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CAPTIVE STATE I How do you get a high-concept alien occupation film made in the era of superheroes? Director Rupert Wyatt reveals all…

- Jordan Farley

Science fiction may have taken over the movie world, but with sequels, prequels, adaptations, reboots, and preboots (they’re a thing) being the big money spinners, original sci-fi movies are an increasingly rare proposition. Rupert Wyatt is no stranger to franchise filmmaking – he helmed 2011’s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes – so the “privilege” and chance to build a world with his new film, Captive State, was not lost on the Brit director.

“The fact they bet on me – I’m just very lucky, I guess,” acknowledges Wyatt, talking to Teasers over the phone from his home in Hudson, New York. “Not just in terms of being able to get something made of my own in this genre. But looking to subvert the genre and do something a little bit different.”

Rather than tell a well-worn story about the first contact (though “we see an aspect of that in the prologue”, according to Wyatt), Captive State is set a decade after the invasion and colonization of Earth by a carbon-based species, here to strip mine the planet’s fossil fuels. The director and his wife Erica Beeney (The Battle of Shaker Heights) wrote the film on spec, and shopping the fully realized script around any production company that would take their call was key to getting it made.

“That’s the best way to get a film like this off the ground, primarily because it’s easier for them to say no than yes,” Wyatt explains. “When you have an existing script and a filmmaking team that wants to do it, and we’re all able to stand behind a particular budget number; that galvanizes people to back it because it puts the responsibility of the success of the film on our shoulders, not theirs.”