Feature Category: Interviews

STARBURST chats to director Martin Owen about his latest horror film Let’s Be Evil, which has been likened to the classic film Village of the Damned.

STARBURST: You have worn a number of hats in your career now. Do you prefer behind the camera to being in front of it?

Martin Owen: Definitely behind the camera. I get creative freedom to do what I want to do. Acting was never really my ambition

What was the shooting schedule on Let’s Be Evil?

Six weeks.

Are you an avid follower of social media and how important is it in terms of getting films off the ground, given schemes like crowd-funding schemes like Kickstarter?

I am not really a social media fan, but there are benefits when trying to get a film going and it does have an influence.

You have now collaborated with Elizabeth Morris on writing on this film and others. What is the best thing about working with her in a script and what is your key strength as a filmmaker?

Film is a collaborative process and we do work at creating an effective screenplay to shoot.

What were your influences for this film?

John Carpenter in terms of his style and visual content. Trainspotting was also a big influence and made me want to make movies after I saw that the first time.

Are you planning to stay in the UK for films, or have you been approached for any major projects in the USA?

My next project, Kung Fu Princess, is going to be shot in the USA. It’s a family action movie.

Is there a particular genre you’d like to work in that you haven’t done before?

I would love to do a stripped down character drama, more as a challenge to myself.

Going back to your shooting style on Let’s Be Evil – did you rehearse with the cast and crew when planning the film and did you rely on storyboards?

The way it was shot was a very organic way and was very difficult to storyboard.

Augmented reality and the effect it has on these children in the film is the through line of the story in Let’s Be Evil. The effect of technology and how it is dividing, rather than uniting humanity is also a theme. Where do you feel things could be improved in the world with technology of this nature?

There seems to be an over-reliance on technology, a feeling that the more it works, the less it helps. Also, with the advent of children getting IPads for example, they are not really engaging their imaginations as much.

How has the film been received so far on the horror festival circuit and where is it getting the best reaction?

It’s not really that type of a horror film. Often, the reaction does change from when you watch it on a laptop to when you watch it on a big screen. The scares in this film are more psychological and more down a rabbit hole so to speak.

Horror often reflects the times we live in, but some of the earlier classics do find themselves of their time, thus dating their essence such as the Hammer films of the 20th Century. Which filmmaker’s work in the horror genre do you admire?

I liked It Follows recently. I am not a great fan of gratuitous gore as it doesn’t scare. It Follows generates an atmosphere and involves you as an audience.

Finally, is there a particular project you have in development that you feel would be perfect for the big screen?

Kung Fu Princess is one of those projects – a unique take on a credible genre.

Let’s Be Evil is out now on VOD.

The new psychological horror film Let’s Be Evil focuses on an unusual academy for gifted children, heightened by the use of virtual reality. STARBURST had the pleasure of speaking with lead actors Elizabeth Morris and Elliot James Langridge about this film and other aspects of their career.

STARBURST: Elliot, can you tell us about your character in Let’s Be Evil?

Elliot James Langridge: He’s a bit of a drifter through life. He’s a joke of a person and in a mess. He comes into the programme to change his life as he is a wreck and by the end of the film you do see a change.

You worked with Kara Tointon from Eastenders. You yourself came from Hollyoaks. Is there any contact between the Soap actors from different series?

EJL: Yes. I had never met Kara before this film, except at various Soap-related events like the Soap Awards. It’s great to be in a Soap, but I did need to get away from that. I’d love to do more films, but Hollyoaks was a great experience.

Elizabeth, you co-wrote the story for the film, based on an original concept. What was the inspiration for it and how much did your story remain true to the source material?

Elizabeth Morris: It was an original concept. We met the creator at a party and he brought to myself and Martin Owen (the director).

With the more liberal use of mobile and computer technology, it has become harder to create something that is genuinely scary in horror films, especially with more recent found footage offerings like The Blair Witch Project.  What sort of rules did you and others involved with the film set when making it?

EM: We were very keen to do something different. You can see it throughout this film that the virtual reality aspect does make it more immersive and claustrophobic in tone.

Children in horror films are scarier in a scenario like this, as is personified in previous offerings like Village Of The Damned and the more recent The Children, not to mention Damien Thorn in The Omen films. What was it like working with the children on this film?

EM: It was a lot easier than anticipated. We did wonder in light of the logistics how long we could use them for and how much they could shoot. In fact, they were very professional, as well as well-mannered and well looked after. They were discovered at an Academy in Essex.

Who did you use as a role model for your character when you were preparing for the film?

EM: To be honest, because I co-wrote it, I didn’t have any real inspiration, which is what sometimes happens when you create something from scratch. When you receive a script, you use inspiration and imagination and approach it from a different way.

Elliot, you worked on a Harry Potter film – what was your experience of that?

EJL: Great! I was actually on there as a part of the camera crew and ended up getting a small part in the film, but spent two months as a Camera Assistant.

You worked on Primeval and The Bill as well. What were the key lessons you learned from these shows?

EJL: They were my first two acting jobs, I was shy when I started, but bit by bit I got used to being in front of the camera and it was a make or break situation for me.

How does working in low-budget affect your performance?

EJL: It doesn’t affect your performance indirectly. Low budget tends to be quicker and you know that you are only going to be on a shoot for three to four weeks, whereby it is great to walk away from it finished.

Elizabeth, your next film is KUNG FU PRINCESS, which you have also co-written. How has your talent in this area evolved and do you see yourself doing more behind the camera writing in the future?

EM: This is the third script I have worked on with Martin Owen. We write as a duo and KUNG FU PRINCESS is our idea. This gives us complete control and free rein.

You worked with Eric Roberts and Mischa Barton on L.A. SLASHER, which is a film that seems to emphasise the mind-set of reality TV and so-called visible families like The Kardashians. What was it like working with them and do you feel that the reality TV era has reached its peak?

Eric Roberts could be intimidating, but he was an inspiration to work with when you watched him. Mischa Barton was one of the nicest people, with a great sense of humour and also she had just come out of a reality show herself. As far as the Reality TV era goes, I don’t think it has reached it’s peak.

How did the Virtual Reality affect you in terms of its potential and is it something you would like to use more of?

EJL: It’s a very interesting problem, the idea that augmented reality changes the children in the film. When I grew up, we had TV, but nowadays we have phones that do all kinds of things and have a TV built in.to them. It’s scary, but an interesting concept.

EM: No. Absolutely not.

Finally, what are your favourite three horror films?

EJL: The Shining (original 1980 version), I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream.

