An alien threat has come to earth. Microbes are infecting humans and poised to take over the planet. Malik Khan (Riz Ahmed) is a former Marine who is well aware of this threat, knows what to look for, and wants to protect his two sons. Encounter starts out as a thrilling tale and challenges the audience to think about what’s real and what’s in the mind of the protagonist.

Also starring Octavia Spencer, Encounter was co-written by Joe Barton and Michael Pearce, who also directed the film. 

As Pearce shared, getting the story of Encounter from script to screen wasn’t a short process. Barton’s screenplay had been floating around the U.K. for a while and other directors were attached at different stages.

“It became free again and I read a draft of the script and really connected with it,” Pearce said.

“I had some strong instincts about how I wanted to develop it. It was just a case that Joe wasn’t free because he was busy doing a TV show. I pitched to him and the producers what I thought we should do, and they gave their blessing for me to continue to develop the script.”

What attracted Pearce to this story was his personal reaction to the material.

“I felt a lot of resonance with my own family upbringing,” Pearce said. “Anytime you can read material and you can connect in a personal way and it’s meaningful to you, I think you have to follow that.”

There was also the universal theme running through Encounter that Pearce found intriguing, which is the loss of innocence that the kid in the film goes through when he realizes that his father isn’t an all-knowing, all-powerful superhero.

“He learns his dad is a flawed human being and he needs compassion to get through a crisis. There was something universal in that,” Pearce said. “Even though there were genre elements that were quite fun to play in with Encounter, it was the human story I was attracted to.”

When it came to working on the script he inherited from Barton, there were main things that Pearce knew were important to keep and build on.

“Joe had written a beautiful and tender coming-of-age film and road movie, but it had this thrilling opening with a father who kidnaps his kids,” Pearce said. “I felt that needed to continue and deliver on the promise of that thriller opening so it was really about amplifying the stakes where I saw opportunities.”

It was important for Pearce to build upon Barton’s initial script rather than just bringing in arbitrary elements or completely new characters and combining his own family upbringing and some of the things he experienced.

Pearce’s writing process

“I’m always really impressed with a writer who can start a script and not know where it’s going to go,” Pearce said. “When I’ve done that, I’ve ended up in cul-de-sacs that I can’t get out of.”

When Pearce writes his material from scratch, his method is to start with a treatment or outline.

“I need to work in broad brush strokes,” he said. “I have to get a helicopter view of the story. When I know the rough architecture of the narrative then I start to zoom in.”

Pearce finds the fun really takes off once the foundations of the story are set. Once he invests a lot of time in that world building and is confident with where the story is heading, he can be very granular with the details.

With rewriting, Pearce’s goal is to keep as much of the original material as possible in the script. He says it’s important because you’re trying to retain the thing that attracted you to the project in the first place. But you also have to follow your own instincts.

Regarding rewrites, Pearce says, “It’s like the best adaptation of a novel is an unfaithful one because you’re having to write a script in a way that exists on its own terms. It’s the same way with a rewrite.”

For Encounter, Pearce would leave Barton’s original script aside for a few months, do a draft then would reread the original script and see the areas where he had deviated from the path too wildly, then go back to work on his draft again.

Where it all began

Pearce wanted to be a painter since he was a kid and attended art school in his teenage years. During this time, he was taking different courses on other art forms like sculpture and photography and ended up taking a class on filmmaking. It was the first time he worked with a camera and saw film as a versatile, creative medium.

“My teacher gave me some art-house movies and one was Seven Samurai and it blew my mind,” Pearce recalled. “I saw this movie and was like, ‘wow, this medium captures everything that I’m fascinated about — literature, performance, architecture, music, sound — and it was one of those situations where you see a movie and you decide that’s what you want to do.”

After that he got a degree in film and post-graduate for directing. He made shorts throughout that period and in 2017 his first feature Beast debuted.

“I really tried with Beast to put as much attention into the tone and texture of the writing, dialogue and storytelling because I felt that it really helps with the read when you’re sending the script out to actors or heads of departments or financiers,” Pearce said. He explains that if the script is an enjoyable read and not just a cold blueprint for a movie, it will attract attention.

He continues, “That doesn’t mean the writing needs to be flowery or too fussy; sometimes a precise description is more vivid than four sentences.” Pearce chooses to paint a picture of the scene to invoke a sense of tone — a lesson he brought on when rewriting Encounter.

Pearce came out of Encounter with a new lesson when it comes to working with actors.

“To some degree, we did a lot of improvisation. I had a lunch with Aditya Geddada (who plays Bobby in the film) and we’re not sure what percentage of his lines were in the script — maybe it’s a quarter, if that. It could be 10%.”

Pearce discovered that he could get the best results when he gave the kids a lot of freedom. He realized it could be the same for adult actors as well. For writers, they should recognize that they may have written a piece of material so that it reads well and when filmed it would work, but when you come to set, to some degree you have to kind of forget the script and leave it aside and work with what’s in front of you.

Encounter is now showing in theaters and is available on Prime Video.