Interview: Logan Marshall-Green on ‘Beware Boiúna’
Logan Marshall-Green has become something of a fixture in genre cinema over the last decade. Between Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation and Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade, he has developed a real knack for playing men pushed into increasingly impossible situations, finding vulnerability and complexity in characters that could have easily been much less nuanced in another actor’s hands. Beware Boiúna, Mike P. Nelson’s Amazon-set creature feature, gives him another opportunity to do exactly that, but in a very different way.
The film follows Alli (Jessica Rothe), a doctor who travels deep into the Amazon as part of a humanitarian medical mission, alongside Lena (Kiana Madeira), a local who knows the jungle considerably better than anyone else around her. Their journey eventually puts them in the path of Brennan Malloy (Marshall-Green), a contractor whose reasons for being there are decidedly less altruistic. As tensions between the two groups escalate, they also find themselves entering the territory of Boiúna, a colossal ancient serpent that has little interest in welcoming any of them.
Brennan initially comes across as exactly the kind of man you expect him to be: aggressive, self-assured and completely comfortable exploiting the land around him. But the further the film pushes him into survival mode, the more that confidence starts to fall apart, and Marshall-Green gets to play a much more vulnerable, frightened version of Brennan than the one we first meet.
There’s an obvious version of Beware Boiúna that could have been content to give audiences a giant snake, a collection of increasingly gruesome deaths and not much else. Nelson is considerably more interested in why the snake is angry in the first place, and the film’s environmental ideas were part of what immediately appealed to Marshall-Green, even if Brennan exists almost entirely on the wrong side of them.
“It certainly appealed to me, even though I was playing a character somewhat antithetical to the approach,” he says. “It was very thoughtful, very conscious, with a lot of intention of respecting the place we were going to be shooting, the culture we were going to be shooting about, and also this creature, which is the ambassador to the earth in many ways.”
Marshall-Green had never worked with Nelson before, and at the time he first read the screenplay, then titled Titan, he wasn’t entirely sure how the director planned to pull any of it off. Watching a handful of Nelson’s short films quickly answered at least part of that question. “I’d seen some of his shorts, but immediately when I watched some of the shorts, I was like, ‘Oh, this guy knows what he’s talking about,’” he recalls.
More importantly, the two seemed to have the same idea about where the fear should come from. Rather than immediately putting Boiúna front and centre, Nelson understood how much scarier the anticipation of something can be than actually seeing it. “It was a conscious effort of asking permission first and then kind of hiding the snake, and allowing our fears to be our worst enemies as well until they aren’t,” Marshall-Green explains. “Really drawing out the script through an anticipation of death being worse than the death itself.”
For much of Beware Boiúna, that means the Amazon is doing almost as much of the work as the creature itself. Shot on location in Colombia, the film places its actors inside an environment that never really allows them to relax. The jungle is beautiful but there’s something inherently unsettling about how little of it you can actually see through, something Marshall-Green says proved incredibly useful once cameras started rolling.
“It’s what we couldn’t see that was so scary,” he says. “When you walk into the jungle, it’s what you can’t see. Because you know it’s there. You know the jungle is watching you. You just can’t see its eyes. That was very useful to us. And I think why it was incredibly important for Mike and production to be shooting right there.”
Ironically, one of the things that unsettled him most on set was also one of its simplest practical creations. For a sequence involving Boiúna out on the water, production built what Marshall-Green describes as a massive but completely flat wooden cutout of the creature’s head. In daylight, he wasn’t exactly convinced. “I was a little worried,” he laughs. “‘Why is this cutout here? Is this really going to be the placeholder?’ I’d almost rather it just be a green screen.”
Then night fell. “That head was just a silhouette, really. And it was out on the lake, and I remember seeing it for the first time, and I got total chills. It takes a lot for me to get chills, but I got total chills looking at this thing. I didn’t want to look at it. It was just out there in the lake, watching.” For Marshall-Green, having something physical to react to made all the difference. “It is so effective for me as an actor,” he says. “So I knew that it was going to be very evocative on film.”
Brennan, meanwhile, initially appears to be a fairly recognisable kind of antagonist. He’s aggressive, comfortable exploiting a place that isn’t his and surrounded by enough bravado to suggest there might not be much underneath it. Marshall-Green was much more interested in what happens when that armour starts falling away. “Brennan, without giving too much away, goes through three kinds of phases,” he explains. “The first phase is a lot of bravado, a lot of tough guy, a lot of armour. That’s the way he’s going to get to sleep at night, because what he’s doing there is, he’s destroying a rainforest for money.”
