Interview: Director Greg McLean Discusses This Week’s Home Entertainment Release of THE BELKO EXPERIMENT

Out on Blu-ray and DVD tomorrow is Greg McLean’s The Belko Experiment, which was written and produced by James Gunn, and features a cavalcade of familiar faces, including John Gallagher Jr. (Hush, 10 Cloverfield Lane), Tony Goldwyn, John C. McGinley (Point Break, Stan Against Evil), Sean Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, Super), Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy), Rusty Schwimmer (Jason Goes to Hell, Twister), Owain Yeoman (The Mentalist), and many more. The film’s story pits an office building filled with co-workers against each other once they realize they’re pawns in some unknown entity’s twisted game of survival of the fittest.

Daily Dead caught up with McLean recently to discuss this week's home entertainment release of The Belko Experiment, and he discussed additional materials fans will get to enjoy beginning this Tuesday, the challenge of creating compelling visuals for his one-location setting, and more.

So, there has been this shift in our culture since the time you made the film, versus where things are at now socio-politically at the time of The Belko home release. And I'm curious, has that shifted your perspective of what this story is? I love the over-the-top violence because that's stuff that I grew up on as a kid. But this film seems like it might feel a bit contextually different for you now maybe than it would've back when you and James first began working on this.

Greg McLean: Right. I would have to say that the meaning of the movie given what's happened in the last 12 months has completely and definitely changed, because the world has changed, and particularly America has changed. From the time we were making the movie, I would never imagine that Donald Trump would be the President of the United States, and this movie is kind of like a metaphor for evil corporations gone wrong and government gone wrong, so it’s been weird [laughs].

When we started, our goal was to make a very dark satire and where that could possibly go, and now some of that is kind of being reflected in terms of crazy policies and these really extreme kinds of things going on. So, if the movie had been green-lit today and we're shooting it, people would be saying, "Oh, wow that's so on topic," in terms of how crazy the world's becoming and how outrageous everything has turned out. We have the new normal kind of happening around the world where there's so much crazy stuff going on that nothing can surprise people anymore, in terms of how crazy the world's getting right now.

So, yeah, I think my view has changed a lot in terms of the question of when we made the film, did we have any idea that there would be this strange political environment we're making the film in. When we started, there was none of this going on, because it was a very different world. So, that was the long way of saying the answer is "absolutely."

On paper, this film seems “easy” because it's a one-location story, and those always seem like the most simple and straightforward approaches to use for a story and yet, you take that idea and kick things up to 11 almost immediately. There’s nothing simple about the approach at all. I would love to hear about taking that idea of having this very contained horror movie but then making it into one of the most ambitious I’ve seen all year, in terms of the effects and the amount of cast that you have involved. It’s such an amazing feat in terms of what you guys were able to pull off with Belko.

Greg McLean: When I read the script, that's what I fell in love with. First of all, I thought the idea was so outrageous and interesting and fascinating. But, as a director, a challenge was weaving these characters contained in this one location and finding ways to make that visually spectacular and also just visually different enough because you spend the entire time in an office building, which sounds really boring.

And very recently, I've been very surprised by looking at movies like Wolf of Wall Street, and when I saw that movie by Martin Scorsese, that just really inspired me for two years, where I was going, "My God! How thrilling is this film and how great is the filmmaking and the design and the cinematography and the creativity in every scene!" So, I came into this movie inspired by that notion of making this space interesting, because a lot of my films are outdoors. It's very easy when you're out in the Outback, when you're in the jungle, for me to do spectacular landscapes and make things interesting visually, but to me, the challenge was saying, "Let's do the same thing, but now we're contained within different office spaces."

And that's why all the energy goes into trying to create visual difference between the way we shoot characters, and we designed very specific color schemes for how the story progresses so that we feel we're actually witnessing something visually dynamic even though we are in an office building. That was the fun directorial challenge for me, to try and make that journey very clear to the audience and also make it visually satisfying.

In terms of the home release, are we going to see some extra stuff that didn't quite make it into the theatrical version of the film, and are there some fun extras that fans will get to see with this release?

Greg McLean: There's a behind-the-scenes documentary called "Rules of the Game: Secrets Behind The Belko Experiment", and that is interviews with the cast, interviews with myself, interviews with James Gunn—I think everybody's on there. And there's a pretty wide-ranging and pretty detailed featurette about the making of it that has a lot of behind-the-scenes footage. It's quite fun and really cool. Also, Lee Hardcastle created these amazing stop-motion animation videos that came out that had a release in the U.S. and that was just incredibly funny, hilarious, ultra-violent shorts riffing on things in The Belko Experiment, which were pretty amazing. And then there's a stills gallery as well. But the actual version of the film that you see in theaters is the version on the DVD. There is no director's cut, because the cut you see is the final cut.

Well, I'm glad you guys didn't have to cut anything out for theatrical, because it was a lot of fun.

Greg McLean: That was really the struggle when we first set out to make Belko. That was the proviso of making the movie; James, as the producer, had said to the studio, "The only way I'll make this movie is if we can make it as completely hardcore and f**ked up as the script is," and we got to do that, which was great because more often than not, you don't ever get to do that.