Some of the most exciting moments in recent fandom memory have been the indie revolution of kaiju media. Mostly relegated to comics, due to time and budget concerns with fans, few have dared to make a legitimate & original film production. One notable director, Scott David Lister, who hails from Australia, has decided to tackle this challenge head on. Recently, he just released his latest creation — a kaiju short film known as SNAGGLETOOTH!
Kaiju United had the chance to catch up with Scott and ask him a few questions about the film, being a filmmaker down under, and how Godzilla has influenced his filmography!
Q&A
What was your first exposure to kaiju media? What captured your attention and made you a fan?
I was a pretty stereotypical five-year-old, really into dinosaurs. One day, my Dad said to me, “So, you like dinosaurs? Let me tell you about the biggest, most awesome dinosaur – Godzilla!”. He wasn’t a big fan or anything like that, he just knew about Godzilla broadly through pop culture. I think he’d seen that a movie was going to be on TV, and just figured that I’d like it. It’s funny how little things like that can have such an impact – I don’t think he knew what he and Mum were in for!
So, that weekend, he taped “Godzilla 1985” off Channel Ten for me. It’s the first movie I can remember watching in my life. I was immediately hooked. I wanted my own Godzilla suit, and I remember re-enacting the scene at the Mihama Nuclear reactor in the lounge room with my toys. This was way back in 1991. I’ve still got that tape, and it still plays.
A few years later, when my Dad was working at the University of Melbourne Library, he borrowed Stuart Galbraith IV’s “Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Movies” for me. It became my encyclopedia, introducing me to the order the films were made, and to the many related movies I hadn’t yet heard of. But even more importantly, it got me thinking about the technical craftsmanship of these movies at a young age.
What made you decide to become a filmmaker?
I don’t know if there was ever really a decision – for as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to make films. I used to watch children’s morning TV shows and instead of wishing I could be on them, I’d fantasize about being able to take control of the camera. I remember writing a barely-intelligible sequel script to the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie in grade four, when I must have been maybe eight years old.
Once it became clear after several years that this wasn’t a passing fad, my parents purchased a handycam. I made incomprehensible short film after incomprehensible short film, throwing my toys around in front of the camera.
So, seven years later, going to film school seemed like the logical choice. Education-wise, it was the first time I felt like I was in the right place. I’ve been working as a cinematographer for a few years now. I’m still doing my best to climb further, and have a long way to go, but being anywhere on the ladder at all is a wonderful feeling.
What is your favorite non-monster movie?
That’s a tough one. I love so many genres. Monster movies were just the gateway.
Hard Boiled might be my favorite action film. Versus is probably my favorite indie. For comedy, I love the Marx Brothers, so maybe Horse Feathers. Either 12 Angry Men or Ninotchka would be my pick for dramas. Deep Red is probably my favourite giallo. For westerns, it’s a toss up between The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West. And I don’t know what genre to put it in, but One Cut of the Dead is absolutely brilliant.
But to narrow it down to just one… let’s go with Kinji Fukasaku’s Black Lizard. That’s usually the film I show people when they ask for an example of my taste. It’s stylish, stirring, off-the-wall and hilarious. I love it so much.
How is filmmaking different in Australia vs. the USA? Are there any big differences? Funding, etc.
I’ve only been on a handful of indie shoots in America (California specifically), but the core working side of being on set felt similar. We seem to have a few different nicknames and terms for certain things, and the work ethic is a little different, but it’s not a big culture shock or anything. I’m sure that’s true even from one end of America to another – I sometimes hear people joke about how the terminology can be different depending on which part of the country you’re in.
As far as funding and the industry in general… Melbourne has a pretty bustling indie scene, possibly the biggest in the country, but a lot of people in it seem disillusioned with our funding bodies. I’ve never been the one to interact with them myself, so I don’t really know. As a country overall, we seem to get one or two big international projects every year or so. Mortal Kombat 2 just wrapped filming up in Brisbane, and of course the new Godzilla x Kong was partly shot up there too. A couple of my friends and acquaintances were on a “vengeful Liam Neeson” movie that just filmed in regional Victoria. A fair bit of post VFX for big movies gets done here too. But it’s definitely not like LA, Toronto or London where stuff is constantly happening, industry professionals are everywhere, and there are networking events all the time. For many years we didn’t seem to do that at all – I went to a Raindance networking meetup in London in 2019 and thought, “wow, getting your foot in the door and connecting with people seems so comparatively straightforward here”. St Kilda Film Festival has only just started doing something similar in the past couple of years. So, I guess we’re getting better, but if you were looking to start a career in film and could choose any place in the world, I’d say the fields are still definitely greener elsewhere in that sense.
I think Australia has had a bit of an issue with making genre movies in the last few decades. In the 70’s and 80’s, we had the Australian New Wave. It was a bountiful time for the industry and a bunch of Australian classics were made – Wake In Fright, the original Mad Max trilogy, Breaker Morant, Crocodile Dundee… then the government started putting money in different places, and the way films were funded changed. These days, Australia only seems interested in funding particular types of projects, mostly dramas and stories that showcase Australiana. I don’t know if they’d be interested in doing a big-budget genre movie, unless it’s another Mad Max film, or they were co-funding something from overseas. Saw is a good example – those guys got knocked back by every funding body in Australia. Then they managed to secure a budget elsewhere and make their movie in America instead, and suddenly, it’s all, “do you know those guys are Australian? Good on ya, boys!”.
