Melbourne
March 29-30, 2025
Melbourne Showgrounds
The next blockbuster movie from the acclaimed creative team behind the Lord of the Rings franchise isn’t so much set in London as on it. That’s not London as we know today, mind you, but the London of the far-flung future: an entire, towering city mounted on gargantuan caterpillar tracks that rumbles across a vast, dry, post-nuclear ocean bed, hunting for smaller, weaker “traction cities” to run down and devour.
That’s the central conceit of Philip Reeve’s cult 2001 novel, Mortal Engines, soon to be brought to the screen in all its epic, clanking glory. The future is mobile, with predatory towns pillaging each other for supplies, materials, and citizens in a world whose natural resources have been wiped away by the ominously-titled Sixty Minute War. It’s a world populated by daring air pirates, desperate refugees, rogue archaeologists and relentless undead cyborgs.
Sounds pretty good, huh?
“It was a world that I’d never seen before,” explains producer Peter Jackson, who also adapted the novel with his regular writing partners, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. “We’ve seen movies about the distant future and what would happen after a nuclear war, but we haven’t really seen one in which society has rebuilt itself back up again into these big wheeled cities that go around consuming each other, and the airships and the dogfights.”
“So I thought yes, if we could make this movie it would be a film I’d never seen before, which in this day and age is getting a bit rare. I thought there’s a chance here to be completely original with the visuals we’re doing.”
Our guides to this fascinating world are two disparate characters who are forced together by fortune – or misfortune, really. Apprentice Historian Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan, seen recently in the sci-fi disaster epic, GeoStorm) is thrust – or, more literally, kicked – into a life of adventure when he foils an assassination attempt on London’s celebrated Head Historian, Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving, aka Elrond Half-Elven) by Hester Shaw (relative newcomer Hera Hilmar), a mysterious, scarred refugee from a destroyed city.
However, things are not what they seem, and Tom soon finds himself on the run from his erstwhile hero, Valentine, with the vengeful Hester his only friend in a dangerous world.
Hilmar was drawn to the character of Hester because she stood apart from the usual roles available to young women in the film industry.
“The amount of characters that you read and audition for that are described as beautiful and intelligent,” she sighs. “And they’re not allowed to be faulty and messy and horrible or something, and then you realise why that is. That’s what I liked about her – I get to play someone that to me is way more real than many other Hollywood roles.”
“I think in general we find it very difficult to see women being difficult. I think she has every right to be pissed off and annoyed and upset.”
The object of Hester’s anger is, of course, Hugo Weaving’s swashbuckling villain. Although he’s played roles in everything from The Matrix to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the last few years have seen the South African-born actor concentrate on smaller Australian dramas, so Mortal Engines marks a rare return to blockbuster cinema at the behest of his Lord of the Rings director.
“This feels like coming home in a way,” he muses. “Many of the people who were on Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are here, and it’s the same physical space.”
Weaving said he was taken by the unique world depicting in the film, explaining “I got involved with this because it’s a really good read – it’s a good story. It should be exciting, and I’m sure it’ll be a big film. The universe becomes three dimensional. I think it does have heart and I think it’s a great, rollicking rollercoaster of a ride. You move or you die in this world.”
And while Valentine is most assuredly the villain of the piece, in Weaving’s hands the character is a more complex fellow than you might expect.
“I was thinking who is this guy like?” he says. “He’s definitely an explorer, he’s an adventurer, he’s a pirate, he’s a pilot, he’s an archaeologist – there’s all sorts of people you can reference. But he’s also a politician… there’s something quite dark about him and potentially sinister about him, perhaps – which isn’t evident initially, but there’s a darker driving force within him that we learn about as we go on.”
However, while Peter Jackson’s fingerprints are all over Mortal Engines, the esteemed Kiwi filmmaker is not actually sitting I the director’s chair on this one. That duty falls to Christian Rivers, who has worked with Jackson since providing the storyboard art on 1992’s gross-out horror comedy, Brain Dead. In the following years he became an integral part of Jackson’s WingNut Films production team, and worked as splinter unit director on The Hobbit films. Mortal Engines, however, marks his first feature outing as director.
“Creatively, I think we’re trying something new,” he says. “Which is always exciting. We hope it’s gonna surprise audiences. Like anything you get so used to seeing it you get numb to it, and you have to remind yourself. That happens to me in the editing room – I go ‘Wow, there’s nothing else that looks like this.’ And it’s interesting because it’s sort of got an echo of… if we can hit a magic triangle of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Mad Max – if we can land in the middle somewhere…” that’s what the world felt like to us. We didn’t want to make it steampunk, we didn’t want to make it a post-apocalyptic future, but it has to echo certain elements of a lot of those things.”
For Jackson, helping Rivers make his directorial debut is the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of creative collaboration.
“I’ve always wanted to get a feature film made with him and in some respects it was pragmatic, because we came out of The Hobbit and we had not just this book but other things that Fran and I were planning on doing but had been put on hold for five yours. So I thought if we could get Christian interested in directing this… and fortunately he was, because it’s his son’s favourite book – so it wasn’t too difficult!”
Mortal Engines is in cinemas from December 6.
