The third entry in the Skyline story is here, and it's a delightful throwback to the golden age of mid-budget action extravaganzas, like a long-lost Cannon Films production that's been recently discovered. The original Skyline, released in 2010, turned heads with its provocative visual effects, and the 2017 sequel, Beyond Skyline, won over audiences by infusing the alien invasion storyline with an unexpected focus on martial arts action, courtesy of The Raid's Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian.
For part three, Skylines, writer/director Liam O'Donnell has pushed out the scope even further. The new film follows a strike team on a mission to the alien planet in an effort to protect the Earth, its human inhabitants, and alien refugees, once and for all. Lindsey Morgan stars as Rose, reprising her cameo role from Beyond Skylines, and she's joined by a strong ensemble that includes genre veterans James Cosmo, Alexander Siddig, Rhona Mitra, and Daniel Bernhardt, among others.
While promoting the release of Skylines, Liam O'Donnell spoke to Screen Rant about his work on the film, and discusses the series' evolution from an alien-themed horror film to a rousing martial arts adventure saga. He talks about his love of 80s/90s B-movie fare like Total Recall and Robocop, and how Skylines looks up to the legacy of those films while forging its own identity as the ultimate "Friday night movie." With Skylines, O'Donnell and his team aimed to create a crowd-pleasing adventure that would disarm even the most cynical viewer, and they succeeded in their task.
Skylines is out now in theaters, on Digital, and on VOD.
I just watched your movie, Skyliines, or Skyline 3, depending on what you want to call it.
Yes. (Laughs) Yeah, that title was an interesting journey. It was originally just supposed to be "Skylines," but then we were told we couldn't clear that because there's a German Netflix show called Skylines. So we put the number three in there (Skylin3s), and then the internet joked on that. Then, all of a sudden, Vertical was like, "Actually, we can clear Skylines in the US, so we're just gonna use that." And I'm like, "But... I already put the three in the movie!" But I actually do think, as funny as the three is, it did help raise awareness for part two. The first film had a massive marketing budget, but for part two and three, we don't have that same Universal/Relativity apparatus. So anytime we can remind somebody that it's part of a bigger narrative, that's probably pretty good.
It's such an interesting trajectory for these movies. I like to call it, "The little franchise that could." That first movie got a mixed reception, but it did well enough for you to make the second one, which came out of nowhere and just blew everyone away. It's secretly a martial arts movie, which impressed a lot of people. And now this one moves even further into the action realm, and is just a massive crowd-pleasing adventure. I watched it by myself and was just standing and cheering. This movie is just friggin' awesome, dude.
Yeah! It's definitely... It's hard for me to hear great news like that because I don't know how to react. (Laughs) But that's awesome to hear. I think part three is the tone that I've been looking for, I suppose. Even on set, just the experience of making Beyond, which was a tough movie to make, especially as a first-time director. But on set, I felt like I could finally see the things I wanted to fix, and fix them in real-time, and then get exactly what I wanted. You still don't know if it's going to work out, though. When you have a VFX movie, and you're shooting Johnny and Lindsey in the cockpit, and all that stuff came out great, but what if the VFX of them hurtling through space don't work? Fortunately, we had a great post team who made everything work.
Was it a lot of the same guys, the Strauss guys and Hydraulx and all that?
No. For part three, the only way to get it made was to do it as a U.K. co-production. So we ended up working with a new VFX company, Lip Sync, out of the U.K., as our main vendor. There was a lot of all this really nerdy stuff I didn't have to explain as much in part two. I definitely had to take them to Skyline school, but I'd say they all graduated with honors.
Cool. Tell me about the writing process of this franchise. These movies have been yours from the beginning, from what I understand. Tell me about evolving the tone and shifting from horror to something more jolly. It's still rated R and everything, but it's a jolly movie!
(Laughs) Jolly, that's hilarious. I'd say the first movie was a little bit more of a Night of the Living Dead zombie setup, with the alien apocalypse on top of it. It was definitely coming more from a horror standpoint. The characters were coming more from a horror standpoint. For part two... Part of it was because of the mixed feedback from part one, but even before Skyline came out, we came up with the idea for part two. We knew we wanted to go in a more action movie direction. We already had the idea of the cop being the lead in part two. Part one was like, "what would a normal dude in the middle of an alien invasion do in a hopeless and dire situation?" And part two is, like, "Okay, what if you're on a train, who is the guy you want to be on the train with during an alien invasion? It's this guy." And Frank Grillo was perfect as that guy. Like, whatever he says, I'm gonna follow him. I really embraced the character archetypes that I love the most. I wanted to do Die Hard with an alien invasion. I wanted him to be this John McClane type of character. The way we ended up casting Iko and Yayan, it was a total stroke of luck. We were over in Indonesia and the producers were having dinner with us and were like, "They'd be great in this movie!" And we were like, are you kdding?! Like, they're available? That's possible? And it ended up perfectly fitting their schedule. They were like, "Do you want us to do choreo?" And I'm like, "Uh, absolutely!" So we added in the fights. Like you said, it secretly became a martial arts movie.
And how does that evolution continue with Skylines?
And then for part three, I always wanted to do an adventure to an alien planet. I was thinking about that when we were filming part two, but I didn't know quite how to get there. When we did the wraparounds with Lindsey, which were the last things we filmed for Beyond Skyline, it was when I saw... I really loved her dynamic. Even at the end of that movie when she's cracking jokes with Trent and then swaggering in and blowing up the aliens, that was the tone that the new movie becomes. It is, like you say, a little bit more fun! It really embraces... There's dramatic aspects, there's horror aspects, but it's a movie that, above all, is trying to make you say, "F*** yeah!"
