Feature Category: Interviews

Remnant is the latest short film from Scottish filmmaker Andy Stewart, who is no stranger to STARBURST, having had his fabulous debut Dysmorphia highlighted by us last Halloween.

The film will have its world premiere at Celluloid Screams in Sheffield this October, just prior to the eagerly-anticipated shocker Goodnight Mommy. We caught up with Andy to find out more about his latest venture…

STARBURST: Tell us a little about Remnant…
Remnant is actually plucked from a feature script that I had written a year or so ago. The decision to lift from that project and go ahead with it as a short for now was in response to a few comments I had heard and a borne out of a personal fear that I was at risk of becoming a little bit predictable.

Remnant is a little bit different to my other films insofar as it centres on a female protagonist and contains practically no gore. That’s not to say that there isn’t some weird and disturbing stuff in there, but it’s certainly a lot lighter on the gore.

The film is about a girl called Claire who is suffering from disturbed sleep, nightmares etc. She is waking up in weird places with zero recollection as to how she got there. As her condition worsens, it has a knock-on effect on her work and health.

We brought back much of the same crew that worked on INK, with Alan C McLaughlin back as the cinematographer and Grant Mason back handling FX. We also got really lucky with the cast. We lost an actress a couple of weeks before the shoot, which caused a lot of stress and grief until I met with Lucy Goldie over coffee. We had a chat and I cast her there and then, without audition, something that I have done on all four of my short films to date. It feels almost serendipitous as I can’t imagine the role in the hands of anyone else now. She’s pretty fearless and I think she did a great job.

I’m also extremely honoured to have had Nicholas Vince make the trip up to appear in the film as Claire’s boss, Ian. I’m a huge Hellraiser fan, as most people know, so to work with Nick was huge to me.

Did you make a concerted decision to do something that wasn’t involving body horror?
It is certainly lighter on the body horror stuff, but it still has very clear body horror elements throughout and practical effects to match that. I didn’t want to go in a totally different direction altogether so this was my soft compromise with myself. I love body horror and I am going to keep making body horror films, but I now realise it doesn’t always have to be flat-out, balls to the wall blood and guts. There’s a place for subtlety and I think you can see that in Remnant. I DO have subtlety in me after all!

What’s happening with Redacted?
It’s been a long, old bumpy road, to be honest, and I think it was a shake-up that I needed. A reality check on exactly how hard it can be to be a filmmaker. We lost funding, lost locations, ran into FX delays. It’s been a hell of a pre-production but, fortunately, a lot of the stuff is now in place. The costumes are purchased and waiting, the creature FX has been built and is waiting. With Scottish autumn/winter creeping in, it will likely be 2016 now before we come back around to it but it is definitely coming.

Is it still your plan to move onto feature films soon?
Absolutely! I have a few scripts ready to roll, one of which is obviously a feature length version of Remnant, but I should probably wait and see how the short is received first.

Remnant is premiered at Celluloid Screams this October, are there any other screenings confirmed as yet?

None at this time. I am just super stoked to have the Celluloid Screams screening down and to be playing with Goodnight Mommy is an absolute dream come true for me. It’s terrifying too as I know that will be a busy screening and I don’t do that well introducing my films, especially for the first time, in front of a crowd. I think it will be a pretty complimentary pairing and just hope that everyone enjoys it.

Celluloid Screams takes place between October 23rd-25th, more details are at the website, and you can find out more about Andy Stewart’s films on Facebook.

Spearheaded by director Axelle Carolyn and featuring the work of Lucky McKee, Darren Lynn Bousman and Neil Marshall, Tales of Halloween is a Samhain-set anthology movie, telling ten short tales over the course of one spooky night. Carolyn and Marshall presented their movie at this year’s FrightFest, where the pair were gracious enough to sit down for a good chat about the anthology and their obvious love for the festivities therein.

STARBURST: How would you both describe Tales of Halloween?
Axelle Carolyn: It’s an indulging movie of ten stories that take place on the same night in the same town. Each movie is directed by a separate person. They’re all different in tone, but they all have a unity between them. It’s all part of a shared universe.

Neil Marshall: I did describe it as a love letter to Halloween from a bunch of people who live and breathe horror.

How did the idea come about?
AC: We used live in London and visit LA and we’d always hang out with the same people. We all met at some Fangoria convention, shared a love of the same horror. We go to the same screenings. I had the idea that it’d be cool to have something that brings everybody together. It’s a group that’s very mixed. There are a lot of directors but there’s also a lot of writers, journalists, actors and a lot of people who have that common love for the same type of films. When we moved (to LA) I came back to that idea. Then the idea of Halloween came up – a concept beyond ‘hey, let’s do something together’ and Halloween seemed like a natural idea. I’ve always been obsessed with Halloween since I was a kid.

You’ve both made horror films in the past, but none specifically during the Halloween period. So how did you go about choosing an idea for your own segments within that sandbox?
NM: In my case, I struggled. One of the great things about the project is that we were given creative freedom to do whatever we wanted. In some ways, that’s one of the worst things to be presented with. It’s such a broad spectrum of, well, what? I just couldn’t think of an idea and then, at some point, and I don’t know what triggered it off, was the idea of a pumpkin coming alive and taking revenge for all the pumpkins that get cut up and gutted every Halloween.

AC: For me, the process was really fun. Once we’d set up to do this we would all meet in the backyard of our house or the cafe all often visit, and start talking about stories and exchanging ideas. You’d pitch and you can look around and see on their faces if they were into it or not. I had a few of those where it was like, ‘I like the idea but I can see a lot of blank faces when I explain it…’ I thought ‘what can I do?’ I’d made this ghost story called Soulmate, which is a psychological drama. I love that movie but it’s not what you’d expect when you watch Insidious or something like that. I wanted to make a ghost but this time I’m going to make it scary! And it looks like it works. I’ve seen audiences jump out of their seats.

It is one of the scarier ones, where most of the others fall more on the comedy end of the spectrum. Was it always part of the plan that Tales of Halloween would veer more towards humour?
AC: Neil always says that it’s funny that you give Carte Blanche to ten directors who make horror movies and they all want to do comedies! There’s a huge variety of tones within those comedies – there’s the gross-out comedy, there’s the crazy Mike Mendez Friday the 31st story…

NM: There are different levels of humour. I don’t think any of them are played to be broad comedies, as such.

AC: Yours is so dry, I heard someone go ‘I didn’t like the one with the pumpkins because it’s really serious but they don’t seem to realise that the pumpkin is not scary!’

There’s always one.
NM: Uh-huh. I think also because the project is borne of friendship that there’s a rich sense of humour throughout anyway. Most horror people who make horror films are generally really nice people. It just naturally flowed from the material.

AC: Halloween is fun. It’s not so much a horror movie as a Halloween movie. The holiday itself is about being playful and cheeky.

We seem to be seeing quite a lot of that recently, where horror is turning away from the grimmer torture side of things, more towards the fun and action. Why do you think that might be?
NM: It just goes through phases. I think we get a bit tired of seeing the same thing over and over again. The whole torture porn thing, it went through its cycle and wore out its welcome after a while.

We’ve talked about how you, the directors, are all friends and very close, but is there anyone you wanted for Tales of Halloween but couldn’t get?
AC: Originally we had Joe Begas who did Almost Human, attached to it and then just before we started pre-production – we had his script, it was part of the full script – he had to drop out because he got greenlight for Mind’s Eye. We had another friend who we hadn’t been able to approach because he’s less often in LA. We flew him over for the shoot and that was Lucky McKee, who’d done May and The Woman, and all those films that I hugely admire. That was pretty cool.

NM: We tried to talk James Wan into joining us, but he was slightly busy doing some car movie. I don’t know (laughs). We got him a cameo instead.

Axelle, how did you find the experience of co-ordinating so many directors on one project?
AC: It was great fun. That’s not just the party line, it really was.

NM: That’s not to say that it was easy.

AC: It was fun but it was very hard at times. The first stage was putting the scripts together at preproduction. I kept saying to people ‘you have the right to do whatever you like; you just don’t have a license to suck.’ If the script wasn’t quite there, it was always a question of collecting other people’s opinions. They could do whatever they wanted with it, but it’s very strongly suggested that if you do that, you’ll have the sucky one. Nobody wants to have the sucky episode.

How did you manage that all of the interconnecting elements of the stories are carried through by each director?
AC: Once I had all the scripts, I tried to put them in a rough order that I thought was good. I had to balance out the comedies with the scary stuff. We had to make a timeline of who dies at what point so that they don’t come back in another episode. Then see what pops up.

Neil, how did you find the experience of working on a shorter film, compared to the features you’ve been known for in the past?
NM: It was the toughest shoot I’ve ever done. In terms of having three nights to shoot something that was wildly ambitious for its size. It’s only a ten minute film, but there’s a riot scene and lots of practical effects which are very time consuming. We really struggled. When we were filming the sun’s starting to come up and you’re still trying to do a night-time scene. But we got there.

AC: If this had been my first filming experience, there’s no way I’d want to be a director. It’s fun, but it’s so hard.

Unlike a lot of recent anthology movies, Tales of Halloween is notable for its absence of found footage. Was this a conscious decision when putting it together?
AC: The producers said early on, because they produced the V/H/S movies. They didn’t want to do something like that again. But Halloween’s not… there’s a visual aesthetic to it that’s very appealing and you can’t find that in found footage. And we wanted that unity of look in all the episodes.

NM: As an aesthetic, I think it’s used up now. It’s been done and we’re not really into it at all. From a practical point of view, if I’d done mine in found footage, I still have to have a practical pumpkin and if I’m shooting that on a camcorder or decent camera, it doesn’t make any difference from that point of view. It wouldn’t have made it quicker or easier or cheaper – it just would have made it look bad.

Have you been approached for any anthology movies before this one?
NM: I have been approached for one of them, but I can’t remember what…

AC: You were approached for ABCs of Death 2. We’ve been approached for V/H/S 3, but as a couple. Like, no.

NM: Again, they’re heavily dominated by found footage. Nah, not interested.

Do you think we’ll see a sequel to Tales of Halloween?
AC & NM (in unison): That’d be awesome.

NM: We’ll have to wait and see. Maybe next year. Who knows?

What’s next for you both?
AC: Right now, promoting this. Then I have a script that I’m finishing right now.

NM: I’ve just shot an episode of Westworld for HBO. I’m hopefully going to be doing a feature in January.

Finally, how do you celebrate Halloween yourself?
NM: Well, Halloween is our wedding anniversary. It’s not so much the one night as the whole season. There’s usually any number of things to do. 

AC: Last year, we had a party and we organised it at Adam Gierasch’s house. He made that episode Trick. The party was on Halloween and he filmed less than two week’s late. He just left the decorations up and we filmed in the same house. When we say that this is a movie about friendship, this is how real it is!

Tales of Halloween has yet to be given a UK release date, but you can see it at Manchester’s Grimmfest in October.

She wore shoes throughout the whole interview. 

STARBURST: How would you describe Awaiting to potential audiences?

Diana Vickers: It’s a psychological thriller; it’s a very intelligent horror film. A lot of horror films can borderline comedy sometimes, and you’ve got to be quite careful – I think it’s done really tastefully. It’s about a father and daughter who live in a house together, and he treats her like a child, and she’s very isolated from normality. He’s got the secret life of a very angry man who murders people and lied to her about her mother, and then one day he gets caught in the act with Jake… Lauren goes very Lolita with him. She’s never seen a man before in her life and acts on impulse. And then it all unravels. Shit kicks off, basically.

What attracted you to the project?

When I read the script I was automatically drawn to it. I love psychological thrillers. I read a lot. One of my favourite books is Gone Girl, and The Psychopath Test. I love watching horror, and it was just my kind of film. I’ve done a lot of comedy before and I hadn’t done a lot of drama. It felt like the right role for me. It’s very character led and the story’s so powerful.

You’ve done some acting in the past, as you said – a lot of comedy – is a horror film something you’d been wanting to do for a while?

I love doing comedy, and I was filming Give Out Girls, the Comedy Central series I do, and Kerry Howard, who is the lead, said “Diana, you need to do a horror film, because you’re so animated!” Usually I’m very animated, very big. It’s a dream – I love doing horror. I want to do more.

Your character in the film, Lauren, isn’t what you might describe as a typical female horror role in that she’s not a damsel in distress or victim…

No, she’s the person you empathise with. Everyone’s crazy and there’s a lot of anger from my father, and you’ve got Jake, who’s quite aggressive and you don’t really feel sorry for him at times. He’s an angry man and doesn’t help himself. Lauren is the innocent eyes – the person that you want to save by the end of it.

So was it a conscious effort to go for that sort of character, rather than the alternative?

Yeah! Lauren’s a strong girl – she’s a bit confused, she’s had the wool pulled over her eyes – but by the end of the film she’s really found her voice. I liked that about her; the fact that she could yell at her father and tell him all the things that he’s done wrong; that she’s a clever girl. I think that’s a more interesting character to play.

It’ll surprise a lot of people how brutal the film is. Do you think your being cast in the film was intentional, in that sense? Given that people might not expect you to appear in this sort of thing?

The director when he cast me said that he loved my audition and had no idea who I was! So I don’t think it was an intentional thing from the director. But it’s always good to shock people. That’s quite fun.

Talking of shocking people, how do you think the fans of your music and prior work will react to the film? Do you think they’ll be surprised?

I think so. It’s a different side to me. Whenever I do a gig I’m always quite funny on stage. This is nowhere near my personality, this character, so it’ll be quite strange for people to see.

It gets really violent and gory towards the end. How did you get on, dealing with all the fake blood and prosthetics there?

There were moments when it was pretty grim. I was so tired and delirious. I didn’t have any fake tears. All the tears were real. I put myself in a real headspace and I was absolutely sobbing. I was exhausted to the point where I thought I was going to faint from crying that much. It is quite intense.

How did you find that experience?

I was able to take myself away and realise what was actually happening. It was tense and hard. But we had such a great team.

How did you get on with Tony Curran, who plays your father?

Tony is fantastic. He is such a terrific actor. He’s a very real actor. He’s very curious – he wants to understand, he always questions and he made me realise that you have to do that, and really delve into the character. We were doing before a scene – it was an awful scene where he puts his arms around my neck and strangles me – and he became the character before the take without saying anything, without warning me. He was whispering awful, violent, scary things into my ear and really prepping me up. It came out of nowhere and it absolutely terrified me. It just goes to show that he’s a fantastic actor and wants to bring out the best in everyone’s performance.

As a father and daughter, your relationship onscreen is very believable.

Me, Rupert and Tony were very close. Every night we’d share a car home to the same hotel and sat up drinking every night. We bonded; we were such a tight knit. He was lovely. He used to call me ‘daughter’ and I used to call him ‘daddy’ offscreen. We were really close.

Do you think you’ll make more horror in future?

Definitely. I would love to do more. I had such a good time. I love horror.

Can you name a few of your favourite horror films?

I love The Strangers. What’s the wrinkle-my-dress? Chucky! I love The Others. What’s that one where the people have to cut their own limbs off?

Saw?

Saw! I watched that the other day. I really enjoyed that.

What about films which would have inspired Awaiting, like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre?

I have seen that but I had to turn it off. It was a bit too gory for me! But the really good thing about making a horror film, when you shoot it, you realise that all the baddies are actually really lovely people. When the take stops they’ll be like ‘I’m just going to the toilet and having a cup of tea.’ I feel like I can watch horror films now and not be as terrified!

Diana Vickers, thank you very much!

Awaiting is released on DVD on September 7th, and you can find our review here.

Tyler Shields is an American photographer whose occasionally controversial, yet unavoidably original, style has brought a certain notoriety. Final Girl is his directorial debut.

STARBURST: Final Girl feels very different, but what would you say distinguishes it from other similarly themed films?

Tyler Shields: I think that’s absolutely right. A lot of the films you see coming out now are very CGI-driven and they look the same, and they sound the same, and they have the same tone. This is the complete opposite of that; Final Girl is an homage to early cinema and contemporary Americana.

Abigail Breslin is key in her role as Veronica. What was about her that you thought made her perfect for the part?

When I met her she was only 16 years old and is so innocent looking and sweet. Not now, obviously, as I’ve seen her beat up grown men! She used to be really nice so maybe I corrupted her. You would never expect this from her and that’s why she was perfect.

Veronica’s relationship with Wes Bentley’s William is very ambiguous for much of the film. Did you come with a backstory or flesh their relationship out in the script at all?

I have my own backstory for the film. There are a lot of things people complain about in movies these days, such as not having strong female-driven films. Well, we did that. Another thing is that films try and explain everything and never let the audience make up their own mind. We wanted people to do that with William. There were times when the producers wanted us to reveal more of his story but we wanted the audience to have those questions at the end, ones that they would need to figure out themselves.

The film feels very raw, not in a “debut movie” way but in a “let’s just get to the point” way. Was that something you consciously worked towards?

One hundred percent. Why did we need to have all that explanation when you should be on a journey with the film, working things out as you go? Hopefully that works.

Have you found then that different people have taken different things from the film?

If you try to tell people how they’re supposed to think or feel about art, or anything really, then you’re going to lose them. Some people have thought one thing and others have thought something else, which is fascinating for me.

Any internet search of you brings up a certain amount of controversy…

What? Me? I don’t have any controversy !

Well you do seem to like pushing buttons and stretching boundaries, but we wondered if you found that it was difficult to find an independent voice in filmmaking?

I think that there’s an interesting thing happening with movies, and that is there are a lot of people unwilling to take risks. It’s all about the bottom dollar. They all think they don’t want to do something different because it might not work. In the past this has caused the film industry to collapse. You had Paramount, who were about to close their doors but then they took a chance on what was considered an experimental film called The Godfather. That worked out. This is an industry built around taking risks and creating worlds. It’s too easy to get caught up in what might or might not make money.

Do you feel then that you would rather just have people talk about your film then regardless of whether they like it or not or how successful it is?

You brought up the photography and the controversy, and what I’ve found is that I’ve been very fortunate for some of my work to make big news. That doesn’t happen very often. But that also means there have been people who absolutely hate the photographs and some that absolutely love them. Those polarising news stories create a dynamic. Extreme hate and extreme love are often very similar in that you’re ultimately getting that extreme reaction.

Final Girl is extremely stylish and stunning to look at. Did you feel that the aesthetic could overpower the story?

I personally don’t think that’s the case. The first time some people watch the film they might be taken aback a little. A friend of mine said that the first time he watched it he had no idea what was going on and just noticed the visuals. When he watched it again he understood the story more. It goes back to what we were saying before; I remember when we were filming in the woods and it was pouring with rain and a producer asked me if we needed so much light as nothing looked realistic. I’d been out there for about ten hours at that point, and was a little stern so I just said “It’s a movie, it’s a fantasy…get over it!”

What will we see next from you?

There is something I’m writing now, I’m about halfway through, which is the best thing I’ve ever written and it’s the most unique idea I’ve ever had but I don’t know when it might happen. There’s The Wild Ones which I wrote that’s on the Blacklist, so I may do that first, but I’ve learned so much with Final Girl that I can’t wait to get going on the next one.

Final Girl is released on DVD on September 7th.

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Following several previously successful crowd funding projects, KING Art Games has returned to adapt The Dwarves novels to PC and gaming consoles. Having launched the Kickstarter with considerable support and fanfare, STARBURST took the opportunity to sit down and speak with Narrative Designer Marco Rosenberg about their plans for the game.

STARBURST: Being based around a series of novels, will The Dwarves be sticking entirely to the main storyline, or will opportunities appear to diverge at all from the books? With author Markus Heitz involved as a project consultant, has he given blessing at all to alter how certain events played out?

Marco Rosenberg: The main story of our game is based on the first book, but there are also many additional adventures and side-quests. Markus is involved in the development. He gives us the necessary freedom to turn his book into a great game, and will even write some quests for it himself.

Most in-game footage thus far has depicted the heroes fighting hordes of orcs armed with short swords and very little else.  Can you tell us much more about the enemy variety The Dwarves will offer, and will we see much of the series’ other foes such as the Älfs?

All the enemies that appear in the book will also appear in the game: So there is a great variety, from the sinister Älfars to savage ogres. Among the orcs there are three different basic types: light, medium and heavy. Each of these types also has a couple of different classes like berserker, archer, etc.

You have cited Fire Emblem as a source of inspiration for some of the combat present in the game, featuring twelve varied main characters. Will this directly influence how the heroes operate in battle or how they will gradually progress throughout the story?

Fire Emblem is not the inspiration for our combat system, but for the idea of a huge group of heroes that you chose a few of prior to each battle. Each hero in The Dwarves has a unique backstory, opinions about the world and other characters, as well as unique skills.

What of the combat system itself? The footage shown so far seemed akin of Diablo or Dynasty Warriors in terms of scope, with a handful of heroes battling hundreds of foes at a time. What level of strategy and skill can players expect? Something akin to Dragon Age: Origins’ ability to pause and co-ordinate attacks, or something more fast paced and visceral?

Our combat system resembles DA:O more closely than Diablo or Dynasty Warriors. At the moment we’re experimenting with stop-and-play or bullet time mechanisms. Similar to Warcraft 3, our game features heroes with a limited amount of powerful special abilities and huge amounts of enemies.

One element of the game you mentioned was the way in which enemies physically reacted to certain attacks. Notably how heavy blows could drive hordes backwards and throwing them from your path. Can you express how this will alter the flow of battle or how levels have been built to make use of this combined with the flocking AI?

The physical reactions of enemies are not restricted to certain actions, but enemy and environment behaviour is constantly influenced by physics. Every action the player takes influences all of the enemies and by clever positioning of your character you can deal extra damage.

In the novel the characters visit a fair number of extremely varied locations as they travel across Girdlegard. Were there any challenges in adapting the novel’s descriptions into a video game, or favourites to work on?

All of the important locations that Tungdil visits and characters that he meets in the book made it into the game. It was a big challenge to scan all five Dwarves books for info about the huge world they take place in. Then we collaborated with Markus to fill the gaps. In the end we combined all the spread bites of info into one complete world map.

Given the diverse group of characters and their various abilities, will we see certain bonuses in pairing up certain characters in battle? Will players also be given the opportunity to speak with them between battles or learn more about their specific traits between combatting orcs?

The characters will definitely talk between battles and you’ll learn more about them and their backstory. The different characters have different relationships to each other and we’re planning on that having an influence on battles too.

You were quite successful in prior Kickstarter funded games, notably Battle Worlds: Kronos, which received more than double its required goal. If you see such overwhelming support again, what sort of stretch goals do you have planned?

We have four different stretch goals planned. This time we added a twist though: We pre-defined the stretch goals and the pledged sum at which they are unlocked, but each time we reach one of those “milestones” we let the backers choose which of the four stretch goals they want to unlock.

And finally, as a more general question, is KING Art planning to return to The Book of Unwritten Tales any time in the future?

Of course we are planning to return to The Book of Unwritten Tales, since we want to bring the story to an end, but currently we’re focusing all our attention on The Dwarves.

The Dwarves is currently active on Kickstarter, to support KING Art Games in their efforts or discover more information about their game, please click here.

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Tom Green is a British writer and director who made his name on television series such as Misfits and Blackout. Graduating to film his first major release is Monsters: Dark Continent, the follow-up to Gareth Edwards 2010 original.

STARBURST: Firstly, how did you come to be involved in the project and how conscious were you of making a film that was very different from the original?
Tom Green: It was important to remain faithful to the ethos of Gareth’s film while making something that was entirely stand-alone. It was never really a sequel in my head at all. Initially though, the producers came to me with a small amount of money and asked if I’d be interested in making a film. There’s usually such hard work getting a film off the ground; no matter how independent, it can take years. So to have it more the other way around was great. I thought about whether I could make it different and still good enough, and I thought I could. The only remit was that it needed to include monsters and be contemporary while still remaining in the genre. Apart from that it was a case of go and get on with it. I think as a result the film is quite experimental and free-form.

Watching Monsters: Dark Continent, you never get the impression that this film is as much a low budget production as the original. How did you create your world under such restrictions?
The funny thing is that we had virtually the same budget as Gareth so had similar challenges. What our team has managed to achieve within those constraints has been remarkable, with regard to monster design and world building. Because of that, the film has fallen on its sword in some ways. People think that this is a cynical cash-in with loads of money spent. In reality, it is a tiny film made with only one handheld camera. Everyone involved came to the project at the right time and were keen to create a cohesive collaborative environment. This was everyone’s film and everyone was keen to show what they could do.

Your monsters are amazingly complex creatures.
It was essential for me that these were potentially living creatures and so we designed them from the bottom up. They had to be breathing life forms, having come from a planet similar to ours. The difference was that their evolutionary process was fast, taking perhaps 10 million years in just 10 of ours. The other thing was that we were setting the film in this harsh desert landscape, so they had developed harder shells to protect their gelatinous insides. Our designers had to understand how the creatures would work anatomically and I think we succeeded in making them completely organic.

Your film’s characters have a real energy and a visibly close bond. Was this something that came about on set and how did you make sure you had the casting right?
For me Johnny Harris is one of the best actors in the country but has never been given a lead role. He’s very method, a talented actor and his process is amazing. He became a guiding force for the film, very raw and instinctive and you have to run with that. This kind of punk rock filmmaking bled into the other actors. He never came out of character once and was unbelievably intense. I remember someone came out to visit the set once and they were surprised how far we’d gone into the film and in our group. We’d created such a world that I know it took some of the actors a while to integrate back into their lives when they returned home. It was never a conventional shoot and that reflects in it not being a conventional film or narrative.

We did have a script but a lot of the scenes came from the shoot itself, particularly in the Bedouin scenes. They were mapped out, but we worked with the community and put the actors in with them and the scenes developed from that, almost shooting documentary style with the actors still in character. And the film is all about energy, whether in front of the camera with the actors or behind it with a young filmmaker like myself.

Stylistically where did your inspiration come from?
Primarily this is a war film and there’s an inevitable blurring of the lines and crossover with other films. We shot on some of the army bases as Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker which was necessary for the authenticity and landscapes we wanted. You’re not trying to mimic them but it just happens that way sometimes. That said, I think we made a completely different film than any other. So much comes from the real experiences we learned about from talking with marines who had experienced several tours which added to that documentary feel.

Finally, did you feel the trailers for Monsters: Dark Continent gave a slightly misleading impression of the film?
Possibly. I understand why trailers are cut the way they are to show the action within, but that’s not the film we set out to make or finally produced. This is a poetic, experimental film that explores human psychology in an interesting way with amazing visuals. I think there is a big misconception of the film which led to misjudgement. We were young filmmakers trying to make the best film we could with limited resources and I think we achieved that.

MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT is available on Blu-ray/DVD on August 31st.

BAIT is the new feature from Emmerdale star Dominic Brunt whose extraordinary ‘zombie’ drama BEFORE DAWN rocked STARBURST’s world back in 2012. We spoke to the soap actor-turned-director about his gritty, powerful and disturbing new movie set within the world of loan sharks…

STARBURST: As with Before Dawn, one of the themes of Bait is monsters and the effect they have on people – although here the monsters are ordinary human beings who do terrible things to other human beings. But Bait is more grounded and relatable. How would you categorise the film?

Dominic Brunt: To me, Before Dawn isn’t really a genre piece, it’s more of a domestic drama and the horror was allegorical and Bait is similar in that it’s a thriller first and foremost, but I like to take things to the worst case scenario; taking an excessive situation and seeing how far you can possibly push it whilst staying faithful to the central idea. But as far as I’m concerned it’s also an out and out horror film; on the surface it’s a thriller but we’re dealing with monsters no different from any other monster, totally without conscience, they’re animals after their prey. That’s how they live and behave and it’s how they feed themselves. I actually describe it as a ‘violent female revenge thriller’ and I called it that even when it was just in script form, and it was great to see how far we could take that because you’ve got to try and get noticed somehow and rather than being a polite thriller with a polite ending, it’s great to do what we feel we do best and push things to an absolute extreme.

The film’s credits tell us that it’s ‘based on true events’. What did you find out about the world of debt collectors when you were putting the film together and how did that influence the story you wanted to tell?

It’s actually based on three stories, especially one from the UK, which involved a really unpleasant gang of people. The more we read about these people, the more we thought we were going over the top and the more we thought ‘Wow, we couldn’t really go far enough’; these people are alive and if you Google ‘loan shark’ and any town or city there’s a glut of stories out there, but we chose three specific stories that are true and just bent them to our needs. Being a horror film fan, it always seemed that no matter how bad a horror film was, real life and what human beings do to each other can more often than not be far worse, far more violent and upsetting and scary than anything that a monster or a paranormal force can do in your imagination and the more we read about loan sharks and what they did in real life, the more we thought ‘Jesus, these are the real monsters.’ We got a structure together and then passed that to Paul Roundell and then he wrote the screenplay around that.

 

It’s a strong screenplay; one of its greatest strengths is its naturalism, the sense that these are real people behaving the way real people do…

Paul works for Emmerdale, but whenever there’s an hour special or something really dramatic going on thing they always get him in because he’s one of the best writers on the show. I just wanted to get a filmic story together and pass it to him and say ‘You don’t have to worry about the structure at all, you just put your brilliant dialogue around this and make it sound realistic and like real people’. Paul really took his time on the characters even before he’d written it all down and once he’d written it, he went back to the beginning and rewrote it and kept doing that until he had three distinct voices – Bex, Dawn and Jeremy, the debt guy – that were absolutely different from each other. The plan with Bex and Dawn was that they were like chalk and cheese in that Dawn allows Bex to be gregarious and loud and doesn’t judge her in the same way that Bex allows Dawn to be mild and to get on with things; they kind of support each other and allow each other to be themselves.

Jeremy (Jonathan Slinger) is a fascinating bad guy because at first we like him and trust him and then it all gets turned on its head. It must have been a tough role to cast…

We were looking at a book called ‘Without Conscience’ (Robert D Hare, 1999) and the more you look at sociopaths, the more you realise that they actually yearn for a normal steady life or to put that across and then manipulate people in order to get it. His wife is very much a trophy wife who he doesn’t really like; he’s got this facade of normality but actually it’s all about getting more of what he thinks is his ‘normal’ and it’s his rationale. He loves his work. Being a loan shark is the absolute perfect job for a sociopath. We had a psychiatrist with us on set working on the script and working with Jonathan so that he could get it just right. Jonathan had been at the Royal Shakespeare Company for ten years and I’d seen him play all the main parts and the main baddies in Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard III. What we really wanted to avoid was the clichéd two-a-penny gangster which can turn any film into absolute rubbish purely because they’ve cast the baddie wrong. If we’d got some very stereotypical gangster who had a constant ‘front’ on him and was just threatening, it would have been a disaster and to my mind the only person who could actually do that was Jonathan because he can turn on a coin and I knew that he wouldn’t play it like this archetypal gangster. He didn’t do any of that, he steered away from every single cliché and I knew he’d do it right. When he said he’d do it, everything fell into place because we knew we didn’t have to worry about anything.

 

Bex and Dawn are tough characters too – and they have to do tough things. How did Joanne and Victoria rise to the challenge of some pretty strong material?

Jo and Vicky went to Drama School together and they’re very good friends so we didn’t have to rehearse that friendship or pull that out from somewhere. They’d been filming for a week and were already solid together before Jonathan turned up and threw all the spanners in the works. Jo loves all the violent stuff anyway and Vic has already done grand stuff like Dracula and Once Upon A Time, and they both agreed that Jonathan had to get his comeuppance, so they weren’t bothered about that side of things. It was more important that, as bad as Jonathan could be, we had to indulge that because he had to deserve his fate otherwise it’s a bit like ‘Oh, what did they do that for?’

And ‘that’ is pretty intense when the girls turn the tables in a climax which – without giving too much away – is violence on virtually an operatic scale.

Well the bad guy has to get his comeuppance, there have to be consequences for his actions and I suppose that even earlier on, where he’s attacking Bex by the river, it was really uncomfortable but you’re still thinking ‘well, they have to get their own back on him but not just because they don’t like him or they owe him money’ – it has to be more than that. Eventually, you have to give the audience what they’ve been waiting for. You’ve been entertaining them and turning the screw; there’s tragedy, comedy, the whole thrill ride with the threat rising in scale and then you hit them with what they’ve paid their money to see, which is a huge fight and them struggling for a revenge which is what they feel they have to reap.

 

How did the experience of directing Bait differ from Before Dawn?

We had more preparation time and I think because we were working with a lot more of other people’s money – Metrodome paid for it – it meant we could make it more professional. I was talking to our cinematographer about it being unashamedly commercial which was correct whereas Before Dawn was unashamedly uncommercial; it was just throwing cameras around the room, getting as much coverage as we could and just trying to make sure that we captured everything ‘in the raw’. With this one, we planned all the shots, planned all the lights, we had more time, money, and people. The difference was that we had ten people involved on Before Dawn and seventy-three on Bait. The filming schedule was about twenty-four days altogether with little gaps in between. In theory, it was supposed to be a bit easier and with a bit more space but because of the sheer amount of locations and jumping about it was just as manic really. It was just a bit scarier, we had to make sure that we didn’t let Metrodome down. We were like a travelling band, it was ridiculous. There was so much equipment to be dragged around with big lorries and trucks everywhere and vans dragging around all the props, the actors being ferried left, right, and centre and all the costumes. I’d say it was more fraught and yet it was also more relaxed in that you felt like there was departments you could rely on, but at the same time the pressure was on to deliver something that was better, as well, because I want to make other films! It feels like it’s a step up the ladder.

