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As Highlander prepares to arrive on screens in all its 4K glory, STARBURST talks to maverick film director Russell Mulcahy about how his rule-breaking approach to filmmaking helped the crazy little ‘80s fantasy movie find immortality.

STARBURST: So here we are talking about Highlander again. Do you ever feel like, ‘for God’s sake can we talk about one of my other films?’

Russell Mulcahy: [Laughs] Sometimes I do, but I guess for some reason it’s the one film that resonates more than the others. I guess Highlander has a unique quality that people respond to.

We think one of the reasons that Highlander struck such a chord was because you broke all the rules when you made it. You didn’t apply the normal film rules, you applied the rules you’d learned through making music videos. 

I used the terminology, I think, of the music videos. Also, I was pretty much given free rein in a good way, and I had such wonderful talent with me. I had Alan Cameron, the production designer, Jim Acheson doing costumes and Gerry Fisher the DoP, just wonderful talent behind the scenes.

The first couple of days, I didn’t like the lighting so I asked if they could turn them off and go for natural lighting and they were like ‘Oh my God!’. But when they saw the first couple of days rushes, they all joined the party. They had a great time and there was this sense of creative freedom on the set.

Paul Archuleta/FilmMagic

There’s a rumour that the infamous deleted ‘orange scene’ was a case you just shooting something to see if it would fit.

It was the first day of principal photography and we were filming the duel on Boston Common. So we filmed that and there’s this beautiful house in the background of the shot, so we went up there. It’s not in the script but we thought; ‘let’s shoot this scene and maybe if it works we can develop it into another flashback’. But it never developed. It was just an experiment.

We imagine that’s something that these days, you just can’t do.

Yeah. What also helped was that it was an EMI film and I’d done a lot of work with them and Duran Duran on Wild Boys and whatever, so there was very little intervention. It was like, ‘Okay, erm, good luck. Make something good!’

It’s such a shame that the deleted scenes are lost forever.

There was another scene that’s not in the film. It was a fight with Kurgan and another immortal amongst a load of computers. We did all of that and it was fine, but when we saw the first cut we just thought, ‘we don’t need another fight’. It was overkill. The film was already 113 minutes and in those days that was quite a long film. Now films are regularly two hours.

One of the lesser-known deleted scenes involve a lot more of Detective Bedsoe. Was there any particular reason why his role was cut down so much?

It was really just down to pacing. There was already some subplots going on and that one just wasn’t that strong. It was just this guy sniffing around and there was no real conclusion to it. I think the only bit that stayed in was the bit where he’s outside Brenda’s house and spills coffee on himself.

And that scene is only on the American Cut.

I remember being at a test screening, one of the first with an audience and they said we should lose the Boston Common duel, but luckily that didn’t go. But they did cut out the scene in Germany where Connor finds Rachel as a young girl for the American cut.

It’s crazy because that’s such a great scene and it says so much about Connor.

Right, and also the thing about that scene is that it was in the script but it was never filmed because of time and whatever. We cut the film together and I was like, ‘hang on, that bit’s missing’. So I pulled together all of my people from music videos and made a rag-tag little crew and we went out on a Sunday, rented a tank and this and that. We had Nicholas Roeg’s son, Waldo as DoP and when the actor who was going to play the German walked off because it was taking so long, Waldo stepped in and became the German. And we just shot that. It was unbelievable.

Do you have a preferred cut? There’s been a few between the US, UK and the Producers one when they painted out the wires.

I hope they painted out the wires [laughs]. They were very thick! It is an ode to the past. But I am looking forward to seeing the 4K version, I haven’t seen it yet. The artwork looks great though.

It does, it’s nice to have a change from the same artwork we’ve had for so long.

It was a travesty what happened in the US with the poster artwork. It’s very unusual.

How has the creative freedom you had while making Highlander diminished as you became more popular and the budgets got higher?

There’s still a good amount of creative freedom, you just have to sell it a bit more. When you’re dealing with big budgets you can’t go wacko you have to have a reason. Highlander was made in the crazy ‘80s and everyone was a bit more free in those days. I couldn’t do that film now.

