Matthew Reilly is no stranger to storytelling; the Australian author has written more than a dozen novels since self-publishing Contest in 1996. But action thriller Interceptor was an entirely new kind of assignment for the experienced writer. It follows a missile interceptor base and its newly assigned army captain (Elsa Pataky), who just may be the only thing standing between the United States and nuclear annihilation. Meanwhile, Reilly had a task that was almost as difficult: writing and directing the film.
“Novels and scripts are just totally different,” Reilly tells Tudum. Between novels, Reilly would knock out pages of various screenplays, learning the ropes by trial and error. Of course, he had a little bit of help: BAFTA-nominated screenwriter Stuart Beattie. “I sent it to Stu; we read each other’s scripts, and we give each other constructive feedback,” Reilly says. “I sent him Interceptor, and he read it. He said he loved it. Then he says, ‘Do you mind if I have a little go at it?’ So I sent him the file, and if you want the best screenwriting lesson, get Stu Beattie to take your script away for four days.”
The film’s single-location screenplay was designed to keep the budget low on Reilly’s first at bat as a filmmaker. But that didn’t mean the stakes had to be as small as the budget. “Setting it in this interceptor facility meant that our heroine has to shoot down nuclear missiles, which are going to destroy America,” Reilly says. “So your stakes are high, but your location costs are lower.” For Beattie, the film’s small-scale structure had the same appeal as his earlier work Collateral, in which a Los Angeles taxi driver is taken hostage by a hitman and forced to ferry him from assassination to assassination. “It’s always very hard to get your protagonist and antagonist together,” he says. “And that’s where you often get the best stuff, because they’re arguing over the philosophies that you’re talking about, the themes, the big ideas. And it really allows for great character introspection.” In Interceptor, those roles are filled by Pataky’s Captain JJ Collins and Alexander (Luke Bracey), the terrorist holding her military base hostage. As Alexander menaces Collins from the other side of a blast door, they have ample time to snipe at each other about their opposing ideals — until, inevitably, it comes to blows.
Reilly says his partner became an invaluable resource in crafting the confrontations between Interceptor’s two adversaries. “I think we could safely say that most of the villain’s lines were probably done by [Stuart], and most of JJ’s lines were done by me,” Reilly says. “And that’s also where you do [well], from my perspective, to let go and to give Stu his head on that. And that comes out rather well, because it’s always nice for me to see Alexander speak lines that in a thousand years I could never have come up with... That’s a nice change from writing novels where it’s all on you.”
In fact, that collaborative element was one of Reilly’s biggest takeaways from life on a film set. “The best thing I did was I let go,” he says, “and I trusted these extraordinarily capable professionals to do what they do.” That didn’t mean he eased off the throttle in terms of his own job. “I built a model of the set, I did 770 storyboards. So people knew what was in my head, and then I gave them pretty free rein,” Reilly continues. “Writing a novel is good to do as a solitary pursuit, but making a film, it’s by necessity [a] collaboration. So you embrace that. I loved it. I wish I could do that with the books.” On that note: Now that his novelist partner has turned in his first work as a screenwriter, has Beattie ever thought of writing a book? “Never,” he says. “If I ever was,” Beattie notes, “I’d be talking to Matt extensively and trying to figure out how to do it, because I have no idea.” Hey, that’s what friends are for.