Speaking of other films – what’s next in the pipeline?

There’s a couple of things in development and I’m hoping to find out next month about something which I’m hoping might be done in Puerto Rico, something on the horizon which I won’t have to produce, it’ll be just as director which will be amazing because I don’t want to have to produce any more –  I’ve had enough of producing. The next one will be a full-on proper jumpy, gory horror film.

BAIT screens at FILM 4 FRIGHTFEST on Saturday August 29th and will enjoy a limited UK cinema release on September 4th and will be available on DVD on September 7th.

With FILM 4 FRIGHTFEST, the annual celebration of all things horror almost upon us, we chatted to one of the head honchos, legendary journalist ALAN JONES to get the skinny on the event…

STARBURST: How did FrightFest get started?

Alan Jones: Back in the year 2000, Paul McEvoy – who I didn’t know – asked me to join him in setting up a horror film festival in the centre of London. He used to come to something I used to do in the eighties called Shock Around The Clock that I did at the Scala cinema and transformed into Fantasm at the National Film Theatre. I didn’t like doing it at the NFI, they weren’t the right place for a horror film festival; they don’t understand it. As a result of that, it sort of faded away; I lost interest. Until Paul mentioned this. I’d been in on the festival circuit for thirty years, I’d been to all the really famous ones across Europe, and could never understand why London being a capital city never had a festival and I thought this was a really good chance for us to do something. It was baby steps to begin with, but because I had set up Shock Around The Clock with Stefan Jaworzyn years ago, I knew basically what to do. Because I’d been a journalist for so long, I knew the film companies to talk to about getting films. It was easy enough. The reason we put it on the August bank holiday weekend really was because I live very near the Notting Hill Gate carnival – hate it – and wanted something to do, and thought there are other people as well who just couldn’t bear the carnival and the fact it took over the whole of London. So here was an alternative. We got a really good audience the first year and looking back, it’s grown and grown to where we are now.

What sort of selection process is there for the films?

Paul and I mainly do it, Ian every now and again stamps his feet and says ‘I want this in, ‘cos I like it!’ and generally, it’s OK and we’ll say ‘yes’. But Paul and I mainly do everything, we trawl every festival – I still do go to a lot of festivals: Berlin and Cannes, obviously, are quite crucial, but submissions have been really, really more important this year than I’ve ever come across. We’ve had so many films submitted, and we do watch everything, because you never know. We had some amazing entries this year. A lot of what you will see at FrightFest are those submissions, because we just couldn’t believe the quality and how good they were. Things we didn’t even know existed were turning up; titles we’d never heard of, and they were really fantastic. We managed to keep a lid on most of them I think, until we announced the full line-up. But Paul and I are dogged about this – we watch everything!

That just proves the independent talent is flourishing, but what are your thoughts on the state of the horror genre at the moment?

I would say very, very good, very buoyant. Things are changing; the industry’s changing so much. The reason why festivals like FrightFest work now, even more than they ever did, is because we can provide a platform for the sort of films you used to see on general release, but now they’re lucky if they even get a day-and-date VOD platform. So for that reason, I think we’re considered vital; if we select somebody’s movie and show it, it puts it in the spotlight, head above the parapet, and as a result, we’ve given it sort of like a seal of approval that it wouldn’t necessarily have. From the submissions this year, the horror genre’s in a very good state! Some years aren’t so great, you can see it sort of treading water. While the mainstream industry is content to do sequels and bloated blockbusters, I feel that down at the bottom end of the market that’s where most of the imagination and talent is lying, and I think you’re going to see that this year. We have some extraordinary stuff that I know is going to make sure the directors are going to go on to bigger and better things.

You screen a lot of independent movies, which is something we’re passionate about supporting, is there anyone who are you looking forward to seeing more from?

Oh, I don’t want to particularly single out any one in particular, but Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Some Kind of Hate is such a great film, something that really came on our radar that we had no idea was that good. Michael Thelin, whose film Emelie really is sensational, it’s one of my favourites this year, actually. Valentin Javier Diment, who’s a guy from Argentina whose film The Rotten Link (El eslabón podrido) we sort of thought ‘oh we better go and see this’ in Cannes because I’ve got a particular love of South American cinema. We went to see it not expecting anything, and it blew me away! I thought, ‘Wow, where’s this guy been hiding all these years?’ There’s stuff like that – Adrián García Bogliano’s new film Scherzo Diabolico is on, and we’ve been following his career for quite some time too. It’s great to see these people who we nurtured in the past suddenly grow into full-blown talents. There’s going to be a lot of that this year. We call one of the strands the Discovery Screen, because we want people to discover their own people for themselves. To this day, Vincenzo Natali credits me for helping his career because I gave Cube possibly the very first review he ever had (I was a reviewer for STARBURST for twenty-five years), and you can do that, but we can only program the stuff, and it’s up to today’s outlets to discover it and make those people famous. I love to do it, and love to put people on pedestals and say this is great, but I think from a programmer’s point of view, you can’t do that. In the past, I’ve noticed if I go out in front of an audience and say ‘you’re going to love this, it’s fantastic’, invariably, they say, ‘well it wasn’t as good as you said it was’. So to be honest, I keep my mouth shut, and afterwards, people come up to me and say, ‘that was really good’, and I say ‘yeah, wasn’t it?’ And if they go, ‘that was really not great’ I can say ‘yeah, I know’ in the way you can only provide the conduit between them. It’s up to the likes of STARBURST to do that, I think, more than it is for me to this is great, that’s great. We’ve got a load of things I absolutely adore; Curve by Iain Softley – who’s one of my favourite directors from the past anyway – he’s come back into the spotlight with this amazing thing. There’s loads of stuff like that: Night Fare by Julien Seri, the French director, what a great story that is! He did a movie called Scorpion that got released all round the world and was trying to get his next film off the ground but it never happened. So he thought, ‘fuck this’ and got eighty grand together and made Night Fare, which is possibly one of the best films, you’ll particularly like that because of what it is. That’s what I like about these people, especially now working in this genre level because sometimes money doesn’t matter. We’ve got $100,000 movies and $20,000 movies, and I defy anyone to tell the difference in quality. It beats the studios at their own game.

And everyone has access to a camera now…

True. It’s very democratising this genre at the moment, I think. Anyone can go out and do something and if it’s any good in any way whatsoever… we’ve got a 14-year-old French guy’s film on called Hostile – we couldn’t believe it. It’s a great film, but when we found out Nathan Ambrosioni was only 14, we thought, ‘Jesus, he can’t even see it when we show it!’ He’s just made this great film, and I think it’s just wonderful that people are going out and doing that.

The retro strand is becoming more popular, is there any particular film you’d love to show?

Well for years, I didn’t want to do retro. For me, FrightFest was all about the new, the upcoming, and the exciting. So many people kept saying ‘you should show something old’. I mean, really? And as we’ve done that, I’ve realised there is actual value, as unlike myself, who has seen everything in the cinema, a lot of people haven’t seen favourite films screened. So I could see the value in that. So yes, I want to see – because giallo is a particular favourite of mine – I want to see more. I’m thrilled we’ve got Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key this year, I think I’m going to be droning on incessantly about that one at the front of that! So if anyone’s turning up for that particular movie, I’m afraid they’re going to hear me do a twenty-minute rave about giallo in general. I think it’s important that we show stuff that’s been restored; we can’t just show a DVD or some crappy old print. I think we’ve got to have a reason for showing it, and as more companies – especially Arrow – restore half-way decent films, if they’re quirky enough we’ll put them on. We’ve got Hawk the Slayer on, I remember being on set for that, and it does seems to have built this incredible reputation, they are launching the sequel and Kickstarter campaign on the back of showing the original, and I can see why people like it. 

Do you feel that genre films in general are still looked upon as outcasts by media outlets and critics?

Oh yes, it’s been my mantra for years, and I’m so bored with it still being seen as the poor relation. Look at the London Film Festival, they won’t call their horror strand a horror strand, they call it a cult strand. This goes back to why I hated them back in the nineties. Horror fans are the best in the world as far as I’m concerned, what’s the problem? Horror films still make a fortune for the studios. You have to sit through crap to realise they’re not embarrassed to take the money! Mainstream horror is just a waste of time, as we all know. I don’t want to see another 12 or 15-rated jump-shock, loud-noise excuses for horror, I want to see good stuff. The stuff that shapes you and actually has something to say; that confronts you and I think that’s the most important thing that horror can still do. For me, horror is two things: yes, it’s a rollercoaster ride but it’s also one of the most vital ways of dealing with today’s issues anyway. I think those are the two things that should really work still.

