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MONOLITH, the new sci-fi thriller starring Lily Sullivan (Evil Dead Rise) is set to hit theatres and VOD on February 16th! Written by Lucy Campbell, and directed by Matt Vesely, the film was shot in one location, and stars only one person. Lily Sullivan. This basically puts the entire film on her back, but after Evil Dead Rise, I think she’s up to the task! 

 Recently, we had the chance to chat with Matt Vesely about directing the film, and the challenges behind its creation! Read our interview after the trailer below:

iHorror: Matt, thanks for your time! We wanted to chat about your new film, MONOLITH. What can you tell us, without spoiling too much? 

Matt Vesely: MONOLITH is a science-fiction thriller about a podcaster, a disgraced journalist who worked for a big news outlet and has recently had a job taken away from her when she acted unethically. So, she’s retreated to her parent’s home and started this kind of clickbaity, mystery podcast to try and claw her way back to some credibility. She receives a strange email, an anonymous email, that just gives her a phone number and a woman’s name and says, the black brick. 

She ends up in this strange rabbit hole, finding about these weird, alien artifacts that are appearing around the world and starts to lose herself in this possibly true, alien invasion story. I guess the hook of the film is that there’s only one actor on screen. Lily Sullivan. It’s all told through her perspective, through her speaking to people on the phone, lots of interviews holed up in this palatial, modern home in the beautiful Adelaide Hills. It’s kind of a creepy, one person, X-Files episode.

What was it like working with Lily Sullivan?

She’s brilliant!  She’d just come off of Evil Dead. It hadn’t come out yet, but they had shot it. She brought a lot of that physical energy from Evil Dead to our film, even though it’s very contained. She likes to work from within her body, and generate real adrenaline. Even before she does a scene, she’ll do pushups before the shot to try and build up the adrenaline. It’s really fun and interesting to watch. She’s just super down to earth. We didn’t audition her because we knew her work. She’s extremely talented, and has an amazing voice, which is great for a podcaster. We just talked to her on Zoom to see if she would be up for making a smaller film. She’s like one of our mates now. 

What was it like making a film that’s so contained? 

In some ways, it’s quite freeing. Obviously, it’s a challenge to work out ways to make it thrilling and make it change and grow throughout the film. The cinematographer, Mike Tessari and I, we broke the film into clear chapters and had really clear visual rules. Like in the opening of the film, it has no picture for three or four minutes. It’s just black, then we see Lily. There’s clear rules, so you feel the space, and the visual language of the film growing and changing to make it feel like you’re going on this cinematic ride, as well as an intellectual audio ride. 

So, there’s lots of challenges like that. In other ways, it’s my first feature, one actor, one location, you’re really focused. You don’t have to spread yourself too thin. It’s a really contained way to work. Every choice is about how to make that one person seem on screen. In some ways, it’s a dream. You’re just being creative, you’re never just fighting to get the film made, it’s purely creative. 

So, in some ways, it was almost a benefit rather than a drawback?

Exactly, and that was always the theory of the film. The film was developed through a Film Lab process here in South Australia called The Film Lab New Voices Program. The idea was we went in as a team, we went in with the writer Lucy Campbell and producer Bettina Hamilton, and we went into this lab for a year and you develop a script from the ground up for a fixed budget. If you’re successful, you get the money to go make that film. So, the idea was always to come up with something that would feed that budget, and almost be better for it. 

If you could say one thing about the film, something you wanted people to know, what would it be?

It’s a really exciting way to watch a sci-fi mystery, and the fact that it’s Lily Sullivan, and she’s just a brilliant, charismatic force on the screen. You’ll love spending 90 minutes sort of losing your mind with her, I think. The other thing is that it really escalates. It feels very contained, and it has a kind of slow burn, but it goes somewhere. Stick with it. 

With this being your first feature, tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from, what are your plans? 

I’m from Adelaide, South Australia. It’s probably the size of Phoenix, that size of a city. We’re about an hour flight west of Melbourne. I’ve been working here for a while. I’ve worked mostly in script development for television, for the last  like 19 years. I’ve always loved sci-fi and horror. Alien is my favorite movie of all time. 

I’ve made a number of shorts, and they are sci-fi shorts, but they’re more comedy. This was an opportunity to get into scarier stuff. I realized doing it that it’s all I really care about. It was kind of like coming home. It felt paradoxically so much more fun trying to be scary than trying to be funny, which is painful and miserable. You can be bolder and stranger, and just go for it in horror. I absolutely loved it. 

So, we’re just developing more stuff. At the moment the team is developing another, kind of, cosmic horror that’s in its early days. I just finished up on a script for a dark Lovecraftian horror film. It’s writing time at the moment, and hopefully getting onto the next film. I still work in TV. I’ve been writing pilots and stuff. It’s the ongoing grind of the industry, but hopefully we’ll be back really soon with another film from the Monolith team. We’ll get Lily back in, the whole crew. 

Awesome. We really appreciate your time, Matt. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for you and your future endeavors! 

You can check out Monolith in theaters and on Prime Video February 16th! Courtesy of Well Go USA! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries