Fede Alvarez

For director Fede Alvarez it was quite a journey from shooting action-figure commercials for Mattel to signing a seven-figure deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures for his feature debut.

In November, the Uruguayan director posted his four-minute short, Ataque de Panico! (Panic Attack!), an intense, apocalyptic story of a robot invasion that obliterates the city of Montevideo. It instantly went viral, prompting viewers and bloggers alike to not only marvel at the quality of the production but also at the fact that the film was completed on an unbelievably small $300 budget.

In a landscape where films with reasonable budgets are enjoying huge gains at the box office, such as last year's District 9 from first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp - made for under $30 million while grossing more than $180 million - Hollywood of course came knocking.

Within one weekend of posting Panic Attack! to YouTube, Alvarez found himself courted by every major studio and agent in Los Angeles. His deal with Ghost House guarantees Alvarez a six-figure holding deal, while a writer scripts his alien-invasion pitch, which will be applied against the seven-figure fee if the film gets the green light.

It almost seems like an overnight success story, but the 31-year-old director is far from being green. Boards spoke with Alvarez, who, in his own words, discussed the road to potential blockbuster stardom and his secrets behind stretching a $300 budget.

I started directing, in a non-professional way, since I was eight! I did stuff in stop motion and animation. In university, I studied communications, specializing in film and TV, and got my first gig directing in 2002 right after I got out of school. I joined Paristexas, which is one of the big production companies in Montevideo. [At the time], there was no money to make great post-production, so I usually did all of the post myself on my own computer. So for them it was a great deal and for me it was amazing. I also started shooting Mattel commercials for LA - those action-figure commercials with special effects were some of my first gigs for the States. In 2005, I won a scholarship to complete a master's in screenwriting in Amsterdam and lived there for two years.

I always wanted to get into the movies, but of course I never expected it to happen like this. I was just trying to make movies in Uruguay in a way. I went back there and by late 2007, I quit my production company and opened my own, Murdoc Films, by the beginning of 2008. I also started my post-production house, Aparato, which meant that with a team working with me - as opposed to me directing and doing all my own special effects - I was able to focus more on my personal projects and one those projects was Panic Attack!

When I was living in Amsterdam I saw a short trailer, Tyrants from Afar, which was a presentation for a film festival. It was 30 seconds, probably three or four shots, of retro robots attacking Amsterdam. I was blown away. It was fairly well done, but it was the fact that for the first time in my life I saw something that was that scale in the city where I lived. For me, it was the first time that there was some fantastic movie that happened in the corner of my street. It was an amazing feeling, like this is what happens to people in New York when they see Godzilla. So I said I have to bring this back to Montevideo.

Panic Attack! was one of those projects that you always mean to finish and everyone teases you about it: "Oh, what's happening with the robots? You're never going to finish that." Last year I felt like, I'm not going to do anything, I'm just going to do this. It also developed in a way that last year advertising in Montevideo was kind of slow, so it was a good time to do other stuff. I worked on the project and finished it [in November] and then all of this happened.

I made the film for $300. You can tell: there's no lighting, just a camera going through the city. It was two days of shooting. We did the short film and also a music video [for Uruguayan band Snake] together. The first day of shooting was the live action on the street and the next day was shooting the band, the second day was a bit more expensive because we did some lighting and stuff. So when we say $300, it was for the one day of shooting that you see in the short film.

My DP, Pedro Luque, did it for free, we have worked on all of our advertising projects together. We mainly spent the money on extras. It was a bus with 50 people and you cannot make 50 people work for free, running around the city all day, even if they are your friends. The crew was very small: we didn't need a big crew to just get shots of people running. In Uruguay, it's also very cheap to shoot. It's also easier to go from one point to another if you have a lot of locations in one day because Montevideo looks like a big city, but it's not, and you don't have traffic. It was also very easy to get permission to shoot in locations like the city hall. When its an indie film, one not meant to make money, they basically let you do whatever you want. The post-production of course was free because I did it myself. Basically it was me and Mauro Rondan, who did the rigging and modeling for the robots. We bought the explosions from a site called Detonation Films. They're just some freaks who blow stuff up against the blue screen and they'll sell you the shot for $5 - $10. With that I pulled together the special effects: some effects were CGI, but others were real stuff blowing up against the blue screen.

I posted the movie on YouTube and literally the next day I started getting emails from Hollywood. I posted it on Thursday and by Monday, everybody [contacted me], all the big studios and agents. I went to Los Angeles one week after that and took meetings. I met the right people and Sam Raimi heard about the short film. He liked it and found a way to get to me. They proposed a nice deal for the movie that offered a lot of creative freedom so it was impossible to say no. They said they wanted me to do the movie freely, not inside the studio system. They wanted to protect me from that.

Definitely the biggest challenge was having the time to complete the film. But if you have all kinds of stuff going on and you have your working-day life, you have to find a way to work on your personal projects because I think mine is a great example of how they pay off.

Fede Alvarez is repped by Anonymous Content for the US Market, Cortez Brothers for the Spanish Market, Cine3 in Chile and Murdoc Films for Uruguay.