From High Tension to Crawl, Alexandre Aja is known for crafting pulse-pounding survival movies, but his latest, the Netflix thriller Oxygen, the filmmaker leaves behind bloody set-pieces and deadly predators in favor of a contained sci-fi approach. Mélanie Laurent stars as a young woman who wakes up trapped in a high-tech medical pod with no memory of who she is and discovers she’s rapidly running out of oxygen. With only her wits and an A.I. system named M.I.L.O. (Mathieu Almaric), Laurent’s character has to puzzle out who she is, how she wound up in the pod, and most importantly, how she can get out alive.
With Oxygen now streaming on Netflix, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Aja and Laurent about the film, from how they pulled off the production amidst the COVID pandemic to the technical demands of shooting such a contained film. We also dove into the film’s ending, so if you haven’t caught it yet, be sure to hit pause before we start breaking down all the film’s big twists and turns (and there are a lot of them you won’t want spoiled in advance.
You can watch the full extended interview in the video above and you'll find a list of what we discussed below.
- How they managed to film Oxygen during the COVID pandemic in the summer of 2020
- How did the unique demands of the script challenge Laurent’s usual process?
- Aja discusses how the process of rewriting the script from English to French changed the film.
- What was the technical approach to working with the DP to capture the shots they needed while maintaining a sense of claustrophobia?
- Laurent talks about how she approached delivering a performance when the camera is so intimate.
- Laurent discusses how Mathieu Amalric wound up voicing MILO and why it was so valuable to have a friend providing that voice throughout production.
- Aja breaks down the film’s ending and why he changed it from the original script.
Here's the official synopsis for Oxygen:
Oxygen is a French survival thriller directed by Alexandre Aja. The film tells the story of a young woman (Mélanie Laurent, 6 Underground, Inglourious Basterds), who wakes up in a cryogenic pod. She doesn’t remember who she is or how she ended up there. As she’s running out of oxygen, she must rebuild her memory to find a way out of her nightmare.