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As a writer, Scott Derrickson has worked on all sorts of movies, but as a director, he has been working his way up the Hollywood ladder in leaps and bounds. His first film, Hellraiser: Inferno, was a straight-to-video sequel, and his second, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, was a modestly-budgeted hybrid of the horror movie and courtroom drama genres that did surprisingly well at the box office three years ago.

Derrickson (right) on the set with Keanu Reeves

Now he has directed his first tentpole picture, a big-budget studio movie with major movie stars and pricey special effects—and it's a remake of a universally loved sci-fi classic, to boot. The Day the Earth Stood Still stars Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, the alien who comes to Earth to give us a warning, and Jennifer Connelly as the scientist who sort of befriends him—though not without some difficulty, at first.

Derrickson—who has often talked openly about his Christian faith—spoke to CT Movies about the film from his hotel room in New York City.

Note: Some of this interview includes mild spoilers about the film, but nothing major that isn't already implied or shown in the trailer.

Your last film was your own project, initiated by you, whereas the studio had been working on this film before you came onboard. What was it like to work on someone else's story, especially something this big?

Scott Derrickson: It's a different experience than generating something yourself. I think there's a good and bad side to it. The bad side is that you never feel quite as connected to the material, and you're sculpting something from something that someone else did, much more than you're continuing a process that started from the beginning with yourself and your own ideas. And that becomes a challenge. On the positive side, it's easier to be more objective about things, and to not feel quite so personally attached to everything. You can be a little bit more open to ideas that way.

In the past, you've talked about horror films, and your last two films were also horror films. Is it fair to call this a horror film in some ways?

Derrickson: I don't know that I would. I've got too much respect for the horror genre to classify this as a horror. In sci-fi, horror is definitely a subgenre: The Thing belongs in that genre, and Event Horizon, and Alien, and Pitch Black. Those are sci-fi horror films in a way, and even Pitch Black is probably more sci-fi action. But I think this would probably classify more in science fiction thriller drama. I think it's kind of a hybrid of those three genres.

The swarm destroys all in its path

It certainly has the swarm, as it were, sort of like the classic insect movies, and there is also the apocalyptic angle.

Derrickson: Yeah, there is definitely that. And the fearful apocalyptic tension aspect of it. Where is the line between horror and thriller? There's definitely tension that's intended in the movie, and every time I've seen it with an audience, I can feel a certain tension to the experience, and people are feeling the anxiety of the sequences where they should. And that's a good thing. So it's intended to be less intense than horror, certainly, but still have the tension that you want from a good thriller.

This film also has a much higher death toll than the original. It's not just the robot Gort, but also Klaatu, actively smashing military vehicles, and it's not just military types who die. Has that made the film morally murkier in a way?

Derrickson: The movie is morally murkier, because the times are morally murkier, and there was a lot of thought and discussion that went into each one of those decisions. Gort is definitely an extension of Klaatu. He's a machine that activates in the presence of violence, but it's one of the problems I think that the original film never really resolves.

As much as I love the original, the one thing that I've never been able to unpack is the very end of the movie. Because at the very end of the movie, this very peace-loving Klaatu, who's in the middle of what feels like this anti-war movie, stands in front and delivers this speech about how it's up to you, and then the big closer is, "And if you don't do exactly what I'm telling you to do, then I'm going to send this giant robot back and he's going to kill all of you!" That's why the film has been accused of being fascist by some people, and there's a contradiction in that that I find unresolvable, frankly.

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