Earth to Echo: Director and Screenwriter Interview

I had no idea whether or not I was going to like Earth to Echo when I scheduled an interview with director Dave Green. I figured, judging solely from the trailer, that in the worst case scenario we would at least get to reminisce about classic 1980s sci-fi fantasy movies, to which the new film – despite being shot in the found footage format – clearly owed a debt. But fortune smiled, and Earth to Echo turned out to be a smart, exciting film in the old school kids sci-fi subgenre, and well worth exploring with the filmmaker on a variety of levels. 

Related: Earth to Echo Review: E.T-Mobile

And what luck! Earth to Echo screenwriter Henry Gayden just happened to be in the room with us. We chatted about their difficulty getting Earth to Echo made without a prominent role for an adult, why they originally wanted the kids to swear, the one thing the studio wouldn’t let the child cast do on camera, the origin of Echo’s owl-like appearance and where the alien robot comes from, and what sort of society he’s a part of.

Earth to Echo is in theaters now.

 

CraveOnline: I grew up on exactly this kind of movie.

Dave Green: Awesome!

 

And seeing it done in a way that evokes the films I grew up with but is its own thing is so, so nice.

Henry Gayden: That means a lot.

Dave Green: It does mean a lot.

 

I saw Super 8 and it was a good movie, but it was so reverential and this one’s like, “Screw it, this part is from Explorers but we’re making it our own thing.”

Henry Gayden: Yes.

Dave Green: Yeah.

 

Were you worried about any part being “too Explorers” or “too Batteries Not Included?” Or did you not care?

Dave Green: Me, personally? There are some of those movies… Explorers I saw for the first time three weeks ago.

 

No shit!

Dave Green: Batteries Not Included, I have not seen. Flight of the Navigator I have not seen.

 

What?! What did you watch?!

Dave Green: I watched the same movies over and over in a loop on VHS.

 

So did we all, but what did you watch?

Dave Green: I watched all the Indiana Jones movies. I watched E.T. I watched John Hughes movies. I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over and over and over.

 

Hundreds of times when I was a kid. Had it memorized.

Henry Gayden: Yeah?

 

Yeah. Still do, probably.

Dave Green: Jurassic Park I’ve seen, I think 65 times. That was my favorite movie as a ten-year-old. But we both kind of grew up in the 80s, taking in different stuff. I should let you answer.

Henry Gayden: I watched the fuck out of Flight of the Navigator back in the day. Watcher in the Woods, all those sort of movies. Explorers as well. Honestly, the truth is when we came to this movie it wasn’t a specific we wanted to pay homage to, it was just the fact that we had been pitching ideas with kids as protagonists before and everyone would be like, “Well, could you put Woody Harrelson in it?” Because they’re worried about business…

 

Yeah, they want a star.

Henry Gayden: Yeah, they want a star. And we were like, “No, that’s not the movie,” because you’re not left with these kids, and Panay [Films] gave us this opportunity to do it and what I wanted to do was take the spirit from the good movies of that generation, which are many, and then just be able to talk to kids the way those movies did. The way they talked to me.

 

This is what I really admire about this film. The kids are allowed to be jerks, they’re allowed to be embarrassing, and they’re encouraged to be irresponsible.

Dave Green: Mm-hmm.

 

They have to save the day by being extremely irresponsible. How great is that?

Henry Gayden: I agree so much. It’s so funny. Yeah, I loved that in our movie they’re like, “They have to be wearing helmets because they’re on bikes,” but we’re like, “But they can drive illegally, they can break into establishments, they can break into homes…”

 

They commit multiple felonies in this film!

Henry Gayden: “They can steal from the military, they can do all this stuff… but they have to wear helmets, guys!”

 

Were there any other unexpected rules when you made this movie, about making a kids a movie, that made filming difficult or required a rewrite?

Dave Green: Well, you know, I think they tried to clip certain lines, like “scary as balls.”

Henry Gayden: I had to write ten alts for “scary as balls” because they were so terrified of “balls.”

