elements wherever we went.

We know the film is based on Steven Gould's books Jumper and Reflex, and now he's also published a novel called Jumper: Griffin's Story which is meant to tie-in with the film. What was the script like when you came onboard?

There was a first draft by David Goyer, which was very faithful to the Steven's novel. Anyone who has looked at my Bourne adaptation will see that I kind of take the cool idea from the book and then reinvent the whole thing as a movie, and I tried to bring that whole logic to Jumper. In particular because the book dealt with terrorism, which I didn't like. The combination of jumping and terrorism didn't seem good to me. There wasn't a second jumper in the book. I had really just fallen in love with Steven Gould's character David who was using his power for selfish means, and I wanted to actually pursue that more than he had in the novel.

I love the notion that... okay, you're a superhero, you're globetrotting, you have it all, and then suddenly you meet another superhero who is significantly more talented at it than you are, and you're not the big man on campus anymore. I found that really interesting. The moment I decided to chase David Rice's darker side, you don't get to have your standard cookie-cutter superhero movie plot. There's not a villain who is setting out the destroy the world, and you don't have a hero who is trying to save the world. I didn't feel the Hollywood need to have David Rice become a hero in the Hollywood finale. I didn't want to see Hayden Christensen become Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man in the second half of the film.

Did you create anything for the movie that wasn't in the books? The movie uses jumpscars and jumpcraters whenever someone uses their jumping ability. Were those created for the movie?

Those were created for the film. The source for them is that I wanted this movie to follow, as much as possible, to follow the real laws of physics that govern this planet and the universe. One of the most primary rules is that you don't get something for nothing. It's all a closed loop, it's a closed system. Everything you do has some kind of a price. For example, cars seemed like a magical device when they they were first invented, but they ultimately came with a price with pollution and global warming.

In other superhero films, people tend to have the power, but there's never any physical price that the person or the planet pays in order for that phenomenal event to take place. I wanted there to be some kind of consequence every time you jump, and that leaving behind a trace would ultimately mean that you wouldn't want a lot of people jumping because of those effects. They could be dangerous if somebody walks into them, they could be harmful to the environment.

I've tried to show that in some really subtle ways. For instance when he jumps from New York to Ann Arbor, the tv changes momentarily to a New York station. I'm trying to communicate that these portals stay open for a short burst... for instance if you jump from the Sahara desert to the Arctic, would be bringing warm air and cold air to each environment, and that might not be good for the planet on a large scale. If you jumped and there were no after effects or repercussions, it would seem like a much more magical power. But, my bullshit meter in me says this would come with a consequence, and wouldn't be like Superman just being able to fly. If he could actually fly, he'd leave a wake turbulence, and there would be consequences to him and other people when he'd fly. These things can't just happen for free.

What about Samuel L. Jacksons character and the Paladins who pursue the Jumpers?

There's no Paladins in the book, there's no mythology of that, there's no one pursuing the Jumpers in that first book. In the second book people are trying to catch the Jumpers for personal gain. You know if you could get a Jumper to work for you, they'd be extremely useful. I was more curious to explore a villain who really wasn't a villain, other than that they wanted to destroy the Jumpers simply because of what they can do. I really believe that in our current climate, if there were people who could actually teleport, there would be people who would think that was treading on some sort of holy land, and that should only be reserved for god. There are already plenty of people who kill in the name of god for far less dramatic reasons.

We do like the fact that there isn't a lot of exposition in the film about how the jumping works, or explanations of things like jumpsites and jumpscars. They just accept it and get right into it.

Well, because David Rise isn't a physicist. If I had a character who was quantum physicist at MIT who one day discovers he can teleport, then that character would commence an investigation as to how that happens. But, a high school dropout is never going to understand how he's able to teleport, and since I'm telling the story from his perspective, I didn't feel like it was necessary to bog down in science that the characters themselves wouldn't understand.

Can you tell us about your next film? We know that it involves going to the moon, but what else can you let us know?

