Dominik Moll, the German director behind such thrillers as Harry, He’s Here to Help and Lemming, which were both nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, takes a new approach with his latest film, The Monk, out this month on DVD.

A complex mix of subtle, psychological horror and gothic, period romance, The Monk may at first seem a peculiar subject choice for a director better known for films placed in contemporary settings. However, this tale, based on the classic novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis which charts the rise and fall of a Capuchin monk (Vincent Cassel) in 17th century Madrid, has a deeper moral meaning. It focuses on the far-reaching effects of guilt and the power of religion over the individual, messages which are as relevant today as when the scandalous novel first appeared in the 18th century. It all makes for a disturbing and sinister gothic horror film.

When Starburst caught up with the director, the obvious question to ask was what had attracted him to a novel which has largely been forgotten, or perhaps avoided, by filmmakers in the past?

Starburst: What attracted you to the novel The Monk as the basis of a film?

Dominik Moll: I was attracted by the very visual and gothic atmosphere of the novel and also by the tragic figure of Ambrosio.

You wrote the screenplay for the film as well as directing it. Did you enjoy this dual role and what freedom did you get from it?

Until now I’ve always written my own scripts, often with co-writers. It allows you to anticipate the artistic choices of the film, so I guess it gives more coherence to the film.

The film has been widely marketed as a thriller, despite the original 18th century novel on which it’s based often being referred to as a ‘gothic romance / horror’. Was this approach intentional?

I would actually rather describe it as gothic romance, or a gothic tragedy.

The film goes for the subtle, psychological approach as opposed to being in-your-face and visceral. What was the intention behind this?

That was what interested me, to bring depth and truth to the characters, but of course I wanted the film to be visually beautiful as well.

Visual impact clearly plays a major part in the film, for example in the grey starkness of the monastery being contrasted with the sun bleached browns of the Spanish countryside outside its walls. Was this a conscious decision?

Yes. All the work on visual contrasts, such as bright exteriors and dark interiors, and on the use of colours was planned in advance and well prepared.

The Catholic religion does not always come over well in the film. What reaction, if any, have you had from the church in relation to the film?

There’s been no reaction from the church. The film is much less anti-Catholic than the novel. In fact, it is almost pro-Catholic, as Ambrosio, contrary to the novel, is seeking redemption in the end by trying to save Antonia.

How did you get Vincent Cassel involved with the project?

I sent him the script, met him, explained my vision of the film to him and he said yes!

In his portrayal of Ambrosio, Cassel lays himself bare physically, emotionally and psychologically. Was he open to this from the start and how did you both approach the development of such a complex character?

The important thing was that Ambrosio should be very sincere about everything he was doing. It was important to me that his faith should be strong and deep and that he should be convinced by what he was saying in his sermons. Otherwise it would have been much too easy for the devil to bring him to fall. Once we had established that, his development didn’t seem so complex.

The film and story have a deeply European feeling. Are there plans to release it internationally and how do you feel it will be accepted outside of Europe?

Yes, it will be released in countries outside Europe. It will come out in the USA and South America, for example. I don’t think the reception will be that different than in European countries.

What project do you have lined up next?

A Hitchcockian psychological thriller, which I hope to be able to shoot in 2013.

The Monk is released on DVD August 20th and is reviewed HERE.

This month sees the release on DVD and Blu-ray of quirky British horror/thriller, Elfie Hopkins. It is a tale of amateur detection and grisly slayings in deep, dark, rural Wales. The film is the first full-length feature by London Film School graduate Ryan Andrews, who recently spoke to Starburst about his work and the experience of making his cinema debut with an ambitious and daringly-different British genre film.

Elfie Hopkins stars Jaime Winstone as a twenty two year old slacker-cum-would-be detective, frustrated by her life in a drowsy village somewhere in Wales. Along with her geeky best friend Dylan (Aneurin Barnard), Elfie keeps her spirits up by making a nuisance of herself around the village, making spurious, if imaginative, allegations about the activities of the bemused locals. The arrival of a mysterious new family, the Gammons, arouses Elfie’s suspicions and when the locals start disappearing she realises that there’s much more to the newcomers than meets the eye.

There’s much more to Elfie too. She has her origins back in director Ryan Andrews’ formative years as a would-be film-maker. “I wrote a really funny, weird little story about a couple adopting a kid who turned into a cannibal,” Ryan tells Starburst. “That was Elfie and that was as much as it was. I actually wrote a script about ‘the Gammons’, but it was just too big for my first film and everyone advised me to break it down and to do something simpler with fewer characters. So I took the one character with the cannibal aspect from the short film, Little Munchkin, and wrote a different script.”

Ryan wrote the script for Elfie Hopkins with his long-time collaborator Riyad Barmania. “Initially we batted ideas back and forth,” says Ryan. “But I was really heavily into producing the movie as well so I had to back off after a bit. In the first few days of writing the script I was really deeply involved in everything. We talked about different characters, every scene, what was going to happen in the scenes and as it went closer and closer into production I had to sort of step back because we were shooting down in Wales and I was busy getting the cast and crew together.”

Even seasoned directors can find getting projects off the ground difficult in today’s climate. It must be especially difficult for someone new and untested to get a film moving. “Yeah, it’s really hard. You just have to grind your way through,” he says. “Obviously no-one has any confidence in you at that point, so you have to be constantly knocking on people’s doors and showing them stuff and you’re working for free for almost twenty four hours a day for three or four years! A lot of that is trying to convince people to give you the money. It’s a real rollercoaster and I’ve heard other film-makers say that even when they’re on their third or fourth film it’s the same process but with a bigger budget.”

Jaime Winstone is joined in Elfie Hopkins by her legendary dad Ray, who gives good cameo value as a creepy butcher. Also present are respected TV and theatre actor Steven Mackintosh, Fresh Meat’s Kimberley Nixon, Kate (Mrs John Simm) Magowan and Welsh actor Richard Harrington, who also starred in the Little Munchkin short. That’s an impressive call sheet for any director, let alone one embarking on his first feature. “Jaime and I met several years ago on set when I was a camera trainee on her film Daddy’s Girl. We became friends and then a couple of years later when I was developing Elfie I said to her ‘Look, I’ve got a script which would be really good for you. Would you be interested in doing it?’ She said ‘yes’ and then I met Michael Wiggs, who became one of the producers of the film and who’s also Jaime’s agent. We got on really well and he said ‘This is something I’d like to do with you so I’ll help you in finding some good cast.’ The rest was just going in and meeting the cast and convincing them we were doing something different, or at least attempting to do something different, from what’s normally done in the UK and that it would be an exciting, adventurous project – experimental in some ways.”

Elfie Hopkins leaps across a number of genres, including the detective story, thriller, film noir and finally into all-out horror. Ryan explains that the film changed organically in the making. “I think it changes a lot,” he agrees. “It became more of a horror film as we were developing it because it originally started off as more of a noir film, but then for distribution and budgetary reasons, and the fact that we wanted to make our money back, I ramped up some of the horror elements which I was quite excited about anyway because I love horror films. I suppose that originally it was more of a fantasy film, almost like a fairy-tale, but obviously with our budgetary restraints we toned some of that down. At the moment I’d say it’s definitely a horror film.”

As ever, compromises had to be made to bring the film to the screen and Ryan, like most writer/directors, found the process difficult to come to terms with. “It’s frustrating,” he says. “I didn’t realise how much it would affect the film because I’d never done it before. You’ve got all these ideas in your head that you really want to nail down and that becomes really difficult because you have to change so much. You come in very prepared and then you have to adapt on the job because it’s physically not possible on the sort of budget and the number of filming days we had. I found it really hard. I mean, the set was fun because we had great people around us and we moved as fast as we could, but I was committed to a style for the film which was also burning time, so sometimes it was actually a bit crazy. But saying that, sometimes you manage to get things that really work out of those circumstances.”

It’s fair to say that Elfie Hopkins wasn’t exactly rapturously received by the critics, but even some of the more savage and personal reviews didn’t particularly phase Ryan.  “I actually don’t mind at all. At the end of the day I’m out there trying to please an audience, so I think you just have to take those kinds of things on the chin. The audience have no idea about the problems in making an independent film, especially when you’re trying to do something different and probably beyond your budget. If the reviews are really personally offensive then you just have to laugh. Some of them were harsher than I expected because I honestly though that what we made, for a British film on our kind of budget, was really quite impressive. I could have just done some kitchen sink drama, but I always try to push myself and being more of a ‘fantasy’ director I just had to make that sort of film. Perhaps that was my mistake. Perhaps I should have thought ‘right, I won’t push myself’ and I could have made more of a traditional drama, but that’s just not the way I work.”