EM: Stephen King’s It, which I saw when I was four and gave me a phobia about clowns. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Scream.

Let’s Be Evil is available on all VOD platforms now.

Broken tells the story of a young woman, Evie, who is on the run from her past. When she takes a job caring for tetraplegic John she realises she must confront her demons, while dealing with a whole new set of problems. We sat down with director Shaun Robert Smith and producer and star Craig Conway to chat about their new film, and how far you need to go as a low budget filmmaker.

STARBURST: Is it true that you guys slept at the house throughout the whole of filming? Was that all part of your “method”?

Shaun Robert Smith: That’s what we tell people!

Craig Conway: There was just no budget for hotels really.

Shaun Robert Smith: Actually, it just made sense and I think we would have done it anyway. It was such a great experience. The film is about a carer, and her work for a tetraplegic, and I actually slept in the carer’s bed. It really helped us absorb the atmosphere as this is a very dark, claustrophobic film. And we also had to get up early to get started.

Did all the cast and crew sleep there?

CC: Just us two. Because I was acting in the film, with producing I didn’t have as much time as the other actors to devote time to lines and so on. It gave us chance to talk about the character and how to attack him.

Because your character Dougie is pretty unpleasant.

CC: He’s not the kindest of men to be honest, no.

SRS: He’s loyal.

CC: which was pretty bizarre.

SRS: We were actually struggling with the location. I’d originally written it to be set in a large manor house but they all wanted £2000 per day which was ridiculous. Mel then said his childhood home was up for sale so we went to see it. One thing that was great for filmmakers was that it had one of the largest landings we’d seen so we could get all the shots we needed as an awful lot happens in those hallways.

CC: We were about a week away from shooting as well when we got the house, so we still had all the prep and design to do. Initially, we spent a day there and suddenly this house, which at the time was all white and beautiful became our canvas.

You didn’t have an estate agent knocking on the door then, wanting to do some viewings?

CC: We did say they could come but they never did.

SRS: It did sell during the time we were there, though.

CC: Perhaps we’ll drop them the DVD off to show what we did to it.

SRS: You could do it in character. At the end of filming, it was Craig who had to put the house back together as that was the deal we had. We’d changed it a lot.

Was that within your producer remit?

CC: It actually was! The art department did so much to the house but they only had two days at the end to put it back as it was. So, I was there for days afterward after everyone had gone, just cleaning floors.

SRS: As low budget filmmakers that’s what happens. You’ve really got to put your crew and cast through much more than you would on a Hollywood film for next to nothing. You have to think twice as hard as a producer because you have to make the best film you can from the little money you have. £75,000 was all we had for the production budget.

CC: Shaun made the short film and we then asked for £50,000 to make the film. In the end, we were given £75,000 which we were over the moon with. Basically, by the time we’d planned everything out, and got the crew together we knew we only had 17 days to shoot the film. From the moment we were greenlit through to the end of the film was just a 10-week period. We tested ourselves to really go for it and make it collaborative.

You can often tell when a short film has been made into a feature as it feels stretched. How did you avoid the obvious pitfalls?

SRS: It was an issue but the short had so much crammed into its 20 minutes that making the feature allowed the story time to breathe and the characters to develop. It gives weight to the intensity of the film.

CC: Usually when you read the script for a short, you get the sense the writer has tried to do too much. Shorts are a different thing altogether and there’s a skill and a craft to making one. With Shaun’s there was a bloody good story first off, but there were also the beats that would lend themselves to a feature if allowed the time to develop. You have to allow the characters and the dialogue to live and then capture it. For some people, Broken might be too slow, but that’s part of the story.

Finally, Craig, is it true you were a crawler in The Descent called Scar? And which one was Scar?

CC: It’s true – I’m the one who gets a torch in the mouth at the end! When Neil asked me to do the film, he also asked me to choreograph a lot so as a thank you I got named. No-one would ever know who I was, but it was a nice touch.

Broken is available on VOD now.

One of the most entertaining British films of recent years was Cockneys Vs Zombies, directed by Matthias Hoene, who had previously only made the ultra-low-budget shot-on-video Hammer Films comeback Beyond the Rave. Despite the title, the film turned out to be amazingly good fun, full of gory moments, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, actually hilarious. Blessed with a cast of British film and TV legends, on paper, it had all the hallmarks of being a disaster (much like the updating of Ray Cooney’s farce Run for Your Wife). However, no matter how many instantly recognisable faces there were on the screen (which included an unlikely band of septuagenarians and octogenarians like Alan Ford, Richard Briers, Honor Blackman, Dudley Sutton, Georgina Hale and Tony Selby), nor how bloody effective the undead killings were, the film may have been cold in the grave had it not been for the witty and engaging script by James Moran. Already a veteran of TV (Doctor Who, Primeval, Torchwood) and having made headways onto the big screen with Severance and Tower Block.

The story follows a group of youngsters who attempt to rob a bank to get the money to save their grandad’s rest home from being bulldozed in an urban redevelopment. While they are in the vaults filling their bags, all hell is literally breaking loose as the streets become filled with flesh-eating reanimated corpses. They attempt to get to save the old folk but find their elders are a still a little handy when it comes to looking after themselves in a scrap.

Taking in satirical digs at property developers, wannabe gangsters and the way old people are treated (or ignored) in our society and thrusting it head-on with the rising of the undead, it’s as perfect as a plate of pie, mash, and jellied eels. With plenty of liquor.

STARBURST: What was it like coming into Cockneys Vs Zombies after the initial story, etc. had been written?

James Moran: There was an initial pitch that Matthias (the director) had come up with, and they originally came to me to script it from that. I was doing tons of TV at the time, and just couldn’t squeeze it in, much as I loved it. A year later, they had a script, but it wasn’t the direction they wanted to go in, so they came back to me and asked if I could start again from scratch, a blank slate. I came in with a more comedic, splattery take on it, a new storyline, characters, set pieces, so it then changed from the initial pitch into something else.

Did you have specific points of reference when writing the script?

I had made a list of all the things I wanted to get in there – basically, if I go to the cinema on a Friday night, and choose to see Cockneys Vs Zombies based on the title, what do I expect to see? I was also very careful to avoid anything that was too similar to Shaun of the Dead, even accidentally – it’d be very easy to copy a successful film, but I wanted us to do our own thing. I took that so far, there was a sequence in a pub that I got rid of because Shaun’s third act is set in a pub! Obviously, we share a similar world, but you have to try to plough your own path, otherwise why bother? My biggest concern was that I really wanted to celebrate the East End, the people, and the locations, I didn’t want to do a parody or make fun of Cockneys or do yet another gangster movie. That’s why they’re not gangsters; they’re not even good criminals, they’ve never done this before and feel they have no other option to try and help their granddad. I also set myself the challenge of coming up with three zombie gags that I haven’t seen before, and we pulled them all off. The biggest thing for me was: slow or fast zombies? I was determined to have slow zombies, and Matthias and the producers agreed, luckily.

