ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to Lumina director Gino McKoy and star Eric Roberts about the alien abduction movie. The duo discussed the sci-fi horror film, its alien designs, and more. Goldove will release Lumina in theaters on July 12.
“A terrifying sci-fi thrill ride, Lumina follows four friends desperately searching for their abductee friend in a DUMB – Deep Underground Military Base. Whether they find their friend or not, what they find in the desert of the US to the sands of the Sahara, will change their lives forever,” says the synopsis of Lumina.
Tyler Treese: Eric, your character in Lumina is Thom, he’s got all the Black Ops knowledge. You deliver some important lore. There’s also an action-filled sequence in there. What did you like most about this character?
Eric Roberts: My guy, he’s a former government employee. I have knowledge of all the government’s finances that are connected to this research on aliens. So I’m like the linchpin between facts, money, and myth. I’m the guy who knows it all. Fun role to play, man.
I had a really cool leader, Gino, who took me on a really cool trip. It’s a fun movie. Because even if you’re close-minded to aliens, this will make you peek ’cause it’s cool.
Gino, you wrote the script and wound up directing it as well. What was it that inspired this core concept? I was also curious if it took a lot of iteration to get to its current form, or if this was always the idea?
Gino McKoy: I probably had like two drafts. I wrote the first draft in seven days at my uncle’s house in Florida while I was visiting him. But I wanted to get to the psychological effect on people. If they experience abduction, someone close to them, someone that they love, if they’re abducted, how would that psychologically affect them, and how far will they go to save that person? The stories about Alex taking his friends on a journey basically to save the one he loves and their friend and what happens during that journey. So that really inspired me in terms of also meeting a lot of people from MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), a lot of former militaries and former Black Ops Marines that spoke about their experience with aliens with UFO phenomena.
That really inspired me to do this movie as well as how someone would be affected. So if it could happen to me, it could happen to you kind of thing. If you’re put in that situation, how far would you go? It’s very relatable because parents who have a child who’s abducted could relate to the same way. Like, okay, so if my loved one gets abducted by aliens, how would I go? What would I go about? In that case, looking for that person and, and trying to find them and what would be my psychological mind state in that present situation?
Eric, I love where your career is at because you’re really using your name value and your acting skills that help some of these projects get made. It’s so hard these days for original projects to really come out, especially in theaters. So how do you feel being involved with such a wild amount of projects, but also really giving back in a way and helping these films get made as well?
Roberts: It’s satisfaction. It’s like getting kissed back. It’s just wonderful when you give somebody a kiss, you get a kiss back, it makes your day. Well, that’s kind of what my life is like and it really is. I’m not just making up to be nice. Yeah. I have a great life of great people, and every day, I get to go to work with somebody not unlike Gino, who’s smart, gifted, and cool.
It’s really fun for me, especially being an older guy now, to watch all the young guys who are just on it, especially Gino, he was on it. We had so much fun making this movie because he knew what he wanted, how he wanted it, and here’s how we’re doing it. He was a cool leader, and he’s also not a bad actor.
Gino, it takes a while to finally see the aliens in Lumina, but when we do, we get a pretty cool design. How was it coming up with their look?
McKoy: I was inspired by a lot of stories from people I spoke to in their depictions and going down that whole rabbit hole of what people have seen in terms of aliens and everything else. Then I was also inspired by one of the first movies that I loved, Predator. John Turner’s Predator really inspired me. I love that and I love the whole Predator look and everything else. That inspired me as well as their personal experience and what they saw, the people I spoke to. We went about designing it, and we tried different designs and stuff like that and created different aliens for it. That’s how we went about putting it in the movie. We did both. We did practical effects, which is creature effects, and also visual effects. So we combined both.
Eric, one thing that’s been really cool to see over the past two years is that Suits has just become such a phenomenon, and you had such a fun run on that show. How has it been seeing that show really just light on fire years after the fact? That has to be pretty neat.
Roberts: Well, I have never been involved in that kind of delayed reaction and that it was a hit. And we got, we got attention both professionally and privately. And then it went away, and then it exploded. And we, and, and, and then these 12-year-old girls were saying hi to me now because “I love you on Suits.” They know nothing about my career, but they just tell me from that show. So I have a whole new audience now. It’s really kind of fun.
That show is so much fun. I gotta tell you, that group was so on it, but it was the hardest job I ever had. Because we speak in monologues all the time, speeches, and they hand you rewrites every five minutes. It’s a very hard show to keep up with. But it’s a fantastic group, every one of ’em, especially Gabe [Macht]. I love him.
Gino, you’re also a musician, so how was it also getting to provide music for Lumina?
Oh man, I came full circle because I came to LA to sign with the labels. I decided to go independent and started writing movies, and this was a dream to put my music in movies and hear people and to put it in the right positions. Because music supervision is an art by itself. Putting the right music in the right scene takes… you’re thinking above just a normal case of just slotted music. You have to be very careful in terms of what music you put in certain scenes to make it work. So I was really happy, man. I was really blessed to be able to do that.