So it’s onwards and upwards  for Ryan Andrews, who cites Ridley Scott and Tim Burton amongst his contemporary influences. “I’ve got two projects in the treatment and script stages,” he reveals. “One’s called Black Unicorn which is a genre film and I’m also on the look out for other people’s scripts because I love the idea of finding another script and doing that as well. It’s all a great learning experience. I’ve learned so much from Elfie Hopkins from the perspective of working out what you need to shoot and where you need to be and building tension in a scene. It’s invaluable getting the experience of doing all that and building up the process from the start and then seeing the end product in the cinema. Until you actually do the job of directing a feature film you’re not actually a director. It’s like being a plasterer because if you’re not doing it all the time then you’re not going to get any better at it and every time you do it you get a bit better. I’ll continue to direct and I’ll continue to push myself, but next time I’ll have more knowledge about where to push myself and where to hold back.”

Elfie Hopkins is available on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK from August 13th.

One of the better British horror thrillers of the last 12 months has been Panic Button, released on DVD in the UK last November (and was reviewed here). It’s the story of four complete strangers brought together by their common obsession with a social networking site and plunged into a nightmare scenario which finds them fighting for their very lives. Panic Button warns us that if something’s free and it seems too good to be true it very probably is. Starburst recently spoke to Frazer Lee who co-wrote the film’s script as well as the currently-available tie-in novelisation (reviewed here).

Don’t Panic! – An Interview with PANIC BUTTON Writer Frazer Lee

Starburst: Can you tell Starburst a little about your own background and how you became a writer?

Frazer Lee: I’ve been a movie and book aficionado for as long as I can remember. Showing my age now, but I actually had a subscription to Starburst back in the early eighties – I used to love reading about films I was then too young to see, stuff like Battle Beyond the Stars and Halloween II. I studied English and Media at school, then Theatre, Journalism, Film and Screenwriting at college; all of which prepared me for writing professionally. In my twenties I spent eight years working on film sets for little or no money to learn the production side of the film business. I then got my chance to write and direct my first short film, On Edge (adapted from the amazing short story by Christopher Fowler) and since then I have been lucky to work steadily as a freelance screenwriter and script doctor. I wrote and directed another short, Red Lines, and the Discovery Channel promo campaign for True Horror with Anthony Head. Concurrent with the film work, I am also a published author of short fiction and novels including Bram Stoker Award™ Finalist The Lamplighters and the movie novelisation of Panic Button.

SB: How did you get involved with the Panic Button project? What inspired the original idea?

FL: The producers at Movie Mogul Films had read one of my spec scripts and invited me in for a chat about a project they were developing, originally called All2gthr (the name of the social networking site in the movie), which was at the time a nine-page story outline. All the core ideas and characters were there and I was hired to turn the ideas into a full-length feature screenplay. The initial idea was apparently inspired by a dream that the producer had. As I worked on the development drafts, real-life horror stories from the world of the internet also became sources of inspiration along with twists and turns from our own depraved minds. During that process, we discovered the new title Panic Button and everything fell into place.

SB: How involved were you in the making of the actual film?

FL: Not at all. My work on the screenplay done, I handed over to the producers, director, cast and crew who set about the difficult task of actually making the film while I got on with my next commission. As a screenwriter, I believe you ‘let go’ of a project twice; first when you hand over to production, and second when you hand over to the audience.

SB: Were you pleased with the way the film turned out?

FL: Very. I think everyone involved gave it their all and achieved a lot on a low budget. It was a thrill to see the world premiere at Film4 FrightFest on the huge screen at the Empire Leicester Square in an auditorium packed with fellow horror fans!

SB: Film novelisations are few and far between these days. How did you come to write the novel of Panic Button?

FL: I agree there should be more of them! But in a plugged-in world where photos from the set are posted real-time for all to see perhaps the movie novel is seen as being a little redundant, which is a shame. Although there are a few titles out there and it’s really great to see tie-ins from the genre giants like Ramsey Campbell and Tim Lebbon. For Panic Button, the producers touted the idea of a movie novelisation while they were in the later stages of post-production on the film itself. We had a couple of calls and batted some notes and ideas back and forth and, contract signed, I got cracking. That was July 2011, and the novel came out four months later. It was an insane schedule but I really enjoyed the process. And readers seem equally to be enjoying the book.

SB: The book obviously follows the general story of the movie. What did you think you could bring to the novel to make it a worthwhile accompaniment to the film?

FL: Well, the obvious advantage of a novel is that you can go into the characters’ minds and explore what makes them tick. That’s not to say the characters aren’t writ large on the screen in the film version, they absolutely are, but the novel allows you to hear their thoughts, to feel how they are feeling. It’s a sensory experience, like a movie is, but as a writer you have a whole set of different tools and techniques to use. In addition to the character side of things, there was an opportunity to broaden the scope of the story. The novel format allowed me to reinstate a couple of deleted scenes and moments that were dropped from the film for time/budget reasons.

SB: Panic Button is a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of social networking. What’s your own view of Facebook and co?

FL: Oh, that’s a jumbo, family-sized, ‘3 for the price of 2’ can of worms right there. I have a complex and frustrating relationship with all things social networking. On the one hand, I hate Facebook and everything it represents. The people behind it have a cavalier attitude toward users’ privacies to say the least, often making changes to privacy settings without warning or consultation. Obviously their asses are covered by their T&Cs, so I think Panic Button makes a pertinent point in flagging up the importance of checking the small print. “Have you checked the Terms and Conditions?” as the movie tag-line goes. But as the character ‘Dave’ says in the film and book, nobody does check, because the T&Cs always require a Law Degree if they are to make any sense. That said, as a writer I understand that social networking sites like Facebook are a necessary evil through which to help get your name and your work out there. I’m a total hypocrite because I have a ‘Page’ on Facebook, a Twitter account, and use them to promote my work. And Panic Button even has its own Facebook page – oh the irony! At best, such sites can be powerful promotional tools and vessels for societal change. At worst they can simply be filled with “amusing” photos of cats and awful “inspirational messages” photoshopped onto cheesy images that look like they’ve been lifted from 1980s Athena posters. I find all that stuff terribly depressing, which is perhaps the opposite of the emotion they are meant to invoke. I suppose in that respect social networking sites are simply a reflection of human life and culture both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. But I think it’s worth remembering that they are only websites, nothing more. I think we’re in very real danger, as a culture, of depending on them as the ‘empathy machines’ described by the late, great Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. They facilitate, through us, a facsimile of human emotion and connectivity that we project from behind the cold, unfeeling masks of our avatars. That, and endless ‘Memes’ and ‘LOLcats’. We are becoming a global herd of electric sheep. Maybe one day the Internet will explode in our faces and we’ll be left blinded and trying to open tins of coffee in the hope the contents are baked beans, just like in ‘Day of the Triffids’. I, for one, am ready.

SB: Clearly! Which discipline do you prefer, script-writing or prose-writing?

FL: I love both! I enjoy the different sets of challenges posed by both disciplines. The process of drafting, editing and rewriting is common to each of course, so it’s a pleasure to be able to switch between a novel and a screenplay at any given time during my working week. This generates a natural rhythm between projects, meaning that whatever development stage they are at, each has time to gestate and evolve. And that process keeps me on my toes as a writer. In my experience, screenplay drafts happen faster but there are usually a greater number of drafts than a novel or short story – anything from 5-8 script drafts on average for a feature project with decent development funding. Novel drafts are fewer, around 3-4 on average, but they take much longer to write.

SB: The Panic Button book is published under the All2Gethr Industries banner. What’s your opinion of the self-publishing/online publishing revolution? Is it the way forward?

