Clive Owen Video Interview On ‘Intruders’

It’s always the same things. It always starts with a script. Juan Carlos sent me the script. I really liked it. I was really taken away and I thought it was a very unusual, intelligent, sort of, psychological thriller. I was a big fan of Juan Carlos’s films. '28 Weeks Later' and 'Intacto' were both great movies.

This movie is about the origin of fear and how on many levels I think I needed to make some kind of investigation about the time when we were kids and we were having our first nightmares. We were thinking about monsters and those kind of things. So I needed to show, in terms of creating a monster, somebody who, in terms of the visual appearance, had that kind of mystery in the shape of that. The faceless concept was perfect for that. It’s like the monster looking for his identity. I think it’s one of the drives of the movie until the very end. On the other hand, I think when you don’t see the face of somebody, it is really scary. We wanted to make that kind of feeling as well in the movie.

Clive Owen: I can’t remember the specific nightmares, but I do remember the intensity of the feeling of them when I was young. I’ve seen it in my girls, as well, that it can be incredibly overbearing and overwhelming before you learn to process and, as you get older, you start to know what’s real and what isn’t real and you come out of the dream much quicker because you wake up and go, 'oh that was the dream.' But for a child, it stays with them for a very long time, it’s a very intense feeling and I remember that.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo: This movie comes from a very personal feeling that I had when I was a kid. It’s related to some stories, some secret that my parents didn’t tell me. I am complete sure that dark side it was affecting my life and it created some kind of nightmares in my life. So, I needed to overcome that and I think the best way to do it was to making a movie.

You know they are already asking to see the movie. I’m not sure. It might be okay for Hannah, the older one; I’m not sure about Eve, the younger one.

Clive Owen: It's unusual doing a film like this because it’s often more demanding than it would be if you had two pages of dialogue, sort of because transmitting that kind of fear or tension takes as much work as it does handling lengthy dialogue because you've got to convey that feeling. It has to come out and come across and people have to buy it. It was demanding in a very different way.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo: In terms of making the movie, as a director, I think the challenge here was to split the story in two different countries and two different places because we are jumping back and forth in these cities and these families. As an audience member I needed to follow both at the same time and it was difficult, but finally, in terms of the rhythm, we made some kind of adjustment that really helps the audience to go through.