Adventures in Uncinema

Deliver Me

2010-03-04T21:52:00.003Z

My short film 'Deliver Me' - made in the months before 'Mum & Dad'. Starring MyAnna Buring, Sam Loggin and Glenn Doherty.

Deliver Me from Steven Sheil on Vimeo.

Bloodlines

2010-03-04T21:47:00.003Z

I'll be appearing on a panel at the 'Bloodlines' Festival in Leicester tomorrow, alongside Jake West and Johannes Roberts, talking about Contemporary British Horror. Pete Walker, of 'Frightmare' legend, is also going to be there earlier in the day. Hopefully I'll get to say a few words to him about how his films played their part in inspiring 'Mum & Dad'...

Der britische Horrorfilm

2010-03-04T21:36:00.004Z

A while ago, on the festival trail for 'Mum & Dad', I visited the Fantasy Filmfest in Germany, where I was interviewed alongside Mark Tonderai ("Hush") for German TV. Here, I recently discovered, is the interview.

Obviously, for some people this is a major selling point

2009-05-27T20:30:00.002+01:00

'Mum & Dad' in the USA

2009-05-14T20:40:00.005+01:00

In the rush to talk about obscure early 70s exploitation-tinged psycho-sexual drama, I completely forgot to mention that my own late 00s exploitation tinged psycho-sexual concoction 'Mum & Dad' has now been released in the States. The film is available on DVD and on download (details here), including iTunes, and its even managed to cross the Atlantic with it's spelling intact (a version of the film with 'Mom' instead of 'Mum' was mooted at one point - which I wouldn't have minded, considering that the original 'Mom and Dad' was the film which gave me the title...)

There's a review of the film on the Fangoria site, and the film is also featured in a 3-page spread in the latest edition (the one with Sam Raimi's 'Drag Me To Hell' on the cover...
I've also done another interview, this time with Bloody Good Horror, where you can read me talk about video nasties, broken britain, and watching young women fight on grubby kitchen floors...

'The Fiend' with a face. And a crash helmet.

2009-05-11T21:27:00.007+01:00

Noodling around the BBC schedules late the other night, I came across a film called ‘The Fiend’. By virtue of the title – and the fact that the BBC regularly show half-remembered early Seventies horrors like “The Beast in the Cellar” (Beryl Reid harbours a dark secret in the basement) or 'I Don’t Want To Be Born' (Joan Collins as a stripper giving birth to a demon child (and the film which gives my sister-in-law hives at the very mention of the title)) at preposterous times of the morning – and because I half had it down as 'The Fiend Without A Face' (featuring a memorable insectoid brain monster...) I figured that it might be worth a watch. When I checked the film out online, I found out that it is in fact from the Seventies - but also that the film was directed by Robert Hartford-Davies - who made the Peter Cushing face-stealing horror 'Corruption' - and written by Brian Comport - who also wrote the screenplay for 'Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girlie', one of the influences for 'Mum & Dad' (it even, coincidentally features a character called Birdy...). All of which made it unmissable, for me at least.'The Fiend' - released in the States as 'Beware My Brethren' - is a story about a young man, brought up in the bosom of a strict religious sect, who now goes out and murders young woman whom he considers of loose morals – (prostitutes, topless bathers, anyone who expresses any kind of ‘brazen’ sexuality, basically…). Living with his diabetic mother – his father having left years ago with another woman – in the house which also houses the chapel of ‘The Brethren’, the church to which both belong, Kenny Wemys (the killer) is a mess of repression and self-loathing and desire. Looking like a cross between Michael Caine and Harry H. Corbett, Kenny works nights as a security guard (and the film features a great,brawling punch-up in the opening ten minutes as Kenny, dressed in black, almost Nazi-style uniform and crash helmet, takes on two burly thieves in a junkyard) and days as a lifeguard at a swimming pool (loudly hectoring women who dare to loosen their bikini straps), both of which occupations he uses to line up his next victims. Kenny has a weird relationship with his Mum, Birdy – both of them at times seem to express a repressed incestuous desire for each other – although the only release (well, besides all the murdering) that Kenny gets is in going down into his cellar where he either sits in a room surrounded by his hanging bra collection (‘scalps’ from his victims) or at his workbench where, using three tape players, he makes his Pervert’s Own Mix Tapes – mashing-up recordings of his killings with tapes of The Brethrens’ American leader giving his inspirational speeches.

Scenes like these have a great feeling about them – really messed-up and sordid – and the killings are pretty well done too. There’s a real feeling of Seventies sexploitation about them - Hartford-Davies also made the girls-in-prison film ‘A Smashing Bird I Used To Know’ and the schoolgirl sex education movie ‘The Yellow Teddy Bears’ – with a grubbiness that you only really get from seeing middle-aged British character actors being given blow-jobs in knackered old cars on industrial estates by young prostitutes who gob the resultant mouthful out onto the gravel before being bludgeoned to death by truncheon-wielding nutjob God-botherers.

The film isn’t uniformly great – the opening sequence, cross-cutting between the young Kenny’s baptism in the chapel - orchestrated by severe minister Patrick Magee - and grown-up Kenny’s chase and drowning of a young woman in the canal, all soundtracked by church member (and original Grand Final Winner of Granada Television's Stars In Their Eyes (as well as the world's very best impersonator of Shirley Bassey)) Maxine Barrie’s psychedelic funk-tinged gospel song (the backing track of which appears, very unconvincingly, to be played by Kenny’s mum on the church organ) ‘Wash Me in His Blood’ – is terrific, but the film never really sustains the same intensity. Some subplots – mainly the police’s investigation into the killings – just peter out, and some sequences feel like they’ve been cut with a minimum of footage (reusing shots and jumping weirdly in time and perspective), but the film is always watchable and the characters – with the exception of the do-gooder nurse, her journalist sister and suave boyfriend (played by archetypal Seventies smoothie Ronald Allen, who presents a classic case of Husbanddickery throughout) – are interesting and engaging, with weird undercurrents and twisted perspectives (just how I like them.) If you get the chance, it's worth a watch - and would probably go great on a double bill with Pete Walker's 'House of Mortal Sin'. Ah, religion, cause of and solution to all of life's problems. No, wait, that's alcohol, isn't it...?

le BIFFF

2009-04-24T19:46:00.008+01:00

Last weekend, myself and Perry Benson were both invited out to the Brussels International Fantasy Film Festival (le BIFFF) to introduce 'Mum & Dad' and do a Q and A afterwards. It's the first time that I've been out to BIFFF, but I'd been told by a few people who have been that the crowd is very passionate and vocal. I don't know if I exactly took this to be a euphemism for 'they love to heckle', but it did make me a little bit apprehensive about the film's reception...

