On the UK release of his directorial debut Monsters Of California, blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves mainman Tom DeLonge takes us in search of answers to life, the universe and everything…
“When you study that phenomenon,” says Tom DeLonge, in a way that only Tom DeLonge can, “it has the scariest elements and also some very paranormal elements – and there's a very playful element with it, too. There's a lot of times that encounters with whatever this is, it'll fuck with you. It’ll fuck with your tent, or your cabin, throwing rocks at you. If you're leaning against the wall in your bedroom watching TV, it'll bang right behind your head, and it'll keep doing it over and over again to get a reaction out of you. You'll hear voices and all this weird shit. There's a playful nature mixed with extreme fear…”
Tom is speaking to Kerrang! at his home studio in San Diego, California. He is explaining the scene from his feature film directorial debut, in which a group of teenage adventure-seekers, chasing answers to the paranormal activity taking place in their hometown, are tracking Bigfoot, only for one of their number to have the legendary Sasquatch, um, take a piss on his face.
“I just thought it was a good way to end the scene…” he adds with a laugh.
If Tom’s words sound equal parts elevated and absurd then, well, welcome to Monsters Of California. First released in the U.S. in 2023, the movie is finally making its way to UK audiences this week. Even two years removed from its initial run, Tom’s passion and excitement for the project ooze from his every machine-gun-quick word. Part coming-of-age adventure comedy, part exploration of the real-life questions about “the search for truth within understanding identified aerial phenomenon, paranormal events, time and frequency and consciousness”, and all soaked in lashings of toilet humour, it’s Tom DeLonge distilled into movie format – the scope of Angels & Airwaves meets the tone of blink-182 on the silver screen. It’s great fun, too.
”That's just who I am, you know?” he says. “I'm both those people. I have serious sides to me, and I have that eternal youth side to me. Just because I laugh at ridiculous jokes doesn't mean that I don't sit there and conceptualise frameworks for who we are, what consciousness is, and the way the universe might be…”
The desire to try his hand at film directing has been long on Tom’s mind.
“I knew I wanted to do it [even before I had the idea for this particular movie],” he says. “I wanted the artistic challenge, and felt I had the potential for creating a piece of art that was more ambitious, that can really touch people in a different way than just hearing a song in your car.” Movies, he says, “have the ability to get someone to stop what they're doing. When you put out music, someone's putting it on when they’re driving their car, or it's in the background in the office. So it was really about the idea of trying to win someone's attention span.”
He laughs a slightly despondent laugh when nodding that “music’s almost disposable”.
“A band could work on an album for a year, and [people will be] like, ‘Yeah, I heard it once, I don't know, whatever,’” he rues. “So I was very much thinking, well, maybe one larger art project that's more ambitious can make a more lasting impression on someone's emotions…”
The premise of Monsters Of California followed, its script crafted over a couple of years before production began in 2020, and driven in its infancy by the evident restrictions a first-time filmmaker works under – no matter how famous they are in another creative sphere.
“I knew that going into my directorial debut I was going to be limited on a micro-budget, and I was going to be stuck to the writing that I was doing on the script,” Tom admits. “So to mediate those issues, I wanted to root a story in the culture I grew up in, in the area I grew up in, with topics that I would readily consider myself well-versed in, so that I could fall back on things that I know personally and mitigate any disasters. I knew the way the words should be said, what these kids should be like, and what the issues were with the subject matter.”
Filmmaking, says Tom, has its similarities and distinctions to making a record.
“When you’re in a studio, you can sit back and think, ‘Okay, we’re going to be in here for the next year, take your time, let’s just start making some sounds, nothing matters,” he explains. “Day one on a movie, what you do that day is done, and if something doesn’t come off, you’re fucked (laughs). You have to be present and focused on every single thing that you capture to make sure what you have allows you to move on to the next day.