It’s a dream cast for fans of classic British TV/cinema, what challenges or joys did that bring?

When you write a script, as soon as they cast someone cool, you immediately doubt yourself and think ‘but that part isn’t big enough!’ – and then you do a rewrite for that character. It’s actually a good writing exercise, pretend one role has landed an amazing actor, and retune it for them, and it focuses your mind wonderfully. Make sure that everyone has a cool moment, or a speech, or a great death, etc. – make it worth an actor’s time to turn up and do your tiny budget movie. The cast really was a dream; I couldn’t believe it every time they told me someone had been cast. The hardest thing is seeing all the amazing actors who audition for each part and knowing that only one of them can get the job. We were really spoiled on this.

Did you write any moments specifically for particular stars? That Richard Briers chase scene is particularly inspired!

I wrote Ray specifically for Alan Ford; he was in my initial brainstorm notes, and I told the guys that we absolutely had to have him. Luckily, he was available and liked the script. I wrote it with his voice in mind, I re-watched some of his movies and made sure every line sounded right for him. But I had no idea who would play the other parts, it was more a case of writing lots of fun moments, and waiting to see who would do them, so it was a particular joy to find out that Richard Briers would do the slow motion chase and have an Uzi taped to his walking frame. Although after the read-through, Honor Blackman very sweetly said ‘I don’t swear as much as the others, maybe I’m not allowed…’ – I took the hint, and gave her some more sweary lines, which she delivered wonderfully.

What was your favourite moment from the film – the part that really made you proud to have done it?

There was a moment during my brainstorming where I was trying to figure out why they’d rob a bank, and it had to be something that would make us sympathise with them – we have to root for the leads. Otherwise, it turns into a cartoon. Thinking up the plan to save the old folks’ home led to the granddad Ray character, then the other elderly characters, then the slow motion chase. That slo-mo chase is probably the best idea I will ever have, ever. I’ve peaked, may as well pack it in now.

The other thing that makes me proud is putting together what I call ‘a feel-good family horror comedy’. I wanted it to be a fun ride, leave people laughing and cheering and wanting to see it again. I’ve had lots of messages from people saying they watched with their families, kids, and grandparents, who all enjoyed it. Bizarrely, it’s one of the warmest things I’ve written, despite the gore, swearing, and violence…

Did you approach the script any differently than Severance or Tower Block? Playing it more for laughs, etc.

Whenever I write anything, I have a natural tendency to overload it with humour, and then have to pull it back depending on the project. For this, I was able to relax and let it be as funny as it wanted to be. It ended up way more comedic than any of us thought, but it felt right – like I said before, if you see that title and decide you want to see the movie, you’re going to expect a lot of laughs.

The thing I didn’t do differently was coming up with believable characters who react to extraordinary situations in as realistic a way as possible. You have to buy their reactions, their hopes, dreams, and fears, so you have a spine to hang the scares and laughs from (mostly laughs in this case). I always try to do that with my characters, even when things get really silly. And my number one goal in a horror film is having a solid storyline that would be enough for a movie even without the horror stuff happening, which then gets derailed when things kick off. That’s why horror films are harder than people realise because you’re writing two movies at once.

What’s harder to write for you – comedy or drama/horror? Film or TV?

It’s all equally hard, or easy, depending on the day. Sometimes it flows, sometimes it drags. If any of them were easier, I’d just do that all the time! Although I do find it takes longer to do anything non-genre because you can’t usually shake things up by dropping in a serial killer, zombie, alien, or explosion.

How hands-on were you on set?

I was on set quite a lot, particularly the first day and any big dialogue days – mainly to watch and have fun, as my job was done – but also to be an extra pair of eyes, a helping hand if necessary. Sometimes they might want an alternate line, or to trim a scene back a bit, so I’d be there to offer up my brain. But that all goes through Matthias – he’s in charge when we’re on set, so I only did things if he cleared them first. You have to have one person in charge or it’s chaos. I also got to be an extra, twice – once as a scared customer in the bank scene, once as a zombie outside the bank. Although my zombie sequence was cut – the other actors were all jealous of how brilliant my acting was, probably.

The film’s a few years old now, has gone down really well, and is about to be screened on UKTV for the first time thanks to Horror Channel, is there anything you’d like to say to people who haven’t yet seen it?

It was made with a lot of love and passion, by people who love zombies, horror, splatter, and fun. It’s rude, sweary, gory, but has plenty of warmth and heart. I’m so proud of what we all did, so turn the volume up, have a drink, get some friends over, and watch with a crowd. If you think you’ll like it, you definitely will. If you think you won’t, give it half an hour and see. Horror Channel is definitely the place to see this, and I’m hugely honoured that it’s going to be on there. The cast are amazing, Matthias directs it beautifully, we’ve got lots of great zombie gags, and Richard Briers with an Uzi. Frankly, if the thought of Richard Briers shooting an Uzi doesn’t excite you, I don’t think we can be friends.

COCKNEYS VS ZOMBIES is screened on Horror Channel in the UK on November 4th. Sky 319, Virgin 149, Freeview 70, Freesat 138.

Pete Ploszek is an American actor best known for his roles as Garrett Douglas on the series Teen Wolf and Leonardo in the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films. We caught up with him to find out what it’s like to be a Ninja turtle…

STARBURST: What is it like to be the leader of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?
Paul Ploszek: It’s such a dream come true. Getting the chance to step into these shoes and giving the fans the chance to meet the things they fell in love with when growing up. It’s a real special opportunity.

Talk us through the process of acting the role a giant sword wielding mutant whilst in a motion capture costume?
The suit and the head gear are a challenge to become comfortable inside all the technology. As actors, we had that journey with the first movie. By the second movie, the hard part was over. Eventually, it all disappears and you concentrate on the acting. It’s the humour and brotherly love that brings these characters to life. We really got to hit the ground running and move the story forward.

Let’s scroll back to the first ever time you played Leonardo. What was it like on the first day of the first movie?
It was pretty amazing. We started with the snow chase sequence. With all the technology and cameras around, we just had to figure it out from day one. They had us on a hydraulic press on the back of a truck and we were moving in every direction imaginable, all why we were trying to figure out how it all worked. Luckily we had those big turtle shells on our back and they were good cushions.