Being driven to the venue from the airport, I got told that it's a bit of a BIFFF tradition for the crowd to ask directors to sing a song to introduce the film. Having the vocal talents of a distressed cat with a throat wound, I was a bit nervous, but luckily Perry was along to save the day. He immediately started preparing an acapella version of one of his self-composed numbers 'Mad Mum' (v.fitting) and also got the festival organisers to write out for him an introduction in both French and Flemish. Man, that guy's good.

The venue itself was a place called 'Tour and Taxis' - an immense complex of buildings that used to house the customs office for Belgium. For the festival, one of the halls is converted into a kind of bar/cafe/shop/marketplace, while a neighbouring space is transformed into a massive 750 seat cinema.

'Mum & Dad' was screening at midnight (as seems to perpetually be the case...), and we had a good sized crowd for the show. Once up on stage, Perry read out his introductions, then launched into 'Mad Mum' with me on distracting backing vocals. I have no idea what on earth the audience made of it (and part of me wondered all the way through whether we hadn't just been made the butt of a particularly elaborate practical joke (a feeling which didn't quite leave me until I met another director later that evening who confirmed that he'd been through the same thing)), but we got a good round of applause. I only stayed in for parts of the film (it's got to that stage where I'm not sure I'll be able to actually sit through a whole screening of the film again for a good ten years) but from what I saw and heard, the rumours about the crowd were true. They are very vocal, almost holding a perpetual conversation with the action on screen, really unlike any other crowd I've seen it with. Not speaking either French or Flemish, I couldn't get a great idea of what was being said, but they seemed to laugh and groan and react at all the right places.

The only problem with screening at midnight is that you end up having to do the Q and A at two o'clock in the morning, which is what happened here. Factor in the additional elements of a) a free bar stocked with Belgian beer and b) Perry Benson, and you've got a recipe for a rather looser question and answer session than you might normally get. I think we both managed to hold it together to talk about the film lucidly enough, and we seemed to get a good response, with some interesting questions and comments (one guy asked why I was 'so fucking English and repressed' and I could only answer that I was born like that. Turns out he was another filmmaker, Alberto Sciamma, a Spanish director now living in London, who, I later found out, made the film Killer Tongue (which I haven't seen, but looks like it is a far cry from repressed...) who we ended up hanging out with for a lot of the weekend. After that we did some signings - including writing our names in the festival's own guestbook, a lovingly recreated Necronomicon - then went out and got horribly drunk. This wasn't the initial plan - I'd been told that Brussels 'wasn't really a late-night city' - but the combination of travel, long day, screening stress, Q and A adrenalin buzz and Troll beer led to wrongness. Unfortunately (for him), one of the people we were out with was director Lucky McKee, whose films I really like, especially the great May, a fact which I repeatedly told him in a drunken fug for about an hour. My only hope is that he was as drunk as I was and has even less memory of what was going on.

The next day, with ringing hangovers, Perry and I both did a couple of hours of press, including interviews for a couple of French websites and magazines, one of which is already up (the link's here for anyone who's got a good grasp of the language...), then went on to watch the football - Arsenal (Perry's team) versus Chelsea (my team) in the FA Cup. It was a good-natured contest - with Perry the loudest fan in the pub (full, seemingly, of Belgian Gooners), at least up until the Chelsea winner. From there, onto dinner and then back to the festival to see a little of the Ball of the Vampires (which reminded me a lot of my experiences on Goth Cruise, except with a lot more elaborate dressing up and some great make-up (they had an all-day make-up booth for both face-painting and SFX make-up - I saw one guy who looked really convincingly like his nose had exploded across his face. (If there's anyone reading this who had a terrible cocaine-swapped-for-gunpowder mishap at the festival, my apologies for the previous comment.)))

It's one of the great things about having made a film, getting to go to places like this and it really serves to remind you (especially when you're in the middle of head-scratching, knuckle-gnawing script revisions) why you're doing what you're doing. Everybody we met at the festival was really passionate about what they were doing, whether making films, programming them or just along to watch, which is a great atmosphere to be in. I only wished I'd had more of a chance to see some films, which always seems to be the problem when you're actually showing something...

Script Meetings and Scorpions

2009-02-27T20:11:00.004Z

Down to London this week for a meeting about my new script, 'Empire of Flesh', with my producers, script editor and development funder from Em-media. I always try and be open-minded and responsive at these meetings, although it can be tough sometimes when you have face a lot of questions you'd really rather not have to face (even though you know at heart that you are going to have to). I try to do a lot of listening, letting stuff sink in and percolate a bit, rather than reacting immediately because I know that the people I'm talking to a) want the best script possible, b) believe that I can produce it and c) are an audience - so if the script isn't working and they've got questions, then it's likely that any other audience might have similar questions. It's hard though, sometimes I can't help but get defensive - in this instance I ended up using the phrase 'it's not fucking Dora the Explorer' to object to a suggested story direction I wasn't immediately sure of, which was both very childish, and very revealing of the extent of my current cultural frames of reference. (I've often thought that it would be great to do an Alan Moore style fictional mash-up (in the manner of his recent 'The Black Dossier' wherein Bertie Wooster meets one of The Great Old Ones from H.P.Lovecraft's fiction) between Dora and the 2000AD character Rogue Trooper - I could just see Dora, grown up now, in a future science-fiction war, with only her friends Backpack and Map for company...)

