Hi everyone,

Somewhere deep in the catacombs of a liminal semi-condemned office building in the heart of Albuquerque, New Mexico, sat a temporary production office for Onslaught. When making movies, you always inevitably end up in these types of buildings or abandoned high schools—places that time has forgotten but that, thanks to their cheap rent, have become an industry necessity. I remember David Kern, our line producer, referring to the office as smelling like a latrine. This was an apt observation. But toil away we did, and much creativity was born from these most inauspicious surroundings.

Welcome to the war room! Which is a fancy way to say the room with the biggest table for us to hold meetings in. Notice how sleepy everyone at this meeting looks. Surrounding us is an adornment of pictures of locations and set photos by the brilliant production designer Tom Hammock. We do this on all our films. I assume every filmmaker does, but as I type this I realize that I actually don’t know. This is the way we do it, and it’s a great way to wrap your head around the production as we have our daily meetings.

Behold the VISION BOARD!

Tom encouraged the DP, Oren Soffer, and I to use the last block of space in the war room for our vision board, which is a collection of film stills that represent all of the aesthetic influences we were basing the film around. This is just as much a movie about movies, so this collage was especially important.

I love looking at this now with the film completed. It’s interesting to see how well this really does, at least, describe the intent behind the decisions we made.

The last time I was filming a movie in New Mexico was for The Guest, all the way back in 2013. In a way, I always felt like I put my own personal style of filmmaking on hold in order to pursue a larger studio film career, so it was only fitting that, as Onslaught was created as a return to form, we would head back to New Mexico for another helping of the magic there.

Where you shoot a film is important. You may be able to make anywhere look like anywhere, but the atmosphere and the energy of a place come through as well and that can be just as important. For the last decade I’ve been shooting movies out of the country for tax credit reasons, so to be back in America making a VERY American film felt poignant.

For me, this was a film I made to regain my identity as a filmmaker and a person. I love making those big fuck-all blockbuster movies, but at the end of the day, this film is what it’s about for me: a movie that can express why I love cinema and can do it in a very personal way.

Even if my version of personal includes a bunch of super soldiers shooting up a trailer park!