From director Christian Rivers and with a script written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, the fantasy adventure Mortal Engines is set hundreds of years after civilization was destroyed by a cataclysmic event that has led society to rebuild as moving cities of varying sizes, where the bigger cities hunt down and consume the smaller cities, as part of the natural evolution. When the mysterious and fierce Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar) joins forces with outcast Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan) to stop the giant predator city of London from destroying everything in its path, their strength and determination will be tested in ways that neither could have ever imagined.

At the film’s press day, held on the Universal Pictures backlot, Collider got the opportunity to sit down with director Christian Rivers to talk about how his working relationship with Peter Jackson began with a fan letter when he was 15, getting offered the job to direct Mortal Engines, his evolution to director, finding his footing on such a big project, paring down the focus of the story, finding the perfect cast, and not wanting to end on a cliffhanger, even though there is more story to tell.

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Image via Universal Pictures

Collider: Is it true that you actually sent a fan letter to Peter Jackson and asked for a job, and here we are?

CHRISTIAN RIVERS: Yeah, I did. I sent him a letter, but it wasn’t so much, “Oh, please give me a job,” because I didn’t really know what that meant. I was 15 and wondering what I was gonna do with my life. I was still in high school, and I sent him a letter because I’d seen Bad Taste and I thought, “Here’s a guy making a movie, which was horror and science fiction, and it had comedy and all of those elements that I loved.” So, I sent him a letter saying, “Look, I’m 15 years old and loved your movie. I love movies. I can draw. Here are a whole lot of pictures. What would your advice be, to get into the industry?” We stayed in contact, and then a couple of years later, he rang me and said, “We’ve got funding for a film, called Braindead. Would you like to storyboard it?” And I said, “Yes.” And then, fast forward 25 years, and he called me up on the telephone, one morning in August 2016, and said, “Hey, remember that film Mortal Engines? Do you want to direct that?” He very generously offered me something that I was not experienced to do.

When he offered you that job, what was your reaction? Did you have to convince yourself to take that leap?

RIVERS: Absolutely! I’d done second unit for him on The Hobbit, after Andy Serkis had wrapped up and left, I worked second unit on Pete’s Dragon, and I went off and did my own short film, which I did completely outside of Weta. I needed to actually step outside of that and go make something, just for my own creative sanity. Then, I was actually in the process of developing something that was a more logical next step, which was lower budget genre feature that we could make for five to six million, and that was gonna be gritty. We were on a second draft of the script and my producing partner was talking to distributors, and we were trying to get that going, and then Mortal Engines came through, like a freight train. I did have a moment of, “Oh, shit, what about this other thing? This is too big for a first feature. Are you mad?!” But, that was just fear trying to make me say no because it was really scary. The prospect of taking it on was terrifying, but I was like, “What the hell are you doing, saying that you want to direct feature films, if you’re gonna turn this thing down? You can turn this down and in five years’ time, either it won’t have been made, or someone else will have made it. If Peter asks someone else, you could go see it and you kick yourself because they made it so amazing that you’d wish you had done it, or it will be terrible and you’ll wonder why you didn’t say yes, so that you could have made it better than that.” So, I just had to say yes and hold on for dear life, for the next two years. I think we survived.

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Image via Universal Pictures

Do you hope to still go back and make that smaller film?

RIVERS: Yeah, I do.

It’s hard to go much bigger from here.

RIVERS: It’s pretty hard to get bigger, but there are many more books [in this series] and they go some pretty wacky places. There are cities bigger than London, so there is actually scope to go bigger. We’ll see.

Had you always had thoughts of directing, or did that desire develop while you were doing other things?

RIVERS: Yeah, absolutely. Even back on Braindead, when I was storyboarding the film with Peter, in a little office at his house, with him and Jamie Selkirk, the editor. They were writing a complete shot list for the film, and I was just sketching the shots. Then, I started working with Richard Taylor, who now is the head of Weta Workshop, and we were doing physical effects, like filming puppets and bloody things that were gonna get sprayed around chopped up. And then, they started shooting and I went down to the set to see. I saw Pete directing, and I went, “That’s what I need to be doing. That’s where I need to be.” But it took me a long, long time to get there, partially because I was always learning. I didn’t just stay a storyboard artist. I got involved in working at Weta Workshop, and there was a lot of learning, all about sculpting and making puppets. In the Hercules and Xena days, we’d go up and shoot those. Then, the digital effects happened on Frighteners, so I started learning about that and about animation.