You’ve expanded into other screenings throughout the year now, including the Halloween allnighter and Glasgow, are there any plans to expand further, maybe a FF roadshow?

Well, we’re moving into the DVD/VOD market thanks to our liaison with Icon Distribution with FrightFest presents, which we launch in October, we have a number of titles coming up there. We also have FrightFest enterprises, because we’re going to be doing some merchandising of sorts. We’re still working those things out. We keep being asked to do festivals in various places in the UK and abroad, I can’t honestly see us doing it, I think it’s enough as it is. I’m always worried about spreading the brand too thin. I don’t want people to ever think, ‘oh god, another FrightFest’, I want people to look forward to it. The three events are well spaced for me; everyone looks forward to the August one; as they’re coming down from that, there’s Halloween to look forward to. Then there’s the wait until Glasgow where we hit them with a fabulous new range of stuff. I think it works that way, I’m happy with the way it all is at the moment.

We guess to much would dilute the impact…

Yes, and I think the fans would be upset if we did dilute it; I don’t want that to happen! FrightFest is very special to me, and special to the people who come. Every year, I think ‘are we doing a good job’ and yet every year we sell the tickets we do, which to me says we still have our fingers on the pulse. One of the reasons is because I’ve been in the business for so long and know what I’m doing. Some of the people that do festivals don’t understand the genre they’re in and I do!

Do you foresee the festival will outgrow the cinemas available?

Well, everything that’s happened to FrightFest has happened because of outside forces. It grew because we had to move cinemas, and then the cinema closed down. Then it grew because the Empire was converting into two cinemas, we had to go to Vue. They’re going to be doing a refurbish plan next year, so who knows what’s going to happen? Perhaps we will take over Leicester Square in the end, I don’t know! Some people say there’s such a choice of films this year – but I like that! In every other film festival – if you go to Sitges or Brussels – you have to curate your own experience anyway; you can’t see everything. I want to choose my own films to see – there are some I don’t want to see, some I do – It was very hard to choose this year what we were going to put in the Discovery Screen and what we were going to put in the Main Screen – where they are screened three times – but that is where you go to discover, it’s not us putting things on three times and forcing people to discover it, that’s the difference. There are seventy-seven movies we’re showing this year; I don’t think we could do more next year! There was just so much good stuff around; we just had to show it all.

Alan Jones’ new book THE ACT OF SEEING, is a collaboration with DRIVE director NICOLAS WINDING REFN. The weighty tome is a lavish exploration of classic exploitation cinema poster art, with hundreds of glorious images and is published by FAB Press’ new NWR Imprint on September 10th, order here.

FILM 4 FRIGHTFEST takes place over Bank Holiday weekend, August 27th – 31st at Vue Cinemas, Leicester Square, London.

In the long and colourful annals of cult movies, few are cultier than HAWK THE SLAYER, directed and co-written by Terry Marcel and released in 1980. Fans of this lively, cheap’n’cheerful sword-and-sorcery romp have been crying out for a sequel ever since and it finally looks as if – after years of promises and false starts –  they’re finally going to get their wish. Last month, Terry announced that a deal has been struck with Rebellion, the leading games developer and publisher, to move forward with the long-awaited sequel HAWK THE HUNTER – with a TV series to follow – which will be part-funded by a Kickstarter campaign. STARBURST recently met up with Terry Marcel to find out more about the history of Hawk… and his future…

“The slayer returns…the hunt begins…”

STARBURST: It’s been thirty-five years since Hawk the Slayer first appeared in the UK. What’s the story behind the long wait for the sequel?
Terry Marcel: What happened with Hawk was that it was released in the UK where it did extremely well. Then (co-writer) Harry Robertson and I went to the US where it was going to be released. We were in the US for about a week and then ITC, our distributors, went bust. So it never got released in the US and it disappeared. But interestingly enough, as we’ve recently discovered, it’s not stopped selling worldwide all this time. We had a list from ITC and I couldn’t believe it because every country in the world still buys this film. Harry and I wrote a sequel which I’ve reworked since and we were thinking ‘How can we get this sequel made?’ We’ve been looking around for people to get involved and we did a deal with Baltic Films in Lithuania – I worked there for two years on The New Adventures of Robin Hood and got on very well with them – so they came on board because there’s a nice tax deal there. We were nowhere near getting the money we needed so we said ‘Let’s go for a Kickstarter and see if we can raise some money.’ In the interim, Rebellion had contacted me and said that they were very keen to get involved – subject to the Kickstarter working out – and they have been very generous with what they’ve given us in terms of their investment, so as it stands at the moment we’ve got all the pieces in place if the Kickstarter works.

How would you anticipate the project moving forward in the immediate future?
The Kickstarter launches in August after a screening of the original film and a Q&A at FrightFest. If we get the money – we need to raise 20% of our £5 million budget – we would start preparation immediately in October. We would shoot in Lithuania in November and based on what the response is to that we would then go into a TV series.

Spoiler time! Tell us everything about Hawk the Hunter…
I’ll give you some little hints! It’s a direct sequel to Hawk the Slayer in that Voltan returns and this time he’s after the Dark Sword which was made before the Mind Sword, The Dark Sword is evil and has been hidden away by a troll. If Voltan gets his hands on it, we’re in deep trouble so there’s a race to find the Dark Sword. We also see the development of Hawk beginning to understand the power of the Mind Sword. We’ve just put up a prologue on YouTube which gives away a little bit about the stones. There were three stones and one of them ends up with the wizards, who are in fact elves and one ends up in the Sword – the other one I can’t disclose! They were discovered by a rock-finding troll who’s digging away in a tiny tunnel. He breaks through into this gigantic cavern where he finds this skyscraper-sized crystal buried in the ground. Around the crystal are three shining stones, the Three Sisters. He grabs them and runs but as he does so the giant crystal bursts into life and that’s when magic is born in the land. It’s all to do with crystal magic and in the sequel we begin to see how it all works, why it works and I had to reinvent everything to give a reason for the Mindstone.

How does the sequel feed into the proposed TV series and how advanced are you in planning for the series should it happen?
The sequel is very much the sequel to the original film and it’s really the beginning of the saga, moving it in a totally new direction. The series arc is all about trying to find the final stone and what happens when we get all three together. Planning it all required a lot of work and it took me about six or seven months to actually create the whole arc but I think that’s what Rebellion like about it. Their plan is to release a game, books and comic books and we’re in talks about releasing a soundtrack album. It’ll be a long haul, five years of the series I hope. Whereas a lot of series don’t know where they’re heading, I’ve already done the ending – which is going to be locked up in secret with the Coca Cola formula!

What’s your target audience for the sequel and the TV series?
We’re going for the same target audience as the original film – young, old, male, female. I’m not into horror, I like doing family stuff but it’s very difficult to put together. TV is the big market today and we’re constantly keeping our eye on the ball and the only thing like us coming along is The Shannara Chronicles series for MTV which is a big (ten-episode) ‘event’ series. That’ll be big and we can’t compete with that. But I’m aiming for family 8pm slot for Hawk, and I believe that a good sword-and-sorcery series can fit that slot. Rebellion are of the same mindset as me; we want to really show all the stuff you’ve read with Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance. So while we’ve done the overall arc we can still have closed-end stories every week. Our characters are ‘Star Trekking’, they’re going out there every week. It’s the sort of thing that’s never been done properly on television; I attempted it in a small way with Dark Knight which was based on Ivanhoe, but this will be pure sword-and-sorcery.

Can we rewind a bit and discuss how Hawk the Slayer came about in the first place?
I’d always been a sword-and-sorcery fan – I loved Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard, and I particularly loved Solomon Kane which, incidentally, I thought was a great movie. I was working on turning two Ray Cooney plays into films and my writing partner Harry was doing the music for them. We got chatting one day and both said that we loved sword-and-sorcery and I said ‘Funnily enough, I’m working on an idea at the moment’ and I told him that I wanted to do something about a medieval warrior set in the fourteenth century much in the way that A Fistful of Dollars was a virtual remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. I was taking a two-week break in Spain, so while I was there I knocked out a seventy-page draft and came back and sat down with Harry and together we finished off the script.