The premise of the movie is about a group that mounts a private expedition to not only go to the moon, but also to colonize it. It's set present day, and it is not science fiction, it's science fact. The blueprint for going to the moon was designed 40 years ago, and the components for implementing it are so old that they're in museums waiting to be stolen. So the group steals, buys, and in other ways pull together all the components it would take to launch and actually land on the moon.

Their goal is to actually leave somebody behind. They're recreating the Apollo mission up to a point, and then exceed it by leaving someone behind and starting mankind's exodus out into the universe. Plus, you can imagine how much shit can possibly go wrong, and it does. It's actually a miracle that it didn't go wrong in any of the lunar landings. What I'm also hoping to do with this film is to once again celebrate what was America's greatest accomplishment in its 200 and some-odd year history. There really is no other country that could have done what we did in the 1960s with the space program.

We know you're executive producing the Knight Rider television movie that comes on this weekend, how involved have you been with it?

I've been very involved with it, at least as involved as I can be given the fact that I'm finishing a visual effects movie. But I'm very involved with it and I would remain a producer on it if it goes to series.

We know about J.J. Abrams going into the toy store in Japan and seeing all these Godzilla figures and being inspired to make this film, but at what point were you contacted and asked to come onboard to direct?

Basically, J.J. and Drew were talking about the story, and they went in and pitched it to Paramount and they immediately said "Okay, we'll make it." It wasn't like, okay write a script and then we'll put it into development. They were like, We love the idea, we'll make it, we know where it goes, we know when to open it. Apparently Drew walked out of that meeting and turned to J.J., because they'd pitched it as if they had everything, and he said "J.J., that's all we have!" J.J. said, "No no, we're gonna do it."

It all happened very, very quickly, so Drew went off and wrote a 60 page outline which we called a "scriptment" because it was a weird hybrid between a script and a treatment. That was what they showed me. J.J. and Bryan Burk, who has been his producing partner for years, came to me and showed me the treatment. I read it and they said I should meet Drew. The thing is... it was clearly filled with a huge amount of special effects. I was thinking, "We can't just go out on the streets of New York and film this as is. There's going to be a lot of effects work." I'd never done effects work before, and I was also in the middle of of putting this film together that I'm hoping to do now called The Invisible Woman, and we were in the middle of a casting snafu and J.J. was like "I want you to do this! Do this first and you can do that film right after." So I said to him, "Why do you want me? It's such a heavy visual effects thing." And he said, "Because I know that you love character, and that's what we want. We want a sense of realism."

Then I got very excited, because I was reading it and I was seeing all of the crazy detail, I thought if we could really do this, against this epic scale... on the page it read like a Roland Emmerich-sized Independence Day kind of movie. But I thought, if do it in this kind of intimate, naturalistic style... And I wanted to do some improvisation and other things to make it feel real. That was very exciting to me, and they said great, so J.J. and Drew and I got together and started talking about the direction to take the outline and we fleshed it out further.

That's basically how I got involved. I'm going to guess they had their pitch around January or February, and then Drew wrote up that very extensive treatment very quickly. By the end of February I'd already read it and was on board, and we started developing the treatment further and going into production on the teaser trailer. There was no script when I got on-board, so from when I got on to the release date, is still under a year, which is crazy. In fact, we didn't even have a script until four weeks before we started shooting. Drew was still working on Lost, and we were working on weekends and talking about how to rework the story, coming up with the structure of the flashbacks and all that stuff. It was all madly coming together because we knew that we had this release date, and we also knew we wanted to finish this teaser trailer and get it onto the front of Transformers.

We thought for a movie that didn't have any recognizable people in it, we thought it would be great to tease people with that trailer on the front of a huge movie like Transformers, and we had no idea what kind of a reaction we'd get. All of that, working on the script, readying the trailer, was all happening at once.

How different was this experience vs. your other feature film, The Pallbearer?

It was very different, although it's funny because the casting process was very similar in that... it's funny, because when we did that film I wanted the main character to be someone you didn't recognize, and who you'd meet as that new character. When we cast David Schwimmer at the time he was on the first season of Friends. We thought it was this show that had just begun, and he was part of a huge ensemble, and in it's first season it wasn't a hit, it was only sort of a middling success. However, right when it began filming it became this monster smash, and we knew this because we'd be out on location filming and kids, little kids, would come out and surround where we were shooting, and then we realized, "Oh, we don't have an unknown cast."

