Feature Category: Interviews

ERIC RED has written screenplays for NEAR DARK, BODY PARTS, BAD MOON, THE HITCHER, and 100 FEET. He has directed several of the films too. His latest endeavour is the new highway horror novel WHITE KNUCKLE. We caught up with him to find out more…

STARBURST: Near Dark, Hitcher and now White Knuckle – what draws you to horror stories set on the road?

Eric Red: The road thriller milieu involves an interesting reverse claustrophobia where even through you’re surrounded by vast highway and open spaces, you can’t get away and there’s no escape. The emptiness closes in on you. Isolation breeds terror. You’re isolated in your car. You’re isolated on that open highway. It’s even scarier at night when it’s all darkness outside your windshield beyond the beams of your headlights and then you see a pair of headlights appear in your rearview mirror. Those are obligatory scenes for road thrillers. The spare roadside iconography focuses the suspense with a less-is-more economy of elements, breaking the confrontation down to its basic moving parts and heightening the tension. There’s also a sense of speed – on the road, you’re driving forward fast, infusing an intrinsic pace and momentum into the narrative.

White Knuckle differs from my other road thrillers in that it’s a cross-country chase with a female FBI agent on the trail of a horrific interstate trucker serial killer. Here, the sprawling sense of scale and scope of the vast distances are used to unnerving effect. The Hitcher took place in Texas and Near Dark in a few Midwestern states, so both were more contained. But like those, this book involves a scary mano a mano between a good guy and bad guy. And of course, there’s lots of exciting vehicular action scenes.

What inspired you to write White Knuckle? Is it based on any real case or cases, because it’s so plausible that we’d be surprised if a serial killer didn’t operate under the cover of a long distance hauler?

White Knuckle is a fictional character and there’s never been a prolific trucker serial killer like the monster in my book that I’m aware of. There are real-life truck drivers who kill people in one state and elude detection by transporting and dumping the body in another state. Statistically, these cases generally involve one or two murders and the victims are usually truck stop prostitutes.

The idea for the book came when my wife and I drove across America a few years ago and saw all those countless tractor-trailers driving those thousands of miles of interstate. If one of those big rigs was a serial killer truck driver, I wondered, how would you know, how would law enforcement track him down? There’s literally millions of trucks on the U.S. highways and it would be like finding a needle in haystack. That sounded like a solid mystery idea fraught with thriller possibilities. The notion of a serial killer interstate truck driver is relatable, because we all know what it feels like to drive on the highway and that shiver of fear we feel when an eighteen-wheeler hurtles by a little too close. It taps into a universal fear.

A close friend of mine is a female FBI Special Agent and I discussed the idea with her and found out there is a division of the Bureau devoted to apprehending highway killers, called the Highway Serial Killer Initiative or HSK. I decided the hero of the story would be an FBI agent, since the Bureau is in charge of all interstate crime, and that’s when story came together. The character of my agent heroine Sharon Ormsby is based partly on my FBI friend, who’s one of the coolest people I know and was a technical advisor when I was researching the novel. When I finished the book, I showed it to her first to be sure it was technically accurate. 

It gave me the opportunity to do a bigger, scarier road horror story than I’d done before, with a bad guy so terrifying, he made The Hitcher look soft. With White Knuckle, I set out to write a horror thriller that did for highways what Jaws did for the ocean.

There’s lot of background information, from the way the law enforcement agencies operate on a cross state level with the FBI and their training, to the technicalities and mechanics of how to apply the brakes on an eighteen-wheeler to prevent it from jack knifing. How meticulous is your research on the fine detail in your books?

I do extensive research and consult technical advisors when the novel involves real-life subject matter like the FBI and trucking industry like in White Knuckle, because those details must be accurate as possible for the book to be believable and convincing. I have a responsibility as an author to know what I’m writing about. Plus, all that background is interesting for the reader and part of the whole reading experience. A window into a world of the American trucker we all see every day on the road but most of us know very little about.

My previous book, It Waits Below, is a science fiction novel about the crew of a three-man Deep Submergence Vehicle who dive to the deepest part of the ocean to recover a sunken treasure and encounter an alien organism. The extraterrestrial creature stuff was obviously made up, but all the sub stuff needed to be technically accurate. I spent a lot of time researching that with a technical advisor who is a top Alvin sub pilot. The deep diving ocean bottom scenes in the book are pretty realistic.

But my first novel Don’t Stand So Close was a dark coming-of-age story about teenagers growing up in a small town, so that book didn’t require much research. The amount of research required really depends on the book.

Not only are you an accomplished screenwriter and novelist, but you complete the triple threat by being a seasoned film director as well. Which of the three do you prefer?

I love directing films. That’s my favorite job. Don’t know anything that’s as fun and exciting to do. Making movies is what I do best.