Why do you think the film’s remained so popular for over three decades?
I have no idea whatsoever! I am as surprised as anybody else! I was amazed when it suddenly became a cult classic. When did it happen? Did STARBURST do it? People say that what they love about it is that it isn’t a ‘men in tights’ film, and that’s right because I was totally against that! We filmed at Pinewood – I’m a Pinewood boy – and they were very kind to me, they did an all-in deal for butkus; told us we could help ourselves to anything we could find, so we went around looking at props and pieces of set and whatever we could use! But I used to get stuff in the post from fans all the time – books to sign, old vinyl soundtracks which someone had found. They just kept coming. One guy was continually asking me if I’d sell the original sword which I’ve still got and it never crossed my mind, of course! I was busy writing other things and I’d done this series Dark Knight and a couple of other series which are potentially going ahead, so I was really concentrating on all those. But Hawk kept nagging and nagging and eventually I sort of fell in love with the fans. I thought ‘well, if they love it so much, now it’s a cult classic, perhaps we should do it again in memory of my old partner Harry.’ . We’ve got Rick Wakeman on board to provide the soundtrack, that’s a real coup. We just contacted him, found out he was a Hawk fan and he said he’d kick himself if he didn’t get involved!

Sadly many of the cast of Hawk the Slayer are no longer with us, so presumably you’ll be looking at an all-new cast. What will the casting process be like this time?
As you probably know, Rebellion do an awful lot of casting for their games and one of their principal casting guys has already started looking at various people. The main characters – Hawk, Gort, Crow are all going to be new people. It’ll be difficult to cast Voltan ; we’d like a ‘name’ but we don’t have a lot of money. But what we want to do is what we did on Hawk: finding the very best character actors we can get for all the small ‘one day’ parts because everybody loved that in Hawk. There’s a new lunatic character which we think Ade Edmondson would be perfect for, but whether he’s going to come out and work in Lithuania for a week with the sort of money we’ll have I have no idea! But we will aspire to the very best people. We were so lucky in Hawk because we had people like Roy Kinnear, who came in to do a few lines as the Innkeeper and Graham Stark, who I’d worked with on the Pink Panther films, playing Sparrow; you always get extra from those sorts of people because they’re such distinctive character actors. But we’ve got to look to the long-term. We want to know that whoever’s going to play Hawk is going to come and stay with us for the series. I think we’ll probably end up with complete newcomers for all the main parts. There is one troll who’s about twice the size of a human and I’ve always wanted Brian Blessed for that, he’d be perfect.

 

Obviously visual effects have moved on a bit since 1980. Will your new Hawk be able to rise to the heightened expectations of a modern audience?
Well actually, the fans always say the same thing – ‘don’t change it, make it exactly as it was’ – but of course, these days we’ve got to do the CGI. When we wrote the sequel back then, we put things in which nobody could have conceived of ever being able to do, but we still put them in. We had changelings and creatures which in our mind’s eye we never thought anyone would be able to do, but of course today it’s simple. If we’d attempted these creatures back then, they’d probably have been stop-motion, but now we’ll be able to do it properly. We actually homage the great stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen in a sequence where there’s this indestructible army of bonemen. Ray was the grandfather of us all, so if anyone says ‘you nicked that from Ray Harryhausen’ then I’ll just say ‘Yes we did, we nicked from the master – and why not?’ There’s another sequence at the beginning where Hawk, Crow and Gort are attacked by flesh-eating creatures. I was going to use stuntmen, but Rebellion said ‘we’ll do these’ and they’ve shown me the CGI creatures and I’ve been licking my lips so we’re already getting far more than we could ever have got doing it with stop-motion or stuntmen!

Will you be back in the director’s chair for the sequel?
No, the new film will be directed by Keith Claxton who worked with me on Dark Knight. It’s a tough shoot, but he understands exactly what I’m looking for. Creatively, though, I’ll be in complete control although there’ll be a few producers including Rebellion’s CEO Jason Kingsley and director Chris Kingsley.

Do you think initiatives like Kickstarter are the way forward for low-budget movies?
Middle-of-the-road movies are very difficult to put together and I think all you can do these days is make a low-cost movie and hope it hits home. Crowd-funding in a superb way of going if you can raise the money. It gives filmmakers a fabulous opportunity to get films out there, and then it just depends on whether the public like them or not. Funding was a lot easier in the old days so nowadays you have to take advantage of any tax incentives you can get and you have to try to find people like Rebellion who are willing to pitch in. It’s very difficult. This has been hard work, but I think Kickstarter is fantastic. If they come up with the money we’re up and running, but if they don’t then we start again. We won’t stop; if Kickstarter fails, we’ll have to look elsewhere and find some other generous person out there. It might end up as a musical on ice!

KEITH CLAXTON

The director tasked with bringing HAWK THE SLAYER back to the screen after a thirty-five year absence opens up…

STARBURST: How did you find yourself working with Terry Marcel?
Keith Claxton: Terry had this cracking little sword-and-sorcery show called Dark Knight which filmed in New Zealand. I’d been doing a lot of scriptwriting until that point, and I branched over into directing. Terry and I got together, I wrote a couple of scripts for the series and then on the back of my showreel Terry said ‘I’m going to give you a break and send you over to New Zealand to see how you go and I’m going to be watching you like a hawk’ – which was slightly unnerving! It all went fantastically well, I felt like a fish in water and I knew that directing wasn’t something that was going to phase me. In the end, I stayed there for months and ended up doing the epic series finale. We had some great times on that, great fun and it was doing well for Channel 5 – as it was then – but then Kevin Lygo came along and it was a case of ‘new commissioner, out with the old’ and even thought the ratings weren’t phenomenal, the audience percentages were great – but that’s television; if they want to get rid of you, they’ll get rid of you!

Did you establish an immediate rapport with Terry?
Terry and I go back over ten years and we hit it off because we share a love of science fiction, fantasy, Ray Harryhausen. He was one of the only people I’ve ever come across who knew immediately what I was talking about when I said ‘Have you ever read any of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, so I knew I was on solid ground!

Why do you think the world of HAWK THE SLAYER is so appealing to audiences?
Hawk is so brilliant because it’s nostalgia; it’s revisiting those early wonderful days of sword-and-sorcery where it was very much uncharted territory. Everybody’s done it since – Kull the Conqueror, Ladyhawke, even Flash Gordon was a bit of a science fiction/sword-and-sorcery mash-up.

How involved have you been in realising Terry’s vision for the sequel?
Ever since we discussed the idea, I’ve been riffing with Terry. But this is very much his project and I feel like I have a responsibility as the custodian of this wonderful world. But I get to take his world and play in it! He’s done all the hard work in many respects in terms of imagining it, building up the whole backstory which supports the structure of the storytelling which just sits there. But it’s all there and I get to run around in this universe! It’s just a wonderful opportunity.

What can you tell us about the look you’ll give the new film from a directing perspective?
It’s early days yet, so I don’t want to commit one way or the other. I always reserve the right to completely change my mind and decide to do things completely differently!

 

The Kickstarter campaign for Hawk the Hunter will be launched on August 30th following a screening of Hawk the Slayer at Film 4 FrightFest in London. Among the rewards on offer will be T-shirts (see the design above) and a unique ‘Fan Day’ in which you can get the chance to be a credited background extra in a scene in Hawk the Hunter that will directed by Terry Marcel himself. The scene will involve a massive barroom brawl, so should be a lot of fun!

Science fiction writer and editor BRIAN ALDISS, OBE celebrated his 90th birthday recently. His incredibly detailed and impressive catalogue of accomplishments includes two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and one John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000, and continues to add to his long list of published work to this day. STARBURST paid him a visit to find out more about what makes him tick…

STARBURST: When did you start telling stories?
Brian Aldiss: When I was three. My mother liked them, bound them up with some unused wallpaper and put them on the nursery shelf; thank god they’ve disappeared!
It kept the other boys quiet, later when I went to public school. I hand wrote my stories, bound them in paper and charged the other boys a penny a read. The boys were very keen to read them, but equally I was very keen that they should read them so I didn’t make many pennies. I always left them waiting for the next bit.

Do you still use cliffhangers?
I really don’t know. I mean I’m still working on the problem. I find it’s best to keep the little buggers worrying about what’s going to happen next. Even at my prep school, I would tell stories after dark, and when one of the other boys would say ‘Shut up Aldiss, you bastard’. Triumph!

