A good religious horror film has been hard to find as of late. While every decade from the 80’s and back had a few solid additions to the sub-genre, the 90’s had Se7en as a notable entry with little else proving to be very impressive or memorable since. Sure, there have been a few watchable ones, such as The Exorcism Of Emily Rose (which is more of a courtroom drama than horror film, but I digress), but mostly it’s been a spattering of Lifetime-esque offerings that do little else except cause extreme boredom. Legion, the directorial debut of The Orphanage co-founder Scott Stewart, looks to plow full speed ahead through the tedious amounts of uneventful and atmosphereless religious offerings and pull off a film that has the action of the Underworld films, the setting and villainous stylings of Demon Knight and the religious implications of The Seventh Sign.

Arriving in Albuquerque, NM and driving to Santa Fe to visit the set in May of 2008, we first stopped at the University of Santa Fe’s Garson Studios to check out the interior sets. New Mexico has been a hot spot for films as of late, with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Terminator Salvation both shooting in the desert and No Country For Old Men using the sound stages at USF. Taking place in modern day, the diner in which the film takes place has the set dressings of a Mom and Pop restaurant from yesteryear. In order to match up the interior set to the exterior set, being shot in the middle of the desert, they used a cyclorama, which is a 360-degree panoramic painting. After taking a brief walk through the office, which had some very cool concept art and story boards that I won’t mention for spoiler purposes, we began our journey into the desert.

We arrived on set to find the exterior of the diner/gas station, with a typical Apopka, FL yard full of beat up, broken down cars. What really caught my eye was the ice cream truck sitting off to the side, of which I only got a “you’ll see” answer as to why it was sitting there (now that I’ve seen the trailer, it makes a little more sense). Huddling around a heater, we watched the crew prep a dust storm to be used in a scene rehearsal. Walking into the shell of the diner, we got to chat with Tyrese Gibson, who plays Kyle Williams. “ It’s heavily established that I'm trying to get to this court proceeding that's happening. My wife is trying to take my child so I stop over to get directions and end up dealing with the apocalypse.”

When asked about what attracted him to working on the film, Gibson explained, “You know, for me it was when I had seen director’s reel, after I read the script. Then I heard about the cast that came on board and I figured it was a win-win situation. It’s one month of work for me; I get a chance to train and get ready for Transformers [Revenge of the Fallen]. It’s a real opportunity to be a part of the genre family. That’s kind of what got me in… I’m not huge on horror films but there’s something really special about this. It had a spark as far as the script. I love that Kyle has a different energy compared to everyone else in the whole film and what he brings to the movie.”

Legion is also a reunion of sort for Dennis Quaid and Gibson, who have previously been in Flight of the Pheonix together. “I told Dennis that I'm starting to not like him because every time I do a movie with him, I'm in the desert somewhere with mountains and dust around.” He also talked about working with Paul Bettany. “[He’s] been a real joy. We click, have great chemistry and certain people, when I get on film sets, I figure out who I'm going to watch and who I'm going to study and take on nuances about ways they deliver dialogue, and his presence on camera is really strong. I want to do another one with Paul, for sure.”

After Tyrese was called to prepare for a scene, we got to speak with Willa Holland, who told us a bit about her character, Audrey Anderson. “ She's a rebellious teenager, trying to get away from her family, be on her own, have her own rules and stuff like that. Then this whole scenario comes down. She has this older persona that she tries to put on. She tries to act older than she is, dresses older than she is, everything like that. This stuff happens and all she really wants is her mother. She goes back into this childish way and then when she realizes that her mother isn't exactly in a place to care for her now, to say the least, she ends up finally taking charge and just being that person that she kind of tried to be, this independent spirited woman, and she just pops out of her shell. She's taking on this new world, where she’s shooting guns and attacking demons, which I don't think she ever planned on doing.”

When asked if she prepared for Legion by watching any apocalyptic horror films, she told us that she hasn’t seen very many genre films. “The thing is that I get scared really easily. The last horror film... well, really the only one I've ever seen, is when my boyfriend tricked me into seeing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [remake] and told me we got tickets for a different film. We walked into that theater and I walked out five times. I can't deal with anything scary, but this I can deal with because I can see how it happens.”

We didn’t get much time with Holland, as she was called away for a scene rather quickly (such is life on a set) but shortly after, we had driven down to the trailers and got a chance to talk with Adrianne Palicki (Friday Night Lights ) who plays Charlie, a waitress who is pregnant with mankind’s last hope. Although the actress wears a prosthetic stomach for the entire film, that doesn’t mean she’s short on her share of action scenes. “ They weighted it and it's about eight pounds, so when I’m running around I’m not just zipping along (laughs).It's good to have that weight, but after 11 hours of it, I kind of want to shoot myself. So, I know I won't be pregnant anytime soon (laughs)… She has quite a bit of action. She’s in part the reason why all this is happening. She gets to whoop a little angel ass.”