Some of the scenes in the new movie seem to be entirely CG. How do you prepare to fight Krang when he’s not even there?
Two things. One, the producers and makers of the film give us a lot of pre-vis renders of what the large sequences are supposed to look out, so we can imagine how the sequences are going to pan out. The other thing is that a lot of these scenes can now be filmed in a real world environment without blue-screens or green-screens. That’s really us on the streets of New York City. So we get a unique blend of the two. It lets you create that reality. The four of us work great together and had each other’s backs.

So take us through the Technodrome scene.
That was entirely CG and shot on a mo-cap stage. You’re really doing a lot of imaginative work yourself. We see a low-grade render, but really it’s all up to you. So you go big and you don’t apologise for it. You give the geniuses at ILM as much material to work with as you can. Really they deserve all the credit.

The Turtles are famously brothers, first and foremost. How did you form that bond with your fellow actors?
It really comes down to spending time with each other so you can build that trust in front of the camera. When Raph and Leo fight, it comes from the mutual respect that Alan and I had for each other so we could really take the gloves off and go for it. So there’s a lot of that, spending time on set. We all learned how to do motion capture together, so that helped form a bond.

Did you grow up with the Turtles?
Yes, Absolutely. When I got the role, it was nuts. The Turtle films are my first movies, so they were so many dreams coming true for me. Then I realised, oh man, I’d better not screw this up.

What would you love to do with the character of Leonardo?
I think we did a great job of humanising these guys. It’s cool to dig into that. I think the comics have dug into his dark side and I’d love to do the whole father/son journey. If I remember the comics, he gets his arm chopped off at one point, and Donnie tries to fix him. I love that stuff – that would be fun to do.

Stephen Amell is Casey Jones in this movie. How was it on set?
What was so great about working with Stephen was our first scene with Casey was also the first time we met Stephen. So that was great to work with and we really sparked off each other. It was his first time working with mo-cap actors, so it went well.

Is the superhero movie going away anytime soon?
I don’t think so, not as long as they continue to ground them and keep them accessible. I think they’ll stick around. Deadpool was a good example of re-invention. If they stick to CGI effect driven stories, maybe not. Marvel are obviously the masters of mixing serious with fun.

What’s your favourite genre thing?
Sci-fi and fantasy, because they are such different worlds, it becomes so much fun. It’s pure play and invention.

What’s next for you?
Teen Wolf. I get to play a Nazi Werewolf, believe it or not. Quite a departure from Leo the leader.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Out of The Shadows is out on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD now.

Marcus Nispel is a director who has managed to do something that many often feel is near-impossible: he actually made a good horror remake. Twice! As well as helming the well-received redoes of both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th, Nispel is also the man behind Pathfinder and the reboot of Conan. The Asylum, the German director’s latest movie, sees him handling his own idea and story from scratch, putting together a sinister, creepy, and often humourous movie that is sure to appeal to long-standing fans of the horror genre.

We were lucky enough to grab some time with Nispel to discuss The Asylum, the pressures of remakes, the difference in creating his own story, for him to educate us on the Manson family, and a whole host more.

STARBURST: The Asylum is your latest film, although in some markets people may know it as Backmask or Exeter…

Marcus Nispel: Yeah, there’s a sure-fire way to confuse just about anyone! It beats me. Originally we called it Backmask because of a major part in the movie. We had to shorten the first act a little bit – it was somewhat of a MacGuffin, and a lot of people didn’t even know what it meant anymore, which shocked me because it shows how I’m aging. Exeter is the place that we shot it, so we gave it that name, but apparently that’s meaningless in the UK and you guys get your own title.

Yep, we get The Asylum, which is a pretty straightforward title.

That gets me, because I like to be a little but puzzled when I read a title. I didn’t know what Apocalypse Now meant when I read the English title that they used in Germany when I grew up there. I didn’t know what an exorcist was when I read that for the first time. It’s strange. What beats me is aren’t there like a whole bunch of “asylum” movies out there already? And I have a Facebook friend who has an “asylum” TV show coming out in Europe and England around about the same time.

Now you put the screenplay for the film together with Kirsten Elms, but where did the initial idea for the story come from?

What triggered it was that Steven Schneider was introduced to me. He just came from Paranormal Activity and Insidious and those movies, and he said “Let’s do one together”. I said that it sounded good and that we could do it for very little money but have more creative control than we’d ever had before. He asked me to write one page about what I would wanna do and then he could tell me if he wanted to do this or not. I was thinking about it. You see, I never thought that another exorcism movie would be possible after The Exorcist. To me, that’s the perfect movie, the perfect horror movie. I thought that I would like to approach that but I would want it to happen to the actual guys that go and watch these movies. An exorcism movie is usually with an Ellen Burstyn, a movie star, a Gregory Peck-type. I said “What happens to the guys who see these movies, the bunch of slackers?” So when I presented it to Steven he liked it because he felt that a lot of the irreverence is missing in these new horror movies; they all take themselves very serious. That’s probably a good thing, but we wanted to do something different. I said, “Look, here’s something I want to tell you going in – it’s not going to be a remake and it’s not going to be a found footage movie!”

There was a stage where every horror film seemed to be a found footage at a certain point a few years ago…

Well I’m responsible for a whole bunch of remakes and he’s responsible for the found footage stuff. We had to do something different here now . I want to make sure I get to do something that the studios won’t let me do.

The thing that’s so impressive with yourself is how you handled your remakes. Critics and fans love to bash remakes, but you did the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th, both of which were remakes that were largely received in a positive way. Those films managed to find new audiences but largely keep on-side the existing fanbase. How did you manage to get that so right?

You’re being very kind. Look, I was young and I needed the money , I’m from Germany. When I grew up, a lot of movies that came out in America would appear in Europe sometimes a year later. They didn’t come out like those Marvel movies all over the globe and on the same weekend. They needed to be translated, at least for us. If a movie like Conan would come out, I would read the reviews from America, I would get the soundtrack, I would get the action figures… and it was still half a year until it was on German screens. So what did you do in the meantime? You acted it out in the sandbox. You acted it out in the treehouse. By the time the movie came out, if it was great or not, you were so charged, you were so amped up. You made the movie in your mind. Rarely it was what you envisioned. So the movies, even the ones I wasn’t allowed to see at the time, I would hear about through Mad Magazine way before I got to see them. So I don’t come from the fanboy who grew up with the genre or a particular movie corner. I came from the guy who had to imagine the movie before he even got to see the movie. This is not a carbon copy from somebody who saw the film for the first time without that mental fill-in I can see, but that’s not necessarily what I went out to do. And here’s another thing, what’s your three favourite horror movies?