As a writer, I prefer writing books to screenplays by far. I have many more storytelling tools at my disposal in a novel, so am able to develop a narrative and explore the characters in much more depth. I’m not constrained by budget or censorship or any other considerations like in a script – the only limits are imagination, which is very liberating as an author.

Previously, you both wrote and directed Bad Moon and 100 Feet. How difficult is it to direct something that you’ve written? Are there scenes you don’t want to drop, but have to for narrative purposes or running time?

There are invariably scenes that work in the script, which may even work during shooting that I’ve cut during the editing. The reason is usually pace, where the film doesn’t need the scene. Sometimes I make more radical changes to what was in the script. I restructured the entire first act of 100 Feet, and reshot the ending of Body Parts, for instance. It’s always based on how the picture shapes up in the cutting.

It’s never been difficult for me directing my own screenplays, because during filming I stop dealing with it as a script and instead as the movie that’s in front of me. This is probably true for any competent writer/director. Writing the screenplay is internal. Directing the movie I’m dealing with externals – cast, locations, camera placement, effects, stunts, whatever – and pulling those elements together to make the picture in the time and budget parameters we have allotted. And once I get in the cutting room and begin working with the editor in post, my focus is making the best film coming together out of the existing shot footage. Every movie is made three times – in the writing, during production, and in the editing. Throughout the process, I always try to be open to and take advantage of good ideas that come out of the collaboration with actors, cameraman, editor, and producers. That’s what making movies is all about, and it’s what makes it fun.

The movie rights to White Knuckle have been sold, and you’re back in the director’s chair we believe?

Producer Gil Adler (Tales from the Crypt, Superman and Contsantine) picked up the rights a few months ago and is in the process of putting the film together. I’m directing, which am very excited about.

Did you write the novel with this in mind?

No, White Knuckle was always conceived as a book. The extensive FBI and trucker material best suited the story to a procedural novel. I’d wanted to write a straight mystery thriller novel for a long time, and this offered that opportunity.

After White Knuckle, what’s next for you?

I have features in the works of my other three books, and am developing a television series. I’m working on my next novel, a Los Angeles-set super-thriller that is a big book with a large cross section of characters. I’m also writing a sequel to my werewolf western novel The Guns of Santa Sangre called The Wolves of El Diablo for the same publisher Samhain.

WHITE KNUCKLE is published as an eBook on June 2nd and is reviewed here.

Ashley Thorpe is a writer and illustrator whose passion for the British Gothic movement has led him to establish Carrion Films; a group of filmmakers determined to reinvigorate this neglected area of cinema. Their fourth film, Borley Rectory tells the story of the “most haunted house in Britain”, blending rotoscope and digital animation to create what is essentially an animated documentary.

STARBURST: How would you describe the style of Borley Rectory, because it is very unlike anything most people will have seen before?

Ashley Thorpe: A lot of people have said that, but it’s not through anything clever on my part. I came to film through animation, which I discovered at university, and originally started doing lots of things on 16mm. I was experimenting, sticking moths to the film and so on like everyone does… don’t they? Maybe they don’t. When I eventually tried to make my own films properly I did things in my own way, especially with rotoscope animation, which I love similar to Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. With Borley all the backgrounds are completely fake so if I had to describe it a certain way that would be how.

Watching your trailer generates a very nostalgic feeling, similar to the old Hammer films and the British Gothic style. Was that a time period that has influenced you?

Hugely. That was why I got Jonathon Rigby (author of English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema) to be a part of this. English Gothic was the reason I wanted to make this film, as at the time it seemed like any British horror film was chasing the American model stylistically and I wanted to celebrate what I thought we were losing, although that was before Woman in Black, which retains some of that essence. It was just that I wanted to see: a film about a screaming skull or a ghostly highwayman, similar to what we used to make. That era was what I grew up with and so when I had the chance it was all about what I wanted to see and not what I thought I could sell.

Do you think that the art of the ghost story is becoming lost then?

I think it still exists and I think there is still a hunger for it. Possibly it’s the market which is more nervous, but things are beginning to change. There were certain characters I used to see all the time when I was kid and that I thought everyone had heard of, such as Spring Heeled Jack, but that wasn’t the case. I just want to get people excited about what I was excited about and still am.

Why Borley Rectory in particular?

It was the title it had as the most haunted house in England. It wasn’t just one haunting, this place had loads of ghosts running around! I was amazed that no-one had made a film about this, but they hadn’t!

You’ve assembled quite a cast.

It was a bit of luck and a bit of being a cheeky bastard! The first person involved was Julian Sands as he’d seen some of my previous films, and he was familiar with the story, so I managed to convince him to do the voiceover. It was a quite a while later during a fundraiser that Reece Shearsmith saw the poster, although I’m not entirely sure how, but he commented on it on social media. I contacted him and just asked if he wanted to be in it and he said yes. I had no idea at the time that he was so crazy about English Gothic too, and when he was a child he actually made a floorplan of Borley Rectory. It seems he was just destined to be in it and then it kind of snowballed really. Jonathan Rigby said yes straight away too so it gave me the confidence to go for who I really wanted and get everyone else involved.