“I'm different to musicians who will sit down, start playing an instrument, write some music, and then go record it,” he continues. “I tend to to really lay in bed at night and conceptualise the type of song I want to write long before I grab a guitar, and that's very similar to making a film where you're conceptualising a story – who's going to be saying these words, what they're going to be doing when they're saying these words, what location they're going to be in, what the colour and lighting is going to be like, what the music is going to be like underneath it. It’s a lot of Tetris pieces in your head, and I do that with music as well.”
Inspired by the “classic Spielberg and Amblin films” – The Goonies, E.T., influences that seep from every inch of Monsters – Tom grounded the story and characters in his own life and upbringing.
“[Those movies] showed that families aren't perfect, that kids have a hard time growing up in, [so] they're dreaming and trying to search for something that is bigger and better and more profound than the life that they're living, that's so painful and difficult,” he says of his attachment to his cinematic references. “But the kids that were in [those movies] did not relate to me, because I grew up with skateboarders and punk rock kids. I've actually really done these things [that the central characters do] – I've gotten in a big RV with my friends, and drove up to the tip of California to look for Bigfoot. I've gone to the desert looking for UFOs. I've gone to haunted houses late at night. This is the stuff we were doing when I wasn't out skateboarding, you know. The movie tells the story of the type of kids that I grew up with.”
Central focus Dallas is “very, very close to me”, Tom says. The movie’s lead character is driven to explore unexplained phenomena by the mysterious disappearance of his pilot father, and the discovery of secret government research. The choice to use a paternal relationship as Dallas’ motivation is a deeply personal one.
“I had the same broken family, where dad is gone,” Tom explains. “It's an engine to get Dallas out searching, and in my case it was similar, and that difficult relationship brought so much hardship in our family that it’s what started me daydreaming about what this is all about. But I also think there's a lot of truth to this in the sense that we've had hundreds of pilots who have gone missing while encountering UFOs since the 1950s. In our story that's exactly what happened. A lot of people might think that's sensational, but it's not. What people need to realise is there's a whole different definition to the matrix that we're living in that nobody is really prepared for. And the types of things that I'm doing these days are there to help people prepare for it, because it's coming…”
Monsters Of California is a movie that sees Tom explore themes ranging from family to friendship, spirituality to humanity; it’s a film about growing up as much as it is about little green men. So what, in Tom’s eyes, is his movie truly about?
“It’s an interesting question,” he says. “There's a scene in the beginning of the film where Dallas is sitting at a table with his mom, and they're arguing about religion. I think that's probably the truest, most authentic place from my own life. My mom is very religious. My dad was not. And I grew up being kind of indoctrinated into religion as a child, and then flying very far away from that as I grew up and realised that none of that stuff applies, especially once you learn the things that I've learned.
“But the spirituality component is very, very real, which is all we really care about in religion anyways,” he adds. “The truest thing in this story, for me, is learning that what we're all searching for in religion, and what we're all searching for in understanding what the universe is and how it's unfolding to us, is all constant and something we can all agree on: it's the only thing that matters.”
Despite this, all Tom really hopes anyone takes away from Monsters Of California is “that people know who I am, know what I've been involved in over the past few years, and they come out of this with curiosity. That’s it. Because the things I have coming next are much more profound and serious…” Those, Tom hints, include “very elevated, ambitious film projects that are coming on these subjects that are not popcorn munching things. You know, they're much more pointed and severe in their intentions.”
“Film stuff takes a long time, you know,” he says. “I work on these things for years. I’m juggling a lot of projects – some are at casting, some are writing outlines, some are in script, some are in production.” Between them all, there’s the small matter blink-182’s year-closing Missionary Impossible tour, culminating at Las Vegas’s When We Were Young festival. “I’ll probably start doing some demos for blink here shortly as well,” he excitingly adds. “I've got to start working on recording stuff now, because I'll be gone for a bit of time when I would normally start next year…”
And with that, Tom DeLonge waves us a cheery goodbye as he heads off in search of answers, in search of enlightenment, in search of the next great pop-punk banger, and in search of the next great Bigfoot’s dick joke.
Monsters Of California is available on digital platforms in the UK now.
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