The fear within

You might think Gareth Edwards would be on a high right now. When we met in the bar of the British Film Institute, on London's Southbank, he was just days away from attending the Baftas, where he had been nominated for outstanding British debut for his film Monsters. He didn't win that but a month earlier, he saw the film sweep the British Independent Film Awards, winning three awards, including best director. Not bad for a former visual effects boffin who put the film together on his laptop with equipment costing US$15,000. So why the long face?

Turns out not everybody is a fan - particularly those in the horror community. 'I've had people come up to me and have a go at me about the film,' he sighs. 'I found that a bit shocking when it first happened. Someone came up and went 'Why did you call it Monsters?' And I came out with the usual stuff, and he went, 'But it's not a monster movie.' I said, 'What would you call it?' And he just wanted an argument. He was livid. He looked like he was ready to punch me. It really threw me for the rest of the day, that someone was that angry.'

Curiously, when I saw the film at the Edinburgh Film Festival last June, I experienced similar vitriol from a viewer who was nonplussed by the experience. Perhaps the title is misleading - although there are, indeed, monsters. But this tale, with overtones of District 9, is more than just your standard alien-invasion story. Set in Mexico, it tells the tale of a photojournalist (Scoot McNairy) who is entrusted to guide his boss' daughter (Whitney Able) through a walled-off Mexico - now dubbed the 'Infected Zone', after a Nasa space probe containing an alien life form crash-landed there six years earlier.

What makes Monsters so evocative is that the squid-like, building-high creatures - as impressive as they are - are very much the backdrop to the story, which the 31-year-old Edwards describes as 'Lost in Translation, set in Mexico, with aliens'. Aided by the fact that Able and McNairy are a real-life couple (and now married), the film deals with the tentative will-they-won't-they relationship that develops between the two characters as they travel through the Infected Zone.

When Edwards first pitched it to Vertigo Films, the British production company liked it so much he was immediately offered a start date for the project - which made him suspicious. 'It was too straightforward. I thought they had to be full of crap. It was weird. You've been waiting all your life for someone to say that to you. When I heard it, I just thought, 'I'm imagining this but it can't be real'. So I didn't take them up on it.'

He went back to his day job, crafting title sequences and digital effects - primarily for the BBC.

A year later, he returned to Vertigo - and was forced to write down a start date. 'Out of paranoia I wrote a date that was three months away, thinking I could figure out the story by then.' Indeed, all Edwards had was a concept. 'It was just, 'It's got to be a monster movie. We'll shoot it like a documentary, use improvisation and use real people, and that will make it more real.' And beyond that I didn't have anything specific,' he says.