How have you found the funding process?

A nightmare! It’s very hard work to get the money together. We got enough to do the Julian Sands voiceover, which was back in late 2011, and that led to promises of money from various sources but every deal seemed to fall through somehow. It languished in limbo for a couple of years until I just go so frustrated that I felt I had to do something, and that was when we started with Indiegogo. We got enough money to pay for just over a day’s shooting, which is what eventually became the extended trailer. I thought that if we had that we might be able to get people excited, and with Reece on board from the start this time we had phenomenal success! The second time I got a load of people involved who were savvy with social media and we ended up more than tripling our initial target.

Do you have a date you’re working towards regarding the release of the finished film?

We’re working towards Valentine’s Day next year. We’re doing some more shoots in June and August and I’ve got plenty of animation to get on with, but it does put some pressure on to hit that release date but we’re hopeful.

How do you envision releasing the film?

Initially it will be festivals but a DVD release would be ideal. We’ve had some interest from production and distribution companies, some as a short, some as a feature but we’ll see. A few have asked about turning it into a feature from a short but all that is a long way off.

Be sure to follow Ashley on Twitter to keep up to date with Borley Rectory.

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Back in 1988, BBC Children’s Television aired Moondial, a six-part time travel mystery series written by the hugely prolific Helen Cresswell whose numerous television credits include The Demon Headmaster and Five Children and It. In Moondial, fourteen-year-old Minty is transported back to the Victorian era by a mysterious moondial and becomes involved in the lives of two children from two different periods of time, both of them tormented and both of them in need of her help… Repeated only once on Children’s BBC and long-since unavailable on video and DVD, Moondial is now back courtesy of a new DVD release from Second Sight. STARBURST spoke to Moondial’s now-retired director, Colin Cant – whose own previous credits include Russell T Davies’s early children’s series Dark Season (starring a very young Kate Winslet) and Century Falls about this haunting and fondly-remembered drama…

STARBURST: How were projects divvied up in the old days of the BBC Children’s department? Was Moondial a title you specifically requested to work on?

Colin Cant: Well, we used to have yearly meetings at which Anna Home who was the head of the Children’s department at the time would say ‘I have this number of scripts which need to be done this year, which one would you like to do?’ Over the years that disappeared until eventually they’d say, ‘You will do this one.’ Moondial was produced by Paul Stone and he just said to me, ‘This is what you’re going to do’.

What were your first impressions of Moondial once you’d had the chance to read the scripts?

I was baffled by it! I used to go in to see Paul and say, ‘What about this, who’s done that and why has this happened?’ and he eventually got fed up with me and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you go up to Nottingham and talk to Helen yourself’. So I went up with a few sheets of A4 with all my questions on, had a nice lunch and she obviously knew I was coming to ask her a few things and she launched into a chat about it and I came away thinking, ‘Oh I get it now!’ Almost by osmosis I got the feel for what it was all about and I never got to ask her one of my questions!

How involved was your producer Paul Stone with the actual production of the series?

He just said, ‘Get on with it!’ We had our battles, of course, but once he said, ‘Go and see Helen’ – which you’re not usually allowed to do, you usually have to go through your producer –but once he relinquished that, it was me on my own. He was very appreciative of the end result; he was a good man.

How much did the series’ main location – Belton House in Lincolnshire – influence the visual look of the series?

The only real visual gimmick I thought I would give it was a certain symmetry and in a lot of the shots I tried to imply that Minty was on a sort of a path which was leading her on. When she arrives at the hospital, for example, she sits in the middle of the frame and the perspective goes away behind her Belton House was ideal for that sort of thing, it enabled us to do lots of long shots of her walking along the grounds, and really they were the only little visual things I did. The long shots also helped to capture the atmosphere of the place itself, which I must say I found slightly sinister. It was more to do with the photographs of the people who’d lived there in the past, they all looked a bit grim, nobody was smiling; it had a definite atmosphere about it. As I remember at the time, the National Trust had only recently taken Belton Hall over so they were quite keen for us to be there, it was good publicity for them.

How did you come to cast Siri Neal as Minty? Apparently she wasn’t originally put forward for the role when you were scouting the Drama Schools…

At the time we didn’t have casting directors so we had to do it all ourselves, and we tended it to do it from a sort of ‘repertory company’ of actors we’d worked with in the past. I often think that good actors are slightly peculiar, it’s almost an attitude of mind; they’re slightly up front all the time, very chatty and extrovert. Siri had that slightly eccentric atmosphere about her. She wasn’t put up originally because she was a bit of ‘bad girl’, a bit naughty I think, which is a bit strange because I always think if you’ve got children at Stage School it’s a bit odd not to put them up for things. But Siri was absolutely fearless considering she pretty much had to carry the whole serial. She was of an age when she was beyond having to have a chaperone; she was quite mature for her years. She was determined to become an actress, but she tells me now she doesn’t do it anymore.