And then, on The Lord of the Rings, Peter started wanting to do 3D pre-vis, so the storyboards were then evolved into animatics. In some ways, you are directing because you’re exercising all of those creative muscles of shot design and animating shots. You’re not just working with actors because you’re also animating versions of the characters to do stuff. It was after King Kong that I was like, “I wanna direct,” And I started to make some pathways to doing that. Pete offered me a feature film then, but that never got off the ground. We got busy on The Lovely Bones, so he offered me the job of being visual effects supervisor on that, which is something that I hadn’t done, and so I took that on. When The Hobbit films kicked off, I actually had a break from the film industry. I went to work in Seattle at a computer games company, called Valve, for a year, hoping that we’d get to make movies, but that didn’t happen, so I left out and came back to work on The Hobbit.

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Image via Universal Pictures

And then, Pete offered me second unit, once Andy left. That was my first real big trial by fire of actually directing. I’d done a bit on Rings and Return of the King, directing extras and stunt doubles for Sam, Frodo and Pippin, and doing some stuff that was gonna be used for little bits and pieces. And then, directing second unit on The Hobbit, it went from just doing some fight stuff to going on location and shooting the barrel sequence. My first day, I directed Ian McKellen and Sylvester McCoy. I was actually working with the lead cast, and I ended up heading at least several scenes with the lead cast. We got through it and Pete said, “They all loved working with you,” so I knew that I could work and communicate with actors. And then, after that, I was like, “Okay, what am I gonna do?” So, I directed a short film that’s a little genre piece. It was meant to be a piece of entertainment, but it’s also a dark little Faustian supernatural horror story, and Pete really liked it. And then, I was setting up that other thing, and this freight train came in from out of nowhere.

Because you really jumped into the deep end with Mortal Engines, did you feel like you found your confidence, as a director, while you were making it, or are you still looking for that?

RIVERS: I’m still looking for that. It’s tricky. I certainly wasn’t given the keys to the Ferrari and someone said, “Off you go. See you in two years.” This was a collaboration. We cast the film together. Pete, Fran [Walsh] and Philippa [Boyens] wrote it. We designed the film together. They let me drive a lot of it, but they had concerns and ideas that they thought were improvements, and they’d come in and those things would happen, which is great. I can’t imagine taking on the full responsibility of something like this, completely by yourself. And also, it’s Peter Jackson presenting a movie, so it needs to have that quality control that people expect when they go see something that has his name on it. When we were shooting, Pete was never sit down and look over my shoulder while I was shooting. Fran was there because she’s one of the writers and producers. Because we started shooting with a script that was kind of in shape, but not quite in shape, things would come up in the screenplay. The script was longer than we knew the film needed to be, so it was great, just in case we reached any logjams with the cast, or with moments in the screenplay, she was there and we’d work it through. She was great at receiving and offering suggestions on things that we could shift.

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Image via Universal Pictures

We also had a second unit director, Glenn Boswell, who was the stunt choreographer on The Hobbit, who did a lot of the fight stuff. Because the script kept changing, but the budget didn’t, there were some drama scenes that needed to be done by second unit. I was shooting main unit and getting feedback on second unit while I was trying to concentrate on my stuff. That’s not usually stuff that a first-time director has to worry about. Usually, you work on something that’s low-budget and you’re only really having to think about what you’re doing. So, when it got too big, Pete very generously came on and said, “Look, I’ll do these things,” and I knew that I didn’t have to worry about that because it was in good hands. That allowed me to focus on what I needed to shoot. It’s a collaborative process. This film is the result of two years, of the four of us all playing around with it and sculpting it. The last six months of it have been me working with the visual effects team, and working with Fran and the editing room. Pete was off making his documentary (They Shall Not Grow Old), so he really let us finish sculpting the film. The result is two years of work between the four of us, and hopefully it finds an audience.

Were there sequences, storylines, or characters that you had to lose, either prior to shooting because of the budget, or during editing because of time?

RIVERS: Not necessarily. If anything, it was more the opposite. In some ways, certain characters, in certain moments, were almost over-accentuated in the screenplay, so when we shot them, it was actually a case of editing them down in the edit room. There was a lot of extra stuff with Bevis (Ronan Raftery) and Katherine (Leila George) that was almost becoming a second love story, and we couldn’t have two love stories. There’s Tom and Hester’s story, there’s the Anti-Tractionists, there’s Valentine, there’s Shrike and Hester, and there’s Katherine discovering the truth about her father. Those are the plots and subplots that are going on. There’s not another love story, between the rich girl and the poor boy. Also, there was a lot more Shrike and Hester stuff, but a lot of that got cut out.

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Image via Universal Pictures

With so many different and interesting character dynamics, between all of the characters, it seems like they’d all have a very full, rich life, if you followed any of them off into their own life, outside of what’s going on in the film.