So, now I've got a bunch of notes and a few thorny problems to deal with. I've spent today wrestling with one of the key problems - which actually threads its way through the whole script - and potentially come up with a workable solution, but I'm going to let it mull over the weekend, just to see if it still hangs together on Monday morning...

Another good thing about going down to London was that I got to try out my new portable DVD player on the train. Although it's a bit of a weight to lug around, it was great to have something to do apart from read the paper (I find it really hard to do any work on the train). It also gives me the chance to catch up on films which I've been meaning to see but not had the chance to watch yet. This time around it was the brilliantly (and lengthily) titled 'Female Prisoner #701: Beast Stable' the third in the series of early seventies Japanese exploitation films featuring the brilliant Meiko Kaji as the stone-faced, taciturn (she doesn't say more than about 30 words in the entire film) and almost supernaturally resilient lead character Scorpion. Whereas the first film was a women-in-prison film and the second more an escape and siege film, 'Beast Stable' is more of a crime drama. It might be my favourite of the three - all of which are great - because it is so beautfully shot, with terrific flashes of more avant-garde technique - the picture allowed to white out as the exposure changes from inside to out, a fantastic strobe sequence in a garish neon-lit bar, a fish-eye lens on top of a police car - and horribly memorable sequences - the film starts with Scorpion escaping the police on a tube train and, after getting handcuffed by a cop, cutting his arm off to free herself. She is subsequently discovered in a graveyard by lonely prostitute Yuki (who nightly allows her mentally disabled big brother to have sex with her to satisfy his sexual urges), holding the severed arm with her mouth while she tries to scrape the handcuffs loose on a gravestone. And you don't get to write sentences like that too often. There's also a horrible scene with a golfclub and a beautiful image involving matches and sewage. I'm not sure it was the most appropriate thing to watch on the 10.02 to St. Pancras (I had to angle the screen away from the aisle a couple of times - especially during the sequence labelled simply as 'Abortions!' on the chapter list) - but it's a terrific film. And it's got a great theme song - "Her Song of Vengeance" - sung by Meiko Kaji (Scorpion) herself. I love it when films use title songs to comment on the action, especially when they're sung by actors from the film...

...and I'm back.

2009-02-09T21:39:00.021Z

No posts for a while, due to a few extenuating circumstances - 1) Christmas, 2) going away to America, 3) being up to my neck in writing a new script, 4) being completely talked out about 'Mum & Dad' and 5) a virulent stomach bug that passed through my family like a soul-possessing demon made of vomit. Charming, I know.

For anyone looking for some of the press reaction to 'Mum & Dad', I've been maintaining a library of scans and links on the film's Facebook fan page, where there's also details about upcoming screenings of the film. It's been strange, having the film out there in the public. We've had some great reviews, but some people have HATED it. I got called a 'nitwit' by the Daily Mail (but then, if we'd got a great review from them, then I'd figure I'd been doing something wrong...), The Times found it 'bonkers', Metro called it 'a work of staggering bad taste' (hey, in some quarters that would be considered a recommendation...) and Little White Lies called it 'a vile piece of masturbation' (they've changed their tune.) Some of what people were complaining about concerned the idea that the film was 'based on the story of Fred and Rose West'. Despite me saying, whenever I was asked, that I didn't base it on anyone's story, it all just came out of my own head (better out than in, I always say), it seemd to become one of the 'facts' about the film. Weird.

But, to be honest, the negative reviews were in the minority, so I could deal with that (although they did upset my Mum a bit), especially as they didn't seem to harm sales of the DVD, which have been really good so far. It was very strange going into shops and seeing it on the racks, like here, a couple of weeks ago, in HMV in Oxford Street.

Or even in the airport, on our way to the States.

(Although my favourite sighting was a few days ago in a WH Smith's in Nottingham...

...sandwiched between Tinkerbell and Sleeping Beauty, which, as the father of a five year-old girl, pretty much sums up my existence at the moment). It was also strange to find ourselves walking along Oxford Street and seeing posters for the film, when we didn't know they were going to be there. Still, it did provide for some cheesy photo ops.

Now that we've had the UK release, the focus has moved on to the American one. A few weeks ago the film had it's US premiere at Slamdance in Utah. The festival is held at the same time as the Sundance festival, in the same place, Park City, a small ski resort town near Salt Lake City. Lisa and I both got the chance to go over for the screening - a long old hike, but really worth it for the experience.

On the flight on the way out there we met Damon Wise from Empire magazine, who was probably the first person to write about the film following the press screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival. He was heading over to cover Sundance, and gave us some tips on getting by in Park City.

We were staying at the ski resort, a couple of miles out from the main street. It was, as you would expect from a ski resort, very cold and snowy, but also beautiful.

(Yeah, we were moaning about the freezing weather conditions and snow weeks before it was cool...). It was about -10 some nights up where we were staying, and although it didn't snow while we were there, it was very very cold. So cold, that they have actually built permanent outdoor fires to warm your toes on while you're out in the street.

(And so cold, that it routinely created THE PERFECT MURDER WEAPON!)

Slamdance takes place at the Treasure Mountain Inn, a hotel at the end of Main Street.

The set-up for screenings at the festival is admirably (and in keeping with the low-budget, independent ethos) ramshackle - there's no actual cinema, instead there's a video projector and screen put up in a couple of the conference rooms, with a few risers with chairs on them for the crowd. (This means that screenings can be a bit more active than normal - we watched a film with subtitles on which meant that you spent about 50 per cent of the time ducking and weaving your head around to see past the people in front.) It's a great festival though - with a real sense of identity, and a great team of people behind it.

