Gareth Edwards hotly anticipated debut feature Monsters nominated for 6 British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor

Toronto – November 2, 2010 – – D FILMS is pleased to announce that Gareth Edwards’ hotly anticipated feature film debut MONSTERS has picked up 6 nominations at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA), including Best British Independent Film, Best Director, Best Debut Director and a Best Actor nod for Scoot McNairy. MONSTERS is not far behind The King’s Speech which won garnered 8 BIFA nominations.  


MONSTERS is a unique sci-fi thriller about extraterrestrials. It is also a romance, an insightful political commentary and a thrilling example of what can be done with ingenuity on a minimal budget. Gareth Edwards wrote, directed and created all of the special effects for his remarkable feature film debut. MONSTERS will open in major cities across Canada on November 12, 2010.  


Six years ago NASA discovered the possibility of alien life within our solar system. A probe was launched to collect samples, but crashed upon re-entry over Central America.  Soon after, new life forms began to appear there and half of Mexico was quarantined as an INFECTED ZONE.  Today, the American and Mexican military still struggle to contain "the creatures"… Our story begins when a US journalist (Scoot McNairy) agrees to escort a shaken tourist (Whitney Able) through the infected zone in Mexico to the safety of the US border.


Highly praised for his role in In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Scoot McNairy jumped at the chance of working with his then girlfriend (and now wife) Whitney Able (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane) on a project that promised to be both challenging and unpredictable.   One of the keys to keeping the dialogue as true to life as possible was improvisation. Edwards gave certain guidelines on what would happen in a scene and what the character developments should be between particular stages of the story, but then left the actors to it. The result is naturalistic and sympathetic performances that ground the film in reality. 


MONSTERS was shot with just a four person crew and a fixer. The team traveled through Guatemala, Belize and Mexico picking locations and shooting them as they found them, using a cinéma vérité and guerrilla style of filmmaking.  Edwards and his crew shot scenes with local people who often didn’t know they were going to be in the film until 20 minutes before.  “It was great, because you just told people what not to do and what you needed them to achieve by the end of the scene, but it was up to them how they got to it,’’ said Edwards. 


Gareth Edwards (Writer/Director/Cinematographer/Special Effects) founded his own visual effects company, The Monkey Experiment Ltd., in 2003. He has produced special effects and directed for a number of BAFTA award-winning and Emmy®-nominated television shows. In 2005 he was named Broadcast magazine’s Young Talent of the Year and he directed the epic drama Attila the Hun for the BBC.  MONSTERS is his first feature.