"We blow up a rabbit at a machine-gun at some point" Neil Marshall says to me. The roundtable interview just barely began but the guy's already given me an easy quote to write up. He was asked whether or not he considers his latest film a violent one. He is, after all, the guy who made Dog Soldiers and The Descent, a movie Brad kept telling me to see and when I finally did a few months ago was a little blown away by. He's a good director and his latest film, Doomsday (which you can read about right here) , sounded interesting enough (a cross between Escape From New York and 28 Weeks Later).

Rabbits aren't the only ones to bite the bullet in Marshall's latest. He told us the film is going to be pretty damn violent and fans of Dog Soldiers will be happy to know that there's another dead cow scene to – in Marshall's words – "continue the tradition".

Just how far does he take the violence in this film is the next question. Someone asked the British director if he might be looking at a possible NC-17 rating. "I don't know how the American rating system works. I would say an R without a doubt but I don't know what you'd have to do to get an NC-17 … it's nasty blood and guts wise … there's plenty of swearing …. but, I don't think it's offensive in any kind of way". I told Neil it's usually the sex, not violence that slaps a movie with the NC-17 rating. "Okay, probably an R then."

Marshall on how this film's more epic scope compares with his previous films: "It's like everything times 100. The scale is just on a different planet compared to the other ones. Those ones were like a cast of six people in a small dark hole or in a cottage and this is just a much bigger cast and the scale is … it's a huge journey across the country and it takes in several different worlds, I guess, different environments and uh, it's huge. We got castles, we got gang warfare, we've got futuristic London, destroyed Glasgow … "

The story for Doomsday, a futuristic tale where Scotland and eventually Britain is cut off from the rest of the world, came from a single image in Marshall's head. "The story idea sprang from an image that came into my mind … six years ago is when I came up with it, which was this vision of a bunch of futuristic soldiers in futuristic body armor and all this kind of stuff standing off against a knight in shining armor on horseback rearing up in front of them and I thought … what context could this image happen in a film and what story is there? So this concept of a virus breaking out in Scotland and if they rebuilt Hadrian's Wall, basically isolating and quarantining the whole country … Chernobyl was kind of a big inspiration where you know they kept people out of this hot zone area and I thought what if that happened to Scotland and there was this virus and they cut it off – literally blocking it off – and locked people in and left them to die. And then from that came, okay if you leave people to die and people survive … what happens to them in this country and in this castle so things like that … what if they became like a feudal society and they regressed. Everyone else is kind of carried on but they've regressed and became this different society and if you'd leave them for 25-30 years and then go back and discover what's there … that's exactly what we're doing in the story."

This idea of a society regressing was interesting. The film stars Rhona Mitra who leads a group to try and get in Scotland where a rumored cure for a lethal virus is said to be kept. "The further they go up north, they cross the wall, up river and up the road and the further up north they go the further they go back in time they seem to go. But the other thing was to absolutely avoid the concept of a time travel movie because it's not about that at all."

Is this film making any kind of social statement? "Not really. In the U.K. there's this big thing having to do with, um, I've forgotten what it's called now … there's a virus that occurs in hospitals and it's just to do with the amount of drugs people are using, it's making them immune to … you know, antibodies are starting to reject these things and this new virus occurs in hospitals and I just thought this is going to happen, sooner or later. We've had the avian flu and panic, you know, on a small scale but sooner or later it's going to come and we're all going to be in shit." Neil laughed at the morbid note he ended on.

Someone asked him what it was like to work with Malcolm McDowell. "Malcolm was an absolute joy. He's a lovely, lovely guy and um, him and Bob Hoskins were great cuz as they openly confessed their favorite place in the world is being on set and making movies."

The concept of a virus breaking out and an England that has been isolated draws obvious comparisons to 28 Days Later. "Well 28 Days Later was not the first virus movie … but our film is not about the virus. The virus is the back story and it's primarily about the group … and they're adventure. It's much more like an action movie and less of a horror movie. The virus doesn't really have any special qualities. It's like you catch it and it kills you in the most horrendous way. It liquidizes the internal organs and makes you hemorrhage from any orifice, you know those kind of disgusting things that real viruses do. It doesn't turn you into a zombie but you do infect people. It's passed like a common cold and the trouble with this particular virus is it works so fast that by the time you realize you've got it, you've already infected everybody you've encountered in the last ten hours … I just wanted to deal with viruses on a very real level and what happens is you have to take extreme measures to stop it."