As we had a friend out in Park City (Sol, who exec-ed 'Mum & Dad') who had a film showing at Sundance - Alexis dos Santos' Unmade Beds, screening at the lovely Egyptian Theatre - we got a couple of passes to allow us to get into some of the Sundance buildings. (No screenings though - trying to get hold of tickets for anything was like trying to source hen's teeth and rocking horse poo combined). Sundance is a bit more spread out - some of it is housed on Main Street, while a lot of the screenings take place about a mile away, in and around a group of hotels, where most journos, critics and filmmakers hang out. Main Street itself is where you tend to see the odd star though. I saw a third of Ashley Judd's head, caught a glimpse of Mariah Carey

(who seems to be a tiny orange growth attached to a pair of enormous black-clad security men) and a mobbed Robin Williams all of which was trumped by Lisa, who stood next to Robert Redford in a bar.

Our screening was late on the Sunday. We found out when we got to Park City that there are regulations about where you can put your posters and flyers (you can't just hand one to someone in the street, you have to do it as part of a conversation). There were a few boards specially designed for this purpose dotted along Main Street, which were inches thick by the end, as people stuck their own posters over others.

We had only brought a stack of postcards, some badges and some enormous quads, so our presence on the boards was either subtle

or decidedly emphatic

We had a good crowd for the screening and the film played well, with a great Q and A afterwards. (I didn't stay in for most of the screening, but this meant that I was allowed the opportunity to observe a slightly grumpy Ron Jeremy retrieve his suitcase from beneath the desk we were sitting at). I was worried that the film might be too British, but it seemed to travel fine and people got the humour. One woman asked me if I had been worried about screening the film - which includes a Christmas-themed quasi-crucifixion - in the highly religious State of Utah and I had to admit that I hadn't even thought about it. After living with the film for so long, some of the more contentious elements of the story now seem, weirdly, almost cosy.

It would have been great to have stayed longer, but our flight was booked for midnight the next day. I only got to see a few things - including a great documentary called Graphic Sexual Horror, about an extreme BDSM website called Insex and the man who created it (I met the directors, Anna and Barbara at one of the Slamdance events and had a great chat about the film - and about the prospect of whether it could ever get a release in the UK, due to the newly passed law banning the possession of "extreme pornography". They also gave me a T-shirt with the film's title on, which should cause a stir at the next parents' evening.) I also got the chance to meet up with MyAnna Buring, who I worked with on my short film 'Deliver Me' back at the end of 2006. She was out there with a whole gang of people from a film called City Rats, which she worked on and which was also showing at Slamdance. It was great to see her again - she's done quite a bit of horror now - including 'Doomsday', 'Freakdog' and 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' - although 'City Rats' is completely outside the genre and she's great in that too. One of the producers, Dean Fisher, was also someone we'd met through Microschool (albeit with a different project), and it was good to see him again, too and to meet the rest of the crew. (Although we didn't envy them their living quarters - about 5 of them were squeezed into an RV together with minimal heating. Makes my teeth chatter just thinking about it.)

On the way back (after nearly being killed by an overly chatty, mobile phone-using, sleep-deprived taxi driver, who pretty much fractured her arm just before setting off on the hour long journey to the airport along dark, mountainous icy roads) we missed probably the most significant day in recent American history. But then the flight was empty and I got to sleep (finally) across four whole seats, so, hey, I guess it all evens out in the end.

For Lisa's version of the whole of the above (and more) go here.. I'll try and be back sometime before the end of the year...

A festive greeting for all the family

2008-12-21T21:30:00.003Z

And for Boxing Day, why not go and see the film they're calling 'Horrifying' (The Daily Mirror), 'Shocking" (Empire), 'Savage' (The Dark Side) and 'Filth' (The Sunday Express)...

Dark Side and the moon

2008-11-26T20:21:00.006Z

With a month to go before the release of my film 'Mum & Dad', the activity surrounding the film has kicked up a notch. After a short delay while we got all the artwork sorted, the official website for the film is now up and running, with all the details about how to see the film - in cinemas, on DVD, on VOD and on download (we discussed beaming it onto the insides of people's eyelids while they slept, but the technology's not quite there yet) as well as the new trailer, some stills, cast and crew biogs and updates on other screenings. There's also a new Facebook group and MySpace page, if you're that way inclined.

I've been doing a lot of interviews around the film, including one in the latest issue of The Dark Side magazine

(which also features us - or rather a bloody, hanging Lena - on the cover). We've also kept the film going on the festival circuit, with another couple of screenings at the Northern Lights Film Festival in Newcastle and Gateshead next week. Lisa and I are also going to be on a panel about How to make a low-budget horror.

Ironically enough, one of the only festivals we didn't go to - only due to other commitments - was the Leeds International Film Festival where, we found out this week, we actually won an award (obviously our attendance at a festival must have a detrimental effect on the film's award prospects...). It was a real surprise - but greatly appreciated, especially as winning the award - a Silver Melies, named after George Melies, who made (amongst many others) the silent classic 'A Voyage to the Moon'

- means that we get entered for the Golden Melies, which is presented at Sitges next year, and is contested by the films which have been awarded the Silver Melies by each of the members of the European Fantastic Film Federation. If that means that there is even a slim chance of us getting a trophy of a grumpy moonface with a rocket sticking out of it, I'm there. The festival have posted up the Jury's comments on the programme, including their reasons for choosing 'Mum & Dad' here.

In other news - that's not all about me, me, me - Jeanie's film Goth Cruise is showing on IFC in the States tomorrow. You can see the American trailer for the film, complete with Trailer Voice Man, here. What with Jeanie screening on Thanksgiving and me on Boxing Day, we're seem to be staging a two-pronged assault on all national and international Bank Holidays. Watch it, Easter, you're next.