Would you ever return to the franchise?

No, no, no. It holds a very special place in my heart but I wouldn’t want to revisit it.

How do you feel about the reboot?

They’ve been trying to make the reboot for over 10 years and I wish them all the best. Whether it ever happens, who knows? It’s a great story, it’s got romance, the lore. That’s what attracted me to it.

So what are you up to now? You’ve just come off the Teen Wolf movie, right?

We do our final mix in four weeks and then that will be released on Paramount+ in January. There’s a few other things happening but I’m not going to mention them. I’m keeping busy.

Are there any of the upcoming projects where you foresee yourself being able to break all of the rules again in the way that you did at the beginning with Highlander?

One of them, maybe.

We’d really love to see that.

To really let my hair down? I’ll try not to disappoint you.

Highlander arrives on 4K UHD Blu-ray this October 31st from Studiocanal.

Brian and Charles is a funny, heartwarming tale of a bumbling inventor who builds himself a friend. We loved it and, with the home-media release of the film, we were able to sit down with Chris Hayward (co-writer of the film and Charles, himself) for a chat about bringing these beloved characters to the big screen…

STARBURST: While David Earl’s character of Brian Gittins is something of a cult comedy icon at this point, having hosted numerous stage shows in the comedy scene, appeared in various Ricky Gervais projects and released various hit podcasts, the origins of Chris Hayward’s character, Charles Petrescu, the film’s cabbage-loving robot, are a lot harder to pin down.

Chris Hayward: I was trying to do bits of stand up so I met David through the comedy scene. He started doing a low-fi radio show on the internet where he was being Brian Gittins and it was really funny. We both knew Rupert Majendie (who’s our producer on Brian and Charles) and he would call into David’s show but he would use this voice software to type out what he wanted to say and that became the voice of Charles.

Their conversations together were really funny, so we all got talking and I had an idea of how we could do it live, where I’d be dressed in a costume, on stage with David, and then Rupert would be sat at the back of the comedy club, typing away and doing Charles’ voice. So that’s how it began, really. For two or three years we did these live gigs which were quite mad as you can imagine, but they were a lot of fun and we were trying to work out what to do with them. At one point we were trying to do a live game show – we were trying to work out what the next Shooting Stars could be – but we never worked that out. It was just always mayhem on stage and people were baffled.

The main reason that Brian and Charles made such a splash with its release was that so many people saw and loved the 2017 short film that it was based on. How did that come about?

We’d do Brian and Charles live on stage for a few years and it wasn’t really going anywhere. We had a small group of fans – David certainly did as Brian Gittins. He had a hardcore group of fans. So we got Jim Archer involved, who’s the director. We knew Jim, again, through the comedy scene and through friends. So we all got together, we went away for a weekend in Wales, shot the short film and then that led to us getting commissioned for the film. That sounds like it happened over a few weeks, but from the start of the comedy gigs to making the film, the process took at least 10 years.

We only really ever made it for fun initially. We hadn’t really put anything of Brian and Charles on YouTube and we thought, “Well, they are quite funny together, but it’s only people who come to the gigs who’ve seen them”, so we wanted to put something online. We’d already done a little sketch with them but we wanted to make something with a bit more substance – but we didn’t really think anything of it more than that: just putting something on there and then moving onto the next thing, whatever that was.

FilmFour pretty quickly got in touch with us and said, “Do you think this could work as a feature?” And that led to us talking with them and developing it from there.

The route of turning a short film into a feature is a well-trodden one. How did everyone working on Brian and Charles approach the film in order to ensure they didn’t lose what worked the first time around?

I think if people can do it, I think making a short film is the best thing you can do as a proof of concept because, whether a producer or commissioners, rather than having to read – you know everyone’s making PDFs and treatments of their ideas that they send in. Rather than having to slog through all that, a producer – whoever – can just watch a short film and instantly get if they like it or not. It’s easier to show your ideas when you can film them and show them. Like Brian and Charles, if we’d just sent that in as a script, there’s no way it would have got made. You have to get the tone across and see the dynamic. You really had to see them on screen.