And of course, you cast the formidable Jacqueline Pearce who you’d worked with before on Dark Season in the dual role of Miss Vole/Miss Raven…

She was an absolute dream. She’s quite a character, not exactly overpowering but she certainly stands out! Apart from playing a superb character, she was terrific on location for keeping everything going.

Moondial is unusual in that it’s a fantasy series but there’s not much going on in the way of visual effects, it’s all carried by the story…

Indeed, there was really no visual trickery at all. The only tricky thing I suppose was the scene where all the children from the village dress up on Halloween and come up with the lanterns all lit up. I didn’t believe we were going to be able to do it but it was amazing. The lanterns had some sort of reflective material in the eyes and behind the camera there was just one lamp – this must have been a good hundred yards away – and as long as they kept the eyes looking in the direction of the light they shone brightly which was wonderful. But that’s one of the great things about doing children’s programmes, there are all these unusual things to stage which I always enjoyed. If you were working in adult television in those days you were either in hospitals or police stations, but children’s TV had all sorts of strange things to stage so it could be quite a challenge.

There’s some quite spooky imagery and challenging subject matter presented in Moondial too. Did you ever worry you might not be able to get away with ideas like the ‘devil’s child’ and the scenes with the chanting masked children, and indeed the show’s themes of death, loss and abuse?

I tended not to worry about it. I always felt that the Department kept us back a bit. We got away with all the stuff about the Devil, but in various other shows there were things we didn’t get away with. I actually think kids are well capable of dealing with all these things; death, bereavement etc. but I think they’re always a bit careful at Children’s BBC about those sorts of things.

Did Helen Cresswell visit the set and was she pleased with the realisation of her novel?

She was very pleased with what she saw. What was interesting was that she turned up one day – we didn’t know she was coming – and she immediately spotted Siri Neal and said, ‘That must be Minty’, so we knew we’d got the casting right. She picked her out of this massive crowd standing around. She was no problem at all and she was very pleased with the end product. We eventually took it up to the school where we got the extras from and showed it to the kids and she was delighted with it.

Do you recall the reaction to the show when it was screened and do you think it stands a chance of finding a new audience over two decades later?

It went down very well. It was quite a success. I think it could find a new young audience today because every so often over the years people have asked why it hasn’t been repeated. It’s been out on DVD before but not for years and I’ve still got the original VHS release around somewhere but I think there were bits edited out. I think there’s a big gap there even allowing for all the pop stuff and the video games that kids are into today, and I think shows like Moondial were thought-provoking and I’m sure that kids today are still interested in thought-provoking material given the chance to watch it.

You worked with Russell T Davies early in his career when you directed his Dark Season and Century Falls children’s serials. What did you make of his work back then?

Well I knew him because he’d been around at the BBC so I’d met him a few times. Dark Season was the first one I did and it was very interesting, two three-part stories. I am a great admirer of Russell T Davies, his scripts are just packed full of ideas, you could make two or three series based on the things he puts into his scripts. Century Falls was a fascinating piece that covered huge subjects and I felt it could have gone on and on but the Children’s department didn’t work that way at that time. Interestingly, where Moondial came in under budget, Century Falls was well over budget. It turned out that instead of six episodes, I shot seven and we put that up for them but scheduling being what it is we were told we had to lose an episode and cut it down to six.

Century Falls – The Director’s Cut!

I’d love to revisit it and reinstate the missing stuff but I don’t know if the footage is still around. I don’t know if they keep all this stuff in the archive or not.

You’re now retired, but your credits show a predomination of children’s serials and dramas. What was the appeal to you in working in that specific areas of television?

I think it really was probably just the sheer variety and the things you had to stage as opposed to police chases and routine A&E dramas – plus the fact we were really our own man. We were handed the script, the budget, you had a few chats with the producer and you were off. I don’t think it’s like that anymore. Of course, the department doesn’t exist in the same way now at the BBC, there’s not much drama at all these days and I think it’s a shame because you hear a lot of people saying, ‘Whatever happened to BBC children’s drama’ which is a pity because it was always going in such an interesting area, but nowadays it’s all crash-bang-wallop with just games and cartoons. I watch miles and miles of CBeebies with my granddaughter and I’m amazed at the quality of it and the money they must spend on some of that is colossal compared to the budgets we used to have!

MOONDIAL is released on May 4th from Second Sight, and is reviewed here.