In this case, we thought it was critical to cast people you didn't realize, because in trying to create this "reality," and create this illusion that you're watching found footage. If you're supposed to be looking at someone's camcorder, you don't want to end up seeing Will Smith, because as great as he is, that immediately tells you that you're watching a movie.

The actual process itself was different, and not just for me, because I'd never done effects before, but also for the visual effects people as well. I went to them and I said "Okay, I don't know how this is done, but this is what I want to do. I want it to look handheld, and I want it to be continuous takes." I thought it was critical that this needed to look like a handheld film. Our escape route has always been that we could put in a jump cut, but I felt if we used that in this, people would feel cheated. So when we met with the vfs people, they suggested shooting on steadicam and then adding shake later, but the problem with that is that anyone who is doing these kind of videos that you see on YouTube every day, which is really our audience, will say "Hey, that's not authentic." So they had to figure out a way that it could all be done handheld.

Also, in most films you have all these shots that are like a small shot here, a few seconds there, and it would all be very containable and the visual effects people would know exactly how many shots they'd be working on. But, with this film since we were doing everything in continuous takes, we'd shoot a scene and I'd ask them "How many effects shots is that?" and they'd say, "Well, we don't know." Instead of doing many shots, we did one long shot that would basically take in all the effects of many shots.

It was also really different for the crew, because I was having the camera operators run the cameras as unprofessionally as possible. And the focus pullers as well... focus pullers lose their job if they're not dead on when someone walks into a room and hits their mark. I'd be saying "No! You're too dead on! This is autofocus on a handheld consumer camera, it has to go past them, and come back." They'd say, "Well, this is the kind of thing that gets me fired." I told them, "Not on this movie!"

I also wanted to be able to use the handheld camera as a basis for improvisation as well. Instead of shooting the scene a normal way where you'd have several angles, I'd only have one angle. I would also shoot the rehearsals, because you never know if something great was going to happen. Then after we'd done the scenes a bunch of times, I'd say "Okay, forget the words and lets just try something else. You know what the scene is about." I'd let them go and improv the scene, and a lot of times those ended up in the movie, because they felt more understated and natural.

Were you inspired at all by the original 1954 Gojira film?

Yeah, absolutely! That's actually an incredible film, and we've seen the bastardized version here in the United States. Most people are familiar with the film and have seen the Raymond Burr intercut scenes, but that movie is far inferior to the original. It came out the same year as Seven Samurai, and is considered to be a masterpiece in that country. It is a great movie, and it's very haunting.

There's no question that we were aware of the fact that the monster in that film was really a metaphor for the anxiety of that time. That was definitely the idea here that we wanted to create our own national monster the same way Godzilla did to create a monster of our time.

When you worked with artist Neville Page who designed the monster, what inspirations did both of you draw from? What was that like?

We wanted it to be totally original. He is really amazing, he has this thing I affectionately call his "Wall of Terror." You walk into this office and there's this very colorful wall of pictures, and immediately you want to walk over to it and check it out. However, the closer you get to it, the more quickly you want to look away. They're images of intestines and body parts and all these different things because there's a very biological, evolutionary logic to his work. He was coming up with all of these different features for the monster, and drawing from nature for this.

In working with him I was very interested in what the creature was going through, and we came up with the secret that the creature was a baby. It was this enormous baby that was going through terrible separation anxiety, it didn't know what was going on, and it was pissed. I wanted a creature that would be ferocious and angry, but also that there would be fear in the eyes. He showed all these sorts of fearful eyes, like how horses have a lot of white showing under their eyes when they're scared. He would always come up with these diabolical features that the creature would have. He has a singular talent, and he's really amazing.

So, at the end of the film, after the credits, a walkie-talkie crackles to life and you hear... something. What is it?

Yes, you do hear something! That's another sort of radio chatter moment. I don't actually want to give that away at this point, because it is decipherable. That's the very last thing we did on the mix, I sort of jumped up to the microphone and did this thing. I know someone will figure it out, but I don't want to give it away yet.