His fist is devastating

2008-11-19T14:06:00.009Z

It was my birthday last week, and in a notable display of hitherto unrevealed almost supernatural detective powers, my brother managed to get me a copy of Death of the Fuhrer, the brilliantly insane pulp novel about Hitler, brain transplants, sexy German countesses with dark secrets and DIY surgery. Not only is the book the same edition - with the female Hitler on the cover - but it actually contains the ending of the story! (Unlike my previous copy which had a misprinted Mills and Boon denoument.) I haven't read it all the way through yet, but I'm hoping that the pay-off can match my expectations for it - which, admittedly, is probably very unlikely...

I also got a book on Jack Kirby by Mark Evanier (which has the only cover that it should have - a giant fist punching you in the face, like you're being chinned by brilliance.) When I was a kid reading comics, I was never really into Kirby all that much - and when I saw his stuff it always seemed to chunky and big and unnaturalistic and weird. But as I got older, all of those things suddenly became more and more appealing and the sheer scale of Kirby's imagination became apparent. I love his 70s stuff especially, or what I've seen of it - comics where he was editor, writer and artist all at once, and got to create entire worlds. Stuff like OMAC - 'One Man Army Corps', set in 'The World That's Coming', a dystopian future where you can buy a girlfriend in a box, the super-rich hire cities to play assassination games in and, if you're OMAC, you can punch 10 people in the face at once.
There's also The Eternals, about ancient space gods, which is the dictionary definition of Grand Scale in every sense. (No.11 of the series starts like this:

'THIS IS WHAT HAS HAPPENED:GIANTS HAVE COME FROM SPACE TO BEGIN A FIFTY YEAR JUDGEMENT OF ALL THAT LIVES ON EARTH! THEY PROWL THE PLANET...THEY PROBE THE OCEANS...THEIR AWESOME VESSEL ORBITS ABOVE US LIKE A COSMIC SENTRY...

THIS IS WHAT IS HAPPENING: HUMANS EVERYWHERE ARE REACTING TO THIS...AND MORE!! WE SHARE OUR PLANET WITH TWO FANTASTIC SPECIES--THE IMMORTAL ETERNALS AND THE SCHEMING DEVIANTS WHO MUST FACE THIS WITH US!

THIS IS WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN: HUMANS WILL STRIKE FIRST!!'

Now that's how you write an attention-grabbing opening.)

I also love Kamandi, another dystopian future (actually linked to the one in OMAC), where, in a scenario slightly influenced by a very popular 70s film series, TALKING ANIMALS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE WORLD AND HUMANS ARE THEIR BEASTS OF BURDEN!! What I especially love about all these comics is the fact that everything is so BIG - big ideas, big splash pages, big stakes - and especially Big Close-Ups

Man, Kirby did great freak-out faces. I mean, just look at the guy in the bottom left corner of this two-page spread. That's what's happening in The World That's Coming - Space Gods, One Man Armys and Jack Kirby freaking you out.

Zombie Footballers, Bloody Brides and Pumpkin Sick

2008-11-07T21:14:00.007Z

And now it's November already. The past few weeks have gone by in a bit of a blur, what with Mayhem (which was on last weekend) and loads of stuff to prep for the release of 'Mum & Dad', and trying to work on a couple of new outlines, so AiU has suffered. I'll attempt a bit of a catch-up...

Mayhem 2008 went brilliantly well. We had a couple of sell-outs, a couple more near sell-outs and some great crowds throughout. This being the first year that we've run for a whole weekend as opposed to a single night, our workload increased exponentially, so that despite there being three of us, we still needed to constantly be in two places at once.

Highlights for me were the guests. On Friday, Mark Tonderai, director of 'Hush' (who I met at the Fantasy Filmfest in Germany recently) and his producer Zoe Stewart, who both came to our special preview screening of the film. It seemed to go down really well - even with an unscheduled intermission, when the fire alarm went off about ten minutes before the end of the film after the smoke machine in the bar got a bit out of control (and which Mark and Zoe were thankfully very understanding about). It was great to see Mark again and get the chance to catch up - even if he was faced with my specially-grown-for-the-night Beard of Evil.

Also on Friday was the Halloween party at Broadway, run by No More Parachutes, which we as Mayhem piggyback onto each year. I don't know why, but this year everybody seemed to really go for it with the costumes, including these great zombie American footballers(who seem to be haunted by a tiny ghoul...)

Jeanie and her friend Katie also did their bitwith Jeanie previewing the look she'll be wearing for our wedding next year.

Winner of first prize in the fancy dress costume was Scary Hellraiser Lady (otherwise known as Annie), seen here being presented with her prize by Chris Cooke with a Freddie Mercury tribute microphone pose
On Saturday our guest was Mark Gatiss. I interviewed Mark in front of an audience for our 'What Are You Scared Of?' spot, where we ask people to talk about the formative horror moments in their lives, the moments that have really frightened them. Mark was terrific - very entertaining and charming, and we showed a clutch of clips from 70s Doctor Who ('Terror of the Autons') to Hammer House of Horror, Carry On Screaming and the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas. These last clips were especially relevant, as Mark is just finishing three of his own Christmas Ghost Stories - a horror anthology spread over three nights leading up to Christmas called 'Crooked House'. He brought us a short trailer to show and it looks great. I can't wait. Talking to Mark about Carry on Screaming, he told me that it was one of the formative experiences in the lives of all of the League of Gentlemen, having all watched it one Bonfire night in the 70s. When he said it, it brought back my own memory of the same night - I burnt my hand on a sparkler and was allowed to sit up and watch the film as some sort of comfort. Pain, shock, horror and comedy all melding together in my little brain...

Also on Saturday, we had a screening of 'Mum & Dad' which was unexpectedly nerve-wracking for me. It was weird showing it at Broadway, especially as a load of people I knew were in the audience. It felt a bit like dropping your trousers at a christening. Afterwards I got some good feedback from some and some perturbed looks from others, which I've come to expect as par for the course with this film.

By Sunday, we were all feeling mental with tiredness, but still had a whole day of films to show, as well as runing events like Horror Wii tennis (basically Wii tennis on a big screen, except you get to play as a variety of horror characters - a werewolf, a vampire, Freddie, Jason, Sadako amongst others).