What helped was we knew the characters going in there. We knew them really well having performed them live for so long. We had an advantage there, going into the film knowing what our lead characters are, because obviously that’s the main issue: “What are these characters?” So we had a headstart in that way and, from there, we knew obviously we wanted to keep it as a comedy. But then it was just trying to work out a story, work something out that would keep people’s attention, that wouldn’t be too weird that people turned off – that was a conversation we had a lot of times. I’d often be thinking let’s make this really weird and they’d think people probably won’t like it if it’s too weird.

We had a conversation at first about whether to keep the mockumentary feel or whether to lose that and go with a narrative and we kind of felt like we were losing a bit of the comedy if we lost the mockumentary feel, just because when David as Brian looked at the camera, it was always funny, and saying little asides to the camera was funny. We tried to keep the tone of the short. We tried to keep the lonely aspect of Brian. We tried to remain true to that as much as we could.

In terms of thinking, “What would this look like in a film?” and “Are people going to believe in the character?”… Because even in the short, I think some of the comments were, “You can see it’s a guy’s legs”. They wanted more of a functioning, actual robot but we quite liked that cheeky appeal that it probably was a guy in a suit. It was getting the audience to believe it was a real robot, so that was really tricky but I think there’s something with practical effects that you can relate to more than CGI.

Films that I really love – even if they’re a bit shonky, if they’re practical, I kind of buy it more. It’s real and believable, whereas CGI sometimes feels a bit cold. That gives it a charm sometimes. I mean Charles is a puppet, basically. He’s like a box and I’ve got a mannequin head that I’m operating inside. I just thought, “You can have a Muppets film and they’re obviously puppets but you believe those characters and you invest in it”. C3PO is a guy in a suit, isn’t it? But you buy into the fact that it’s an android, so I was just crossing my fingers and hoping it’d all work out.

Charles is a wonderfully designed robot. Inherently funny, charming and unique in equal measure – all just to look at him. Where did the design come from and what was the process of taking that into a feature film?

I designed the one that we used for the comedy clubs and I just had it in my mind because he sounded like a professor, so I had a “professor-y” look in my mind. I’ve always been a big fan of sci-fi, so I think a lot of that fed into my brain. When I was a kid, there was a terrible, 1980s sci-fi film called Eliminators and there’s a guy in it called Mandroid who’s got like an eye – he’s kind of like The Terminator, but he’s half man, half machine and it was so bad, but I wonder if that fed into my subconscious as a kid and Charles has come out of that in a way. He’s a low-fi construction.

We handed that over to our production department on the film and they pretty much copied it – it’s pretty much the same thing. It’s a box, a mannequin head – we just had to get some new heads, a new box and some new clothes. Other than that, the film version is pretty much made the same way that we did the comedy version. We used them all in the film and they all got quite battered. I’ve had some of them returned to me and the original just looks like he’s been crushed in a crushing machine. And we have, I think, about four heads in total – all in different states of… they all need repairing.

Part of the appeal of Charles is the deadpan delivery of his automated voice software. What are the logistics of working with that as an actor or a comedian?

We had all the lines from the script pre-recorded on a laptop and when we were indoors, Rupert could trigger those lines. At the same time, if we had time, we’d try to do an improvised version of that or try some new lines of dialogue where Rupert could type. When we were outdoors, we often couldn’t use the laptop, so I had to either remember that I say the dialogue that we had written or, again, we’d improvise scenes and I’d be improvising with David and we’d dub over those lines in post. And what was really good was that in post, we could alter whatever Charles said at any point, so even up until the very final picture lock, we could still change Charles’ dialogue. That gave us a lot of flexibility and really helped us change the tone of entire scenes sometimes. It’s a good way to work.

Is this the last we’ve seen of Brian and Charles?

Considering the state of his heads currently… Yes.