FL: I think it is the way forward if the same approach to quality control exists, whatever the sector you are publishing in. The Panic Button novel was subject to the same rigorous editing and proofing process as my other works. Some of the self-pubbed stuff out there is maybe not as polished as it could be, that’s fair to say I think. But a lot of what the small presses, for example, are putting out is very exciting and original stuff. I read dozens of film novelisations when I was a kid, with the excitement of ‘8 pages of color photos from the film!’ inside – back in the day when an Alan Dean Foster title was on the shelf of any self-respecting movie nerd. I find the idea of indie producers publishing their own movie tie-ins very exciting indeed. It’s a potential additional source of revenue for the producers, so they can hopefully develop more scripts and ideas. And it’s another credit for the writer(s) not to mention a fun sidebar to the movie for fans of the film. Exciting times.

SB: What projects are you currently working on? Any more film scripts in the pipeline?

FL: I have a new horror novel in the works called The Jack in the Green, with a novella and a further novel to follow. Screenplay-wise, I have been working on a slew of horrors and thrillers, one or more of which I hope will see the light of day and the dark of cinemas. I can’t give details of those away for contractual reasons, but I can say the projects occupy a broad spectrum from action-thriller to full-on, gory horror. I am also attached to direct a couple of stonking feature film projects. That has been the toughest nut to crack so far, as I’ve spent the past decade trying to get several rather ambitious feature film projects into production. Finding a producer who has the belief in you as a first-time (feature) director is one thing, but finding investors who have the same faith and vision as you and your producer is another thing entirely. For a business built on risk, the film industry is incredibly risk-averse. Hence all the remakes and reboots we are seeing, as tried-and-tested makes far more money sense than untried-and-untested. So, directing another film might be something I am never privileged to do again. A shame because I feel I have a lot to offer in that arena, given half the chance. But I shall keep trying nonetheless; as William Goldman reminds us, “Nobody knows anything” and it is accepted industry wisdom that the film biz is 90% luck. And I consider myself very, very lucky to have been able to work on some of the projects I’ve done so far. Hopefully this is just the beginning. Maybe I should Photoshop that sentiment onto an old Athena postcard and post it on All2gethr.com alongside all the bloody LOLcats!

Frazer Lee’s Bram Stoker Award nominated first novel The Lamplighters is published by Samhain Horror and his short stories have appeared in anthologies including the acclaimed ‘Read By Dawn’ series. His other screen credits include the award-winning short horror movies On Edge, Red Lines and Simone. Find out more about Frazer at his official website. The Panic Button novel is reviewed here.

We caught up with Matt Pennington, the head of professional live roleplay company Profound Decisions to ask him some questions about his new game Empire, which is inspired by the hottest new ideas in fantasy fiction and games design.

Starburst: For those who have never been to a live action roleplaying event, tell us more…

Matt Pennington: If you’ve ever played a MMORPG and wanted to feel like you were really there, if you watched Lord of the Rings and wanted to be there in those battles, then Empire is for you. Computer games and films can be immersive and incredibly fun to play or watch, but they can never give you the experience that live roleplaying does – of actually being there.

Profound Decisions aim to set the standard for professional live roleplaying games. Our new game will feature purpose built sets, such as a medieval tavern, epic battles where you will be a participant in the war between the Empire and their enemies and the opportunity to lead the Empire along with your fellow players. If you want that experience – then Empire is for you. It’s designed as a massive festival based game, intended for a thousand plus players to play together. The rules are simple and easy to understand and the focus is on making the setting look and feel as believable as possible.

SB: How does Empire differ from your previous works?

MP: Empire builds on everything we have learned in our previous games. The rules are heavily streamlined from the complex systems presented for Maelstrom to make the game more accessible and allow players to focus on the setting. We’ve removed elements that were problematic, such as the powerful NPCs whose influence was unduly affecting the game – allowing the new setting to emphasize the role for the players in leading their Empire.

One key difference is the move away from direct physical confrontation between players – as seen in Maelstrom and Odyssey. By creating opponents for the players to fight against we can work to deliver massive dramatic battles where individual player’s actions can turn the tide.

SB: Your other game, Odyssey, is set in a world of Romans, Greeks and other ancient nations. How different is that from Empire?

MP: Odyssey is a pseudo-historical game, although it doesn’t attempt to be historical it is inspired by the history and myths of the classical period, it’s part Homer, part Harryhausen. Empire is a radically different setting, it’s a fantasy world complete with its own original history, races and mythology. It is inspired by classic works of fantasy like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones so the battles, the monsters, the costumes are all the sort of things you would expect to see if you watched those films or programmes.

SB: How heavily influenced has your game been by current trends in Fantasy fiction? For example; Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean etc?

MP: Well I wouldn’t call Lord of the Rings a current trend! Clearly it is visually – Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the books is majestic and fantastically well realized. That has inspired us visually – to try and recreate the kind of battle scenes from the Two Towers and The Return of the King – and it inspires some of the visuals that underpin the game. More than one nation owes its look and feel to the kind of imagery that you see in the Lord of the Ring’s films.

But Tolkien’s works are over half a century old. They’re obviously shaped by the Second World War, something that very few live roleplayers have much experience of. Game of Thrones is a much more modern work of fantasy and it suits the modern tastes, with rich complex politics, intrigue and conspiracy, romance and murder. Critically most decent fantasy novels have moved away from the simplistic moral tropes of yesteryear with convenient labels of good and evil hung on things for the players to understand them.

That richness, that complexity of setting and the combination of the fantasy world with the very human emotions and motives is a huge influence for Empire. We’re striving to create a game that encompasses the rivalry, jealousy and politics that Game of Thrones brings to life. Like the Houses of the Seven Kingdoms, our players will be striving to gain allies, build their Empire and defeat their enemies.

SB: What would you consider to be Empire’s biggest innovation?

MP: I think that our biggest innovation is in the creation of purpose built sets for the game. We have a mechanical system for deploying completed sets into the field for the game, based on military technology. The system was pioneered for Odyssey, our classical game, where it is used to create the gladiatorial arena that players fight in, but it’s in Empire that the system will really come into its own.

We’re already planning four sets for the first game with more to be produced as time goes on. The head of set design is a professional in the field with years of experience working set design projects for Hollywood movies such as the Harry Potter films. His artistic vision combined with our technical expertise is going to produce sets for the game that will be fantastic to roleplay in and on!

SB: Why did you go into organising LARP events professionally?

MP: I ran larp events for years as a hobby but the events continued to grow in popularity and it was consuming more and more of my time. I had some experience of self-employment and enjoyed it and I was bored in my job at the time and not really challenged, so I decided to quit work and start running events for a living.

It’s a fantastic job, insanely long hours for low pay, but I love what I do. I haven’t had a single dull day at work in nine years – not many people can make that boast!

SB: What is the future for LARP and for gaming generally?

MP: Immersion! The future for larp and gaming is in producing more immersive games – that’s what the mainstream wants and that’s what us and the gaming sector is striving for. For games that means better graphics, better storylines, more freedom to act as you choose. For larp it means better sets, better costumes, better monsters, better set dressing, better props.

We need to make the entire experience look and feel more real. Live roleplaying has improved enormously over the last twenty years – we want to lead the charge to continue improving for the next generation.

SB: Immersion is a currently a word being used throughout the gaming industry. How does it apply to Profound Decisions in general and Empire specifically?

MP: Although you can argue the case, it’s not unreasonable to make the claim that live roleplaying is immersion. The more we can make the players immerse in the setting, in the characters, in the narrative that spontaneously develops – the more they will enjoy the roleplaying experience.

Immersion has many aspects and we’re looking to try and address as many of them as we can. Partly that is about working with the players to encourage and help them to create fantastic costumes of their own. But it’s also about detailing every element of the world, to make it real for the players.

To immerse in a setting – it helps to know the setting, as intimately as we know our own world. If you look at the great works of fantasy, like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, what singles them out is the rich detailed setting. Middle-earth and the Seven Kingdoms feel like real worlds. For Empire we are creating a world with that level of detail, so players know the history of their world, they know the people who live there, their culture, their costume, their music, their history.

SB: How important is storytelling when it comes to games?

MP: Personally I have never valued storytelling in games. Larp is the only gaming medium that is completely interactive; the participants can do anything they choose that makes sense in the setting. As an organizer you have no control over what happens at the events, none whatsoever, and any attempt to usurp control comes at the cost of your players’ roles as the central characters. So there is no capacity for telling stories and the story-teller’s art is not a part of creating compelling live roleplaying games.

