Courtney Howard // Film Critic
Director Ric Roman Waugh knows how to shoot the hell out of an action sequence. He understands what’s really driving the visceral nature of those riveting scenes are the characters and their conflicts, whether those are internal, external or both simultaneously. He’s earned the audience’s trust grounding his heroes in reality, despite the fact they’re struggling with extraordinary extenuating circumstances, from SHOT CALLER to KANDAHAR.
In his second chapter in the Garrity family saga, GREENLAND 2: MIGRATION, John (Gerard Butler), his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and teen son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis) are forced to flee the safety of their underground bunker for a rumored, habitable sanctuary located in the South of France – a colonized crater flourishing with new life. Similar to the stellar original GREENLAND, the pulse-pounding, gripping and deeply emotional follow-up captures Waugh’s signature touches with a thoughtful eye on preserving character integrity.
I recently spoke with the fantastic filmmaker about how these films continue to speak to our own post-pandemic world and how he pulled off such a feat making two phenomenal features.
I haven’t stopped thinking about this movie for a day since seeing it in December. I love these GREENLAND movies, so thank you for delivering another great one to us.
Waugh: “This is a franchise that’s really special to me. I can’t even believe I’m saying franchise. We never thought there’d be more than one. We always thought it was one movie. When I first read Chris Sparling’s script, I was a dog with a bone. There was no way I was not directing that movie. I loved the personal, human experience of it. Never really was ‘A Comet Movie.’ It wasn’t ‘A Disaster Movie.’ It was about the people. After shooting that movie, to live through a global pandemic and watch how humanity treated one another, whether it was selfish or self-less. I was like, ‘Oh my god this is mirroring everything!’.
And then to see a disaster movie in the middle of a disaster and we can’t open in theaters here. It goes #1 all over the world. My pal, Noah Fogelson, being fearless, instead of kicking the can into the next year, he’s like, ‘We got a huge deal with HBO. This is how we get people to see it right now. It’s the biggest streaming deal in history. Let’s go’ and I was like, ‘Let’s go!’ You just are so excited in the middle of the world that’s frozen to get something out that we’re really passionate about.
Did we ever think there was a second movie? Never thought about it. It wasn’t until we settled in and started thinking about, if there is going to be another one, it has to have the same heart. It has to have the same integrity. Basil, Gerry, Noah, all of us would never make this movie without us thinking there’s a story that has the same inner conflict of a family that we all did – our own conflicts didn’t stop at the pandemic. We wanted that same thing. Have it be set in the middle of a family dealing with their own issues with scope and scale.”
Everything is bigger. The visual effects sequences are immersive, as are the palpable emotions. You’re really good about retaining the visceral nature of the action with character drive at the forefront. Is that a tough to balance the scale and scope with the heart?
“Yeah. The thing for me, coming from the action background, it was always like people wanted to know, ‘What fear did you feel? What was the exhilaration in that moment? What was the emotional experience of it?’ I’ve always taken the mantra of action for the sake of action is mindless. It doesn’t matter what we blow up, or how much money we put into it. If there’s not an emotional component….If I don’t read a piece of material, or a story, that I’m emotionally connected to, I’m not doing it. I’ve probably lost a lot of money by saying that. But it really has to have that emotional connection. Once I have that, it roots everything I’m doing with the action.
How do I make it real? The first movie dealt with the real world. The second movie, yeah, you can do everything on a beach in subzero weather in freezing water and there was a lot of safety factors and so forth. But you’re seeing it all done real. Then you’re seeing a sequence like the ladders going across the English Channel and you know you’re going to have to do a virtual world of visual effects. We went through a decade of everything being fake and audiences got tired of it. We needed to do something real. We built the England side, the center peninsula and France 30 feet in the air with ladders and huge wind machines. Our actors were 30 feet in the air, dangling for real. It felt real. You can’t fake that. By the way, who’s got to be on the ladder with them? The camera person. I wanted that school of thought where you can really get lost in the visual effects and you can use them and weaponize them to your advantage.”
This chapter for the Garrity family could really be called One Battle After Another.
“[laughs] True.”
It’s a series of unrelenting problem solving scenarios and you’ve gotta keep all the plates spinning. Were there any situations you rejected putting them through?
“No. The hardest part with the first movie dealt with a human interaction; Are people going to help you or are they going to try to rob you of your existence? The nomadic sense of a lot of these places where now you’re dealing with internal conflict of the family, it was really about the way points having a human experience. We didn’t want you to just have the monster in the sky that pelted you. We now have the monster underneath you with seismic activity.
Man vs. Man was very much a component of the first movie and it really had to be in the second movie. Look at how many conflicts we see around the world. We wanted real conflicts like when people start fighting over land and resources. Finding a human moment of a single soldier trying to get you through the line.”
In the last film, you blessedly gave us an action hero who got his hands dirty saving his family. And this time we get to see Allie get into the fight.
“Yes!”
Can we talk about her character development and NOT turning her into a stereotypical “strong female” caricature?
“First of all, I had to be with Morena Baccarin for a week and I wasn’t gonna let her… she’d knock me out. It was one of my favorite things about Allison in the second movie. The first movie is about two equals that are at odds, trying to find their sea legs in their marriage again, right? That’s hanging on by a thread. Now that they’ve rekindled their love, it’s, what would you do as a parent, if he’s out there doing his blue-collar engineering, we wanted her to be proactive to rebuild this world. We wanted Allison to be a proactive component in a new civil government that’s half civilian and half military, rebuilding. It wasn’t just putting her in the action of the movie. It was about her being proactive in rebuilding mankind. We loved that about Allison.”
What brought you joy and creative fulfillment on this film?
“It’s always the sum of all parts. It’s when you see everything come together and see the labor – that everyone really believes in something and wants it to be special. I really do love the ladder sequence. I think it’s one that could’ve easily been broken where you could’ve not had the emotional integrity of it or the physicality of it or then you do all that and the visual effects let you down because it doesn’t look real. The sound design also… Dror Mohar’s sound design and David Buckley’s score putting you in the 3-D environment. I’m really proud of the collaborative experience on this, that everyone had to be the sum of all parts to make that fly.”
Could you envision a third GREENLAND film and would you want to do it?
“I think financially now, everyone’s like, ‘Let’s make 10 of them!’ – but not the creators. The people on the creative side are very precious about this, including myself. I would love to see another one. I wouldn’t want it to be a ‘Number 3.’ We don’t see the second as a ‘Number 2.’ It’s the second chapter – not a sequel. Is the next movie, would it be a hundred years from now and be Nathan’s kids? Or would it be Nathan as a man? It would be, again, about finding the story: what is the internal conflict of the characters that we relate to as people and what can we build as our wrapper around it that’s the evolution?
Given that we took 5 years in between these movies and chronologically mirror that with the movies. Not that we need to wait another 5 years, but it would be chronologically where would we evolve that would make the most sense for the next chapter.”
GREENLAND 2: MIGRATION is now playing in theaters.