One could stand to reason that Charlie is a version of the Virgin Mary. “Yes, you could say that (laughs). A version of that, for sure. She's a little bit more trailer-trash than that, but it's exciting to play her… I just love her frankness. She’s just very honest, down to business, kind of brutal. I love that; I don’t have that.”

When faced with the apocalypse, her character goes through a flurry of emotions and does a little self-discovery. “Disbelief, fear, not believing that it’s actually happening. Once something horrific starts happening we know something supernatural is going on,” she said. “ She finds her inner hero, and she also finds her heart. She’s very adamant about taking care of herself and not thinking about the baby or anyone else in the world and she comes full circle.”

After chatting with Palicki and leaving her to continue reading her copy of Wanted (before the film came out, no less), we walked down a few trailers and talked to Paul Bettany, who plays Michael, an angel who comes to Earth to protect Charlie and the salvation for mankind that’s in her womb. Bettany talked a bit about getting into the mindset of an angel. “You know what, you can’t and that’s the real answer. Other people would lie to you, I won’t. You really can’t because clearly it’s not something you can experience, but what you can do is sort of approximate a mixture of things. The thing that really appealed to me about Michael which I found on my endless delving into the worldwide waste of time is that he was the first angel in heaven to bow down before all humans. He was Adam and Eve’s protector. That really appealed to me. He really believes in human beings. I like the idea of a protector who has a single-minded objective, which is to save the human race, which is impossible to play. You have to come up with substitutes. I have a wife and 2 children I’m quite fond of, and wouldn’t want anything awful to happen to them. I mix my fascination with the mythology of angels with my real-life objective to keep my children safe and as happy as possible with something that is more accessible which is the attitude of a warrior. One can only deal with one’s fantasies with what an angel is; I wanted to create something more concrete than the Archangel Michael.”

He went on to talk a bit more about his character and his identifiability. “Yes, he’s an archetype in that he’s a hero with a really clear objective, so you can broadly relate him to lots of heroes in movies. He’s a fucking angel that’s decided to take a stand against God. Quite an impossible feat. I don’t personally have a frame of reference. I’ve had a few angry directors, if you know what I mean… I forego all my supernatural powers when I get rid of my wings. They’re referred to as the dogs of heaven. He has a collar that comes off his neck as well. I’m just really good at fighting, which is awesome. It’s hard not to practice something you’re really good at.”

In this age of CGI, the shunning of practical effects is the norm; however, Bettany talks about the use of in-camera effects with an visual effects artist at the helm of the film. “Yeah, but weirdly he’s shooting quite an analog movie. All that stuff will of course get put on. It’s a sort of relief. It’s his effects house, he runs The Orphanage. First thing he said to me is I don’t want to shoot a blue or green movie. I want to shoot a Technicolor movie, the colors you get in Close Encounters. You can feel all his film references are so vast. You see The Warriors, etc. It’s peculiarly analog in that we’re getting a lot in camera, a lot of kicking the shit out of people. I was stove-piping this guy in the neck. This stunt guy didn’t mind me hitting him in the throat. There’s not a lot of effects involved, it’s just him running towards me and I’m hitting him in the throat again and again. I think it’s sort of great because he’ll get all that stuff and then do his digital wizardry.”

After going back down to the set for a little bit and huddling around the heater a little more (in case you guys haven’t been in the desert in the middle of the night, it’s freezing!), we headed over to the break tent a little after midnight and talked to director Scott Stewart. Being a co-founder of The Orphanage, Stewart has worked on everything from Sin City to the Pirate sequels and even on the latest version of my favorite film of all-time, Blade Runner. Although he’s known for his visual effects work, he’s not new to the art of screenwriting. “ I was a screenwriting major at NYU, and I played with computers when I was a kid. I had this very strange circuitous route where I landed at ILM as a visual effects artist. So I came from both areas, but I principally see myself as a writer. I’m geek enough to do visual effects, but writing is the first passion. I was hired to write this originally for another director a few years ago, the project kicked around and the director fell out. The producer got the script back and came back to me. There were a lot of fans of the script but it never quite crossed the finish line, and I said I’d do it if I could direct it. We got it to a place where the momentum just built and now here we are.”