It has to be said that that is a fairly contentious view and is not ubiquitous in the hobby. But an approach that concentrates on making the player’s world vivid and exciting but gives them complete control of the narrative, rather than imposing a story, is one of the features that makes Empire distinctive.

SB: If you were stranded on a desert island and could only have one book for company, what would that book be?

MP: A really good dictionary. I consume books in hours, so no novel in existence would last me more than a day or two at most. But I love words, there are so many beautiful words in the English language that you could open a dictionary every day of your life, spend a few moments reading it and find a new word you never heard before. If I was alone on a desert island I think that is a pleasure that I’d really relish.

If you’re really asking me what is my favourite novel… that is really tricky. I think it would probably be the Lord of the Rings, I first read it when I  was eight and I think I’ve read it cover to cover more than a dozen times in my life.

SB: What fictional worlds inspire you?

NP: Ooh the list is endless! Lord of the Rings and Games of Thrones obviously. The Codex Alera books by Jim Butcher were fantastic, Joe Abercrombie’s “first law” books were equally good and while they’re not towering works of fiction I really enjoyed Peter V Brett’s “Painted Man”series. Usually it’s the characters more than the worlds themselves which really catch my imagination – for me – if the world is really beautifully created then it becomes invisible – you simply stop noticing it’s there and take it for granted.

SB: Simpsons or Futurama?

MP: I’ve never seen Futurama – I don’t have satellite as I don’t watch television. I don’t watch The Simpsons either, but wikipedia tells me they once offended the Scientologists, so they can stay on account of their charitable good works. Or have I just confused them with South Park? Whatever – I don’t watch television, you can have them all.

SB: Video Games or Board Games?

MP: Video games. Board games are more hassle but more fun. A good board game with friends is like a really fine wine – it’s a memory that lasts. But video games are like cheap cider, they just leave you with big blank periods in your life and feeling hungover the next morning.

SB: Calvin or Hobbes?

MP: From the list presented above I choose to eliminate the word “or”. I’ve never been particularly fond of choosing between things so I am confident that I will not miss this particular word, whereas Calvin and Hobbes are two friends I simply could not do without.

SB: Truth or Beauty?

MP: Beauty. You can’t have beauty without truth. The world is an incredibly, extraordinary, amazingly beautiful place – truth is what lets us appreciate that beauty.

SB: The Devil or The Deep Blue Sea?

MP: The deep blue Sea – I’m terrified of deep water having a ridiculously childish fear of sharks. Plus I wasted five years of my life studying oceanography – get rid of the sea – get back the time I wasted on a degree – a double bonus!

The devil on the other hand has always struck me as someone who would make a terribly interesting individual to have to dinner. He rebelled against god… that’s got to be someone worth talking to right? And I’ll bet his after-dinner anecdote about what really happened in the Garden of Eden is hilarious.

For more information check out Profound Decisions’ website HERE.

Jason Yee goes on a mission to find the killer of Sandy, his new love, in The Girl from the Naked Eye (reviewed here). He recently sat down with Starburst to talk about his experience and what’s next for the San-Shou Kick-Boxer

Starburst: What influenced you to be an actor when you were a kid?

Jason Yee: I was a huge comic book fan when I was a kid! I even drew my own comic book series. I watched a lot of Bruce Lee and Clint Eastwood movies and they inspired me. I was good at drawing growing up but was also into a lot of sports. When I got accepted to school I went to an art college, The Museum School of Fine Arts. But, around the same time I started competing in martial arts and it took over and became my career. Martial arts was the first thing that gave me positive feedback for my hard work and I was making a living teaching, supporting myself by the time I was 22. I first picked up a movie camera in art school but I didn’t really experiment much until it became a serious hobby along side my martial arts career. I think martial arts helped me with acting because performing katas or fighting in front of an the audience taught me to stay focused on stage. But becoming an actor is something that really started in my 20s while I was deep in the martial arts competition world. My hobby on the side of my martial arts was shooting my own little short films on 8mm and 16mm cameras. After spending thousands of dollars on film I started to realize it was time to get more into acting and writing because I was planning to someday make my own movie. So, I started taking acting classes and reading every book I could on acting and screenwriting.

SB: Your first movie was Dark Assassin. It’s a very well made film for a first time director that featured some outstanding stunts for that kind of budget.

JY: Thank you. Dark Assassin was really my film school – it was made for $70,000, shot on super 16mm film. I wore a lot of hats on that film – I wrote, directed and starred and my mom cooked all the food for the cast and crew! It took three years to complete and it was put out by Blockbuster which did very well for them. So then I decided to turn over my kickboxing gym to my students to make a career change and move from my hometown of Boston to the movie capital, Los Angeles.

SB: How did The Girl from the Naked Eye come to fruition?

JY: Henry Mu, my producing partner, and I wanted to make a new film with a bigger budget. We started looking at script submissions and we found one that we liked by Larry Madill that featured Italian Americans. We retailored the script and it went through a lot of collaborative changes with the director, David Ren. I came up with the title ‘The Girl from the Naked Eye’, named after a famous strip club in Boston called, The Naked Eye.

SB: You have a great cast for The Girl from the Naked Eye, what were they like to work with?

JY: The cast was great to work with. Ron Yuan did a fantastic job working with us on the action scenes. Henry Mu came up with some brilliant ideas that really added to the film including the musical classic Bolero for the finale fight scene.

SB: What’s up next for you?

JY: I’ve got 5 projects on the burner, one is an action movie that takes place in 1890 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, it’s a western film noir. Another is a period gangster movie set in the 80s. That’s all I’ll say for now.

Lovely Molly, the new horror film from Eduardo Sanchez, hits UK cinemas this month. A disturbing study of one woman’s descent into insanity, possession and murder, Lovely Molly is arguably Sanchez’s best film since his 1999 smash, The Blair Witch Project. Starburst’s Jon Towlson sat down with the director to discuss psychological horror in Lovely Molly.

Lovely Molly concerns a young woman’s return to the house of her childhood following her marriage and the death of her father. She soon becomes the victim of a malignant force that manifests itself as slamming doors, clomping horse hooves and a child’s crying. Is Molly falling under the influence of a demon? Is she going insane? Or is her tragic past returning to reclaim her? Afraid to reach out to her husband in case he thinks she has lapsed back into substance abuse, Molly begins to videotape her encounters with the ‘demon’ instead.

Starburst: What drew you to the story?

Eduardo Sanchez: The Exorcist was a movie that had scarred me. Even though I was a big fan of other movies and especially documentaries about UFOs and Bigfoot and stuff like that, The Exorcist was the only scripted movie that really left a mark on me. Jaws was scary and I loved Amityville Horror, The Shining and The Changeling but that movie just really chilled me emotionally and I always wanted to make a movie about exorcism. I always wanted to add something new to that. And then my friend and writer Jamie Nash came up with the idea of somebody videotaping themselves going through a possession and I was like, wow, that’s it. But I didn’t want to do a found footage movie. I wanted my exorcism movie to be totally real, as real as I could make it, and I think that found footage, even on Blair Witch, the big thing that we were constantly fighting is ‘when are they going to run out of batteries and why are they videotaping themselves?’ It’s the thing that every found footage movie fights with, I mean, if somebody is chasing you why don’t you throw down the camera and run the fuck away? I just did a Bigfoot movie and I think it totally works with that movie – it’s a monster movie and it’s a little less serious, but with Lovely Molly I wanted to make it as real as possible as far as giving – not really an explanation – but an alternate reason for why things were happening. Not just ‘there’s a demon that’s coming after her’. She has this psychotic background, she’s a drug user, she was abused by her Dad, all these things that could have motivated what is happening to her. And make it scary, about this uncontrollable woman and what she’s going through, and nobody around her knows what to do.

There was this idea that I wanted to touch upon too, that it’s happening in the United States right now. For us there is no national healthcare program so basically there are forty million Americans without health insurance, in fact I think it’s up to sixty million now, and I went through that. In my twenties I had no health insurance. It’s the idea of even being able to turn to that basic ‘hey can you check her out and give her some guidance’.

SB: It struck me in the film that your characters are blue collar or working class. He’s a long distance lorry driver, she’s a cleaner, they’re scraping by. You get used to seeing characters in movies from more salubrious backgrounds.