These extreme measures are attributed to the Britain we will see in Doomsday. Marshall comes across as a pretty smart guy who has a reason and a way of thinking behind every frame he shoots. Here he is talking a little more about his futuristic version of Britain and why it is the way it is. "What happens in the context of the story is the British government quarantines Scotland and leaves everyone inside to die because there simply is no alternative. They can't evacuate, they can't do anything about it. There's no cure and as a result of that the world isolates and cuts off Britain because they don't want to take the risk either. It's easy to do with Britain, it's an island so we just don't let anybody out … we tried to apply a real logic to it like, Britain wouldn't need an army any more because not being able to fight overseas so the army becomes kind of the police force and it becomes this police state which is the only they could combat these levels of crime and unemployment and all this other kind of shit that's going to go down there. And uh, you know, it becomes a brutal and nasty place to live."

Marshall went on to talk about the production. Surprisingly, he shot most of the film in South Africa. Cape Town, a city much cheaper and more practical to shoot in, doubled for much of Britain and Scotland. "Trying to shut down a major highway in Scotland is just virtually impossible … and for the scenes involving medieval society and the castle, we shot all that at the end of the schedule in Scotland because there aren't too many castles in Cape Town."

I asked Marshall why he thinks movies like Children of Men, 28 Weeks Later, the upcoming remake of Escape From New York … all of these quasi-apocalyptic movies that we used to see a lot of in the '80s are suddenly becoming popular again. "It's timing, isn't it? It's political climate or whatever that brings these things about. Maybe it's just an effort to relive our youth on the part of filmmakers. I'd say that our film is a lot more fun that some of those other ones … it has a bleakness to it and it certainly deals with something that's very real, viral apocalypse and all that kind of stuff but at the same time we are trying to have some fun with it. Children of Men, you know, I absolutely loved that movie. It was beautiful and we were just like- " Marshall made a very depressed look here that got us laughing. " … [the movie] is spectacular, it's beautiful, they did a fantastic job with it … I was just going to go in a different direction. We've got human sacrifices, they didn't have human sacrifices!"

Future projects came up next. He told us he has "absolutely nothing" to do with Dog Soldiers 2. As for Outpost, the long-rumored zombie film he had in development but he thinks we've pretty much had our fill of zombie movies of late so it's been pushed back indefinitely. It looks like his next film would be the other project he'd been developing called The Eagles Nest, a World War II action film pitched as Die Hard meets Remains of the Day. I can't think of two unlikelier combinations.

Did Marshall have a favorite scene to shoot on Doomsday? "The case chase. I was so pleased to do that. I've never done a car chase before and being a huge fan of, you know, great car chases. I did so much research on car chases to figure out what it is I wanted to achieve. Our car chase kind of [combines] everything; one car kind of against an armada of cars … but it also has a sort of one-on-one car chase, like Bullet or something like that. We just try to pile everything in. We had a lot of fun doing that and there's some really, really dodgy stunts going on in that. Really scary stuff. And those guys in South Africa, they're just an absolutely brilliant stunt team. They're game for everything. I'm just like, 'Can I have a guy standing on this car while I start driving at high speed and he's going to try and jump on the back of another car?' and they're like 'Yeah, we'll do that.' And they do it and they do it without wires, you know? There's no safety wire or anything. In this day and age they're always like, 'We'll do a safety wire and take it out in post' and these guys were like 'What do we need a wire for?'

Any chance at a Doomsday video game? The story definitely seems like it makes it a likely candidate. "I think there definitely is and it's perfect for that kind of thing. There's definitely video game potential."

Last time out, Marshall experienced a run-in with the studio when they asked him to change his bleak ending to The Descent to a happier one. He was asked how many endings he shot this time. So far, just the one. "I don't know what they could possibly change this ending to."

I asked Marshall something I touched upon with DVD producer Charles Lazrika during the Blade Runner roundtable; whether or not he thinks directors are leaving more in the script these days to shoot and using the DVD as a fallback. "I don't think that's so much the case. You don't have time to sort of shoot extra stuff for the hell of it. But I do think that directors accept the fact that, okay the movie may be released in the cinemas in a cut version or a lesser version. But it gives us a degree of satisfaction to know that it will all be seen in some context at some point."

Yet at the same time, I said, studios use it to flip on the director. "Totally, yeah. That's exactly what happened with the ending of Descent. In return for cutting the end for the studio, what I got in return for that was a minimum 2000 screen release. I sold my soul [laughing] but I knew that everybody was going to see that version on the DVD so it wasn't going to be a big secret … and once everyone knew I cut the end, there was going to be interest in wanting to see it. So for me it was a kind of win-win situation."

And that pretty much is where the interview ended. There were a few more questions asked but nothing of amazing interest, although I did find out that Alexander Siddig is Malcom McDowell's nephew, a fact Marshall says he was unaware of until they were both on set. Who knew? This guy is a director on the rise and I'm very much looking forward to Doomsday now. It is slated for a release some time in 2008.

Related post categories: Comic-Con, Features : Doomsday, Neil Marshall

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