Eminent VFX artiste Wes Ball is making his directorial debut with The Maze Runner. He shares how the characters are inspired by his childhood, his growing up in the woods, building forts and tree houses
Take us back to the beginning. This all started with your short film, Ruin, didn’t itIJ
Yeah, it began with a little short film Ruin. It was a good little experiment where I wanted to do something for myself. I always wanted to do a chase scene — big time. And then again, I had the idea of Ruin in the back of my head for years. I’ve been working on this thing and it’s huge. It’s a really ambitious story— a big, sprawling thing. It’s like the first scene in Raiders of the lost Ark; it’s an introduction to a character and a world, but not much story. But there are all these little things I put, that are big set-up stuff for the larger picture.
Why did you choose to make a short film before mainstream cinemaIJ
Technically, I wanted to go do something. I closed down my little VFX shop that was paying the bills and went off for eight months and made this thing. I asked some friends to come on and help out, and we just had a ball. There was no agenda to it — I just wanted to make something and put it out there.
How did The Maze Runner happenIJ
I met the guys at Fox and I just felt like it was the exact place I wanted to be. What had happened was, I made Ruin in stereoscopic 3D and I’d never seen it on the big screen. At that screening they gave me The Maze Runner book. I came up with all these ideas, and then I went home and started thinking about it some more. When I get pregnant with an idea I started generating artwork for the screenplay. As soon as I finished that book, I made this one image of a wall and this kid holding a spear like in A lord of the Flies and then there was the feeling of this monolithic, concrete, overgrown thing. I was like, ‘That’s cool. That’s the movie for me.’ And then it started spreading from there.
So I went forward and pitched my whole take on the film with a bunch of artwork that I had already made, and they said, ‘Great, you’re our director.’
What was it about the book that grabbed your attentionIJ
Probably the Glade. I love the idea of a group of kids surviving on their own and building their own world. That was me as a kid. I grew up in the woods, building my own forts and tree houses and all these things. I was a Boy Scout, so I loved that stuff. What really got me interested was the facty that no one has really done anything like this before and it’s a very intriguing concept. That was the next challenge — figuring out how to make that look real. The whole story idea was, that these mazes might have been something else in a previous time and have now been reappropriated to do whatever they’re there for. I took that angle and then started figuring out what all the different types of mazes you could actually have.
I knew variety was going to be important for us. You couldn’t just have the classic narrow thing, which we start in, and there’s also a real character to that maze — the design itself. So I actually ended up designing the maze myself. I came up with these little cool set pieces that play within them. I didn’t want it to be a magical maze. I wanted it to be as grounded as possible. The blades were particularly fun. The concept in the book is that the maze never takes the same shape twice. How do you have an infinite maze when it is finiteIJ What you could do is have this grid of flappers, essentially, and you can design any number of possible variations. That’s how that idea came about. That’s what that was born out of.
The Glade is fascinating — paradise in the middle of horror. What went into designing thatIJ
Actually, there was a version for me that was very much paradise. I could do a whole movie on just the Glade. There’s so much history — what does it take to build this placeIJ I have whole scenes that I would love to do with Alby (Amel Ameen) being the first one up — which is a change from the book, because they had 20 people come up all at once in the book. I actually thought it was so cool that someone had to be first, and all they have are the supplies given them in this box and they have to create the world from there. That’s really cool to me.
Alby, the character, is this great leader and great father figure. His one flaw is the fact that he’s not trying to actively get out, because of a past experience.We came up with this cool backstory — the first boy that ever got stung was Alby’s best friend and he had to banish him out himself. As soon as that happened he realised that from now on he could do better and protect everyone there.
We started creating a world that would sustain us for as long as possible without us having to risk everything to get out. We still have the runners out there to give hope — but even in the movie we change that too. That concept — the illusion of paradise — was important so that it could all crumble. That was probably a little different in the book too, but it felt cool and it was neat.
Is that a difficult balanceIJ You don’t want to alienate the audience but you don’t want to spoonfeed them either.
It came together in the edit, really, when you start feeling it, and testing it with an audience. There’s some good questions we wanted to have and some bad ones, and we tried to figure that out. We had a lot of material to edit with, so it was just finding that right balance. The mystery thing is probably the biggest engine that keeps you going.
You shot in louisiana, and built the Glade for real. Weren’t there snakes everywhereIJ
The snakes man. It was louisiana and we were out in the woods, so they were everywhere. They’d come out when it rained, and we’d have to check the area every day and pull up a dozen snakes every day.
You’re from the world of visual effects, but how important was the character and storyIJ
That was our emphasis. We had to put emphasis on those characters. In the next movie, there’s no more maze. The maze is kind of the star of the first movie, the selling point. But by the next movie there’s no maze, so you have to make sure those characters are great and that you fall in love with those people so that you want to see the next one. I think we’ve really done that. I think you really fall in love with these guys. And the tricky thing of it is we’ve got a limited amount of time to deal with these major characters — six or seven characters we have to get a good sense of. But always leave them wanting more.