Karen Lam is the Canadian director of Evangeline, a fantastic horror looking at the morality of vengeance from a supernatural perspective, and which will soon have a DVD and VOD release in the US.

STARBURST: Despite having a supernatural element, Evangeline is driven by the actions of real people. What inspired the story?

Karen Lam: I’m a news junkie, and many of the true-crime horror stories about young women being assaulted on campus really got under my skin. There’s also a highway up north in British Columbia, nicknamed the “Highway of Tears” because so many young women have gone missing on that stretch. It’s truly frightening.

One of Evangeline’s themes is a look at misogyny and how its perpetrators are dealt with (or as is all too often the case, aren’t). Is this something you feel particularly strongly about?

I was actually much more interested in exploring the ideas of revenge and forgiveness – for me, the film is more about cruelty and hierarchy than gender, although I believe that gender and power are very much interlinked. Our present society is very unbalanced and (what I tried to show in the characters of Jim and Billy) anyone who falls outside of the social structure will be equally mistreated.

As well as violence and murder there was also a degree of casual racism from the killers, specifically towards an Asian girl. Is this a reflection of anything you’ve had to deal with?

I have dealt with it in my past, although it tends to be less blatant nowadays but more subversive. In some ways, it’s harder now because the prejudices are under the surface. For example, Vancouver has experienced a huge increase in Chinese immigration over the last decade and our housing prices have gone sky high. The comments now are about limiting “foreign investment” or “overseas buyers”, which is a much more veiled way of expressing racism.

What did you learn from your first feature Stained that you brought into the making of Evangeline?

After having a large number of investors, producers and distributors on Stained, I really wanted to strip this film down to its essence: in many ways, I made my first film second, and my second film first! I like the freedom of a smaller budget, if that makes any sense. I have fewer bosses.

With many of your main cast being quite young, were there any problems with shooting the more disturbing scenes of the film?

The actors are all in their 20s and professionally trained, so the scenes were actually quite light-hearted in shooting. I think whenever we’re making something so dark, the atmosphere and tone doesn’t come through until we’re screening to an audience, and the editing/sound design/score work their magic.

The film’s stars Kat de Lieva and Richard Harmon each look perfect for their roles (doe-eyed innocent and soulless murderer respectively). How was each of them cast?

I first saw Richard on a flight to LA – I had just written the script and when he came into the waiting room, I thought “There he is!” Katarina auditioned, and I loved her mix of vulnerability and strength. She also looks a lot like my best friend from when I was five, whose life I borrowed bits and pieces from when I was imagining the Evangeline character.

As well as playing Eva’s friend Shannon, Mayumi Yoshida also performs as the demon that torments her in purgatory. How was it decided she should play both parts?

I think the Demon role was quite a bit smaller in the script, so really, I adored working with Mayumi and I was just needing a dark shadow in the background. I asked her to come back during the shoot, and when we were shooting the purgatory scenes, her role grew and grew as Mayumi did more and more.

You’ve cast David Lewis in many of your films and he almost always ends up dying horribly! How did you first meet and how has your working relationship developed since then?

I met David on Doll Parts, and we’ve been great friends since. I’ve learned a lot from working with him – he’s really smart, a great writer in his own right (he wrote and produced Stalled, a short film I directed), and really puts his heart into every role. He comes up with choices that push my comfort zone: it was actually his suggestion to do the workout scene in the buff. I only agreed because I misread his email and couldn’t go back on my word.

Having made a number of short films, do you have a preference between them or full-length features?

I love working on both shorts and features – they’re very different things, like short stories versus a novella. I have yet to tackle a long form like a TV series, which is like a novel. The shorts allow me to really push specific ideas, and experiment with techniques and stories in a way that I can’t do in a longer format.

Now that shared universes across multiple mediums are becoming increasingly frequent (thanks, Marvel) and with your shorts Doll Parts and The Stolen and web series Mythos all sharing a similar background mythology with Evangeline, do you see them as existing in the same world?

The stories all come from my understanding of the universe: I studied comparative religion and mythology in my undergrad, so I do use the films to explore these ideas.

Is this something you plan on expanding?

I have two other feature films written, and am in development on a mini-series based on Evangeline. We also have a graphic novel series, written by my story editor Gavin Bennett that is in need of good artist.

With Vancouver being a popular filming location for innumerable films and TV shows, is it any different making a film in the city when you actually live there?

Vancouver has been the inspiration for all my stories; I feel like the city exists on the threshold between the living and the dead, and all I have to do is keep my eyes open. The challenge (and benefits) of working in a production hub is that you have incredible infrastructure: the cast and crew are internationally trained – I can’t imagine living or working anywhere else in the world.

Although Evangeline was made in 2013, it’s only now getting a release. What caused the delay?

