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SINOPSIS
La Humanidad ha sido devastada por una extraña enfermedad. A los afectados se les arrebata absolutamente todo lo que tienen. La única esperanza es un reducido grupo de niños híbridos a los que les gusta la carne humana y los cuales poseen la capacidad de pensar y sentir. Estos niños se encuentran en una base militar expuestos a una serie de cruentos experimentos...
INTÉRPRETES
GEMMA ARTERTON, GLENN CLOSE, PADDY CONSIDINE, ANAMARIA MARINCA, DOMINIQUE TIPPER, SENNIA NANUA, LOBNA FUTERS, DANIEL EGHAN, FISAYO AKINADE
MÁS INFORMACIÓN DE INTERÉS
CRITICA
TRÁILER
BSO
CLIPS
CÓMO SE HIZO
VIDEO ENTREVISTAS
AUDIOS
PREMIERE
GALERÍA DE FOTOS
https://www.cineymax.es/estrenos/fichas/112-m/102598-melanie-the-girl-whit-all-the-gifts-2016#sigProIddfc48be1f6
PREMIOS Y FESTIVALES
INFORMACIÓN EXCLUSIVA
Nota: La compañía distribuidora de la película no nos ha facilitado el material en castellano
LA PRODUCCIÓN...
'The Girl With All The Gifts' began with a short story submitted to a themed anthology. Mike Carey, author of comic books and novels, was invited by Charlaine Harris and Toni Kelner to contribute to a collection of supernatural, horror and dark fantasy stories, all of which would pertain to the theme of ‘school days’. Having been a teacher for 10 years, Carey agreed to participate, though saying “yes” was the easy part.
“Then I sat at home for months, staring at the wall,” he recalls. “I couldn’t think of a single idea that wasn’t a really bad Harry Potter rip-off. And then one day, I just woke up with the idea of Melanie in my mind – a young girl sitting in a classroom, writing that sort of perennial essay ‘What I Want To Be When I Grow Up’. But we can see that she’s not going to grow up. She’s a zombie.”
The short story is set in a subterranean bunker on an army base. It is the only world that Melanie knows. “Her experience is limited to a handful of rooms and a corridor; the cell in which she is kept; the corridor outside the cell; and a classroom in which she and several other children like her are taught,” Carey continues. “She doesn’t question it. It’s all she’s ever known. But we notice that the adults around her are treating her in a very strange way, that she’s being treated like a cross between a wild beast and an unexploded bomb. She’s tied in a wheelchair in order to be taken from room to room. She’s never allowed any interaction with adults, except for when she is restrained in that way. And soldiers train guns on her for most of the time as well. It takes us a while to realize why she is being treated in this way.”
The next step in the journey happened rather casually. Meeting with producer Camille Gatin for a general catch-up, Carey mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that he’d just completed a short story. He asked Gatin if she would take a look at it before he sent it off.
“I absolutely fell in love with Melanie,” says Gatin. “I knew there were a lot of zombie stories out there, on TV and in comic-books and novels, but I’d never really seen a character like Melanie before. Concurrently, Colm [McCarthy, director] had told me he’d looked at a lot of derelict locations and he’d love to find a project we could shoot there. So I thought it might be a really good fit. I sent it to Colm and we all responded to all the same elements.”
McCarthy agrees, pointing out that Carey wrote the character of Melanie out of love for his daughter – something that the director could relate to, having a daughter himself. “Melanie is incredibly unique and yet somebody who feels like somebody who could be your friend or somebody you could love,” he says.
And so began the unusual process of a writer, director and producer all working together on ideas and story arcs. The short story, they knew, would only account for the first 10 minutes or so of screen time, and so they brainstormed. Making the process even more unusual was the fact that Carey was writing a novel concurrent to the script: “I ended up writing a draft of the movie, and then chapters of the novel, and then a draft of the movie, and then more chapters,” he laughs.
The screenplay takes place 10 years after a plague has decimated Britain. ‘Hungries’ are now the dominant species, with the few surviving humans barricading themselves away from these roving, flesh-eating creatures. Ten-year-old Melanie (Sennia Nanua) and 20 other children are second-generation survivors, half human, half-hungry. The children are educated by teacher Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton) whose developing bond with the fiercely intelligent Melanie forms the heart of the movie. But there are other key figures, too: scientist Dr. Caroline Caldwell (Glenn Close) hopes to discover an anti-virus by experimenting on the children; and armed military men Sgt. Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine) and Kieron Gallagher (Fisayo Akinade) are forever on hand to act as a reminder of the great danger at hand. It is these five characters that we follow when the action moves above ground and across a country that’s been partially reclaimed by nature.
'The Girl With All The Gifts' is, undoubtedly, a zombie movie. But it is also something very different. “I think it has a number of unique selling points as a zombie story,” starts Carey. “We decided very early on that we wanted to have a scientifically plausible explanation for our zombie apocalypse; for the plague that’s overtaken humanity. We went shopping and we found a fungus, Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, in a David Attenborough documentary, ‘The Secret Life Of Plants’. It is a parasite that attacks ants in the Amazon rainforest. Its spores fall onto the forest floor. The ants crawl over them. The spores attach themselves to the ant’s body, and then the fungal mycelia grow up through the carapace of the ant into its nervous system. Basically, the fungus takes the ant and drives it away. It’s a hijacking.”