But hopefully, we’re talking about trying to bring them back maybe. In what capacity that’ll be, I don’t know. We talked… is there a TV show in there? The sequel? It’s a world that we’d like to revisit and we’re always talking about different ideas that we could come up with. And, certainly for Brian, coming up with inventions was the funnest part of writing that script and different things he can do and you could just have endless fun with that. So stay tuned – is that what they say? Stay tuned.

Brian and Charles is out on DVD & Blu-ray October 24th and is available now to rent or own on digital

Visually epic, and thematically current, this extremely realistic sci-fi captures a hopeful story contained within a bleak setting. Submerged in this detailed sci-fi, Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) has to fight for a better tomorrow alongside her father Darius (Richard Brake); living with locked-in syndrome he is only able to communicate via his eyes and a drone. STARBURST caught up with Richard, who’s also known for Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian to discuss the challenges of being a parent in an atmosphere like this, the many metaphorical layers that Vesper has, and what it was like to work alongside Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper!

STARBURST: When did you first meet Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper and Brian Clark, and why did you initially want to work with them?

Richard Brake: I was brought on board maybe a couple of months before filming really. In fact, I didn’t meet them until I arrived in Lithuania! So I received the script through my agent, and they offered me the role of Darius. I read the script, loved it, and then I went back and I watched Kristina and Bruno’s film Vanishing Waves, and I thought they were incredible directors. So I was like “Yes! I want to be in it”. Then I met both Kristina and Bruno once I arrived in Lithuania, right before we started filming when we were preparing for the film. I don’t think I actually ever met Brian. I think Brian was more involved just with the writing of the script. Whereas Kristina and Bruno were more involved in every aspect of it. They are incredibly detailed directors.

Kristina and Bruno had been working on this idea for six years, do you know how the original concept for Vesper came about, and can you tell us about what they’re like to work with?

I can’t really speak for them on that. I think my experience from working with the two of them is that they’re incredibly visual directors, as you can see from both this film and their previous work. But also, especially with Kristina – because from my experience with working with Bruno he is very much the visual guy, very specific with setting every scene up in terms of how it’s going to look. He was moving little bits of things, here and there on the set, like “Oh no, this looks better over here” – Kristina was very detailed with the performance, in terms of what she wanted the characters to express in every scene. She’s an incredibly detailed director, which as an actor, is a wonderful gift to work with.

Leading on from that, and as your character is both voiced, and in the actual movie, we were wondering how they pitched Darius to you in the beginning, and what excited you the most about playing that part? 

My agent said that she had read the script and she said the character had locked-in syndrome, so he doesn’t move, except for his eyes, and he speaks through a drone. So I was like “OK!”, and at first I was intrigued by that breakdown, and that description, and then as I read the script, I began to do some research in terms of what locked-in syndrome actually is. Obviously, there’s a fantastic book, and movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is a true story about a man with locked-in syndrome. It fascinated me to try and express what was going on with Darius, without having the ability to speak, and also to move. Literally, I had only my eyes, and what was going on behind my eyes in terms of my thinking, to express all of the emotions that Darius is going through, so for an actor, it was an incredible challenge, and I love a challenge. So yeah, that was thrilling.

Some may assume that there is less to do when you’re acting with just your eyes, however, it’s quite the opposite right?

Especially with Kristina going “No, do it again! We need to see more”, because as I said, she’s very demanding, which is wonderful, to really push for me to do as much as I could. Which is really what good acting is about, because with that we don’t really see anything, it’s all really what’s going on with the thinking of the actor. So it was a really fun challenge. Mind you, having said that, Eddie Marsan, who is a good buddy of mine, continued to take the mick out of me all of the time, saying that it was “The easiest job on the planet”.

There’s a really intense scene with Darius and Jonas [Eddie Marsan] where he basically nearly kills you. How fun or challenging was that particular scene to do, just through your eyes, and what was it like to put together?  

