As we’ve seen with Rubicon, Machinima is in the business of translating comics to web series these days, be they with a prequel like that one or what they’re doing with Enormous, a giant-sized graphic novel from Tim Daniel and Mehdi Cheggour about, well, giant-sized things. Specifically, what’s left of human civilization after they’re knocked off the top of the food chain by massive monsters, which is referred to as E-Day – “The Day of Our Extinction..”
Your first thought is likely ‘come on, how are they going to do giant kaiju style beasties in a web series?’
Well, the pilot episode of Enormous has just hit the web today, so you can see for yourself.
Surprisingly good, isn’t it?
Would you believe director BenDavid Grabinski pulled that off in just three months?
“This one was like when Ethan Hunt gets a call on Mission: Impossible,” Grabinski told Crave Online exclusively about getting the gig, “because Adrian Askarieh, the producer, read the comic at New York Comic-Con and he loved it. He had all these hare-brained ideas that producers are supposed to have about turning it into a web series and doing all these things, but the issue was he actually did that work, partnered with Machinima and got it going. I received a call around Halloween of last year from Adrian, he told me about it, he loved Cost of Living [Grabinski’s previous short film starring Brandon Routh, which took him 7.5 months] and wanted me to direct it. The issue was it had to be done before January 31 of this year. I had to make the entire thing from scratch in three months, which was extremely difficult, but you know, it’s not digging ditches. It’s the best job in the world. It just meant I was going to get a lot of gray hairs and lose a lot of sleep.”
That’s an impressive feat, especially with the kind of CG needed to make a monster that didn’t seem cheesy. “We only had a matter of weeks to do maybe six months worth of effects,” he noted, “and there are different surface levels and skin that you can do in that amount of time and stuff that you can’t. So we basically reverse-engineered something that was scary, something that was different, and something that could be done logistically. We designed the monster in about 12 hours and sent it off to a company, and they started making 3D models, and then it just became a very fluid process.”
Not that cheese is necessarily a bad thing, but if the bleak tone of the Enormous graphic novel (which is, by the way, literally enormous at 13″x10″) was going to carry through this screenplay translation from Andre Ovredal of Troll Hunter, you had to be able to take it seriously – but not so seriously that you can’t have fun with giant monsters. “This will probably have the least levity of anything I make in my entire career, this pilot, and that’s by design,” he advised. “I love the Marvel movies, I love what they’re doing so much in terms of tone. The most important thing is that if you create stakes and worry about the state of characters, you can have a lot of fun on top of it. Cheesy is subjective. There’s some of that stuff that ends up being charming, but for this, I wanted to inject as much reality as possible, which is why there are a lot of pre-existing locations and vehicles. I didn’t want it to feel like there were a bunch of goofy, cheap sets. I wanted the costumes to feel kinda lived in. You never know whether or not it works, but I feel like we’ve achieved that in trying to avoid both cliches and corniness. Now you know these characters and you know shit can happen. Five or six people die. You meet people and they don’t make it to the end. I feel like you can have more room for levity later – especially with someone like Billy Miller, the main lead of the group – the guy has incredible comic timing,”
Yes, the plans is for there to be a ‘later’ for Enormous, as in a whole season of episodes, Grabinski confirmed. “The idea is, if this doesn’t land like a wet fart and people actually like it, we’ll go off immediately and start doing the rest of the first season, in theory. Everyone is very exciting about it and there’s been a lot of discussion creatively and logistically about what could happen and where it could go. There’s a lot of stuff about the characters that was going to be divulged in the pilot, but I decided that it would be more fun to save it until later so we have places to go with them – especially the lead character Ellen has a pretty interesting back story that precedes the pilot in why she’s doing what she’s doing, but I thought that I would go the Walter Hill way and let have her behavior instead of back story informing whether or not you like her.”