Where did the idea of Snaggletooth come from?
Snaggletooth was, like so many things, born out of a bigger project that didn’t happen. I’d wanted to do a feature-length film, and had done a bunch of pre-production on it (including making the monster costume and the Space Fox IV spaceship). It was an absolutely huge script, with many setpieces and characters. I was working with the mindset of, “well, what if it’s my only film? I might as well go all-out crazy with it!”.
But it became apparent to me, from working as a cinematographer on other independent films, that over-ambition was a big stumbling block for a lot of first-time indie directors. Time and again, I’d see people spreading themselves thin, being way too overambitious, and trying to make a Hollywood script with indie money rather than picking their battles and playing to their own strengths. That always seemed to be the number one reason projects either didn’t come together, or turned out less polished than they might have.
I knew I had to scale things back to avoid making that same mistake. So, I used all the elements I had in place to make a short, basically to practice doing these kinds of effects and see if I could make a fun little package with it. You might say it was a kind of rehearsal-primer for whatever’s next.
What are your plans for Snaggletooth? Festivals, maybe?
Snaggletooth has had a pretty good run at film festivals – it’s certainly had the best response any of my shorts have received so far. It’s played in Atlanta, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Kentucky, Chicago, Toronto, Moldova, the UK, Tokyo, and here in Melbourne, and it’s picked up a few awards. I’m happy that people seem to be enjoying it!
A big highlight was the Buried Alive Film Festival in Georgia. My friend Xenofauna did the festival ident, which involved a puppet giant monster waking up and rampaging its way to the cinema. I had no idea he’d be doing that when I submitted, so it just happened to be that we both had a tokusatsu work on the bill.
But I think the best place for it now is to be out in the wild, as a public example of my short film work. Even if just a couple of people hear about my next work and think, “hey, the Snaggletooth guy’s doing something new!”, it’ll have done its job.
Who designed Snaggletooth?
I did! He was very vaguely inspired by those freaky behind the scenes photos of the unfinished Cybot from Return of Godzilla. I wanted to use EL wire, so he’d have lights all over him, and I got the idea for the glowing eyes from reading about how Paul Blaisdell had designed Beulah, the Venusian from It Conquered the World (1956). I tried giving him irises, but he looked freakier without them. So he was kind of just kitbashed together – built up with strips of foam and slowly given texture. His hands are $2 store Freddy Krueger gloves. The costume used to live on a mannequin in my driveway, right outside my bedroom window. I’d look outside in the morning, and he’d be standing there. People thought I was crazy and said that having him staring into my bedroom at all hours must have freaked me out. I said I’d be more worried if I looked out there and he was gone!
Originally, he had a different name. But one day, I looked out my window and he really had vanished! A storm had hit overnight and blown him over. Faceplanting onto the ground had knocked one of his teeth out. So from that day on, he became Snaggletooth.
What were some of the challenges in a practical effects shoot?
The Snaggletooth shots actually came together without any major hurdles, but that was only because I’d already had my trial by fire several projects ago. That was back in 2014 on a web series. I was a touch overconfident that I could cover up any sins by underlighting and choosing angles carefully. We tested everything, but we didn’t test enough. The best laid plans sounded good on paper, but didn’t always work out on camera, so we wound up needing to re-shoot a bunch of stuff. It was the first time I’d tried anything like that, so it was all a big learning curve.
So, for Snaggletooth, we had it all specifically planned out. The first shoot was early 2020, with me behind the camera, the suit actor in costume, someone else doing the smoke effects, another person doing the flashing lighting effects, and another generally assisting. Five of us in total. Then the pandemic happened. Eventually I was able to go out with my camera and tripod to take a bunch of plates of the city of Melbourne. That was between lockdowns, so there weren’t many people around. Then more waiting under lockdowns. We didn’t wind up wrapping up filming until 2021!
I wanted to do as much of it for real as I could. Most of the shots with Snaggletooth standing amongst or behind buildings are obviously composited together, but a lot of the solo shots, with the fire in the foreground and smoke in the background, are 100% in-camera. There’s even a bit of back projection, so the bouncing cars, the tanks with the buildings behind them (aside from the cannon fire), and the buildings behind Snaggletooth in certain shots are done without post as well. I needed to know exactly how those effects were going to work to make as much happen in the shot itself as possible. Even the laser-eyes, which are obviously added in After Effects, had a green light shone on the suit to augment them and make the glow seem more natural. I did that because I noticed in BTS footage on the Toho Godzilla DVDs, that the suit usually had a light in the mouth for the same reason.
The one thing that didn’t work out as planned was the shot of Snaggletooth underwater. I wanted to do it dry-for-wet, shooting through a fish tank with a little water bubbler so we could get it all in camera. But we didn’t have a big enough tank for it to look right. The bubbles were too small, and had to be really close to the camera, so the perspective was too obvious. I knew going in that it probably wasn’t going to work, so we shot it two ways. I wound up going with plan B and composited two plates together instead.