ES: For me, most movies ,even The Exorcist… she’s an actress. When you really look at it, it’s foreign to 99.9 percent of the people in the world. So to me it’s like, without making it like they’re living in the backwoods and they’re living in a trailer, they’re not bums but they are working class and just stuck where they are, in an inherited house, the cheapest place to live, unfortunately Molly has unfinished business there. She really does want to get down to the bottom of whatever the hell is going on with her. She does win. It’s a hell of a price she plays but she does win. She completely gives in to whatever the malevolence is.

SB: Without giving away the ending there is the suggestion that whatever caused Molly to become possessed is going to continue.

ES: To me there is something beyond psychosis, and before or after the movie audiences can go onto various websites and we have an incredible amount of backstory: what is in that house? The history of that house, different theories of why this happened. We do a psychiatric study, we trace the demonic thing, is the house haunted?

SB: The ambiguity of the story is a deliberate thing but I was also struck by how upfront the abuse theme is. It really comes into the foreground as the film progresses.

ES: Unfortunately abuse happens a lot. I’ve known people who’ve been through it. Obviously there’re many different levels of it but you can either let it take you down a really bad road or you can try to make the best of it. I think making the best of it is a very courageous thing because it is all so painful. So that is what I wanted to examine – that there was real physical abuse by one of the most trusted people in a child’s life, but at the same time there are other things there. If there is a demon did it have something to do with the molestation, did it have something to do with the dad’s death or the mom’s death, and also why did she return and why does she stay. There are very few movies – I think The Shining is one example – where the protagonist becomes the antagonist. She becomes the criminal, the monster.

SB: Lovely Molly reminded me a bit of Polanski’s Repulsion in that respect.

ES: You know it was very strange that I had never seen Repulsion up until about – literally I was watching many movies with kind of the same tone or subject matter – and I saw Repulsion about two weeks before I shot the movie and I was amazed by how similar the story was. And it was if you’re going to borrow from somebody borrow from that. It didn’t totally connect it back but left you with a very uneasy feeling in the end.

SB: Another quality that Lovely Molly shares with Repulsion and The Exorcist is the evocative use of sound. It really helps to drive the story.

ES: The original idea for the movie was that there would be no music, it was going to be very stark, almost like a documentary. Then I hired a DP called John Rutland who is now my DP for life hopefully. He kind of challenged that, he was like, “I’d like to do this, I’d like to do that”. I didn’t want to make the film glossy or beautiful or anything but he showed me some films of where he wanted to take it and I was like “I think I like that”, so the movie actually visually came out a lot more beautiful than I thought it was going to look, some of the shots to me almost look like paintings, so once I had a movie that looked like that, still very dark and creepy and very wrong in many ways but looked that way, my whole view of what it was started developing and started changing and, as I was editing the movie, I started putting more and more temp music into it and messing around with the sound. I found these two young sound designers near my house who are just amazing, and they definitely brought their own ideas and a mixture of stuff. Then we had a test screening of the movie for some people that we know – writers, directors and editors – one of the notes that came back was that they loved the scene where she hears crying in the closet – to them it was like a creepy movie scene and it also gave backstory – is the little girl her? They thought, is there anything you can give us in the scene where the horse hooves are coming up the stairs other than it’s just the demon coming up the steps? Is there some other bit of information? I always thought it would be creepy if there was a song that she sang to her and the sound designer was like “hey, there’s this song called ‘Lovely Molly’”. The movie was actually called The Possession, until I heard about the movie called The Possession, which I think is coming out in August in the States. So suddenly we were scrambling around for a title, and ‘Lovely Molly’ is a public domain song and the lyrics made sense – kind of creepy in their own way, so I was like “why don’t we have the demon sing that to her” while it was going up the steps and in a bunch of other places, so we edited that in and it brought a whole new creepy level to that scene. This creepy melody. That was the biggest change we made, where we were literally adding story elements into the sound. But that’s what I love about making the movie, that even during the editing we came up with stuff, like in the scene where she gets attacked in the hallway by the invisible spirit. Originally it was a guy who came out, a completely naked guy with a bald head, a hairless white figure who came out and had sex with her. We had the screening and people were confused – is that the demon? Is it somebody from work? So one of my friends said “you should digitally paint him out”. So there were all these little things that we kept tweaking.

SB: Was there much improvisation from the actors?

ES: There was a little bit, not as much as I thought there would be. We did a lot of improv during the rehearsal and I added it into the script. There was a great ending line in the scene where they’re smoking pot and she goes “Remember when she was still here she wanted us to bring flowers to the house”. Gretchen came up with that line so I put it into the script. We started improvising in some of the scenes but always ended up going back to the page. But the improv brought about a certain rawness that they could layer onto the scripted word.

SB: Molly uses the camcorder as a way to confirm that what is happening is really real and not a hallucination. A lot of your films are about people mediating reality through videotape. Do you think things in our culture are going in that direction – “if I can’t film it with my iPhone and put it on Facebook, it isn’t real?”

ES: It really is. If our civilisation goes into decline, that collection that they own is going to be the most valuable thing to humanity because it is literally going to give us an hour by hour glimpse, a living documentation of the human race, a time capsule. Right now they do it, when somebody gets killed or somebody ends up being a killer they go “Hey, there’s his Facebook page” and the page becomes like this record. So it’s like to me, if somebody doesn’t put it on Facebook or video, it doesn’t exist. And there’s video everywhere!

Lovely Molly is released in UK cinemas on 29th June. Watch our exclusive clip HERE.

What do Eisner-award and Emmy-nominated artists like Bill Sienkiewicz, Ashley Wood and George Pratt have in common? They’re all contributing to TOME, a new annual anthology showcasing world-class artists using comic-books, painting and music to express an original theme, the first of which will be Vampirism.

TOME was conceived by 44FLOOD, a collective comprised of MONOCYTE co-creators menton3 and Kasra Ghanbari, 30 Days of Night co-creator Ben Templesmith and comic-shop owner Nick Idell. Only the first in a long line of publishing plans, TOME will collate original art by creators that have been associated with titles like Silent Hill, Hellboy, Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse, Elektra: Assassin, Popbot, Sandman, Criminal Macabre, the Korn albums and Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. With a range of exclusive art and prints offered as rewards for pledging towards TOME in advance, 44FLOOD need your help to bring their dazzling vision to life.

Visit their Kickstarter HERE to learn more about the project and see videos that express their intentions better than words ever could, including the making of a joint Death-themed tarot card by Templesmith and menton3, and keep reading our exclusive interview with the four creators at the heart of 44FLOOD to find out why they all feel driven to offer creative freedom at any costs to such a range of figures from across the film, music, fine art and comic-book industries.

Starburst: Who are 44FLOOD?

NICK IDELL: 44FLOOD is Kasra Ghanbari, Ben Templesmith, menton3, and myself. We’re a group of friends that got together and decided to start a company whose primary purpose is to make amazing books, books that we would buy and that we can’t easily find on the shelf, if at all. We want to make books that try to show the world that it doesn’t matter what kind of art you use to tell a story or convey meaning, just as long as it speaks to your soul. I believe that TOME is a great example of the kind of books that we plan on producing and distributing consistently.

BEN TEMPLESMITH: We’re a group of rebellious young upstarts drawn from various different yet useful backgrounds that want to share art and creativity with the world. We’re people not afraid to try.

SB: Define TOME for us. From all the possible creative outlets that you could choose to start out with why did you decide on the format for TOME?

MENTON3: The initial idea behind TOME was to create an anthology that artists could basically do their best work in. I know as an artist who works with comics and commissions that the tighter you make a subject matter for me to work on, in the sense the less you’re going to get out of me. And that’s not the way it should be, but it is, because it becomes more and more your idea and less and less the idea I see in my head.

Me and Kasra initially had the idea for TOME because we wanted to give our favorite artists and the people we think are just amazing free reign to do whatever they wanted to do given a certain subject matter, and we thought that in and of itself would be an amazing book. The reason we picked this book first is because we kind of felt like it’s our flagship of what we’d be capable of doing as a group.

There is a great deal more to come. This isn’t the only book we’ve talked about doing, this is not the only book we have confirmed that we’re doing. This is just the initial book that we thought would kind of show people what it is that we truly want to do. Me and Ben both have collections of Juxtapoz magazines and comic books, and for us there’s kind of a gap there. And we wanted to make a book that is a hybrid of both of them. And one of the things you hear from a lot of people is that doesn’t sell, and that’s very difficult to sell, and we wanted to give it a shot anyway and kind of go out on our feet rather than on our knees.