I’d likely have to say Halloween, Jaws and The Thing…

Okay, so that makes you pretty much my age or you’ve just got good taste. Most people will give you titles that they have seen from when they were exposed to horror for the first time, when they were probably 17 to 20. In 3 years, there’s going to be 6 or 7 titles that you’re going to like, then from there on it’s going to stop working for you. You actually wonder why people watch that stuff because it is the same scares over and over again. So for me it was going back to stuff that I liked back then and making it appropriate for me rather than creating a carbon copy.

It was really refreshing to see how well received your remakes were. Your Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one of the first of that wave of remakes, and everyone seemed to really enjoy it.

None of them were the sort of movie that I thought I had to do first. I come from an auteur filmmaker country where people like Herzog come from. I’m not supposed to make a remake from the horror genre. So for me it was a very frustrating time to get my first movie in America. I was a music video filmmaker and I’d just get certain type of scripts, like House Party and stuff like that. That was the reality of that. And then one day I had Texas Chainsaw Massacre sent to me. I actually got really mad at my agent because I didn’t want to make a remake, I wanted to do something authentic, something that comes out of me and tells people who I am. Then I bitched about it to my D.P., Daniel Pearl. He’s been my D.P. as long as I can think back, with the music videos and the commercials and stuff. He shot the original when he was fresh out of film school. I said, “Daniel, this is blasphemy. They’re remaking your movie and they’ll screw it up!” And he says, “Well you’ve got to direct it.” I asked him why and he said, “If you’re going to direct it, you’re gonna hire me and I’m gonna make the same movie twice. Once at the beginning of my career and once at the end of my career.” At the same point I was so frustrated that I didn’t get to do what I wanted to do. So I was like, “Fuck it! Let’s just do it, let’s go for it.” And then nearly 2 months later we were done. It was very, very fast. But in the process I got to like the genre, I got to like the actors and I got to like the process. And it’s a great genre because you don’t necessarily have to work with celebrities. I like the idea of working with people where you don’t know who’s going to die next. With Bruce Willis you know he’s gonna be alive at the end of the move, right? And very often working with celebrities makes it a very different experience.

With The Asylum, this is the first time that you’ve really created your own story from scratch. The likes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, Pathfinder and Conan were all adapted from an existing property, so how different was it for you in that regard?

Well the relation of a director and the studio is kind of like the relationship between a farmer and his mule. When you do a remake it’s even more so the case. You become like a dog of many masters. Even though I tried to find a lot of freedom in that, at the end there’s a certain rulebook and certain expectations that you have to live up to. When you get known for that then you just get more of that. And I just wanted to break out of that. It was genre again, but it’s going to be my genre and I wanted to do something very, very different. One idea was of doing an amateur exorcism. In fact, I would remake just about any movie if I could cast just amateurs to be in it. It’s just, like, more fun. The other thing was I wanted to do something different in structure. It’s a weird thing now where when you make a movie, people wanna know what type of movie they’re gonna watch from the movie and the first 2 minutes. I wanna fuck with their heads a little bit, so we did something, and I don’t wanna give too much away here, I wanted to breach styles. I wanted to start like one of those House Party movies, then the second act is like a paranormal movie, and then the third act is a downright slasher movie. People don’t know what hits them, right? If I tell my wife it’s a slasher movie, she’s not going to go and see it. These are all things you can’t do when you make a remake of a movie called Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

And The Asylum certainly keeps you on your toes, flipping between horror subgenres and even having an element of The Thing at one point.

With this it’s a bit of a mystery, which usually these movies are not. The only mystery in these movies that I’ve done in the past is who’s gonna get it next and how. When we were writing it, when we wrote the outline, it seemed to me to be obvious that after page 25 the first head should roll. But when we did it, I was like “Why don’t we wait much longer?” I enjoy too much the amateurs trying to figure things out. The moment you stir them up and send them screaming, that’s over. Also we broke what a normal horror movie would do right now, in particular a slasher flick, by not having the blood splashing early. It was the kind of movie where we could do that. I expect there’s zero expectations for the film right now, and I prefer it like that. You do a movie like Conan, you do a movie like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the expectations go crazy before you even get started. When we did Friday the 13th, in the end I wanted to reveal Jason’s face, I wanted the mask to fall off and I wanted to show some guy really pitiful, almost like a child, like a humungous child. The producers go to Comic Con and some boy dressed up like Jason comes up to them, some fanboy, and he goes “Dude, whatever you do you don’t show Jason’s face ever.” They came back and they were so terrified, saying how we needed to take that out and reshoot. You know, it was like feeling like you were on a leash; anybody can give their opinion but you. And I get it. I’m very curious what they’re going to do with Star Wars. That’s holy to me. But then are any of the movies being made that holy?

We were actually lucky enough to speak to Derek Mears a few months back and he’s just the nicest guy and a huge, huge Jason Voorhees fan, which is always great to see from someone working in the genre.

Isn’t it crazy? He’s the softest, sweetest guy. And he does cage fighting! He’s just such a really cool guy. And here’s the same thing – we were doing the trailer, and Jason to me always seemed like a UPS guy or a FedEx guy, sort of a lumbering guy in an overall, so I go “This guy kept himself alive living in the wild. Surely he can walk at a certain speed?” That was always a big decision when zombies were allowed to run. And this guy can run! We put it in the trailer and immediately got an outpouring: “Jason can’t run!” Fuck yeah, now he does!

Flipping back to The Asylum, there’s a great chemistry between the core group of characters and plenty of humour, such as the group trying to find an exorcism guideline online.

My wife is the voiceover .

The humour in The Asylum does catch you a little off guard initially, but it works well with the tone.

I’m really glad you say so because every day I would take about the balance between funny and serious. Yes they’re amateurs, but they can get seriously hurt. I’m glad you liked the cast. This is the one thing I really take pride in. I’m sort of a questionable filmmaker and I sort of feel myself through the medium and have fun with it, but the one thing I do take great pride in is to get nice ensembles together. Whenever we started this people would ask what movie should we watch, and I’d always say nothing but in the end I’d make them watch Breaking Away. It’s kind of odd to be making a horror movie and telling them to watch Breaking Away, but I think it’s just a fantastic movie and I care about every one of those characters. There’s no bad guy here or there’s no good looking blonde guy who’s an asshole and the villain, but on this one I wanted to like them all.

There’s clearly a strong chemistry between the core group of actors in The Asylum. Is that something that came naturally for them or is it something that you purposely worked on with them?