When did you start writing science fiction?
I’ll tell you a little story. I was four and a half. I walked into out sunlit lounge and someone had left the wireless on. The announcer was saying that Clyde Tombaugh had sighted a planet that would be called Pluto. I cannot tell you how thrilled I was. It was as if he was speaking personally to me… Immediately, I thought how wonderful it would be to get to the planet Pluto. As we know, it’s only this year that we have managed to get a machine to Pluto.

What do you say to do those who say Pluto is not a planet?
It’s balls. Absolute rubbish. What is it if it’s not a planet?

Does Science spoil science fiction?
Science should be the basis of all good science fiction. It could be other things, it can be psychological. The parameters have changed now.

Has the market for science fiction changed?
Back in the forties, if there was a science fiction magazine it would be run by one guy, who had a little money. They would feel compelled to do produce them. There was a chap in London who edited Authentic. The magazine was rather short lived, but I wrote a story for them called Pogsmith and I met up with him. We took a stroll through the streets of London, in those days it was considerably less crowded than now. I thought he was marvellous, but he hadn’t got the money to keep a magazine running. A one-man band is very hard work, you know. Harder work to edit and to write the stories.

Then there was Ted Carnell. He worked for some printers just looking down on the Thames. He ran New Worlds and Science Fantasy. He kept publishing that magazine year after year, month after month. The magazine came out regularly and paid regularly. But then came a time when even Ted Carnell wearied and handed it over to Michael Moorcock, then a well-known eccentric. England must have been improving a slight bit then, because they had a man, Lord Goodman, and he could fund cultural events and magazines. Mike Moorcock and I got together and rehearsed what we could say to appeal to Lord Goodman. We thought it was very unlikely that we’d get the funding for a mere science fiction magazine. Eventually, we were shown into his presence. And he said “I understand you want your magazine subsidised. Well I’m the man to do it”. Low and behold, they did subsidise New Worlds! Mike caught fire, and so vastly improved New Worlds that the incentive we had didn’t cover all of the expenses. Again, there was a magazine going broke.

Dear old Mike. He had a very patient wife. To keep the fans away, he had a big notice on the door that said in very plain English “Fuck Off”. On the weekend, he would lock himself in his bedroom with his typewriter and he would write. He could knock out a whole novel over a weekend and then sell to a firm in the US called Lancet. They were renegades, even amongst publishers. They didn’t live in New York, the lived in Kentucky and they would buy his work for a thousand bucks in total. For the complete thing. Mike would use that money to keep New Worlds afloat.

Which of your works are you most proud of?
I think very well of the Helliconia novels. When I planned Helliconia, I took two years off when I researched the whole matter. My wife wondered if I was going to write again. I was, I was working on Helliconia. It’s an Earth-like planet and it has an Earth-like sun, but it’s been captured by a giant sun on its journey through the universe. It’s about the struggles and difficulties that people have living on this planet, because the seasons last for so long, you see. The first volume takes place in spring, the second in summer and the third in the oncoming winter.

It attracted the interested of a very celebrated publisher in this country and also in the United States from a company called Atheneum. The volumes were being published at exactly the same time on both sides of the Atlantic. It did mean that a volume had to come out every 18 months. Why? Gets more punters, they said. I was unaccustomed to the speed. I would send the manuscripts to the publisher in the UK and the US. I got to know the publisher, he was a remarkable man in the way that all publishers are. Let’s not say anything about the writers. 

Now the publisher over here worked without a copy editor. The USA was much more professional. I sent in the first volume and I got a 25-page letter from the copy editor who told me what I had gone adrift on. I was furious. I said to myself this is typical of the bloody Yanks! I started to read what she said, it made very good sense. To give you an example, she’d say “This meeting is beautifully done, but it follows another meeting. If you did those scenes the other way round, you would find that it was better”. All of this I took in. I was converted. I took in her suggestions. It was almost like a collaboration. Of course, that’s what I suggested to my English publisher and meekly they followed. It was the strength of this woman and her engagement that really supplemented my rather hasty execution. Three volumes were published with moderate success, I mean the bloody things are being reprinted still!

I wrote a letter to this lady to thank her for collaboration, and I sent her a dozen red rose. She phoned me, which was unheard off. She told me “No one ever thanked me before.” Just think of that; the bastards who had worked with her before had never thanked her.

That was the best thing with Helliconia. Except two years ago, NASA they found a world with two suns. Everyone who had dismissed it for having two suns was wrong. I had done my research, I had asked Astronomers. I live in Oxford, you can knock on any door and find some poor sod who longs to talk about their discipline. They didn’t call it Helliconia though.

With so much self-publishing available now, how important are gate-keepers?
Has it changed? The publishers will always drive you mad. They have their difficulties, just as booksellers do.

How has your writing changed?
I suppose you would hope that you would improve quite a bit. I don’t know. With experience you do improve. Much of my experience came when I was younger. I am surrounded with nice people that I like oblige as much as possible. The fact is I also have a very good secretary. We’ve worked together for years and we’ve behaved in a very sensible way. She’s very good on short hand, so I said I’ll stand here and we’ll invent a story. We’ve done that with three stories. One of them is one of the best stories I’ve ever wrote, The Invention of Happiness. It contains a reference to the Venerable Bede. He was a diviner. Imagine him sitting in a hall one dreadful winter’s night and a sparrow flies through the door. Bede said “Our life resembles the live of a sparrow; we come through one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged.” Isn’t that fantastic? Isn’t that just it! Especially if Christianity has slipped off from you. I do have some regret about that. The Venerable Bede got it just right.

What would you say to the sixteen-year-old version of yourself?
Try not to age. Get laid as often as possible.

What experiences shaped your writing?
When World War Two broke out I was at public school and the recruiting chap had a book with all the things you could join. You could join submarines and I wasn’t dumb and I thought of course they want more people in submarines, they’re also being sunk. So I joined Royal Signals and I was sent out to Burma to fight the Japanese. Luckily, we won. After that, we went to India, Sumatra, Singapore and Hong Kong. We were three years away from home. When we got home we expected a reception, there was bound to be a party. There was no one. They had been ordered not to receive us with any measure of honour and I’ve always had that grudge. I still cannot swallow it…

Did that drive your writing?
I don’t write escapism, I want to make the bastards suffer. Hothouse was inspired by Sumatra, of course. When I came back to England, I felt that people enjoyed being miserable. I was wrong, I think.

How different is Hothouse from your more recent work like Comfort Zone?
From Hothouse to Comfort Zone? Jesus – that has been a long journey! It was one of the good things that came from that time abroad back then. One time, I took a ferry across the Hooghly in order to have a look at the Calcutta Botanical Gardens. I found there a tree labelled as the biggest in the world. Not like sequoia, it was a banyan. It was very carefully guarded so goats couldn’t eat the buds. It was immense. I sat there for the afternoon watching this lovely thing grow. When I got home, I read an article by Thomas Huxley and he talks about this very tree and how it could almost cover the world. I thought, hey, there’s a story there. So I started to write.

Do you have any more stories to tell?
Yes I do. I dread to say this, but it’s set in Russia in the 18th century when things aren’t too bad. It’s a big Russian novel, where the chap has to walk ten thousand miles because the motor car hasn’t been invented. It will be a very happy novel.

Would you rewrite any of your older works
I would never do that. I was younger then. I had a beautiful young family and a wife who had also been through WWII. I love her memory still. We had two children and by then I had become Literary Editor of the Oxford Mail. Which sounds like a grand title; really, that’s all it was and I wrote stories. Suddenly, she said she wanted to move from Oxford, I didn’t. I won’t go into details, but in the end, she went away with the kids. So I sold the house to buy her a house and I moved into one room into an Oxford slum. I was forty. I wrote a book about a world where the children had ceased to exist. I was thinking “god, no one is going to read this, it is so miserable”. When you’re really down, you find such unexpected kindness. The wife had taken my typewriter and a friend had got me a brand new Hermes typewriter. The kindness of the man.

That book, Greybeard, was very successful.
It wasn’t that I felt that it was bad book, I just felt it was extremely sad. They published it as science fiction because they thought it would sell better. Now I think that they are people who are suffering and the book helps them. They’ve lost something and this anecdote is an antidote.

If you could save one book so it would survive eternity, what would it be?
Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection. It’s a wonderful book. Why do I like it better than Thomas Hardy or Dickens? Somehow Tolstoy got through to me so I would spare his final novel, Resurrection.

A full catalogue of Brian Aldiss’ work can be found at brianaldiss.co.uk