5 Questions with The Brothers Strause

Colin and Greg Strause came to Hollywood to become visual effects artists. They did that — they’ve contributed VFX to a long list of movies including The Book of Eli, Avatar, 2012  and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. They founded their own visual effects house, Hydraulx, in Santa Monica. And, in 2007, they directed AVPR: Alien vs. Predator — Requiem.The directing bug took; the brothers most recently directed and produced Skyline and have more projects on the way.
Q: What is the story behind creating Skyline? What was it like making your own movie?

A: This is our first foray into the producing world.  We developed the script, shot it, financed it, did all the post and actually had to finish it and did all 540 versions for all the territories. We did it soup to nuts.

Greg had the idea about a bright light that would attract people by the thousands. He had just finished construction on his penthouse. We’d always joked when we were on location that we would never let a film crew in our house. But our agent was telling us about the Paranormal Activity success and how the guy had shot it. We’d already bought one or two RED cameras and had amazing lenses. So we thought, why don’t we shoot something here. We bounced ideas around with [screenwriters] Josh [Cordes] and Liam [O'Donnell] and came up with the alien invasion movie.

From the balcony of Greg’s place, you have box seats to the end of the world. So, it has to be something epic, with big scope. They whipped up a treatment and the script came in 2 months through all the revisions. And from the inception to being in the theaters was 11 and a half months, which is really, really quick.

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