It was a lot of fun because I’ve known Eddie for thirty years, we went to drama school together, so we are very close friends. It was a coincidence that we were in this film, and we’ve been in a few films together. It’s always been a random coincidence, but it’s a great coincidence because even though we both live in London, Eddie is on the west side and I’m on the east side so we see each other rarely in London because we are either working or running around looking after our kids. But we see each other on sets, all over the world. So it’s great to work on this together, and it’s always great to do a scene with him. I love working with him. So that in itself was fun. It’s an interesting scene, and it’s one of my favourite scenes in the film. Eddie is moments – or seconds – away from killing me; it’s powerful and I had to again express all of that emotion with just my eyes. So again, it was challenging but it was incredibly fun. Especially fun doing it with my best mate.

How long did it actually take to get ready for the scenes where you’re lying down, and what was that whole make-up process like? 

It was pretty simple for that one. I had to get grungy, and dirty looking, which is never hard for me. Make-up artists don’t have much trouble with that, with a face like mine. Ironically, now I remember back, I think on one of my first few days of shooting I bent down and my back went out, which happens very rarely. I get a back spasm, so my back just freezes up, so it’s not exactly the most comfortable thing. So I was kind of glad that I wasn’t in a huge action film at the time! I could have moved around, but it’s a pretty saw back. So lying down was an advantage with this film.

Let’s talk about the voiceover work for Darius’s drone. Can you describe the process behind putting a drone sequence together, and also, where did you actually record the lines?

Yeah, good question, because that was done over COVID, because we shot this right at the beginning of 2021, so COVID had just kind of come to the end, but it was still showing its head every once in a while. So they had me record from home because the recording studios in London were closed down at that point. So I actually recorded it on my phone, with Kristina and Bruno, and the recording engineers were all on Zoom, and I recorded all of that drone dialogue on my phone. Over several times. Initially. I think eventually I went into the studio to do the final one, a bit later. I recorded those lines many, many times, for different edits. By the end, I pretty much slept with those lines going through my head.

There’s something very, almost, calming about the voice we hear from Darius’s drone. Can you tell us how they wanted you to sound, and also, was there anything you yourself wanted to bring to shaping how we hear Darius through the drone? 

We just worked it as though it was a real person speaking, and then they, of course, did a lot of editing and effects on to the voice to give it more of a drone quality. The calming sound is probably just my natural voice! With my three-year-old, I put him to sleep quite easily at night, telling him stories. I have a fairly droney voice.

The movie was filmed in Lithuania, and it looks incredible! However, for you, why do you think this location worked so well for capturing the feel of Vesper?

I think a lot of it looks incredible, because of the amazing special effects work. Done on a really tight budget, you have to remember that this film was not made on a Hollywood budget, and to make it look like it looks, real hats off to all of the special effects crew that worked on this. I believe that they were mostly based in France, and with Bruno himself, that was really his forte. I think that has a lot to do with the look of it, there’s a kind of – and I film a lot in Eastern Europe – we have these dense forests out here in Eastern Europe, I’m actually in Slovakia right now shooting a film. Lithuania has an incredible landscape, and they were able to use that as well, to give it that effect. I think one of the things that really struck me about the film, is there is a kind of merge of European and Eastern European, or even Western in terms of American storytelling a little bit. Then with Eastern, it’s like this apocalyptic film Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky, a Russian filmmaker in the ‘70s, who made some incredibly bleak, dark post-apocalyptic films, well one film, in particular. There’s kind of a feel of that in this movie as well, I think. I’m a huge fan of Tarkovsky. He is an amazing director, check his films out, they’re incredible!

There’s a big use of practical effects in this movie. How do you think that approach helps to create a realistic feeling?

hey did a great job at making it realistic, a lot of times you’ll notice that a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic film just doesn’t look real. I think, even though obviously a lot of the plants and flowers were created that were imaginary, is that they’re kind of based on a reality, based on what could be real. I think that this film does a fantastic job of merging where we are now to where we potentially could be. It looks like this could take place maybe not now but in the near future. It doesn’t look fake in my opinion, which is why I think it’s touched a lot of people. The film has done incredibly well on the festival circuits, it’s got amazing reviews for such a kind of small film, and I think that’s partly because it’s so grounded in reality for a science fiction film.