 

What were your favorite alts?

Henry Gayden: They were all terrible.

Dave Green: “Scary as balls” was the only thing that worked. We knew it on set. But we stuck it in and everyone laughed.

 

Think about Monster Squad. Everyone remembers “Wolfman’s got nards.” If it like, “Wow! Wolfman’s got a sensitive spot!” no one would be talking about it.

Dave Green: That’s amazing, yeah.

 

This is the thing though. I was worried about this movie going in after seeing the trailer… it’s a good trailer…

Dave Green: Cool.

 

But it’s a generational thing, where I’m watching the trailer and these kids find this magical thing and they’re still on their phones. And a part of me is like, “Put down your phone! This is magical!” But you came up with a conceit that required them to keep it on.

Henry Gayden: [Laughs.]

 

Tell me about that. Was that just a plot device? Where did that idea come from?

Henry Gayden: That was from the beginning.

Dave Green: Yeah, it was from the beginning I think. Henry came up with this idea of this thing crashlanded and it couldn’t see. It had like shattered eyes, these lenses. It couldn’t see, and he came up with this hook where the creature could only see if it hacked into someone’s cell phone.

Henry Gayden: Which we love because as a found footage movie sometimes you’re like, “Okay, why are we still filming this?”

 

Yeah, exactly.

Henry Gayden: Now we have a motivation to always be filming this. They’re talking to it, “This is where we are, this is where we need to go.” So it allowed an emotional connection, directly, and it also allowed it to motivate filming.

 

I feel like we’re finally getting out of this era where every screenplay was trying to write cell phones out of existence whenever possible. You look at any scene where someone said, “I can’t get reception.” If they could get reception the movie would be over in five minutes.

Henry Gayden: Right, right.

 

So here you’ve found an excuse to make cell phones drive the story forward.

Dave Green: Right, thank you. Yeah, that was important to us. It’s weird, in my life I don’t think about technology in the same way that the movie does, but the movie kind of looks at and talks about technology in a very powerful and empowering way, where technology empowers these kids to communicate with an alien. It empowers them to go on an adventure and leave their houses and not play video games all night. It empowers them…

Henry Gayden: It empowers them to leave their house. That’s true. That’s hilarious.

 

It’s been posited to me that with the exception of Star Trek and maybe Ghostbusters, all sci-fi is anti-technology. It’s saying technology will destroy us.

Dave Green: Mm-hmm.

 

And here’s one where it’s actually pretty good! Seems like a pretty good thing!

Henry Gayden: [Laughs.]

 

“Kids, stay on your phones. You’ll get in an wonderful adventure.”

Dave Green: You’ll get a map.

Henry Gayden: That’s a great point. I love that.

 

Tell me about the origin of Echo’s look. Why does Echo look like an owl?

Dave Green: He looks like…

Henry Gayden: You talk. I’m going to get the picture… [starts searching his phone]

Dave Green: He’s going to pull up a picture. When we first started we knew he had to be tiny, just for budget reasons. It was the kind of thing where we knew he had to be hidden in a backpack sometimes and then come out at other times.

 

Makes sense.

Dave Green: So we started thinking of things like, what has giant eyes and a little compact body? And I started drawing these little blobs. They were not very good. And then started looking. What animal looks like that. And then he showed me this little baby owl that’s on Google Images. He’ll show you. It just has giant eyes and this little squat body. I was like, “It’s that thing. I love that thing.” It was that, and then there was a little Tarsier ape that was just big, big eyes. Hands. And these things we gave to the creature designers and said, “We are falling in love with these things. Can you please give us something that gives us the same kind of emotional pull?”

And the first drawing I got back, that was what became Echo, had that birdlike head… no beak, just big eyes, very regal stance. That’s adorable. We modified that and it ended up becoming what Echo looks like.

 

Was there an earlier draft of this that was “more hardcore” in some way? Or where Munch ends up with a shotgun, blowing guys in orange vests away? Was it ever going to be a hard PG-13 or anything like that?