Our guests on Sunday, for a special screening of their new film 'Salvage' - another microbudget production, this time from the Digital Departures production scheme - were writer Colin O'Donell, director Lawrence Gough and actor Shaun Dooley, who I last met at FrightFest, where he was promoting 'Eden Lake'. They were all really nervous as the film hasn't really been seen before, but it went down really well with our crowd, who gave them a great response at the end.

The last film of the festival was 'Martyrs', which left a lot of the audience looking pretty battered (it's a very intense and brutal film), although that might have been me projecting my own feelings onto them, feeling as I did, like my brain was about to pour out through my ears and collect in a puddle on the floor.

I didn't get much of a chance to recover from the weekend as I had an outline to finish for 'Empire of Flesh', plus some teaching to do. Then, on Wednesday, myself and Lisa went in to do the DVD commentary for 'Mum & Dad'. (Because the film is having this all-platform release on Boxing Day, it means that everything has to be done now - film trailer, DVD box, cinema poster...). It was strange sitting there talking away imagining that people are going to be listening to us (hopefully) in a couple of months. We pretty much went straight through in one take, with only a couple of moments where we paused for breath. It actually went really quickly - it felt like the minute we got into talking about one scene, we were straight on to another. Having done a load of Q and As and interviews over the last couple of months, it felt like a lot of elements in the film were really fresh in my mind, but I also did some homework by reading up on my blog from the time, which, even though it's only 18 months ago, felt a bit like leafing through a leather-bound journal you find next to a bricked-up corpse from the late 19th century.

After that, we had a meeting with our distributors Revolver, to discuss the poster and artwork for the cinema release and DVD, plus some more press stuff, screenings and the new trailer. During the meeting I got a fleeting icy jab of fear through my intestines as I realised that, yes, the film will be OUT on Boxing Day - but I quickly dismissed it by telling myself that Yes, That's Been The Whole Bloody Point Of The Past Two Years, You Idiot....

Strong Bloody

2008-10-17T21:10:00.007+01:00

'Mum & Dad' has been submitted to the BBFC, and passed with no cuts - which is great. The actual wording for the certification is this:Well, I'd go and see it. At least it didn't say 'contains mild peril'...

Sitges '08

2008-10-17T19:40:00.017+01:00

Last weekend 'Mum & Dad' was playing at the Sitges festival in Spain and I went over for a couple of days, flying out from East Midlands Airport late on Friday night on a plane filled with hen weekenders (if anyone's looking for a safe investment in these troubled financial times my tip is put your money in these).

I arrived too late at the hotel to get the chance to see any of the festival on Friday night - which was a shame, because it was the night of a massive Zombie walk on the beach, apparently opened by George Romero - so I just got an early night (although I did entertain myself briefly by pretending to have a massive cameo head). I did get my festival pass though, complete with alternative spelling of my name:
I might adopt it in a Lars 'von' Trier kind of way.

Next day I was up early, and belatedly realised what a great view I had from my room window.

I had a quick breakfast then headed off to get tickets for a couple of films. I went to see 'Donkey Punch' (which I've missed up till now, despite it being on at Edinburgh and already come and gone on theatrical release) at the Casino Prado, a very old venue in the middle of the town, with a terrifically ornate stage and ceiling, and balconies. The film, like everything else at the festival, played in its original language with Spanish and often Catalan electronic subtitles, and got a big cheer when the title at the start 'Mallorca, Spain' came up (in fact, audiences were very vocal throughout the whole festival, cheering and clapping loads). After the film, I had a couple of hours to kill, so I walked down to the beach, where I had a bit of a paddle and basked in the hot sun. When I say bask, I mean squinted uncomfortably, obviously.
Next up, again at the Prado, was a 35mm print of 'King Kong'. Funnily enough, this was the film I was really desperate to see at the festival, having never seen the original film on the big screen. It was great, watching it with a big, enthusiastic crowd (including quite a few kids). It's been a few years since I watched it (I think the last time was about a month after my daughter was born when I found myself up all night rocking her to sleep and happened to find it on telly), and I'd forgotten how brutal it is - Kong rips the T.Rex's jaws open to kill him, bites quite a few sailors to death and treads at least two native men into the ground. He's a real monster - a fact which the remake seemed to soften quite a bit, what with the needless ice-skating crap at the end.

'Mum & Dad' was part of the festival's 'Midnight X-treme' programme, which meant that it was playing third on a bill of four films, starting at 1.00am, so I had a lot of time to kill before the screening. I couldn't get any other tickets for the evening films, so went for a meal - the festival gives guests a load of food vouchers to spend in local restaurants, and though it was tricky trying to find anywhere that did anything remotely vegetarian, I ended up in a great place where the staff were really attentive and the food terrific, all pomegranates and walnuts and gorgonzola and African chocolate cake and stuff. After that, I headed over to the Retiro cinema to see if I could get in to see JCVD, the new film with Jean-Claude van Damme playing himself - an ageing action star caught up in a bank heist. I managed to flash my badly-spelled laminated pass and get in, where the cinema was packed. (It was the same in Germany - Jean-Claude must have one hell of an international fan club...)

The film seemed good - I say 'seemed' because it played in French, with Spanish subtitles, with only about 10% of the whole film being in English (I'm sure the trailer's in English...) which meant that with my severely limited knowledge of those two languages (mainly glommed from episodes of 'Dora the Explorer' and watching 'Betty Blue' as a teenager) I didn't make out everything that was going on, although I got the jist. The film's got a great opening shot (to a great song, though I can't for the life of me find out who it's by) and JC seems to take the piss out of himself quite well. I'm going to look forward to seeing it properly when it gets a release over here.