Brennan knows exactly what kind of work he is doing, and that swagger feels as much like something he needs to convince himself of as something he projects onto everyone around him. Once the film gives him something personal to lose, however, that confidence starts to fall apart. “He goes into that grief, that anger, and is guided by that lizard brain to his demise,” Marshall-Green says, before describing the final version of Brennan as “a white man lost in a jungle. A complete baby in a way. Born, like completely just new again,” with all of the armour finally gone.
Brennan’s unraveling also puts him in direct contrast with Lena. The further Brennan moves into the rainforest, the less equipped he seems to survive it. Lena moves in the opposite direction. She may be facing the same creature, but she understands the environment Brennan has spent his time trying to exploit, and Marshall-Green was particularly interested in what that revealed about both of them once fear took over.
“It was very important to us to show him in a juxtaposition to Kiana [Madeira]’s character, Lena, who is incredibly at home in the jungle,” he says. “Not necessarily at home being chased by a snake, but the thing that he would try to destroy is actually going to be the thing that keeps him alive for some of the film.” For Marshall-Green, that eventually became a much broader question: who are we when we’re actually afraid, rather than simply imagining how we might behave?
“Because of all of these archetypes we watch in movies or in TV, we always put ourselves into those skins and say, ‘Oh, I would be the hero when push comes to shove, or when you’re being chased by a massive Boiúna.’ But really, in the end, studies show we aren’t that person. We move into flight instead of fight. You’re seeing Lena’s fight, and you’re seeing his flight,” he says. “He tries his best, but he’s exposed. He’s undressed by the jungle.” By that point, Brennan is almost unrecognisable from the man we meet at the beginning of the film, with very little of that initial bravado left.
Location was equally important on another of Marshall-Green’s recent projects, albeit on a completely different scale: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. One is an independently made creature feature and the other a massive Nolan epic, but Marshall-Green sees essentially the same principle behind both, with each filmmaker asking real landscapes to do creative work that would have been difficult to replicate on a soundstage.
“They’re both characters in both of those films,” he says of the locations. “Chris Nolan set out to shoot in the places that the book takes place in, for the most part. It shows. That’s a character there. Those sets and those locations are just as big as those characters.”
“Mike Nelson did the same. He set out to place this in a jungle that was the main character, I think. Boiúna is certainly the lead, and don’t tell Kiana that,” he jokes. “I think Kiana would agree. The biggest character is the jungle.”
That authenticity, of course, comes with its own set of problems. “It takes a huge effort to get a crew, equipment, the logistics of going up the river each morning and shooting in the jungle,” he says. “You still pay a lot more money trying to recreate that on a stage, or even in Atlanta. Not in the jungle of Atlanta. But you know what I mean.”
Ultimately, he says, the Colombian crew made that challenge considerably easier. “You can’t buy that kind of production value,” he adds. “And so with this Colombian crew, it was easy to do because they were incredible. It’s a great crew.”
It’s hard to talk about Marshall-Green and genre without eventually arriving at The Invitation and Upgrade, two films that have only grown more beloved since their respective releases. Marshall-Green is quick to push back on the idea that anybody goes into a project intending to make a cult classic. “Nobody sets out to make the cult classic,” he says. “I don’t believe good filmmakers, actors, crew, production, you set out to make the best that scene can be. And then you do it again the next day.”
Both The Invitation and Upgrade were relatively modest productions, something he sees as part of the same lineage as Beware Boiúna. What matters more to Marshall-Green, though, is who is standing behind the camera. “For me, it’s always about the who,” he explains. “Who is the man I’m going to play? Have I played him before? But even more importantly, who is going to create a safe space for me to be unsafe in?”
“With The Invitation, it’s Karyn Kusama. And of course with Upgrade, it’s Leigh Whannell. Those two leaders are the reasons why those are cult classics. Those universes are so specific in their minds.” Nelson, he believes, has that same quality.
“Mike is already a great director, but he’s going to go on to do even greater things because he has fun creating that scene and he relives it like a child, like the audience member he would want out of this film, or out of this scene, or out of that line,” he says. “I think it’s about approach, and I’m so thankful to be a part of these films, and Boiúna is no different.”
Next up is The Sticks, Netflix’s upcoming hockey series, although Marshall-Green is deliberately careful when asked what he can say about it. “I want to share,” he says, stopping himself. “Just because it’s so early, I would probably stop myself before sharing too much.”
What he will talk about is the experience of making it, and particularly the younger actors he worked alongside. “It is a project I had such an incredible time shooting,” he says. “A beautiful family made that project, and I was so happy to be invited on board.”
“You’re about to be introduced to the new generation of acting,” Marshall-Green adds. “And I’m just so thrilled to be a part of it.”
Beware Boiúna is now playing in theaters via Lionsgate.