Dave Green: I wish. The kids always fantasized about that.

Henry Gayden: Yeah!

Dave Green: “Can we add blood to this scene?” And yeah, I wish. That would be awesome.

Henry Gayden: We had conversations. We didn’t have time to have an earlier version because we were just moving so fast, you know? We knew what we were doing from the get-go. But we did want the kids [to curse]. You know, Stand By Me. Kids curse.

 

All the time.

Henry Gayden: Right? And we definitely had that conversation, so much so that we actually got to pitch this at Pixar to hear what their thoughts were. And one of the guys at Pixar was like, “Have them curse and bleep it out.” You know? We were like… that’s really distracting, but in spirit it’s true. But we thought of that, and then we just got the point where how do you tell the story and not think about the fact that they’re not cursing? So that’s what we tried to do, make them feel natural with each other. I think mostly we succeeded. I don’t miss it but I think it would have been cool if we could have done it.

 

Working with the kid actors, was there ever anything they said wasn’t genuine? Like, “You don’t know what it’s like to be a kid now,” anything like that?

Henry Gayden: Just a line they didn’t think was authentic?

Dave Green: Oh sure, yeah.

 

Give me an example?

Dave Green: Oh man… It was just little turns of phrase, honestly. Like they would say, Tuck was interacting with his brother and [Brian Bradley] would say, “He wouldn’t say that, what about this?” Just little suggestions. I wanted them to tell us we were old, tell us “That’s not how we actually talk.”

Henry Gayden: [Shows the following picture on his phone.]

Aw…!

Dave Green: That’s the one, isn’t it?

Henry Gayden: It’s a different pose but it’s the same guy.

 

That’s super adorbz.

Dave Green: [Laughs]

Henry Gayden: [Laughs] It’s on our wall!

 

So if you do a sequel is it going to be like “Earth 2 Echo?”

Henry Gayden: Oh god!

Dave Green: No…

Henry Gayden: [Laughs]

 

You went wide-eyed! You want to do that!

Henry Gaydne: E2E…?

Dave Green: E2E…

Henry Gayden: Isn’t that already a thing?

Dave Green: It’s some people who…

Henry Gayden: No, no, I’m not saying that’s bad at all.

 

Damn right, you’re not. That’s genius, is what that is.

Henry Gayden: [Laughs]

 

But right now everything’s just franchise, franchise, franchise. This is a good “done in one,” but is there room to go in another one?

Dave Green: Maybe. It’s a weird… We’ve been so focused on making this one. I think what could be cool is if kids kind of latch onto the movie. Let’s say you’re ten years old and you latch onto the movie and Echo 2 comes out in a few years.

Henry Gayden: Age them up. Do a Harry Potter.

Dave Green: I would love to be a movie where kids and grow up with it, and be a movie that becomes more mature as kids grow up.

Henry Gayden: My favorite super, super early thought about a sequel… which is really my only thought, because we haven’t talked about it too much, was if… The [original] movie was to be called just Echo, and then the sequel was called Echoes. That excited me. That excited me. I don’t know.

Dave Green: And there’s mythology that’s not dipped into in the context of this movie.

Henry Gayden: There’s a whole lot of mythology we built.

 

So is Echo a species itself, or is it just a robot that works for a species?

Dave Green: I think he works for a… As I look at him, he’s a little baby pilot that’s sent from his planet. There are many other little baby pilots but he’s a young soul where there are much bigger creatures.

Henry Gayden: He comes from a much bigger world.

Dave Green: Much bigger.

Henry Gayden: We had a lot of backstory about…

Dave Green: …where the ship comes from.

Henry Gayden: Yeah. Why is that there?

 

If the franchise doesn’t come together… TV series? Cartoon? Because they used to do that more.

Henry Gayden: Yeah! Like “The Real Ghostbusters?”

 

Yeah!

Dave Green: Yeah, I was obsessed with that.

 

Yeah. So you’re welcome.

Dave Green: [Laughs]

Henry Gayden: [Laughs]

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William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.