and 'Night of the Eagle'. (An AIU favourite).My usual method of research is pretty haphazard - I tend to read a few books at once, making notes from them in various notebooks which I later gather together in one general folder. At the moment, I'm reading a biography of F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, an illustrated copy of Frazer's 'The Golden Bough', a couple of books about Aleister Crowley (although I'm finding them a bit of a slog), William Faulkner's late novel 'The Mansion' and Colin Wilson's book on 'The Occult'. I like switching between the books and having my notebooks alternate between fiction and biography and essay, because I like the idea that it all gets mashed together - that each of the elements starts to play off the others in the part of my head that's thinking about the film. At the moment, it's still early stages - I have a basic story idea and some characters planned out, but the structure and the full story arc are yet to be set in place. I know (at least, at the moment I do) that the film is going to be set in the present day and in the past, mostly the 1920s/30s - and that it's going to be set in America. One of the characters is a novelist from the 20s, hence the Fitzgerald and Faulkner research. Both of them were writers I studied at University and although I never really got heavily into F. Scott, at least not much past 'The Great Gatsby', I loved Faulkner and read a load of his novels - 'The Sound and The Fury', 'Absalom Absalom', 'Light in August' and the brilliant 'As I Lay Dying' among them.
Although they're not exactly light reads - Faulkner often used stream-of-consciousness and multiple timelines and narrators, and even in his more straightforwardly structured books, he would often run a single sentence over a whole paragraph, or even a page (meaning that if you like to read in short bursts, it can be really difficult to find your place if you don't polish off a whole section at one time) - but his books really reward the reader, with their intensity of language and their sense of place and their absolute free-flowing complexity of connections.
Another element that's feeding into the story - and which gives the film its title - is the song 'Katie Cruel'. I first heard this performed by Karen Dalton, a 60s folk singer who has recently had a bit of a popular renaissance, partly due to being mentioned in Bob Dylan's 'Chronicles' book. (Nick Cave is also a massive fan, and recorded a song inspired by 'Katie Cruel', "When I First Came To Town'). Of course, it's early days yet, and I don't know if it'll stay being the title, but I hope so.
It's funny, but 'Mum & Dad' also had an unofficial anthem in the shape of a folk song - '900 Miles' by Odetta. I first heard Odetta a few years ago, again through Bob Dylan (I'm going to have to start paying him royalties in a minute) when she was featured briefly in the Scorcese documentary about him 'No Direction Home.'
I remember thinking at the time that she had such an incredible voice and was such a strong performer that I wondered why I'd never heard of her before. I sought out a few of her recordings and came across '900 Miles', a version of an old folk song which I ended up playing over and over again while I was writing M&D. I knew we'd probably never get the original to use in the film, but we did get a new version recorded by a band called The Gemma Ray Ritual, which is terrific - a different take to the Odetta version, but really fitting in with the film.
I don't know what it is about traditional folk songs that makes me think of brutal horror films - maybe it's something to do with the fact that they seem - like the stories in 'The Golden Bough' - to be drawn from a well of sources, being changed in every telling along the way, but still retaining a primal story-truth that still echoes with audiences today. Well, it's either that, or the fact that you don't have to pay publishing on them...
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