So, what was Raffiella Chapman like to work with, and what do you think she brought to the world of Vesper? 

She was fantastic, an amazing young actor. I think she was about thirteen, she was very young. Often they’ll find actors that are quite a bit older to play that age, and they didn’t here. She was the age of her character. Which for a young actor is challenging. She did amazing, her dedication to the role, and to the shoot was extraordinary. I’ve seen much older actors pull tantrums, and be angry about the fact that they have to work every day and get up early. None of that from her. She was incredibly professional, and she worked so hard. I think she was in pretty much every day of that shoot. Every day was fairly gruelling physically and emotionally. There isn’t really a scene in that that isn’t gruelling for her character. She handled it so well.

For us, the back and forth between Vesper and Camellia represents the difference between rich and poor, would you maybe agree with that, and also, what else do you think their connection does for the viewer?

Yeah I think that’s definitely in the story for sure. The class structure that’s in the film is in reality. It just adds another layer. I think it’s another reason as to why this film has been so successful, and so loved by people and critics. It has many layers. You can just dissect all kinds of different aspects of it, discuss it, and talk about it. A lot of people have left the cinema and had discussions over dinner about the various aspects of the movie. It’s great to be a part of that. I could see that when I read the initial script, there was much more to it than just a thrilling sci-fi adventure. It’s much more than that, which again is kudos to Bruno, Kristina, and Brian, because they spent so much time on the script and their vision of it. Also the shooting of it.

The movie captures so many real-life problems. Like we’ve said, the dynamics between rich and poor, the way humans put greed above anything else, and how it could be a snapshot of our own future. However, was there a certain hard-hitting real-life theme that was captured within Vesper that really resonated with you? 

Yeah, looking after children. I have three children, and I was very much struck, and one of the reasons why I really wanted to do it, was because of the relationship between Darius and Vesper, and how he just wants her to be OK. He knows he’s not going to live forever. He just wants her to be able to survive on her own, which is kind of what any parent wants. For their children to be OK once they’re gone, or even before, hopefully. That for me was really what excited me about the project. Personally, as the character I was playing, to explore that relationship between parents and child, father and daughter. Having explored that intensely and continuing to explore that intensely on a daily basis as me!

We’re also excited for Barbarian, it looks great!

Yeah, that’s exciting. I’m really pleased with how well that’s done. I actually read that script on the way to Lithuania to film Vesper. They sent me the script and when the plane touched down I was texting my agent saying “Yes! I’ll do that for sure”.

Vesper is released in UK cinemas and on-demand from October 21st.

Following his successful shorts The Stomach and Urn, writer/director Ben Steiner has his feature debut with Matriarch, which lands on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK. We caught up with Ben to find out more about the film…

STARBURST: Can you describe the film for our readers?

Ben Steiner: Matriarch starts off as a dark drama about an ad exec doing too much coke, then morphs into a gore, sludge, and saliva-spattered black comedy, and by the end is something like The Wicker Man meets Society. What holds it all together is the tension between the two main characters, brilliantly played by Jemima Rooper and Kate Dickie.

What was the inspiration for the story?

The main inspirations were my short film Urn, the landscape around where I live and Tlazoltéotl, the Aztec ‘goddess of filthy things’.

In 2018 I was commissioned by Hulu to make the short film URN which stars the brilliant Alex Reid (Unorthodox, The Descent) as a woman who’s escaped a toxic relationship with her mum by suffocating her with a plastic bag. That led to a commission to adapt the short into a feature, which I accepted without any idea of how I would do it, and the only thing I ended up keeping from the short was the theme of a troubled mother/daughter relationship. As I was developing the feature, the sludgy dankness of the Somerset Levels near where I live in Bristol seeped into the story and I also stumbled across an article about Tlazoltéotl. She merged with a monstrous father demon that I’d drawn several years previously called The Wormeater to form a character who pops up in the latter part of the film but is central to the whole story. The film’s title was actually Wormeater up until halfway through post-production. The original Wormeater has a mouth full of worms (obviously!), is shrouded in swirling black hair, and in a couple of my drawings, is surrounded by floating, worm-riddled turds. The character in Matriarch lost the turds but gained another nest of worms in a place that may raise a few eyebrows…

The cast is fantastic – what was the casting process like?