SB: What sort of artists can we expect to be contributing to TOME?

KASRA GHANBARI: TOME will have artists from all over the comic book, illustration, and fine art/gallery worlds. You’ll find sculptors, figurative painters, writers, dark art icons, B&W artists, mixed media artists, sketch Gods, graffiti artists, oil painters, and more.

This first volume of TOME will draw largely from our circle of incredible friends and collaborators who are willing to take on some of the heavy lifting needed to will a conceptual project like this forward. That said, we’ve already had a surprising amount of interest from artists whose work we admire but don’t know personally.

As an example, I’ve followed Chet Zar’s work closely since at least 2004, and I have friends who’ve shown his work in their galleries and even published one of his books, but I’ve never met him in person nor have any of the other 44FLOOD partners. But Steve Niles was kind enough to introduce us, and Chet liked what he saw with MONOCYTE and with Menton’s personal work, and the conversation moved fast and easy from there. Chet is a very cool and generous guy who totally gets what we want to do, has his own ideas to make it even better, and is 100% on board. That’s exactly what TOME and 44FLOOD are about.

SB: The theme for the first installment is Vampirism – how did you come to this theme, and what does the concept mean to you?

MENTON3: As far as that concept, it’s an extremely personal concept to me. I have a difficult time talking about this subject without sounding like a woman who collects cats. I met a person throughout the course of my life who believed in vampires, and the way that he believed in vampires was very different. And this was not a belief that he specifically wanted to have, it was actually a horrible thing that he experienced in World War II and then there were later events throughout his life that confirmed this to him. And it was something that really haunted him and bothered him.

When I met him, he was a much older gentleman, and the conversation I had with him has stuck with me my entire life and has been something that has influenced me on many, many levels. And you know in the current climate, I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but there’s a lot of vampire depictions out now with True Blood and Twilight. And I think that’s all awesome, but I definitely wanted to do my idea of this and the way that this gentlemen saw vampires and the way that I’ve come to see vampires is a much more intriguing artistic area for me. And everybody kind of jumped on board with that idea, thank God, because I think it would be a really great theme for a book. For me, I can’t wait to see Sienkiewicz go wild with this kind of thing and other artists involved like David Stoupakis.

The basic construct is to take vampires seriously, as if they actually existed. Not some fantasy, not something sexy, but something that was real and tangible. What kind of artwork would you produce out of that theme? And to me that was very compelling, and I think it compelled everyone else involved.

BEN: Vampirism can be many things. To me, it’s about things of a parasitic nature. One thing living off another, codependent in a sick and probably unjust embrace. It’s never fun to be the host to a parasite! Be it in nature or business or social settings! There’s so much to play with this theme rather than just Dracula.

SB: We’ve spoken at some length before about the creative processes between Kasra and Menton3, so I have to ask, what other themes did you consider for TOME first? How did you even begin narrowing down your choices?

KASRA: If there’s one thing Menton and I do, it’s talk and debate and play chess and see what’s left behind other than two smoke-infested dudes. Early on with TOME, we came up with three or four ideas that got us excited to the point that it made the book seem much more real and possible. I can’t say what they were as that would be telling, but I will say that “Vampirism” wasn’t necessarily one of them.

I can try and give some insight into the nature and kinds of themes we’d be interested in exploring with TOME. It may sound subtle, but to us there’s a massive difference between “Vampires” and “Vampirism.” And similarly, the vices and virtues are fertile ground for an anthology, but TOME would be more likely to explore the peculiar interactions between a vice and a virtue. There’s a figure who’s been the subject of extraordinary intrigue through the centuries, who’s seemingly popped his head in and out of strange places centuries apart. How is that possible? Is there any historical basis for this being true? Well… yes. And who wouldn’t like to know more about a possible real-life motherfucker?

For the first volume of TOME, we didn’t want to go off the deep-end of esoteric. With any luck, there will be a time for that.

SB: Assuming that the Kickstarter for TOME is successful, where do 44FLOOD go next? How will you share with the world this vision that is essentially a direct collaboration between the artists and funders?

MENTON3: I see 44FLOOD more as a band than anything else. I grew up in bands, I helped produce bands, I spent most of my life in and out of bands and working with bands. I don’t see this any differently. The fact that we’re producing art and writing, I don’t think that’s any different than producing music. We’re four individuals who all have something to say, and to me that’s compelling on its own, to me that acts as a band.

As far as the Kickstarter being successful, right now it’s Friday, and we start the Kickstarter on Monday, and I think I can speak for all of us that we’re pretty terrified of it going badly. We respect and are humbled by any support that we get. We don’t know what’s going to happen with it, we have no idea if it’s going to be successful or not. We’re not going to stop, if the Kickstarter is a failure we have plans to continue forward doing things. But we have many, many books that we want to put out. There’s at least 12 right now we’re extremely interested in and 6 that are definite. Some of these books may be revealed during the Kickstarter campaign.

NICK: Yes, TOME is just the beginning. We have our own new ideas, as well as other great opportunities coming to us all the time, from creator-owned comic books to stunning hardcover art collections. The great thing about 44FLOOD is that we’re not just dedicated to one medium. But as of right now, we have a ton of projects lined up that I can’t wait to get out there, mostly because I can’t wait to sit down and read them.

SB: I know that during the creation of MONOCYTE there was a feeling of family, that close collaborators were more than just workmates. Does that apply equally to 44FLOOD? How heavily are you all investing in this?

MENTON3: I think having a personal relationship with who you work with is really important. Art is something that comes from specific areas of the psyche, and the way I see it is that various people play different notes, it’s just who they are. And sometimes those notes harmonize, and sometimes those notes are dissonant, and I feel like all four of us play notes that are extremely similar and harmonize with one another but aren’t in any way distinctly the same. I think, for example, mine and Ben’s artwork is extraordinarily different from each other, but I still think there’s a theme running through both of them that is the same.

I can only speak for myself. I’m extraordinarily and heavily invested in this. To me, it’s become what I wake up thinking about and what I go to sleep thinking about. I’m seriously concentrated on the paintings I’m going to make for it, the pages I’m going to do for it. To me, it’s the most exciting project I’ve ever been a part of just because of the enthusiasm that we all share.

SB: To me it feels completely natural to see you all standing together optimistically, talking about self-reflection and hope for the future at the same time as being surrounded by images of darkness and death. How do you feel about this contradiction? Would you say that your art leads you to dark places, or is it more the case that you overcome adversity through your art?

MENTON3: On the surface, I’d have to say that I think that it’s because if I paint it I don’t have to live it. But, that’s a funny thing to say. I don’t really view my art as dark. And I know that sounds crazy to some people and that I sound delusional. At the same time, I can see how people see it as dark.

I pull images from the subconscious, a lot of times that’s shadow imagery from the Self. But a lot of this stuff is to me very similar to dreams where you’re being chased in. You know there’s some horrible monster that’s chasing you and you turn around and typically in these dreams it’s just a child that wants a hug. I think a lot of times what people view as horrifying is something that just needs to communicate something. But I don’t think there really is a juxtaposition of the imagery with us.

But I will support the fact that we all are optimistic and we all are very excited about the project. But as far as the artwork being dark or not, you the viewer are the judge of that, not us the artists.

BEN: Death isn’t the end. Well, not ultimately. Death also means renewal, rejuvenation, changing things into another form. From the day we’re born, we begin to die. It’s what you do with what you’ve got that counts. Death makes life precious. So really, without being afraid of it, it’s quite uplifting.

KASRA: Every convention we set up at, without fail, a six year-old girl or five-year old boy will run up to our table and point to MONOCYTE or Menton’s paintings or Ben’s prints with excitement and curiosity and purity while their parents sit back hesitant with confusion and sometimes even genuine fear. There’s the contradiction.

Starburst speaks to one of the stars of Ti West’s excellent new horror flick, The Innkeepers (read our review HERE), out now in UK cinemas. Mild spoilers ahead if you’ve not caught it yet…

Starburst: So how did you come to be involved with the film?