After 'JCVD' I went outside to see how the crowds were building for the all-nighter. I'd worried about it being a bit of a graveyard slot, but the place was packed, with queues round the block. Before the screenings started, I had to stand up at the front - being the only filmmaker present - and do my normal intro spiel, which was translated by the guy introducing the films. Again, the crowd were great, cheering the allnighter, my introduction, the mention of the budget and a few points in between. Then the first film started - '100 Feet' ('cheer!') by Eric Red ('big cheer!) - a story about a women who is tagged with an electronic device so that she can't leave her house, after being released from prison for the manslaughter of her physically abusive husband, who was also a cop, whose partner is now in charge of her case and hates her for it. I'd heard some mixed reviews of the film (but then I've heard some mixed reviews of my film, so who knows...) but I really enjoyed it - it was solid genre fun, with some good scares, a couple of great set pieces and decent effects. The crowd loved it too, cheering wildly at the most gruesome death in the film. After that it was 'Acolytes', an Australian film about a trio of teenagers who stumble across the dumping ground of a serial killer, then track him down - and start to blackmail him to kill the bully who's been hounding them. Although it started slow (and a group of lads in front of me were, by this point, cheering everything - each credit in the opening titles, the first shot of a girl running, a close-up of a butterfly - until the rest of the audience told them to shut the fuck up), it had a good set-up and some nice moments of 'River's Edge' style teenage callousness, but by the end it had got a bit too twisty-turny for its own good (and by this time it was 4 in the morning, so not the best time to be trying to retrospectively tie plot points up together). Still, I enjoyed it.

Then it was time for 'Mum & Dad'. I stayed in for about half the film - they'd put me in a little side-box with chairs in to watch the film, which meant that I could get in and out quite easily. It was strange seeing the film with subtitles - some of the nuances of the dialogue seemed to get lost (or maybe some of the lines are too British to resonate with the Spanish (or maybe they just didn't think there was nuance to get), and some things that normally get a response in the UK didn't translate, but it seemed to go down well. We got some good cheers for the deaths in the film and a great round of applause at the end. A few people come up to me to say well done and give me a thumbs up (unless in Catalan that means something totally different...) before I slunk off to bed - after the JCVD incident, I didn't fancy attempting 'Tokyo Gore Police' in Japanese and Spanish.

Next day, after about 4 hours sleep, I checked out of the hotel and spent the rest of the day wandering Sitges before my late evening flight back home. I kind of wish I'd been at the festival earlier - this was the last day, so there was nothing much going on - and been able to see more things, but at least I got to have a paddle in the sea again.

On the plane on the way home, trying to take my mind off the turbulence, I munched on some themed sweets and read another book. After Pynchon last time, I went for something pulpier, namely this: (Complete with trashy 70s cover, designed to make you look like a sleazy misogynist whilst reading.) I first read 'The Killer Inside Me' about 10 years ago and it's always stayed with me. It's a great, brutal, twisted story about a small-town deputy called Lou Ford (from whom this band took their name) who presents a face to the world of being a slow-witted fool, while hiding 'the sickness' inside. Hey, Stanley, what do you think about it? Yeah, me too. After finishing the book, I got to thinking about how it'd work as a movie, and when I got back I looked it up, to find that there was a version of it made in 1976, starring Stacy Keach (which sounds like pretty great casting to me) - which was a bit TV-movie-ish, but also that there is another version currently in development. Part of me really wants to see it, while another part of me hopes it never comes off so that in my fantasy career, I get to buy the rights and do it. Hey, maybe JCVD would be interested...

Beyond Reality, Beyond Comprehension, Beyond Imagining...

2008-09-26T21:55:00.005+01:00

After posting my car boot haul of horror VHS tapes the other day, I found out that Final Girl had also recently been on an 80s retro tape tip. There must be something in the air. (In fact, Chris Cooke was talking the other day about doing a really lo-fi film festival where you only screen from original 80s VHS tapes. Instead of a cinema, there'd be a big room with loads of sofas and a fridge full of beer, and the tapes would all be on a shelf like in a video shop. He'd call it 'Tapestock.')

Anyway, in further honour of the great cultural artifact of our time that is the Eighties Big Box Horror VHS Video, I present the worst cover in my small collection, bought at a charity shop in Sherwood last year. I give you Beyond Evil!
Now, as with many of my purchases, I've never got round to watching 'Beyond Evil'. which is apparently a wannabe giallo thriller with atrocious effects and John Saxon, but nevertheless I find the cover oddly spellbinding. In the annals of bad cover art, I think this holds a special place, being probably the least scary demon I've ever seen. I mean, look at him - piggy nose, tiny fangs in his tiny mouth, above which sits either a John Waters 'tache or, I dunno, a gaping hole? Then there are those things on his cheeks - what are they? Blue walnuts? Squirrel brains? Topping it off you've got sad eyes, pathetic ten-to-two horns and what looks like a child's pitchfork poking out of his disco collar. It's so far Beyond Evil that it's gone round the other side and is Entering Stupid. One of the reasons I haven't watched the film yet is that I couldn't bear to see the film and find out (as is highly likely) that nothing resembling this demon actually appears. Although I guess I would at least get a explanation behind the cheeks...

Christmas with the parents

2008-09-26T21:42:00.003+01:00

With my head down all this week writing and working on finalising the programme for Mayhem, I forgot to even mention that 'Mum & Dad' has now got a release date - Revolver (our distributor) going for a simultaneous theatrical/pay-per-view/rental DVD/retail DVD release on Boxing Day, December 26th. Apparently, this will be the first time that a film has been released with this strategy, so we'll see what happens...

Nightmare Weekend...

