Writer/Director Michael Miller takes some time out to chat about not only his latest project Battalion, but also to give an insight into how he creates.

Some people say that it’s hard enough to come up with a good movie idea, let alone a good, original movie idea. Did you toy with different concepts before settling on this one?

I originally just wanted to make a straight war movie set in the South Pacific. I’ve always been a big fan of the genre, and for years I’ve wanted to make a film based on a real WWII story. But making a proper war film requires a sizeable budget which we didn’t have, so I decided to do a good old genre mash-up and swap the Japanese soldiers with aliens. Grounding it as a war film really helped guide the story during the writing process.

Clearly, films of the ‘80s and ‘90s left quite an impression on you. Can you talk about how they directly and indirectly influenced the script?

Platoon. Battalion. See the connection? Actually my biggest influence though was the great HBO miniseries The Pacific, also the Thin Red Line, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now – they were all big influences. One of the things that’s always drawn me to war stories is how they show portray people changing, how their experiences transform them. Those films that weren’t afraid to explore that, to go to those darker places, they probably inspired me the most.

Lets talk about your writing process? Did you knock it our rather quickly or let it simmer, in it’s own time, over a few months?

I started the script when I was on holiday in the USA (I live in Australia) and I spent some time in LA and New York, so the characters are really what came first, thinking about who they were and where they came from. And then at the end of the holiday I stayed in a beach house on Oahu for two weeks, it was on the west side of the island away from all the condos, and the rest just came to me. I just imagined what it would be like to be washed up and abandoned on an island in the middle of a war, and built the story from there. So that trip took nearly seven weeks all up, and by the end of it I had my first draft.

And what do you write on, Final Draft?

Actually I just write using a normal notepad app, in this case Google Docs, and then I use any program that uses Fountain markup to convert it to a script format. Fade In is pretty good, it’s a paid app but the formatting is really nice.

Anyone you’d read the pages to to get their feedback as you went along?

The first draft is always my own, usually the second draft too as the first is always too messy to show to anyone. The third draft is when I get the feedback. For this one I asked a few friends, including Jesse Richardson who plays Blake. He had a lot of input.

Where do you think your strengths as a writer lie?

I think I’ve gotten pretty good at seeing the long term picture for a film early on. I generally don’t need to write out a treatment or a plan before I start on the first draft – I’ve kind of got the blueprint in my head so I just start writing. That allows me to work in little nuggets to get people thinking early on that will turn into something bigger later. I think it’s better to let that happen organically during the first couple of drafts rather than trying to force it in during rewrites.

Is there anything you had to cut from the script due to budgetary issues?

Not so much budget but location issues. In the original script there was a lot more going in the mountain regions, but those locations turned out to be a lot harder to arrange than the beach locations, so I moved them. In the end I think it worked out better though.

Would ever consider adapting the screenplay into a comic or book?

Yeah I guess maybe? I haven’t really thought about it, probably wouldn’t pursue it myself but would be keen to see someone else have a crack at it!

Having said that, is this envisioned as a one-off or a franchise?

Ah well that would mean talking about the next film, which would be revealing too much at this stage. We’re still keeping it under wraps. But I do see a lot of potential with this kind of sci fi/war mashup. There’s a lot that could be done with it.

Battalion is now on VOD through High Octane Pictures