Pat Healy: I acted in a film called Great World of Sound a few years ago and was at a film festival at the same time as Ti West who had a film there called Trigger Man. We met briefly, then a few years later I still hadn’t seen Trigger Man and a friend of mine who was a big horror fan said you had to see this film House of the Devil. So I went and saw it and was really knocked out. Right after that coincidentally a mutual friend of ours had sent me an email saying Ti West was making a new film and was interested in me for it. I was excited and ready to do the film right there without even having read it! That’s sort of how it happened.

SB: You and Sara Paxton have a very natural chemistry in the film. You really get the impression that these are characters that are close and have known each other for years, did you know Sara before the shoot?

PH: No, quite amazingly I had been cast early on and they took a bit of time trying to find the right woman for the part. She came on very late and we hadn’t had the chance to even meet until the day before shooting when we both arrived in Connecticut. So I suppose it was because the writing was very good, it was a very realistic relationship that two people who work that kind of job together would have. Ti shares the same off kilter sense of humour as us both and we just liked each other very much. Also the film was shot sequentially so the relationship was allowed to build. So what you see was that relationship building over time. It was really a happy accident that we liked each other and got on as well as we did.

SB: In the film you come across very convincingly as a person who is bored of their job and just going through the motions, do you have experience in that kind of work and what did you draw on for that?

PH: I first started working when I was a teenager, I worked in a movie theatre which I loved. As I got older I worked in a camera shop selling and repairing cameras and also worked selling shoes and electronics as well as a couple of telemarketing jobs and things. There was a lot of sitting around and staring at screens.

When I was doing those jobs there was no internet, so there was a lot of staring into space, but I think I am drawing very much from the boredom that results from being over qualified for these jobs that don’t require a lot of brain work. I think also what’s interesting is how you tend to develop these very intense relationships with people who you don’t know that well because of the boredom and because of the close proximity. You’re there trying to make the most of the situation and the relationship that develops in the film comes from that false sense of how you don’t hang out with that person anywhere else in the world but because you are thrown into that situation it seems a lot more intense than perhaps it actually is. 

SB: The film is very funny without ever going into full on comedy; did you draw on your previous experience as part of a comedy sketch group at all?

PH: Well I’ve always sort of done comedy and as you’ve said I’ve been part of a sketch group but I don’t ever approach a role as being comedic or dramatic. I like to read the script a lot and just go for the reality or truth of what’s there. If it happens to be a funny situation or if my natural reaction to something is funny then I think it will be there, especially if I like to think of it more as a comedy than a horror or drama. With  regard The Innkeepers I just try to approach it in terms of what the character is and the story. Having said that there are a lot of very funny lines and situations that Ti has written and I think once I stepped into that character I got the dry sense of humour that’s not too dissimilar to my own. There were several opportunities for me to improvise a few lines here and there that did make it funnier so I guess in a roundabout way some of that experience was brought over to this film.

SB: Your character Luke runs an amateur ghost hunting website in the film, have you ever had any experience with the supernatural and are you a believer?

PH: I haven’t and I’m not a believer. I would very much like to believe and see something but I’m just one of those people that like Ti, without speaking for him too much, share the same sensibility where my mind is very logical. If something happens that seems to have people immediately going to ghosts or the supernatural, my mind will very logically reason out “well this could be this or that”. Things that people experienced in the hotel we were in that is supposedly haunted, are all things that could very easily be explained, my mind doesn’t immediately go to hauntings. I’m very sceptical rather than a downright non-believer, I would love to see some evidence and believe in something like this but I’ll believe it when I see it.

SB: What is your favourite horror film?

PH: My personal favourite is probably Poltergeist. I saw it when I was ten years old and it terrified the hell out of me.  At the time I was a young kid living in a suburbia not too dissimilar from the one in the film and it was the thought that something that terrifying could come into your home and there wasn’t anything your parents could do about it. Everyone was really powerless against it and that was a really scary idea for me. I had nightmares for a really long time after that.

SB: You have worked with the likes of Werner Herzog, Paul Thomas Anderson and David Gordon Green. How did this compare to working with someone like Ti West who is still very much an up and comer?

PH: Well I think that Ti has a similar respect and fondness for cinema and film history that those three have. I think he also has a real workman like spirit. When you have a real appreciation, fondness and respect for what you do then you put everything you have into it so all of those you mention are all very respectful and very skilled craftsmen. Ti is great with cinematography but especially with editing and sound design, he is meticulous about that. I would say that that is true of all of those men and that they share an affinity for and appreciation for actors. I think that if you are making these films that are not based on special effects or big set pieces then your biggest production value is going to be the performances. They are all very respectful and appreciative of the work that you do and all are very welcoming of working with actors. A lot of people want you to deliver the lines exactly as written but all those guys not only welcome, but get really excited by something that you might bring to it, whether that’s an improvised line or just an interpretation that they hadn’t thought of and it makes you want to work harder for them. So I would say they all share the love for the filmmaking craft but also realise that their greatest asset is their performers and relationship with the performers.

 SB: The ending of The Innkeepers is ambiguous and doesn’t end the way you think it might, what was your interpretation of the ending?

PH: Well I would hesitate to give my flat out interpretation because I think that Ti would slap my wrist for that.  I’d say that as the film deals with the central theme of whether or not hauntings are real, if supernatural occurences are real or just a product of our imagination and the emotion of fear and the things we imagine are happening around us.  Our imagination gets stoked and we might just be creating this in our minds. Films like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion deal with the idea as to whether or not things are actually happening or if characters are just losing their minds, that concept isn’t any less horrific than the supernatural to me. They are both really terrifying things and it’s sort of left up to the viewer to decide and I would like to leave it that way as well. I’ve already let you know what my leanings are with regards to the supernatural so you can probably figure out what my leanings are with regards to the ending, but it leaves some open ended questions that make it interesting.

THE INNKEEPERS is in selected UK cinemas now, and will be available on DVD/Blu-ray from June 28th.

For an extended version of the interview and a chat with director Ti West himself, check out our INNKEEPERS coverage in our next issue, released June 15th.

It might not be splashed all over the news anymore, but Japan is still suffering in the wake of the 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster that shocked the entire world. Whole towns were destroyed, over 18,000 people lost their lives and millions of people were affected.

Many fundraisers and campaigners may have already moved on to their next cause, but Steve Collier was determined to keep the fundraising going. He launched Japan Comic Aid, began recruiting comic creators, and has now released the first three Japan Comic Aid comics through new comics publisher Dead Universe. More comics are to follow, and all proceeds will go to the Japanese rebuilding effort.

“Just over a year ago I watched on TV as most of the world did as the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan,” explains Collier exclusively to Starburst. “The scale of it was so unreal, you saw literally villages, whole towns, the whole north east coast of Japan basically being swept away and it was insane and it really hits you, especially when it’s a country that has inspired you such a lot. I’ve always loved comics, so I thought why don’t I do that? So I got an email address, I got a Twitter account together and I sent a lot of emails and people responded.”

Two of the first JCA books boast scripts from Collier himself: The Mystery Boys, a buddy adventure about two agents tackling the supernatural across the globe – their first-issue adventures taking them to Japan – with art from Andy W. Clift, and Kaiju Steel, about a teenage boy coming into unexpected powers when the Earth is over-run with 100-foot monsters, brought to life by Lee Killeen. Both, obviously, have strong Japanese influences.

“I always liked things like Hellboy, Men in Black, X-Files, things like that,” says Collier of The Mystery Boys, “really kind of moody, adventurous mystery things dealing with supernatural creatures, so I wanted to do something like that. I’d always imagined a British version of it. I had this very basic idea of these characters and storylines so when Andy got in contact I saw that his style was very much in keeping with my ideas, lots of shadows and very dynamic, really cool.”

Artist Andy W. Clift, like all the other creatives, came on board after seeing Collier’s call for artists via Twitter, and was instantly taken with The Mystery Boys: “I was really excited about the story being set in Japan. It was an exciting challenge for me to draw such a rich culture that I wasn’t completely familiar with, from the mountain villages and beautiful landscapes to the vehicles and the people themselves. It was extremely important to me to make all of that look as authentic as possible.”