However, Ceren Lee, who plays Ellen, leaves no question of whether or not you’ll like her. “She’s just the easiest person in the fucking world to work with,” Grabinski said about casting her. “I thought Ceren was just the best, because she was strong and vulnerable, and I loved the idea that you hadn’t seen her in things before. I really loved in the Lost pilot how Evangeline Lilly just shows up and she’s just Kate. You don’t have this baggage of who she was before. Also, out of everybody, Ceren just had the best attitude imaginable. She was a total dream to work with. She’s non-stop positivity. It’s not an act. She’s just so much fun to be around.”
Ceren Lee had similarly nice things to say about Grabinski’s work on set. “So nice. Super supportive. Super excited. His brain was going 100 miles a minute and it was really fun to see him, though, slow down when he was shooting. Between ‘action’ and ‘cut,’ he was in another world, but as soon as he said ‘action,’ he was right there with the actor. So supportive and helpful, and that’s why he got great performances. It felt so rich. I think he did an amazing job.”
That’s not to say there weren’t challenges during filming – as you see in the film, she’s got to carry Dallas Liu down several flights of stairs while the building is crumbling around her. That wasn’t easy. “When I was in the audition, I had to come back and try to lift Dallas on my shoulder,” Lee explained. “BenDavid said ‘can you come in and just try to pick up some kids for me?’ My whole attitude is ‘oh, I’m Australian, we can do anything, I’m punk rock.’ So I walked in and I picked up some kids and I thought ‘I can easily do this.’ Then when we got there, I realized how many stairs there actually were and how much lifting was actually going to happen – but the adrenaline was just there and it carried me through. Dallas was so amazing, even though he was 100 pounds of solid muscle. He was a black belt in karate and the kid was doing flips for us on set and just wowing us. But that was a really fun challenge for me, and I felt really empowered afterwards.”
For fans of the graphic novel worried about this adaptation’s loyalty – which is not meant as a sequel or prequel, but meant to stand alone as a separate entity, much like The Walking Dead comic vs. the TV series – Enormous writer Tim Daniel could not have been more supportive of the project. In fact, they put him to work.
“He helped the second unit,” Lee revealed. “He was the dolly operator, aka the wheelchair pusher, while we were doing second unit stuff. It was so guerilla and so beautiful, he just jumped on board and said ‘what do you want me to do for you?’ We got him to push a wheelchair as a dolly. He was so great.”
“He was the most supportive person in the world,” Grabinski agreed. “There were probably 500 emails exchanged and he was on set for every single second of shooting. Honestly, he was the easiest person to work with imaginable. You don’t know if someone is going to be possessive of their work, or a diva, or helpful or unhelfpul, and he was just the nicest person. He was the world’s biggest cheerleader for the project. I couldn’t have been more grateful to have him involved.”
The Walking Dead, but with kaiju instead of zombies, which changes the entire ballgame. Grabinski certainly has the passion for the concept. “I saw Pacific Rim six times. I watched Jurassic Park maybe 200 times as a kid. I’ve always been obsessed with movies with giant creatures, and it’s just completely my wheelhouse. That was the most exciting thing about this – to get to add something to the genre.”
For her part, Lee shared the same reservations any of us would have when we first hear about a web series daring to aspire to be a legitimate monster movie. “This is going to sound terrible, but the most exciting thing for me was that I was so worried that ‘oh my god, what if it’s not good? What if it doesn’t feel real, what if it’s lacking, what if it’s cheesy?’ I had all of these thoughts running through my head, and I sat down and watched it with my husband [that would be Jason Lee of Almost Famous], who is the most honest individual I’ve ever met, so I was waiting for him to say ‘it was okay, there was this thing and that thing…’ But we both looked at each other at the end and he said ‘That was really good!’ And I was like ‘I know, wasn’t it?!’ I was so excited. It was like a great ‘air high-five’ moment.”
So get on board the Enormous train, because with Godzilla getting an big-screen revival with a dark and serious tone much like the original Gojira, the stage is set for big beasties to be the next big thing.
And for more Grabinski, here is Cost of Living, his previous short film about monsters, with levity to spare.
COST OF LIVING from BenDavid Grabinski on Vimeo.