From what we saw on set, and especially after the trailer was debuted, the film takes on a comic book style. “That’s definitely what we’re going for," Stewart continues. "We all love movies, we love comic books. My favorite comic book movies are the ones that were never based on comics, like Unforgiven or Unbreakable. Some of my partners at my company called The Orphanage will be doing a comic book movie, and everybody always wants to formalistically make it look like a comic book, and that usually means turning on purple and green lights. I think it’s more of a sensibility. Me and my DP just try to have the rule of “no boring shots”. When the news started to circulate that we were doing the movie and what my background was, visual effects artists have such a bad rep! 'All they care about are the pixels! They don’t pay any attention to the acting or the story.' I worked for George Lucas, and he told us a story about how early on he made THX 1138. Francis Coppola produced that for him, but he said if he really wanted to be a mainstream filmmaker, which I don’t know if George really wanted to, you have to learn how to write a classically structured film. So he wrote American Graffiti, which at the time was quite innovative, but is now thought of as one of the most classically structured films. I really took that to heart and have just focused on writing. It always starts with the script. If I had a lot of fancy visuals but the script wasn’t compelling for the actors I don’t think any of them would have done the film because none of these people need to do this movie. It is tonally really unusual. There’s a lot of comedy in it, but the visceral horror supernatural action elements are what we tried to commit to. American Werewolf was a movie that was really funny, but the scary stuff was really frickin’ scary! Visually, Rick Baker’s stuff was awesome for the time.”

Stewart managed to gather a pretty great cast for his film and talked about how he casted Bettany specifically. “Me and my producers talked about the kind of movie we wanted to make, and I told them I wanted an action hero that was not known as an action star. I wanted real actors in this movie, not people who are thought of for their gymnastics or their muscles, and then make them into an action star. Paul’s someone whose career I’ve been following closely, whose so otherworldly to play this character, someone who could have the 1,000 yard stare, could be part Steve McQueen and part supernatural. It’s the kind of role that Viggo is known for playing in things like Lord of the Rings. Somebody you can believe is eternal. There aren’t a lot of people who can play that, where you just look at them and believe that they come from some other place and time. Paul’s somebody you would. There’s actually a movie called Gangster #1 that he did a few years ago where he plays the most terrifying character. I don’t think that’s a side that people have seen in mainstream pictures. We set our sights on Paul, we didn’t think in a million years he would do it, but I met with his reps and pitched him my vision for the movie to show that we were aspiring to something… My background is in visual effects so I gave him a lot of visual information, a lot of concept designs, I storyboarded everything in the movie and we actually sent them all that before we sent them the script. After they read the script they got back to us and said ‘Paul really likes zombie movies and wants to be in one!’ Which is not the movie that we’re making, but I appreciated the fact that we’re trying to make a genre movie. I was trying to get all highfalutin with him and he said, ‘I don’t want to do a period film; I want to kill lots of bad guys with machine guns, and jump off buildings and do that kind of stuff.’ I went to New York and I met with him, we had a great meeting and shared a lot of sensibilities about the things in movies we liked and don’t like in this kind of movie. He really became my partner in the picture. Once we got that everything else sort of fell into place. Charles Dutton, then Dennis Quaid and Tyrese, Will Holland, Kevin Durand who I was a big fan of in 3:10 to Yuma.”

Stewart also talked about his approach to using visual effects in the film and how he found a balance he was comfortable with. “We have a lot of practical effects in the movie. I’m a big fan of that; practical effects are really hard to do well. I kind of know why my fellow filmmakers like to shoot things on green screen stages because it’s really nice to be able to fly through it and then do it all later in the luxury of your own facility. I’m very skeptical of visual effects. I own a visual effects company. We have 180 artists; we just finished Iron Man and we’re doing the new John Woo movie. I certainly feel like they get grossly overused, and I’ll probably be accused of overusing them myself. But, if you can serve the story, you won’t know [the majority of them] are there. Removing wires, switching things around, that sort of thing. I’m racing through this schedule, so sometimes I aspire to get it in camera, but other times I’m like, ‘We’ll fix it later!’ Sometimes people look at me and go, ‘Really?’ and I’ll say, ‘Really, I’ve done it before!’ (laughs)."

Although Legion wasn’t quite finished shooting yet, Stewart already has his eye on a couple of other projects. “ There’s a sci-fi western that I’m working on, there’s a superhero movie that’s not based on a comic book, very grounded, and I have a book that we adapted with another writer that’s a ghost story set in the gulf coast called “The Elementals” written by Michael McDowell. Haunted House on a beach, which is something I’ve never seen before and thought it was really scary. Whole bunch of other things. And then tons of sequels to this. There’s a three-movie arc for sure. Jim Cameron sequelizes movies really well, what he did with Aliens and Terminator. He changes the genre of the films; a lot of people don’t realize this. Alien is a monster in the house, Aliens is a war movie about motherhood. (laughs) Terminator is a monster chasing us and then the second one is a father story, where the best father in the world happens to be a machine. That stuff is super bitchin’! The sequel to this won’t be in an enclosed space, it’ll be really spread out with all sorts of different stories and reversing the relationships, not just do ‘Legion Some More.’ We all fall in love with our mythology making, and sometimes we give our audiences too much of it. It can work against you if you spend too much time telling about the world and not enough time telling a cool story.”

Legion arrives in theatres on January 22, 2010.