2014 was a film festival year – we played festivals at home, Australia, South Africa and Asia. We delayed released until it finished its festival run, and we released in Canada on Superchannel (our pay-TV station, as they were one of our financiers) in October 2014. But a US release takes time to set up, which is why we’re just releasing now with our distributor Uncork’d.

Is there any word on if/when Evangeline might get a UK release?

We’re just planning the rest of our international release strategy now. Stay tuned… 

What do you have planned next?

I’m just putting polishing touches on the two feature scripts, and I’m currently in production on my first feature-length documentary about a band. But don’t worry: it will end in bloodshed.

Evangeline will be available in the US on VOD from May 8th and DVD from June 9th and is reviewed here.

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 redos 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 released on DVD on Monday, May 4th.
 

STARBURST: Your background is primarily in writing so what was it about this story that made you want to take on directing?

James Crow: The first thing is that (Curse of the Witching Tree) is entirely mine. A lot of the other things I’ve done have already had a director or producers on board. With this film I was allowed to do pretty much anything I wanted. 4Digital had seen what I’d done before and gave me the chance and this is a film that’s produced very much in house so there was little interference.

Where did the original idea come from? Was there a real story that inspired you?

I love horror films and there aren’t a lot of people making British ones anymore so that was what I really wanted to do. There didn’t seem to be many witch films around either so we thought it would be a good subject for a very traditional style film. There were lots of rumours about how and where witches were hung and I’ve always been fascinated by the subject. This is very much a revenge film too with the witch almost as the innocent as there were a lot of men who persecuted and kill women for gain. That was the basis of the story really.

There seems to be a subtlety and a less-is-more approach to your directing. Was this a conscious decision and if there was any specific inspiration for you?

I set out to build tension like in the films I watched when I was younger, such as the original The Haunting as that’s what really inspired me to want to be a cinematographer. I wanted to make this more of a psychological horror as those films are scarier for me than the gore and the violence that American studios are pushing. Curse of the Witching Tree is much more like a 1970’s film than a modern day one.

Those films rely on strong performances so could you talk about the casting?

I spent a hell of a long time casting the leads. They were mainly people I’d worked with before and in many ways they really helped shape the film. Lucy (Clarvis – Emma), as well as being very beautiful, has a real presence and vulnerability about her which connected with Lawrence (Weller – Jake) as her brother. This was actually the first time he’d acted and it was proving hard to find someone for Jake but I saw him in an amateur dramatic performance and he actually steals many of the scenes he’s in.

And you have Jon Campling?

Jon and I came up with the Irish part of his character which I felt added a folklore element to the film. Many of the woodland scenes also felt very Celtic in nature which I liked. There was an eerie, almost Irish feeling to everything. We’re also in talks about working together again.

Can you talk about that at all?

Jon will possibly be the lead for a script I’m developing which should hopefully get going in the next few months. That’s about all I can say.

The locations are key to the story. Did you find a house to match the script or did the house you found in some way shape the story?

The actual house is a livery for horses and is owned by a friend of mine. It’s an 800-year-old medieval house so we knew what it was like. The film was set around it and we had free reign, but we weren’t allowed to film the Ouija board scenes in the house which is why they’re in the barn. The owner was worried what might get brought up from the history of an 800-year-old property! The house really had all the secret hideaways you see in the film.

You took on a lot of roles in your film?

It was something I’m incredibly passionate about. I want to become a director with my own style and because of the lack of studio interference I was allowed to develop that with Curse of the Witching Tree. Of course, we had a smaller budget because of that but that’s the way it works. I was frustrated as a writer watching my work being changed so it was important to make sure that this film was a part of me.

Could you talk about the music in the film?

I worked very closely with Pete Colman to create a traditional sound, mixing classic themes with abstract and whimsical sounds. There are two sides to everything, those sounds on the one side and dread on the other.

And a sequel?

Perhaps. There’s a lot of backstory to tell.

Carol Morley’s tale of a fainting epidemic in an all girl’s school in 1969 England finds the writer/director deepening the juxtaposition within her filmography between narrative fiction and documentary. The Falling may be most aptly described as a personal drama in the shell of a communal drama that possesses a haunting sense of feeling that is imbued with the high emotions of adolescence. But the most striking quality to what is only Morley’s second narrative feature is the humanity she infuses the film through conscious and unconscious that run parallel and afford the film a humanist depth.

Ahead of the UK theatrical release Morley shared with us her thoughts on the creative process, a willingness to transfer possession of her films, and how her interest in film audiences lies within dream realms.

STARBURST: Why a career in filmmaking? Was there that one inspirational moment?