So, I guess there are two things I’d say to anyone who wants to do this kind of thing on an indie level – first, plan the heck out of it, test it, and then test it again. It kind of requires two levels of planning, because you need a solid, well-tested plan going in, but then you need to have backup plans or the ability to improvise or play around with if those things still don’t go quite right on the big day. I wouldn’t advise that anybody tries to just wing it!
And second, from my own experience, I’d say, never go in expecting to just cover up a monster or effect that you know looks subpar. This didn’t happen on Snaggletooth, because I’d already learned a bunch of those lessons the hard way, but having a puppet or costume that you know in your heart isn’t up to your own standards, and just saying, “eh, we’ll underlight it or never show it from the front or the left side” is a death trap. You’ll wind up directing it with the mindset of “how can we hide this thing’s flaws?” rather than “how can we make this scary or impressive?”.
How does it feel to be a part of a passionate indie community keeping tokusatsu and practical kaiju effects alive?
I had honestly never considered it that way, but it’s a very beautiful thought. I definitely hope I can do much, much more. If I could play any part at all in keeping this kind of thing alive, I’d be very proud. I’ve met some wonderful people and forged friendships with fellow indie monster filmmakers. Even if that’s all I were to get from it, my heart would be very full.
Twenty years ago, I might have said that tokusatsu is maybe best left to the professionals unless you feel like spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. But Godzilla is CGI even in Japan now. I think that means that there’s more of a call for indie kaiju filmmaking than ever.
What does kaiju/godzilla mean to you on a deeper level?
I genuinely think that Godzilla was the gateway drug into cinema for me. I know that sounds convenient for an interview like this, but it’s true! I think that seeing tokusatsu movies at a young age primes you to appreciate film in a lot of different ways. I was always engaged and enthralled by them of course, but even as a kid, I loved seeing into the nuts and bolts of how they were made – not in a “ha ha, that’s so obvious and cheap” kind of way, but more like how you’re aware that Kermit the Frog is a puppet, but you still identify with him as a character.
So being able to say, “oh I see, that’s a suit, but that’s a puppet for the closeup, and that’s a blue screen shot, and that’s an editing trick, and that’s stock footage…” at a young age, introduces you to the technical side of filmmaking. Having an interest in foreign monster films makes you okay with watching movies with subtitles. Being keen to see more monster movies eventually leads you back to the big bug movies of the 50’s, and then the Universal Monsters in the 30’s and 40’s, so it’s an easy path from there to film noir, or Fritz Lang or Orson Welles or other classic cinema. Before too long you’re old enough to think, “hey, I like the films this Toho company makes, what else have these actors or directors done?” and you’re off exploring Kurosawa or Okamoto, and then Leone or Peckinpah, and on to other great directors. It’s a great primer for a young imagination.
So, the root of my love for filmmaking – that’s what Godzilla means to me.
What are your goals as a filmmaker?
My primary goal is simply to be able to keep working on films as my full-time job! It’s all I’ve done since I graduated film school. I hope that, wherever I may wind up, and however the industry and landscape change, I’ll be able to keep it up.
But short-term, my next big goal is to make a feature film. I’m writing it now. It’d say it’s half horror, half tokusatsu. The monster starts off man-sized, but grows and grows until it’s kaiju-sized by the last act. So you get the claustrophobic body-count horror, and then a kaiju rampage at the end. It’ll be even bigger, wilder, and snazzier than Snaggletooth. For now, enjoy this short as a taste of things to come!
SNAGGLETOOTH is now available to stream on formats such as YouTube & Vimeo. Support independent filmmakers like Scott by sharing the film around!
About Snaggletooth
Intergalactic Pirate Queen Zenobia attacks the planet Earth by awakening a kaiju-sized robotic creature and letting it loose on the city of Melbourne. Can the world be saved? Snaggletooth was made as a showcase for low-budget practical effects, and as a love letter to classic giant monster cinema.
Starring Jacqueline Whiting as Queen Zenobia
Narrated by Adam Khuraishi
SFX by Scott David Lister with Justin Chan, Tim Saward, Chris Duffie, Sascha Karner & Tom Hooke
Music by Roger Hartfell & His Fabulous Band
Written & Directed by Scott David Lister
Film Festival Appearances:
WINNER
Best Sci-fi/Fantasy (International) – Couch Film Festival 2023
Best Dark Science Fiction Film – Oregon Screams Horror Festival 2023
FINALIST
Best Short Film – The Strange Days Horror Fest 2023
SEMI-FINALIST
Best Under 5 min Film – Serbest International Film Festival (SIFF) 2023
OFFICIAL SELECTION
Buried Alive Film Festival 2023
Beside the Seaside 2023
Juggernaut Sci-fi & Fantasy Film Festival 2024
Cosmic Holler Film Fest 2023
Random Acts of Terror Festival 2023
Tokyo International Short Film Festival 2024
The Pittsburgh Moving Picture Festival: Thriller Picture Show 2023
