Interview: Roseanne Liang on ‘Shadow in the Cloud’
It’s hard to believe that Shadow in the Cloud is only New Zealand-based director Roseanne Liang’s second feature film. Throughout the course of Shadow in the Cloud’s lean 83-minute runtime, Liang displays a totally unique and highly original voice that firmly stands out against the film’s myriad of references and inspirations, tackling several different genres all while avoiding the tonal whiplash that many filmmakers find themselves struggling with when making similar movies. It’s no wonder that the film was chosen by the Toronto International Film Festival for its 2020 Midnight Madness program in an odd year where only 50 films were selected to screen at the event. “It was incredible,” exclaims Liang when asked about her reaction to finding out that the film was set to screen at TIFF 2020. “To even be selected this year is such a huge thing. It was a huge achievement.”
Liang, who first emerged onto the scene with her 2011 feature debut My Wedding and Other Secrets and turned heads with her critically acclaimed Sundance 2017 short Do No Harm, says she was attracted to the spec script, which she extensively rewrote, thanks to its lead character Maude Garrett (Chloë Grace Moretz), a British flight officer who boards a plane full of men in order to complete a time-sensitive mission bestowed upon her by her government. Brash, occasionally selfish and headstrong, Maude is not your typical action movie heroine. “[Maude] is no Wonder Woman,” confirms Liang. “As much as I love Wonder Woman, she is what happens when the best of us becomes a superhero. Maude is definitely not the best of us.”
The film, which rests entirely on the back of its main character, would not be as effective if it weren’t for the performance of its lead actress Moretz, an industry veteran who is in almost every single frame. Poised, confident and just a little bit intense, Moretz delivers an unforgettable performance, drawing on both her range as an actress and a tough, grueling physicality that sees her doing battle with both the patriarchal mindset of her fellow crew members and a pesky gremlin clinging onto the underside of the plane she finds herself on. “We were so lucky for Chloë to come on early in the process through our producers [Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Kelly McCormick], who actually brought this project to me,” says Liang. “She’s just incredible. I could watch her all day. She’s amazing.”
The rest of the film’s minuscule cast is made up of the eight crew members of the plane Maude reluctantly boards at the start of the movie, including Sharp Objects stand-out Taylor John Smith, Hawaii Five-0 star and New Zealand-based actor Beulah Koale, Jurassic World star Nick Robinson, Captain America scene stealer Callan Mulvey, New Zealand theater actors Benedict Wall and Byron Coll, as well as relative newcomer Joe Witkowski. “We found some amazing actors to fill out the male roles,” gushes Liang. “We had really great New Zealand cast members, as well as some Americans, so I knew some of the people but didn’t know others. It was just a process of finding the right, I guess, rainbow of men in all the colors of different misogyny amongst an American and New Zealand cast so we were very lucky to find all those people.”
An entity that Maude finds herself at odds with, other than the unfriendly crew members who subject her to a bevy of misogynistic comments, is a vexatious gremlin who will seemingly stop at nothing to make its way onto the plane. Speaking of the creature design behind the gremlin, an intimidating, snot-nosed beast of an animal that strongly resembles both a wolf and a bat, Liang says she wanted a “visceral creature to join the pantheon of great creatures.” The surprising influence behind the gremlin? The xenomorphs in Alien, a both vicious and crafty extraterrestrial species that are still heralded as some of the best fictional monsters of today. “Alien was a huge influence for this particular creature, especially when you think about the allegory behind it and what the creature represents on a deeper level,” she reveals. “I think on a deeper level, it is pure id, like ‘I want what I want now, and I’m going to get it.’” What makes the gremlin truly memorable, though, is its resemblance to actual animals that we could encounter in our backyards today. “Animals certainly came a lot into our discussions,” she confirms. “We worked with an amazing VFX company in New Zealand called Weta Digital. They have done amazing movies like Planet of the Apes and the Lord of the Rings movies so they know their creatures. We were looking for a real shit of a creature, you know? A real feral rodent.”
Another surprising element in Shadow of the Cloud is its synth-heavy, ‘80s-sounding score, composed by New Zealand-based musician Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper, which at first may seem at odds with the film’s period setting but ends up both perfectly complimenting the film’s subversive, genre-defying tone and ensuring it stands out against other similar movies. “[Mahuia is] a brilliant musician,” gushes Liang. “I’d worked with him before on Do No Harm and I knew when I read the script that we couldn’t go down the orchestral route. I think that’s something that I was really clear about from the beginning. That was one of the first things I emphasized in the very first pitch document I’d written; that I wanted a certain score, but Mahuia took it to another level. It’s haunting, it’s cool, it’s sexy.”
Next for Liang on the agenda? A feature film adaptation of Do No Harm, which centers on a surgeon forced to break her physician’s oath when violent gangsters storm the private hospital where she works in order to stop a crucial operation. “It’s funny that the short film was a proof of concept for another movie that had already been written,” she reveals. “And that movie has sort of taken a backseat while we’re turning Do No Harm itself into its own feature film.” But first up is her take on the traditional sitcom with the upcoming series, Creamerie, which centers on two women who come across a man in a world where men have gone extinct. “That’ll come out early next year,” she confirms. Until then, Shadow in the Cloud has signaled the arrival of an exciting new voice in the industry, one that has an incredibly bright future ahead of it.
Shadow in the Cloud is now playing in limited theaters and is also available on VOD.