While Collier would cite Men in Black as an influence, Clift brought other inspirations to the table: “I’ve always been influenced by artists who have had more of an animated style: Mike Oeming, Alex Toth, Darwyn Cooke, Bruce Timm, Jack Kirby, Tim Sale, John Romita Jr, etc. There’s just something about the way they each see the world that always blows my mind. In terms of putting together the look of The Mystery Boys, the script had a real noir feel about it so I ran with that.”

Kaiju Steel had more obvious influences. “I had been to a screening of Monsters and it clicked that there were so many ways you could write a monster movie,” says Collier. “A few months later, the Earthquake happened. It occurred to me that a comic involving giant monsters would be a perfect tribute to a really influential part of Japanese culture while the threat of destruction by the monsters themselves served as a good analogy for the unstoppable power of nature. There are a few monster comics out at the moment which are very bright and cartoony in style, but if you watch films like Gojira or Cloverfield, you can really believe it’s happening. I think what Lee has done with the art of Kaiju Steel is nothing short of stunning. I mean, some of this stuff looks photo-real which is great because I really wanted realism and grit in the tone.”

Rounding off the trilogy of books is Nowhereville, written and illustrated by Ken Bastard. It’s the odd-one-out, with no clear Japanese influences to the story, a dark Depression-era tale of journalist Ben Blake investigating mysterious goings-on in Massachusetts. It’s also a one-shot, whereas The Mystery Boys and Kaiju Steel are ongoing stories.

Ken came on board via Twitter,” Collier explains. “I don’t think he’d seriously been involved in comics as much before JCA although looking at his output now, you have to wonder why! Ken had the story of Nowhereville down and really wanted to get involved as, like all of us, Japanese pop culture was a huge influence on him growing up. The character of Ben Blake continues to intrigue me personally…  If you follow any of Ken’s social network feeds or his website, you’ll notice Ben pops up a fair bit and not just in the same time period. I keep saying I’d love to get another book done. I’d love to see Ben Blake as this serial character.”

The three comics launched on Free Comic Book day this year and made waves at Kapow! Comic Convention, with DC Publisher Dan DiDio being spotted buying all three. But where next for JCA? “The Mystery Boys and Kaiju Steel will both be ongoing series. In The Mystery Boys, we’ll delve into Agent Neumann’s backstory quite a bit over the next arc which will start in issue 3 and in Kaiju Steel we’ll continue to follow Scott as he battles against a host of Kaiju (yes, we have a roster of monsters all lined up…). As for release dates, we’re working on getting them done as soon as possible but we’re doing it for free, life and paid jobs have to take priority. Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t let you pay the bills by doing good! The second issues will be out this summer though.”

In terms of new titles, “We have two creators working on a book at the moment which I’m really excited about. I’ll be starting to write the story for another series which will have a manga style to it. I want to continue getting A-list talent on board too. Tonci Zonjic is currently working on a series of three variant covers for the books which are stunning. They all link up to form one incredible image.”

But surely, you might think, what sort of lifespan could Japan Comic Aid have? What happens years down the line when the rest of the world has forgotten about the disaster? “The cleanup process in Japan and the healing after such an event will likely take decades as the next generations tell the story,” Collier says, adding firmly: “JCA will continue indefinitely.”

If you want to support Japan Comic Aid, you can find out more about them and buy the first three comics through their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/#!/JapanComicAid

Jumping aboard the latest instalment of a franchise spawning two and a half billion dollars and featuring a legendary, beloved comic book character would be daunting enough on its own, but setting out to make a film grounded in the real world, one featuring a someone who puts the hero back in superhero? That takes real guts.

None of that fazed filmmaker Marc Webb, the man charged with bringing Spider-Man back to our screens in The Amazing Spider-Man. Aiming to deliver all the super-powered entertainment you could want packed into one hero’s story, the movie completes the journey through Marvel’s comic book universe that filmgoers around the world began this summer with Avengers Assemble. The film boasts a new face behind the mask (Andrew Garfield of sci-fi drama Never Let Me Go) and a tweaked origin story for the webslinger, which finds Peter struggling to investigate why his parents disappeared and coming to grips with his newfound, arachnid-style abilities. For Webb, the appeal wasn’t simply in playing on a much bigger scale; he still wanted to find the beating heart amidst the spectacle. “Peter Parker is the access point. I was always a Spider-Man fan, but I was more a Peter Parker fan. When you see the movie, I don’t think anyone will be worried about the emotional heart of it. There is an incredibly innocent and tender quality to Peter Parker. He’s not a billionaire, he’s not an alien, he’s a kid. He has trouble with the people who raise him and talking to girls and it’s that relatability which is all through the movie. That’s a texture that for me was really intuitive. It’s something I love in movies, particularly with that romantic dimension. I’m very familiar with being made nervous by women! The interpersonal relationships that Peter has are so simple and so domestic that it’s a very fun dichotomy to play that massive spectacle alongside the very small moments. In a very real way, there’s an intimate indie movie at the heart of Spider-Man.”

 

Part of that was finding a way to represent Parker that hasn’t really been seen before; with a take on the youthful hero that springs from his troubled past. “The first domino in this movie is Peter getting left behind by his parents. I thought to myself, ‘how does that change your view on the world?’ And to me it creates a level of distrust. There’s a sarcasm that comes from that, and the quippiness, that comes from the chip on his shoulder – he’s a little bit mean and snarky. That’s an attitude that we can all understand and relate to, but I think it comes from a genuine place. It was fun to explore the humour, because it comes from a real place, it’s not just slapped on.

Webb was happy to strike out in a new direction. “I wanted to do things differently. I feel like we’ve seen the origin of Spider-Man but maybe we haven’t seen the origin of Peter Parker. There are certain iconic elements of Spider-Man that I felt obligated to honour. But there are elements where we spent a lot of time designing and engineering sequences within the camera that we shot practically, like him swinging on chains to help create that sensation, that feeling of joy and fun, which is always an important part.”

 

And make no mistake – the joy and the fun will still be a part of the movie, along with some huge effects sequences grounded in startling reality:  the laws of gravity apply, we’re in a world where Spider-Man might fire a web that gives way, or find himself in a situation where he can’t find purchase.  The solid cast helps keep things real, with a line-up including Martin Sheen (as Peter’s iconic, tragic Uncle Ben), Sally Field (Aunt May), Denis Leary (as police chief George Stacy, who is hunting down Spider-Man and dislikes Peter dating his daughter) Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, Peter’s first love; and Rhys Ifans as Dr Curt Connors who, thanks to a noble scientific experiment gone horribly wrong, ends up turning into slavering beast The Lizard. The scaly threat provides a lot of the action in the film, with eye-popping battles across New York’s famous cityscape. Bringing that to life was a challenge met via various methods. “There is a lot that goes into it,” says Webb.

“When we shot those sequences, we actually shot a human, a large guy named Big John. He was literally a big guy named John, who did a lot of the interactive stuff. Because when you’re trying to interact with Andrew as Peter, you need someone grabbing him to do those things. We would replace him with the computer-generated lizard. But then the performance capture was done with Rhys and we’d shoot him in a similar environment and get his facial information to incorporate his performance into the Lizard itself. I was interested in finding something that could relate human emotions, because I wanted to keep Rhys’ work in that creature. Then there are the physical components of it – I wanted to make him very powerful and stronger than Spider-Man.”

 

While a lot of the new movie’s action was crafted physically, Webb hasn’t spared the CG budget, with plenty of huge sequences shot in state-of-the-art on-set 3D. Was there ever a film better suited for 3D? And Webb got advice from a master: “James Cameron was incredibly generous with me early on. He likes to have things play with depth. He wants you to see depth. Like if the screen is a window and everything you see is behind there. That is what is fun about it. The jungles of Avatar are really a great example of that. I liked pushing the 3D a little bit further so it will come out at you. I remember, as a kid, watching The Creature From The Black Lagoon with all those things coming out at you, or House Of Wax. There was something fun about that and seeing an audience with kids reach out for something. There were moments that I wanted to exploit like that, so I designed the movie in 3D. It’s a matter of convergence. We converged the screen level behind Spider-Man so his legs would come out. Then we made him a little bit more in focus so you could feel a tangible sense of him and reduce the motion blur. It feels more tactile. That helps with that notion that it can come out at you. That’s the other part of letting that feel that it is coming into your space.” A superhero treat full of action, heart and marvels? Challenge? Accepted!

The Amazing Spider-Man opens in UK cinemas July 3rd