Thanks! Yes, I couldn’t believe my luck when Jemima and Kate accepted the roles, and I was luckier than I realised because not only were they brilliant actors, but they were also extremely kind, committed and low maintenance, which was a godsend given some of the challenges we had on the shoot.

Jemima and Kate didn’t audition but I did go through that process with the rest of the cast. I’d do a couple of scenes from the script and also an in-character Q&A, to give the actor a chance to really inhabit and own the character. I borrowed/nicked that technique off Ben Wheatley having sat in on auditions he was doing for some GoCompare adverts I co-wrote many years ago. I don’t know if he still does it, but it really works for me. Thanks, Ben!

What was the hardest part of the shoot?

My son tested positive for Covid on the evening of day one, so I had to spend the first week of my first feature directing in isolation via walkie-talkie, first from inside my car and then from inside a sealed tent! And then Jemima got Covid, so we had to totally reschedule the whole shoot. And then one of the main cast got shingles and had to be replaced at the last minute. Meanwhile, we had all kinds of basic day-to-day operational problems going on in the background. But when the team is committed you can get through those kinds of things together and you make it work and it bonds you. The only thing that seriously tested us was that, while the vast majority of the crew were really lovely, talented, and collaborative, we had a few people on board who were none of those things, to put it very diplomatically indeed.

How long was the process from writing to the final cut?

Just under three years, I think. A year to get the script signed off, a year-long Covid interlude and then a year for production from prep to completion.

Were there any films you looked at for inspiration?

The Suspiria remake was a massive influence with its predominantly female cast, grim and grey setting and occasional flashes of smutty humour. Not to mention its matriarch(s)! The cold, autumnal palette and feeling of pervasive moisture were a real touchstone for myself and DOP Alan McLaughlin, too. The Wicker Man obviously looms very large over Matriarch and I referenced it and The Devils in discussions with Hulu when suggesting that a horror film can be funny and even a bit silly without compromising the darkness. Early Cronenberg, especially The Brood, was an influence as I was writing some of the more visceral sequences. While we did struggle to get some of that from script to screen for the crew-related reasons touched upon earlier, our VFX artist Chris Clements and guest prosthetics designer Leigh Cranston did some absolutely sterling work for which I’m eternally grateful.

This is your feature debut, how differently did you approach compared to shooting shorts?

The guts of the process were virtually identical: I storyboarded the whole thing myself as before, rehearsed and blocked in the same way, and confused the actors with long, rambling notes as I always have done. Obviously, there are more people with a bigger cast and crew but that’s a matter of scaling up rather than changing anything. The one massive difference was having a First Assistant Director, the wonderful Kim Heron, to structure each day and keep us on schedule. Prior to that I’d either done it myself (badly) or relied on a resentful producer to do it. As well as doing her actual job brilliantly under very trying circumstances, Kim provided a lot of what you might call pastoral care that held the production together. She was my on-set emotional support animal, which I’d never had, or needed, before!

How does it feel to have your debut feature appear on Disney+ and Hulu?

The whole thing is a dream come true. The world premiere at Screamfest in LA went really well, so hopefully, it’ll get a similar reaction in people’s living rooms. Between them, Hulu and Disney+ have around 200m subscribers worldwide so it’s pretty amazing… and also terrifying!

What’s next for you?

Another feature, I hope! The feature version of my short The Stomach has producers and is seeking finance. I also have a J-Horror-influenced, transgressive haunted house thing called Dead Windows that’s ready to go. And then I have a horror/comedy/true-crime/bio-pic about two young men who perpetrated a vampire hoax around where I grew up in North London. It’s an amazing true story that hardly anyone knows about, and nobody knows more about it than me!

Matriarch is released on Hulu and Disney+ on October 21st. You can read our review here.