Just imagine if such a thing should happen to humans…
Another of 'The Girl With All The Gift’s' smart decisions is the idea to show the action through the eyes of Melanie, with Carey saying, “We’re being told this story from the point of view of a child – a relatable, intelligent, brave, emotionally open child, who is also a zombie.”
Originality, reality, emotion – put the three together and you begin to understand how the production attracted such names as six-time Academy Award nominee Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine. All three had no hesitation attaching themselves to a ‘genre movie’ when it was this good.
“They sent me the script, and I thought it was wonderful,” shrugs Close. “It was very well-written. It had interesting characters. A different take on the genre. And good people involved. I Skyped with Colm and my blink reaction was very positive.” She pauses, considers. “I’ve never been in a movie like this or played this kind of a part.”
“I thought the zombie thing got very tired,” says Considine. “I know people really love them, but I never took a massive interest in any of that stuff. There are probably only two zombie films I really like – the original Dawn Of The Dead and Shaun Of The Dead. I didn’t have any burning desire to do anything like this.” A read of the script and a meet with McCarthy changed everything, though. “It’s just about the people and the story,” he states.
Arterton is clearly passionate about the project. “I don’t usually get stuff like this sent to me,” she begins. “The story’s so brilliant. I love the themes. I think they’re great. Even recently, in the news, it was a talking point – what’s going to happen when humans mess up the planet? Are we going to be able to survive? Are we the ones that deserve this planet? I love that theme of the survival of the fittest. But also nature rebelling and taking back. I just thought it was fascinating. I mean, of course it’s a genre movie, but it’s deeper than that. Much, much deeper. It’s really hard to describe it when people say, ‘What’s the movie you’re doing?’ It’s about zombies. But it’s not. It’s about life and about our planet. I love that the pathogen is natural.”
It was crucial, of course, to find a child actress who could carry the movie as Melanie. McCarthy and Gatin auditioned 500 girls for the part. They needed someone who could plug into the emotion of the script and at the same time be tough enough to travel away from home for 10 weeks, be strapped to a wheelchair, and cope with some physically demanding action sequences.
“It sounds kind of impossibly romantic, but Sennia was the last of 500 girls to walk through the door and meet us for the part,” insists McCarthy. “I think we were down to about half a dozen girls at that stage, and we were doing final readings with Gemma. But I went to Nottingham to The Television Workshop, which is where a lot of the more exciting, interesting British actors have come from. She was the very last one that day. I knew there was something really special happening from the very first scene that she read.”
Nanua seems quite unfazed by it all. “I auditioned for it and I thought, you know, it’s just a film. And then I auditioned again in London. I had met the director before, but then I met the producer as well, which was really nice, because she’s really sweet. And then I met the cast and crew. And then I went back and auditioned again and did a reading with Gemma – which was really nice, because I really got to know her then. And I think that was the last audition that I did. I heard they rang up my mum and said I had the part. My mum was bursting into tears: ‘Oh my God, Sennia – you’ve got the part!’ I was like, ‘OK, mum.’ I was really happy inside, but I don’t normally show it a lot.”
Once the action moves above ground, McCarthy got a chance to shoot in the kind of derelict locations that he mentioned to Gatin that very first time they spoke about teaming up to make The Girl With All The Gifts.
“I have a love for photography and also the magical quality of the human world taken back over by nature,” he says. “As a child, I used to go and play in derelict houses. I would love being in a room where maybe someone lived and a family had been, but now there was a tree growing through the floorboards. The aesthetic of the film was borne out of that. We looked at a lot of derelict spaces around the world. We knew we wanted some kind of international element to the shoot. We hit upon Pripyat, which is the town outside Chernobyl. So we sent a unit there to film. And the idea of combining that with some of the derelict spaces in the Midlands that we’d found was kind of the world-creating approach that we took. We were looking for locations where nature had really taken over for about the right length of time.”
One of the most striking locations in the film is a hospital that houses a key portion of the action. It looks like a triumph or art design but in fact came ready-made.
“About midway through prep, the location manager phoned me up and excitedly said, ‘I’ve found this place, and it’s the most messed-up hospital I’ve ever been in’,” laughs McCarthy. “We went and looked at this hospital in Dudley that became the hospital in the film. It would have been beyond our budgetary limitations to create that kind of look with the art department. It was epic – corridor after corridor of peeling wallpaper and ivy coming through the windows. All this ‘ruin porn’ stuff that we’d been fantasising about since early on!”
As Gatin notes, these striking locations, aided by subtle use of digital effects where necessary, helped fashion the tone of the film. “It was all about real locations, performances of real human beings under duress, and trying to bring that all together,” she explains. “It was really important that in the performances, we had that feeling of people being harassed and tired and exhausted. It becomes a very basic human feeling of ‘I need to survive’, but frankly it’s ‘survive for what?’ Because you’re never going to have a sense of comfort ever again – and that was part of the realism that Colm was looking for.
“It was interesting talking about it with the actors whilst we were shooting the film because, you know, 10 years of surviving every day, being attacked by hungries every day – you don’t have a weekend, you don’t have a day off, you don’t have a holiday, you haven’t slept properly in 10 years. Every time you hear a sound, it just wakes you up because you think you might need to run away.”
The final word should go to Carey, who can’t quite believe that such a film has sprouted from his idea for a short story. Rather aptly, it grew and grew until it took over and became his whole world. “It is the fulfillment of a dream,” he says. “It really is.”