RIVERS: That’s what we wanted to do. There’s nothing worse than watching a movie where you feel like the character steps onto the screen and their story starts there. You want to feel like you’re getting insight into someone who has a life. It’s all part of making sure the characters really believe in the world that they’re in. They’re not just pretending to be in this world, they actually exist in this world, they have connections outside, and they’re thinking about other things. That’s very important. There are a lot of films that spoon-feed you so much, and we certainly are guilty of a little bit of spoon-feeding in this one, but that’s more just to make sure people understand what mechanics are happening. But as far as the characters and the world, we wanted to create a film where you’re just dumped in the world and have to follow the characters as they develop. We don’t stop to explain anything that’s going on.

What was it like to cast this?

RIVERS: We were lucky. Well, we weren’t lucky because you make your own luck, but I was lucky to get to work with Peter and Fran and Philippa. I was almost just a passenger in the casting process. I would have been happy for them to cast the film because they cast impeccably. I can’t think of a dud piece of casting that they’ve ever done, in their entire careers. And they’re great at spotting new talent. We all knew, up front, that we wanted to find new, fresh faces, and that’s tough. I don’t know if it would have been easier, if it were a teenaged film where the protagonists were teenagers, but we were trying to find people who are in their 20s, who have amazing talent that aren’t already snapped up in a Marvel movie, or haven’t already become iconic, in some way.

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Image via Universal Pictures

What was it about Hera Hilmar, especially knowing that she’d have to cover half of her face for part of it, and also wear a scar?

RIVERS: She was late. We didn’t get her audition until quite late in the game, and she was just hypnotic. We cast a really wide net and looked at hundreds of auditions. After a couple of weeks of auditions, Pete and Fran said, “You’ll feel the pressure of just wanting to go with someone who you think is good, but you’ve gotta just keep turning over the stones. You’ll turn one over and be like, “Oh, my god!” It will hit you that they’re the perfect person. That was good advice. The perfect person is out there, and we found them. We had three other actors for Hester, that we were on the fence about, and they would have been okay, but if you’re even thinking like that, you just shouldn’t go there. It shouldn’t even be like that. They’ve gotta be perfect. We found Hester in Iceland.

When you have a world like this, where there’s obviously more story to tell, is it challenging to figure out the best place to end the story?

RIVERS: Well, I can’t speak to that. That job was done for me because that’s what the writers did with the screenplay, but there’s an actual end in the book, with Tom and Hester in the Jenny Haniver and the world is open to them. The journey in the sky begins there. That’s the finish in the book, and the writers zeroed in on that, as the jumping-off point. The four books are the life story of Tom and Hester, and this is just the part of the story where they meet and fall in love. Obviously, they’re wrapped up in this big adventure, and Hester needs to break free of her covenant with death. She falls in love with Tom, and he falls in love with her, and they are freed of their backgrounds.

It definitely feels like a story that has some resolution to it, instead of just leaving it on a cliffhanger, with the hope that you’ll get to make more films and keep telling this story.

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Image via Universal Pictures

RIVERS: Yeah, no, that’s annoying. The annoying thing about that is, if you leave people on a cliffhanger, you haven’t resolved the story. A cliffhanger is not an end to a story, it’s a device. Obviously, we’d love to make more. We’d love to continue the story because the books just keep getting better and better. The books are great, but this did need to work as its own film and story. Tom is someone who’s always dreamed of being an aviator. The wonderful thing about Tom’s optimism, as a character, is that he’s not bitter about [his position in life]. He’s disappointed, but he’s not complaining about it, even though he wished for something better. And Hester is someone who is so traumatized by what happened to her that she sees death as a good option. That’s important, these days, because there are a lot of people, especially in the creative industries, for whom mental illness is a real thing. We just don’t want to talk about it. Hester is someone who sees death as a good option, but she finds another path. She finds a reason to live through love. That’s gotta be the most human truth there is. Those stories are complete, but it’s the beginning of their journey together, which then becomes another story. There are a lot of interesting fun things that happen in the universe that, hopefully, we get to put on screen, if people go see this one.

Taking on something like this has to be exhausting because it’s such a long journey. How long do you think it will be before you direct again? Do you want to take a sizable break first?

RIVERS: You do, and you don’t. I’ll say that I want a big holiday, and my wife will be like, “You need a big break.” And then, it won’t be long before I start getting bored and itchy, and I just wanna get involved again. So, we’ll see what happens, if this film is successful and they wanna make sequels. If this was a standalone book, it wouldn’t have been made. If this was just one book with one story that was finished, I don’t think the studio would have taken a risk on it. They were hoping to create more films, so if we get to do that, that would be great. If this film is successful, whether I’m involved in them, or Peter decides to direct the next one, that would be fine, too.

Mortal Engines opens in theaters on December 14th.

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Image via Universal Studios