Carol Morley: It’s weird because I came to it relatively late; I wasn’t the kid with a film camera like Spielberg with his Super 8. When I was about 23 I wasn’t sure what I was doing with my life. I was just here and there doing anything, and I ended up enrolling in A Level courses in film and photography. The A Level course in film had a very inspirational teacher who made me more open to film, and so I fell in love with film in a different way. Obviously I had watched films before, but I really began to look at film differently, and that was really the starting point. Then during the A Level night class I realised that I wanted to make film. So I applied to St. Martins college and ended up going to college and studying fine art film and video. I didn’t know at that point that I wanted to make feature films, but I definitely knew I had fallen in love with filmmaking.

The way in which ideas or stories take shape are divided between those writers who write through images, and those writers who perceive that stories are thought out through words. How does the process work for you? Does the idea emerge through images or expressions and words?

Well I think that you must be attracted to stories that resonate with you, and in that way there are feelings and experiences. With The Falling it is definitely feelings around the massive fear of teenagedom and the collective strangeness of it. Then when you think: well I want to tell a story about that, then for me I begin to look at pictures. But I also start writing and so it kind of happens simultaneously. The other thing I do is that once I begin to write the actual script or even once I begin to develop the characters which comes before the script, I play music.

Music is a very important way in for me, and very early on with The Falling, once I had started to invent the characters they all had a song that for me was their song. It was a song they’d pick at their funeral or for Desert Island Discs. So I think it is a combination of image, music and words. But I think words you come to later to some extent because the words are what have to then define it and lock it down. To start with you want to create a world that is about feelings and emotion, which music is so brilliant at evoking.

On The Falling you were working with a cast that was a mix of youth and experience. Does working with either experienced or young actors change the dynamic for you as a director or are the collaborations with each individual from project to project unique and a journey in themselves?

Well I think you are right, and you have to see every situation as unique; you have to see everything as the first time. With The Falling, working with the younger less experienced actors – Maisie wasn’t Florence; she was Abbie. I think it is very important that once you are on set the world exists. The crew, the heads of department nor I own that world. You want the world within the film to be owned by the cast, and in that way the cast feels that it’s theirs. I always think of the cast as the frontline, because no matter how good the lighting or the sound is, if your performances are weak then it doesn’t matter. No one is going to say: “I saw a film and it has great lighting.” I mean they will, but if the acting is bad they are going to notice, and so it is important for the actual cast to feel comfortable. I think that is how it can work having experienced and non-experienced actors together: just make them feel comfortable.

I’ve spoken with filmmakers who have said that once you have made the film and once you have put it out there, then it is no longer your film. Do you agree that ultimately there is a transfer of ownership and a film belongs to its audience?

Well I think when you make a film and it goes out into the world it is like your baby or your child . You worry for it and you want to protect it, but you can’t. It feels like the equivalent of that, although I haven’t got a child so I wouldn’t know, but it is the sense of that experience that I can relate it to. I know Chris Wyatt, the editor, and Cairo Cannon, the producer, and I think of it as like our child going out into the world, and you have to let go. But you are quite right, and I think it does belong to the audience. When Chris and I were editing the film we would talk about how you never finish a film. You take it 90% of the way, and it is the audience that finishes it. So the audience by bringing themselves: their experiences, opinions and everything else to a film is what completes it. While it is a scary stage when you have to let it go it is a really exciting moment. To see it resonate with audiences is exciting, because you feel that the film comes even more alive, and it takes on another life; an after life if you like, but also an adult life.

The use of image and sound in The Falling works on two levels: the conscious and the unconscious, which run parallel and in moments collide. In order to successfully capture this the film would have required a meticulous edit

It is very interesting that you say that, because there is the song When Two Worlds Collide which is used in the film . To me that is exciting because a scene is about what a scene is about. So what you are seeing on screen is only about what you are seeing. It seems disappointing because film has the capacity, and this is what is so exciting about film, where you have the sound, the music, the edit and the cinematography. You have so many elements that you can construct so much with, and so it is disappointing when the scene is only about what the scene is about. I have worked with Chris Wyatt before on Dreams of a Life and he edited ’71. He is really great editor because he gets under the skin of the film. He doesn’t apply a style to it, rather from the very beginning when he first gets the rushes it is about trying to understand what the film is. So we had a brilliant time together, and the actual flash frames that we put in – we called them subliminal images but they are not quite – meant it was very exciting to think about disrupting an actual film text. But to work with him again was brilliant, and he’s just able to get underneath something, and every director longs for that collaboration with someone that is prepared to go so far.

The Falling is a communal drama that at its heart is ultimately a personal drama. One of the exciting aspects of film and storytelling is how the narrowing of the communal scope can reveal the heart of the story as being a personal and intimate drama about one or two characters. This is a note that you managed to strike with The Falling.