It was absolutely natural. They started like that, they all became best friends. You should see them on Facebook, pulling each other’s legs! It’s a real joy for me. Sometimes you go and do a movie and people get very jaded on both sides of the camera. That’s why I like these kind of movies because everybody’s excited to make them, everybody’s sort of a fan of the genre, and those kids just wanna have fun. The hardest thing was to cut the first act down.

What elements of those cuts can you tell us about?

It just simply enough was down to people not having an idea of what backmasking was. It was just the MacGuffin so it was easy to take out. We took 10 minutes of backmasking out. In a way I didn’t necessarily disagree with it because I knew that I couldn’t just have them party forever – I needed to create the sense of a threat.

Just as important as the cast is the actual location. The very spooky building that the film was based in, that’s a real place?

You know what’s funny? They said that there was a team who wanted to do the movie with me who were based in Rhode Island. If you say Rhode Island to me then I think of white picket fences, beautiful churches and a Dennis the Menace sort of world. I don’t associate it with horror movies at all. So I went on the Internet, like something out of the movie, and I just Googled “scary locations in Rhode Island”. Up comes Exeter immediately, and not only is it scary but it’s supposedly the most haunted place in America. The moment we decided to shoot there, these paranormal TV shows called me up to see how I’d got in there as they’d been trying for years to get in there. It was like their wet dream. On a funny side-line, when we wrote it we had no idea where we would go. First of all, do we shoot it in a regular house? No, they need to be confined somehow. Maybe there’s a mental asylum, maybe there’s a background story, maybe after the mental asylum they closed it down and reopened it as a branch of rehab of some sort. We arrived there and nobody had been in that building for 50 years. It was cemented closed. We were the first ones to break through it. When we went in it was like a time capsule; the ceilings collapsed and were on the floor, there was soil in there with stuff growing on it. The neighbouring building, part of it was still open. I said, “What’s that thing there?” They said, “Oh, it burnt down and then they reopened it as a rehab.” That was the scariest, the weirdest thing that happened in Exeter. I’ve got nothing supernatural to report but that blew me away. It was exactly like real life following fiction.

Considering where you were shooting, how did the cast and the crew find it on site?

They loved it. I like to put them in a real situation that I prefer to a stage. So I really liked that we were in a real place. On the acting, Schneider called me up while we were getting ready to shoot the movie and said “Wouldn’t it be great to shoot the movie in real time, then everything happens over 2 hours or a day?” Then I wanted to take it even further and do it without a cut. I’d just seen La Casa Muda, the Uruguayan movie where it was just one take. I loved that. So the first draft was without a cut. If you look at the movie now, it’s six kids in a circle spinning a bottle, six kids in a circle doing levitation, six kids in a circle doing an exorcism. It’s always six kids in a circle, so I tried to lay it out in such a way so that we could play this with them in one room and the camera always keeps on moving. Then later on I was like, “You know what? It was a good exercise in austerity but I really do need to make cuts and it would be scarier then.” But it was good to have gone through the discipline of writing it that lean that you could technically do it this way. Because of that, because of being written this way, it meant that you could shoot it in sequence.

And were there any films you drew inspiration from when you were putting this movie together?

Well in a way almost all of them. In a way it’s not an honest remake but it’s taking the piss out of everything that was ever remade. It’s great because we’ve all seen them. It’s very easy to talk to the writer, to talk to the cast, because they always would know exactly what to do. Actually, the little kid , he wasn’t fluent in those movies. So when the exorcism happens, I told him to try some process kind of similar to The Exorcist. Then I’d always get this look… I was thinking and I realised that he was heavily into heavy metal and rock ‘n’ roll and he plays guitar. He’d really much rather be a musician, I guess. So I said to him “Mosh pit!” And that just worked, he knew exactly what to do. He surprised us. Those were the magic words.

Going forward, are you looking to stay in the horror genre or are you maybe looking to branch out a little bit?

I’m looking to branch out. As I keep telling people, this is just a mad foray into comedy . I don’t know if it’s going to be comedy. I don’t think I’d be trusted with that. But I like the way that we went about it; write the script, don’t take anybody’s minor advice, do you thing and hope to find somebody who’s into it, then make it for a price and get off the leash a little bit.

Is there anything you’re working on at the moment that you can tell us about?

I’m doing something. I guess I can talk about it. Living here in Los Angeles and coming in as a foreigner, you come in with a healthy disrespect of all the celebrity worship and just how the town ticks. You look at it with awe. I revisited Charlie Manson. I looked at the story of Manson and the family. When I read up on it, I got very, very much into it through a good friend who turned me on to it. I realised that the story about Manson and his family has very little to do with the reality. We think of him as some sort of an outsider and a cult that was holed away somewhere. The reality is that the guy was a complete industry insider. He was obsessed with fame and stardom. He loved The Beatles, we all know that, but few people know that he developed a screenplay for Steve McQueen, that he hung out with The Beach Boys and recorded the B-side album with them, that he would go to parties where Warren Beatty would be and be very fluent with those people, Dennis Hopper was a guy he would hang out with at parties. And I didn’t know any of this. This is actually really like Boogie Nights of the Hollywood system. What bent him out of shape at the end was the fact that Terry Melcher, who was Doris Day’s son and the producer of The Monkees, did not hire him to become one of The Monkees. So he goes, “Let’s kill the guy.” Melcher was married to Candice Bergen at the time and they’d moved out of Cielo Drive. When Manson came with a machete to kill them, the door got opened by Sharon Tate. She was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Having read Peter Biskind’s books on that time period, in particular Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Star, that’s the first time I’ve actually heard about that…

He told you in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, there’s a thing where they wind up at a party with the Easy Rider producers and they just popped up there. They were involved in the whole party circuit because they brought the drugs and the girls. On a funny note, we live in a small little beach house here. It’s a tiny place but it’s a big part of the Peter Biskind books, as Julia Phillips… it was her house. So the whole beach gang hung out here. I wanted John Milius originally to write Pathfinder. He showed up here and showed me bullet holes in the ceiling and said “That was my Luger in ’73!”

And what can people expect from your Manson tale?

People might look at it and say that I’m going back to my old tricks of slashers and psycho killers, but the movie’s actually over before all of that happens. It’s just about what builds up to it. Again, I looked at Boogie Nights. Really, if you read into it they’re all amateurs, they’re not born to do that, they just figure stuff out as they go along. It’s just a very different way of looking at it.