Yeah! This a movie that, when it's safe to have my friends come over, I want to order a couple of pizzas and buy a few six-packs, and I want to just watch their faces during so many moments of this movie. Like, when the movie just spontaneously breaks into that kick-ass martial arts fight, I want to see them when they realize how delightfully off the rails this movie can go, in the best possible way.
That scene was one of those things where I was like... We had even more martial arts in the cavern fight. It was so hard because I knew we had such a big story, that we would have to cut that down and stick to the story. Because every shot of the new shadow aliens is expensive, and there was only so much we could do on our budget. But the choreo team had a ten-minute fight where they were just murdering aliens in the most amazing ways, and it breaks your heart not to include all of it. But then it was definitely important to me to still have the martial arts flavor that we introduced in Beyond. We wanted to hold back and then release it in some surprising and fun ways, with both Daniel Bernhardt's character, and Yayan's triumphant return!
Oh yeah. There's a whole act in the film that's just cheers compounded on top of cheers. I really had a great time.
That was the one scene I really wanted to see with an audience. It was very much designed for... I saw Beyond Skyline at every festival we were invited to. I tried to embrace the experience and watch it in theaters with an audience as many times as I could. It was really an education on how to engineer those fan interaction moments for part three. That was one of them where I really wanted to see it with an audience, but I couldn't because of the pandemic.
I imagine some filmmakers might be combative against an audience, like, "You're not supposed to be cheering or laughing, I'm very serious, this is my art!"
No! I think people don't laugh enough because they don't quite get my sense of humor. I think almost every part of Alexander Siddig's performance in the second half of the movie, I'm laughing behind the monitor! I don't know if some people don't get it, but this is me channeling, like, Ronny Cox through Alexander Siddig. I'm having a f****** blast doing it! I feel like you have to be someone, probably like yourself, who has seen Total Recall a hundred times. Then you kinda get what I'm laying down. But certain people will be, like, "Hmm, wow, this is really taking a turn." (Laughs)
I'm 29 years old, so I feel like maybe I'm the last generation that was able to be raised at the rental store, you know?
That's interesting, I think you're probably right. Those movies, like Robocop and Total Recall and Predator and Aliens, they stopped making them for the past 20 years. If you want that flavor, you still have to go back to those. They haven't really diminished in their rewatchability. They were made with such an amazing mix of practical and visual effects of the time. They're great movies. But it's like what you're saying, the kind of movie I want to watch on a Friday night, they just kind of stopped making that particular brand of movie, but that's still my favorite brand.
Totally. And if they do make them, they're like, dirt cheap. Not to speak ill of SyFy original or The Asylum and stuff like that.
I know what you mean. It's either done on too low of a scale to enjoy it, or if it's at too high of a scale, some of the rough edges that we like are sawn off. We're fortunate to be in this sweet spot where we can do a lot... We don't have a huge budget. People who read the script said it was an $80 million script, and we definitely didn't have that! But we're able to make what we have work for us at a high visual level. Hopefully!
A big part of the marketing for the movie is that it's the grand finale, it's the end of the trilogy... And... You konw what my question is, you know what I'm asking.
You know, they did that originally... To let you in on how the sausage gets made, that was the first tag line they went with: "the epic conclusion to the Skyline trilogy." And I was, like, "It's not a trilogy, that's the joke!" And then they were like, we have to let everybody know that it's part of a bigger story. But if you look back at the first teaser poster, it was like, "From the creator of the Skyline franchise." And I was like, "Oh, that sucks." That wasn't any better. So I was, like, you know, let's embrace the trilogy concept, since it helps people understand the idea of three movies. And if we end up making another one down the line, it's marketing. We've gotta get the audience aware. This is the conclusion of a trilogy, and if we make a part four, it'll be the start of the next trilogy! (Laughs)
"It's a fresh start, it's new!"
I was like, look man, I've got a mortgage, I just had my fourth kid, and if I want to keep making Skyline movies, I'm going to keep making them! I don't apologize to anyone for that.
Then I hope we get to see more Skyline movies. I'm just sayin,' I don't know if you're interested in announcing anything for Screen Rant exclusively or anything...
(Laughs) I think, if you watch the end of the movie, you can let your imagination run wild, and I would definitely love to do that. I'm always working on a treatment for something.
You assembled one heck of a cast. Tell me about assembling these folks!
We obviously had Lindsey to start with, and the next person we cast was Daniel Bernhardt. I'm friends with his agent, who pushed him on me, but I was like, "Oh my God, yeah." He was in John Wick! If you wrote the character, Owens, and then saw a picture of Daniel, you're just like, "Oh, there he is." He was an early one. Siddig and Rhona and James Cosmo were great. I credit my producer, Matt Chausse. I think it was because we were a U.K. co-production, we had to bring in British actors, and we just really lucked out by their availability. Alexander and James and Rhona, to have the three of them grounding the first act and bringing you up to speed on this wild adventure, it's like a cheat code, you know? And I especially like how Rhona, her relationship with Lindsey is something you've seen in a lot of action movies, but with different genders. Where it's an older male action hero who is passing it on to the next generation. So it was really cool to have it be that way with Rhona and Lindsey. I love the energy they have together.
All the pieces came together. The movie is fantastic. I can't wait to watch it many times with my boys.
Thank you very much.
Skylines is out now in theaters, on Digital, and on VOD.