Well originally that came out of some of my research. When I was researching mass psychogenic illness and mass hysteria in the medical sense, there was an often a repeated idea that there was somebody very strong and charismatic at the heart of it who had a problem life at home. So I felt that while I was telling this story of a collective, which the film is, and it is also what is so great about mass hysteria, on the other hand I wanted to go behind it. I wanted to peel it away so that it became quite stark, so that you felt some sense of somebody: Lydia’s character struggling to make connections; struggling as teenagers often do to be visible in their life and to be recognised. You see her forming that sense of connection with her mother, and it felt very important to me that I didn’t abandon all of these teenagers, and especially the character of Lydia. I wanted to give some form of resolution and hope, which seemed to come out of moving into a more intimate relationship that you could resolve to some extent.

C.G. Jung contextualises dreams as being a means to solve the problems that we cannot solve in our waking state. Do you think there is an element in which films exist on dream logic?

I so agree, and the problem sometimes with filmmaking is when you get the money to do it you don’t get much time, and the schedule is quite punishing. But I think it is very important to be open, and with the dream state thing I have to dream a film; I had to dream that Tracey had done the music for the film. Then I managed to track her down and she had never done music for a film before, but she was really up for it. So yes, this sort of subconscious that Jung talks about, and he talked about the collective unconscious as well, is what makes me so interested in cinema audiences. When you are in a darkened room you become that collective conscious in a Jungian way. So I was very fascinated with that, and hopefully the film is a summoning up of a lot of dream states too.

The Falling is out now in selected UK cinemas, and you can find our review here.

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Paul Solet is an American director, producer, writer and actor. After receiving acclaim for his debut feature Grace, his most recent film Dark Summer tells the story of an isolated young man trapped in his home at the mercy of guilt-ridden visions.

STARBURST: The tone and the atmosphere are very distinctive in Dark Summer. How do you manage to initially generate such intensity and then maintain it for the entirety of the film?

Paul Solet: The script spoke to me in that it needed the kind of atmosphere we ended up with, and it needed to come from the protagonist as he’s under attack from a number of things that are messing with him. Firstly he’s isolated, which alone could do it and there have been a number of horror movies where isolation has provided a very specific point of view. In addition to that he has all these other things going on.; there’s the question about his medication; there’s a deep love for a woman that was never reciprocated; and then there’s this weird emerald green presence that you never know if it’s him cracking up or some kind of supernatural presence. All those things spoke to me and my photographer Zoran Popovic and my composer Austin Wintory who were very close collaborators. From that perspective came the launching point in creating that atmosphere and in order to keep it we made sure every decision we made was in keeping and tried to be fearless in executing that plan. We had many long, flowing shots that force you into the film rather than using quick cuts.

As a viewer you never quite trust some of the characters, especially Daniel, but you have to go with him and follow his story.

That was a real challenge. The question that was immediately clear to me when I first got the script was “why are we going to go along with this guy?” He’s a creep! Part of it was in the casting as Keir (Gilchrist) is just very likeable and intense as an actor. Part of it was working with him to create this sense of disgust in his own behaviour; he’s ashamed and mystified by what’s happened to him. And then you’ve got to follow him and his friends to the end of the film to find out that maybe he’s not a creep after all.

There isn’t a weak performance from the cast but we have to ask about the legend that is Peter Stormare. He’s the only adult in the film and provides a very different viewpoint, almost comic at times.

I love that guy! He’s just amazing! He’s a real professional and everything he does is so interesting. In reality he was an unusual choice as he’s not the regular American authority figure. You have to ask yourself “who is this guy?” He added so much to film and it was great watching him and Keir interact.

What guidance did you give to Keir as his performance has so much subtlety to it?

Most of it came from Keir himself. He’s far more experienced than you would realise! He is wise beyond his years and really good technically. He made some choices regarding Daniel to play it restrained and so we embraced it, rehearsed it and went with it. We also gave the three friends some history, to make sure that relationship came through. We took them on a field trip with a costume assistant and load of clothes changes and took loads of pictures around the valley. That experience built some history for them.

The set design and the visuals are very interesting and you feel after watching that maybe you’ve missed lots of little things in the background. Could you talk about that a little?

I had a great art department, especially considering they only had 10 days to work on Dark Summer. Ariana Nakata kind of just dropped from the heavens for me! She usually does bigger stuff than this and lots of commercials but she wanted to be involved as she really liked the story. There are a lot of layers there, a real tapestry, and there’s a huge amount of detail and nods all over the place. A lot of our budget went there. The house was also key as we needed one that lent itself to the themes of isolation and so on. We found this house but it was so tiny that I couldn’t have expected Zoran to shoot there but he loved it. The way he shot it made it beautiful but it was tough working in there in the middle of the summer with two camera times but we did it and it was worth it. The house gave us this chance to shoot in a way that made it feel like the walls were closing in.

You’re going back to the short film format for your next project (horror anthology Tales of Halloween).

It was great fun and I think everyone’s is now done. Mine is like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western by way of The Warriors. Two of my favourite films. You can only be so epic on small budgets but it’s definitely operatic.

Dark Summer is out now on DVD.