The Asylum is screened on Horror Channel on October 21st
 

Fabio Frizzi is an Italian composer best known for his work with legendary director Lucio Fulci on several films including Zombi 2 and The Beyond. On October 29th, Fabio will return to Union Chapel in London for Chills in the Chapel, a performance that will include some updated versions of his most famous scores set against film clips and visuals.

The maestro took some time to sit down with STARBURST to discuss Vangelis, music sampling and, of course, working with Fulci.

STARBURST: You’ve spoken in the past about how influential you believe Vangelis to be, and perhaps how he has never received enough credit. You’ve also talked about his style of keeping the same central theme running through a score. Could you talk about that a little?
Fabio Frizzi: The soundtrack I love so much is Blade Runner; it is my movie and one I’ve seen more than thirty times. Each time, though, I find something new – some new meaning or feeling. The music is perfect, a work of poetry. I love many musicians but here Vangelis was perfect. When I write I have one melody that is fundamental; something that you can remember. My search is always for that one interesting melody with one great harmony.

One of your scores, Stiamo Bene Insieme (Italian TV series beginning in 2002), features an incredibly catchy melody.
I’m happy to talk about this because for people like me, who write mainly for cinema, we never get to talk about our work on television. I’ve done so much on TV in the last fifteen years. For me, though, it’s the same as movies. You still have to do a lot of music, the process is the same, but with Stiamo Bene Insieme, I loved the story, about students living together. I am very proud of that music.

What you’re most known for is your music on Zombi 2, but the soundtrack to The Beyond is perhaps your most revered. Could you talk about your work with director Lucio Fulci?
My long relationship with Fulci is very important in my life. The Internet has now made those films and Fulci explode. No matter where you go in the world you find people who know those films and want to talk to you about them. Zombi 2 and The Beyond are the biggest two, though. Interestingly, we’ve just done a new and updated score for The Beyond which we’ll play live sometime soon. For the original recording, though, we had fifty-two songs! Not everything could go in the film which is why I wanted to revisit it. At the beginning, I’d never done a horror, though.

Why do you think directors and composers often have such a strong relationship?
What comes to mind first is Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone. There were friends at school and throughout their life. For a moviemaker, the music is vitally important as it can change the sense of your project. If it works once, where the music and the movie go well together, then next time you work together again.

As someone considered a pioneer of electronic music, how proud are you that there are composers such as Mica Levi (Under The Skin) are still pushing the boundaries?
I have listened to Mica Levi’s score and it’s good. When I was younger, I was wilder and more experimental but now I’m older, probably not so much. Back then, every day there was something new; a new guitar or a new synthesiser. We tried many crazy things. With Mica, she is a sound composer more than a music composer, and it’s good to listen to new things. For me, I also listen to Bach or King Crimson for inspiration.

You say you were more experimental when you were younger so has your process for writing changed?
Everything is basically the same. Whether you sit at a computer or with a piece of paper, it’s still very similar. No matter where you are you can still compose if the music comes to you. You cannot do anything without a start, though. I love to work as I used to though.

Your music has been sampled a lot; what are your thoughts on that?
I think that you can look at everything in a positive or negative way. In Italy we have a phrase that means as long as they’re speaking about you, it’s okay. For me, it is kind of a symbol for success. Obviously, I’m happier if they ask first, either me or my agent, but I never ask for money as music is so difficult to make. On the whole, though, I’m always happy and proud.

For tickets or more information regarding Chills In The Chapel visit unionchapel.org.uk/events/29-oct-16-chills-in-the-chapel

In her relatively short career, Australian Lucy Fry has proved herself to be a talented and diverse actor. Her debut feature Vampire Academy may have been poorly received, but it led to roles in Warner Bros. Stephen King adaptation 11.22.63 and horror film The Darkness. Working with director Greg McLean on the latter led to her being offered the part of Eve in the television series Wolf Creek. Lucy took some time to sit down with us to talk Mick Taylor, vampires and going to dark places.

STARBURST: Did Wolf Creek come about for you directly from your work with Greg McClean on The Darkness?

Lucy Fry: Yeah, absolutely. When he was looking to cast this role he thought of me right away, I guess because he already knew my work. It was going to be a really intense shoot out in the desert and he knew I had the resilience to get through it.

Did you realise exactly what you were getting into with Wolf Creek and Mick Taylor?

I’d put off watching the films until I was working on The Darkness with Greg as the idea just scared me, it being influenced by real events, and I was terrified of Mick Taylor. When I read the script and saw it was about a victim who then turns around and stands up to him, I knew it was something I had to do.

John Jarratt is quite a character – what was it like meeting him?

You get what you get!

What is it in Eve’s character that changes, leading her into what she becomes?

I think a big part of it is in her athletics training, having worked towards going to the Olympics. She has this determination and focus that is quite extreme and more heightened than most people. When this tragedy happens to her she could so easily just be a victim but she chooses to try and take her power back. It’s such a crazy, suicidal thing she does that’s its almost out of hopelessness.

When we meet Eve she’s at a pretty low point.

She has nothing to lose or live for when her family is gone so she then just lives for revenge.

She does go to some pretty dark places. Was it difficult to get into her mindset?

Eve’s very dark, although maybe not so much at the start. Then she gets progressively more twisted in order to face this killer. It’s definitely the toughest mindset I’ve had to get into but I guess it came about quite easily . It’s quite strange, once you open that door into the shadowy side of humanity, it’s very easy to access. Watching John too, he’s so brilliant as he knows how to go there so I was learning from him while Eve was learning from Mick. What was hard, though, was getting out of it.

You’ve had some varied roles in your relatively short career; how do you choose?

It’s really exciting for me to play lots of different people. All the character’s I’ve been involved with have been so varied and have given me the chance to explore different backgrounds and voices and people. I’ve been very lucky.

Your debut film Vampire Academy received a tough time from some quarters. Since then have you made a conscious decision to avoid franchise films and just go your own way?

Vampire Academy was my first film and I was so lucky to be involved, and it did open a lot of doors for me. I’ve worked a lot with coaches since, though, and tried to ground my work a little more. I enjoy doing both television and film as they offer different things. A film to me is more like a poem, a set time, but I couldn’t have played a character like Lucy anywhere other than television as she needed time to develop.

What will we see you in next?

I don’t think I’m actually allowed to say. I’m really excited though and I think it will be announced pretty soon. It’s another mythological creature but done in a very different way. And it’s an original concept and not from a book. I’m just into the training now. I can say how excited I am but I can’t say anymore!

Wolf Creek: the TV Series is out now on DVD and Blu-ray.

