By Ali Moosavi.
They believe the world is going to end in a nuclear war and they set up places off the grid that are self-sustaining. We took that idea and it evolved into a story about a man for whom the Armageddon was really a metaphorical Armageddon in which humanity had gone bad.”
At the beginning of Last Survivors we come across Troy (Stephen Moyer) who lives with his son Jake (Drew Van Acker) in an isolated cabin among the woods. Troy keeps telling his son that a nuclear war has destroyed all humanity and although he may come across creatures who look like humans, he should kill them before they kill him. Though Jake is developing a strong desire to find out about religion, Troy dismisses this as nonsense and denies the existence of a higher being. A chance encounter that Jake has with a woman (Alicia Silverstone), makes him doubt what his father has preaching to him and ignites love and desire within him. His father though has other, more sinister ideas.
Last Survivors is only the second feature film by director Drew Mylrea and the technical qualities of the movie belie its modest budget. It takes time to get going but it picks up pace in the second half and is bolstered by the chemistry between Alicia Silverstone and Drew Van Acker. I spoke to Drew Mylrea and the film’s producer, Sunil Perkash.
How did this movie all come together?
Sunil Perkash (SP): I developed this with writer Josh Janowicz. We were incredibly intrigued by the idea of these people who are doomsday preppers. This really exist and they believe the world is going to end in a nuclear war and they set up places off the grid that are self-sustaining. We took that idea and it evolved into a story about a man for whom the Armageddon was really a metaphorical Armageddon in which humanity had gone bad. I really responded to how the script turned out. I had just made a movie with Drew Mylrea called Spy Intervention and I was giving him everything I was working on just because I thought he was so talented, enthusiastic and passionate. This was the only thing he responded to.
Drew Mylrea (DM): I just really loved it. We’re so influenced in childhood. Here we have a character who’s living with his dad, isolated away from everything. All he knows is what his dad tells him but you realize that some of the things his dad is teaching him aren’t great ideas. I just thought that’s such an interesting idea because we all take things from our parents that are good and bad. The script was really tense and very moving and was about something that I had dealt with my own parents; their preconceptions about the world and things that I don’t necessarily agree with and things that I do agree. So I thought it was a story worth telling and I really wanted to make it to a movie.
SP: We gave the script to Drew Van Acker who was also the lead of our film Spy Intervention and he had the same extremely enthusiastic response, so we decided to get this film made. We put the movie together prior to the pandemic with Alicia Silverstone with whom I had previously worked with years ago on Blast From the Past and Stephen Moyer, both really passionate actors and we had to put a little pause because of the pandemic. We were originally going to shoot the movie in Georgia.
DM: When I read the script, it was it was set in a cold and snowy environment, just like the film that you see, but we had an opportunity to shoot it in Georgia because of tax incentives and the timing was right. But it was going to be during summer. I remember when I first met Alicia, I told her you’re going to be muddy and dirty and it’s going to be an independent film, you’re really going to have to sink your teeth into it. She loved that but then the pandemic happened and everything was put on pause but the actors never did let go of the project. We thought no movies were going to get made but we were still talking to Alicia, Drew and Stephen and they were like guys like this movie is about isolated characters and what isolation does to your mind. We should go out there make this movie and to Sunil’s credit he was like yes I think we can do it. It will have to be during the winter and we found a great spot to do it in Montana and I’m thinking that’s awesome we get to make a movie in the snow and we get to shoot the movie as it was written. We went out to Butte Montana up onto a mountain side and made this movie in a month. It was a really extraordinary experience.
The films starts looking like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film, then a little later develops into a love story and then a thriller, so it’s difficult to classify the film into a particular genre.
DM: I think that’s true. Sunil and I get along so well because we love movies that take place in heightened environments like Titanic which in my opinion is the greatest love story ever told and it’s set against this backdrop that is a heightened sense of the world that we live in. Our movie also is a scenario that most people aren’t going to have to deal with but to see people like us deal with that scenario in a really grounded way, I think is really moving. I go to the movies because I want to have a cathartic experience, I want to see something that I’ve never seen before and feel something I’ve never felt before and I think this movie does that. Like you said, it is a love story at the center of it and it’s a movie about hope which is something I don’t think you see a lot in post-apocalyptic films but we definitely end the movie with a message of hope and I think that’s important because in a world where people really can be down on humanity for good reasons, there’s a lot in humanity that’s worth fighting for and that’s what this movie is about.
In your film, the son is always searching for answers and asks many questions about God and religion but the father is dismissive of them and doesn’t seem to believe in God. That difference of opinion was quite interesting.
DM: It’s great you pointed that out because I think that difference of opinion is hope. Do you believe that tomorrow can be a better day than the today? Do you hope that there’s something out there other than yourself and that manifests in the Jake character and I think his father has lost that hope and that is the difference. We wanted to make a movie about hope and how important it is, so it was definitely intentional.
Visually the film is very engaging, how was your relationship with your cinematographer?
DM: I had worked with the cinematographer (Julian Estrada) before on a commercial and we hit it off. He is great and he’s a very opinionated guy. He is from Peru and has a lot of really interesting life experience. When we first started storyboarding the movie and just talking about it, he was coming to me with classical paintings and he’s like let’s do it like this painting from the 15th century or something. We wanted to be very deliberate with the camera, we didn’t want to be showy, we wanted it to service the story but also to create tension with the camera. You see so many films that are apocalyptic and camera is handheld and it’s gritty and dark but we really wanted to use the camera methodically to create this kind of simmering tension that lurks under the surface. In the beginning you arrive in this cabin where the father and son are living there and we wanted it to feel beautiful. You are in the middle of these mountains and even though the world was destroyed, they’re thriving and we wanted it to feel very regal and beautiful and then slowly notice that something is off here and we wanted the camera to reflect that.
Can you also talk about your use of flashbacks in the movie?
DM: The movie plays with the idea of memory. The stories that people tell us are the stories that we internalize and then we believe. So it was important to us to address that idea and we thought the most effective way to do that was through flashbacks. So we can show the perception that a character has of reality and we can continue going back to these same flashbacks and show them a little differently as they become more aware of their environment and the truth of what’s happening outside this small bubble.
You have people in the film who have lost hope and I guess in the current climate with the pandemic a lot of people may have lost hope. So it may touch a nerve in certain viewers.
SP: I could not agree more and one thing Drew and I set out to do, which is really important to both of us, is we wanted first and foremost for the movie to be engaging and entertaining and by ending with hope to make it uplifting. I think we should come out of a film feeling better about life. I always reference the Sound of Music as a film that you just feel so elated by the end and we wanted something very moving by the end.
DM: We just thought it was important to tell a story about how when you’re feeling down and when you feel like there’s no way out of this thing, you can make a choice to be hopeful even if you don’t know what is out there. We end the movie on a moment where we don’t know what’s on the other side of this door but we hope that it’s not something that we set up in the movie. The movie is about how when even though we don’t know what’s in front of us, it still can be better than where we come from.
You mentioned the pandemic and what was really touching was that everyone came together to make this movie during the pandemic and everyone was feeling like are we ever going to be able to get back to normal? Are we ever going be able to tell stories again? And I think everyone definitely kind of felt the story and felt very hopeful that if we set out to do something, that we can accomplish it so I, think it was kind of imbued into the DNA of the film.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden). He contributed to the second volume of The Directory of World Cinema: Iran (Intellect, 2015).
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