One of the most enjoyable genre shows of 2016 has been FOX’s Lucifer. Loosely based on the Vertigo comic book series of the same name, Lucifer centres on Lucifer Morningstar as he gets bored of his position as the Lord of Hell, instead opting to leave his throne behind and explore Los Angeles where he ends up helping out the LAPD. With Season 1 out on DVD later this month, and with the second season now available on Amazon Prime, we caught up with devilish star Tom Ellis to discuss this fan favourite genre show.

STARBURST: Lucifer is such a brilliant concept, but what drew you to the show? Was it an audience process or were you hunted down?

Tom Ellis: It was a bit of both, actually. I was over in the States – I’d done a show a couple of years ago called Rush. When Rush was no longer, I found myself in pilot season again. I was sent a lot of scripts to read, and a lot of them were very sort of same-y. Then one day I pulled this script out of my bag, Lucifer, and I thought “Oh God, here we go”, and I opened it up, and by about the third page I was thinking that this is what I want to do. It was great, really funny. It was so much funnier than all of the scripts I’d read, including the comedy scripts. There was just something about it that really drew me in. It was a joyful read, just really entertaining. I just thought about how I’d love to do this job because it had a lot of potential. I then went to go and meet Len Wiesman, who’d just been brought on as a director, and it was pretty much an instantaneous bromance. Basically, because we had a shared feeling about the script, about the character, and I think he was really down with the way that I had seen the character, and that was it really. Len championed me to Warner Brothers and FOX, and I think they didn’t take much persuading really because I think they were fans of Rush. It was about trying to find the right thing to do, and this seemed like the perfect fit.

When you got that script through and it says Lucifer on it, and it’s in amongst the many scripts that you’ve had, what was your expectation when you saw that? Were you thinking some sort of ‘generic horror’ type of affair?

Yes! A lot of people ask me whether I was a fan of the comics. True story, I got the job and then the day it was announced on Deadline.com, I read the article and it said “blah, blah, new series based on the comic book, blah, blah…” I was just like, “What?!”. In a way I’m kind of glad that I was a bit ignorant on that side of things, because my choices that I made about the character were made purely on the scripts that I had in front of me. I’ve done quite a few pilot seasons, and over the years I’ve started to learn about what I don’t want to do. Obviously reading the front page of this and seeing Lucifer, you’re thinking “Gosh, what is this going to be? Some sort of weird devil story?”, but it was just so fun and engaging. My sort of surprise about the script, and I think it’s been reflected by our audience… there’s been a lot of people say to me about how surprised they’ve been, how it’s not what they thought it would be and that it’s really funny. So I think it’s been a nice surprise all round.

When you realised that it was based on a comic book, did any trepidation kick in at the thought that there was a fanbase already out there that would be expecting to see certain things?

I suppose there was. With that comes a lot of people who are die-hard fans of the comic. But from the start, we always sort of said that this is ‘inspired by’ the comic. At no point did we try and make this a literal translation of it. In actuality, we’re trying to make a network TV show with potentially 22 episodes a season. We’ve got to find a way to make that work in a new format. The one thing that’s always stayed the same is the essence of the character; it’s been the same from the start and I’ve tried to keep that as true to the first scripts that I read. But I think that the way that this show has gone, the people that were feeling begrudgingly we were not doing service to the comic book have sort of come around now and accepted it as a different entity and accepted it for what it is – which is just an entertaining, fun TV show. And also, I think we’ve broadened our audience by doing that. There’s lots of people watching this show that wouldn’t normally sit down to watch a comic book-based thing.

You mentioned how there’s lots of humour throughout Lucifer, but there’s also a very dark, serious tone to it at times. How difficult was it to make sure that that was well balanced rather than going too funny or too dark?

It was a fine line that we had to walk, really. I think we earn our moments of gravity in the show by the use of humour, actually. I think with the show being funny and irreverent and the character of Lucifer sort of being funny or irreverent and saying what he wants to people, that in itself is quite funny, but to me I needed to find some moments to sort of ground it. I think this started to happen very organically. When we shot the pilot, we had a lot more time to shoot than when you actually go in to series. Len and I were experimenting when we were shooting, really, with different levels of stuff. We weren’t sure how it was all going to come together in the end, but we thought that if we gave ourselves enough options then we knew that we could plot our way through it. When we had that in place and the pilot was fixed, then I had something to work with.

When this was all coming together, were you aware of all of the petitions from people trying to get the show shut down before it even got going?

I think I would be naive to think that to do a show in this day and age called Lucifer that there wouldn’t be some people that were a bit unhappy about that. I mean, the truth of the matter is a lot of these people that were up in arms and petitioning against the show hadn’t even seen it. To me, that says a lot more about them than it does about our show. But I think the thing that makes me smile is when I get messages on social media from people who contact me and say, “Hi, I’m a Christian but I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been watching the show and think it great”. And they take it for what it is, and that’s all we hope that people can do. But there’ll always be haters out there.

It’s like when Kevin Smith was getting death threats whilst working on Dogma. When religion comes into play, people start to get a little tetchy…

They do, they do. I don’t think we really indulge the religious aspect of it, and I think we’ve always been clear about the fact that our source material that we’re drawing this character from is a comic book, not ‘the big book’. Let’s be clear about that.

Was it a bit ominous to be tackling the heavy topics of Heaven, Hell, God, demons, etc?

I suppose so. One of the things I’ve always been keen on is to try and sort of find some grounding aspects to that, so that it’s not just this kind of mythical thing. We’re referring to Heaven as ‘home’ or Hell as ‘home’, and actually really thinking about what a home is to a person. Rather than get carried away with the whole scale of that kind of thing, just to treat it as. For example, for my relationship with Amenadiel, D.B. Woodside and I sat down and talked about the fact that we wanted to try and get the idea that these two brothers were brothers and had grown up together; that they had a proper sibling rivalry, they used to fight in their bedroom and all that sort of stuff. We were trying to find elements that ground the show.

And before we let you go, what can you tell us about Season 2? How big a role was Lucifer’s mother have to play, and can we expect a longer, full season this time around?

We go out in the Fall, so we are essentially a full season this time. We’re doing 13 episodes at the start of it, then there’s the potential to do another 9 on the back. In terms of storyline, I don’t know an awful lot is the truth . What I would say, though, is one of the big storylines of Season 2 is going to be about Lucifer’s mum, who she is, what she represents, what effect she has on him. I think for the first time, at the end of Season 1, you see Lucifer’s quite scared. It’s going to add a new dynamic to the show, for sure.

The first season of Lucifer is available on DVD from October 17th, whilst Season 2 is now showing on Amazon Prime Instant Video.