2008-09-22T23:02:00.003+01:00

This Sunday, anticipating the imminent vanishing of the sun for the rest of the year, we packed up a load of random crap from our house and headed out to Bottesford car boot (just off the A52) for the first time in ages. We were selling a pile of books, boxes of comics, some children's toys (when we could prise them out of my daughter's hands) and various oddments like a compact lightbox in a briefcase (which attracted a lot of attention, and which we could have sold easily, as long as we'd have priced it at a pound (in fact, you could pretty much have sold anything at a pound, it was the default 'make me an offer' offer, regardless of the price you put on anything)). We did okay - about £70 - but we maybe need to hone our selling a bit more. My one inspired moment of Budget Apprentice-style salesmanship was to take the book on Hitler which was at the back of one of the boxes and put it face up at the front. I bet Jeanie that we would sell it within five minutes. Before I even finished the sentence, we heard a bloke go 'Oh, Hitler, he's my hero!'. The enthusiastic purchaser was about 30, shaved head, big fella, with tattoos all over his arms, and, worringly, over half his face in a kind of Maori/Orc mix. He was with his mum. While she paid Jeanie for some of her lovely fairy cakes, he enthused about how Adolf had the right kind of ideas and how things would have been much better if he'd won the war. His mum just shook her head, wearily, and tutted under her breath, like he was a four-year-old wiping bogies on her coat. (This isn't to say that the people of Bottesford are Nazis, by the way, just that anything Hitler-related seems to sell at car boots wherever you are. It's one of the eternally bouyant markets - Hitlerania...). The book was just a plain biography, bought when I was studying German, but selling it made me remember that it's actually the third book about Hitler I've owned - the other two were 1) a luridly packaged NEL paperback called 'The Insane World of Adolf Hitler" (not related to this bloke) and 2) The Greatest Pulp Novel I've Ever Read: I used to have this book, years ago, bought because I thought the cover was funny. I read it immediately - probably at about the speed it took to write it, because it was just about the most insanely plotted thing I've ever read. From what I can recall, the story concerns a spy (lets call him James) who is sent undercover to a German castle, because the British government have heard that the castle's owner, a beautiful blonde Countess, is part of a neo-Nazi cell. James infiltrates the castle, meets up with the gorgeous blond Countess and then, as spies in luridly packaged pulp novels do, starts having sex with her. It's during the sex that James starts to realise that there's something a bit odd about the Countess, especially as she starts to lose control of herself - it's almost as if her voice, her whole manner changes. Finally, at the point of orgasm, with the Countess frothing madly and Seig Heiling on top of him, James realises the awful truth - the Countess may have the body of a beautiful blonde Aryan aristocrat - but she has the brain of Adolf Hitler!

Yes, Evil Nazi Scientists managed to save Hitler's brain, transport it out of the Berlin bunker, keep it alive for years, and then implant it into a curvaceous blonde countess. Obviously at this point in the novel, a few questions come up about what exactly Countess Adolf thinks she's doing...but these are quickly wiped away as the book becomes even more crazed and ridiculous. After discovering the Nazi's plan, James is knocked out and captured. When he comes to, he discovers that the Evil Nazi Scientists have been working on him too - they have removed the top of his head and started experimenting on his brain! Apparently though, they got called away mid-Evil to do some other fucked-up thing (sewing batwings to monkeys or something, probably), so poor James is left there, brain open to the world. How does he escape this predicament? Well, being very, very careful not to spill any precious brain fluid, he reaches over to pick up the top of his head from the plate next to him, and very, very carefully, sews it back on. Yeah, that's right. Take that Rambo, you lightweight. With his headcap stitched on like a pissed dad sewing on a scout badge, James heads off to confront the Nazis...

But how does it end, you ask? How do you surpass this madness? Well, I never found out. You see, in an unexpected development that I'm still not sure wasn't some kind of hideously elaborate practical joke, the last thirty pages of the book were misprinted. Instead of the conclusion of 'Death of the Fuhrer', it was a Mills and Boon romance about a doctor called Clive and a nurse called Jenny and their tepid light petting. If you can imagine how pissed off I was, it's probably nothing compared to the poor soul who was reading Barbara Cartland's 'The Heart Surgeon' and found the climax involved a lot more Nazis, spies and brain-stitching then he or she bargained for.

Anyway, back at the car boot, and despite the fact that we were trying to get rid of stuff, I ended up buying a carrier bag of stuff, much to Jeanie's disgust. The mitigating factors were 1) I only paid 44p for the whole lot - 4 books and 4 VHS tapes and 2) Bottesford is one of the homes of great 80s big box horror VHS films. (And home-made porn.)

So, for 10p each I got: I've never actually owned this, so it was a good one to get.I'm a sucker for anything with a drawn cover. Even when it looks like it's drawn by an 8 year old.Ditto with this one, although I've no idea what's supposed to be going one here - a bloke growing out of another bloke's head holds the body of a masked third bloke like a knife? The back cover promises "Fetishism, Machismo, Misogyny are but some of the ingredients of this suspense riddled horror thriller." Ah, the 80s, when misogyny was a selling point. And films could be riddled with suspense. Like woodworm. And finally: This film has a series of the worst reviews I've ever seen (although it was played though till the end, so someone must have made it through), but the premise, set out on the back cover, sounds intriguingly nuts - " Nightmare Weekend is the story of a desperate, evil woman who manipulates a computer with the ability to warp people's minds, by shooting a tiny silver ball through space which then implants itself in the head of its unsuspecting victimes transforming them into crazed mutantoids". A posting on the film's IMDB page purports to tell the real story of the film's production, so I'll leave the last word to them:

"From An On-Line Producer and Gas Station Attendant, 6 October 2004
Author: beilttog (beilttog@yahoo.com) from New York, New York

I was the on-line producer of "Nightmare Weekend" and was responsible for casting it. I have to agree that "Nightmare Weekend" may be the worst movie made of all time. The very fact that it has been considered for this category should speak volumes. However, while there is truth that this film was made for a direct-to-video release as was popular in the 80s, the film started with good intentions and a decent script. The problems arose when the co-executive producers, (all from France and England) who were supposed to put up their 50% of the $750,000 budget decided that in lieu of $, they would provide a script (horrible - written in French), a director (whose only credits I was told were porno pix out of Thailand, a film crew (again, all from France) and some equipment. We never got our money's worth. When we (I represented the American contingent) looked at the script, I hired a new writer (American) to re-write the entire thing. However, when we finally arrived on location in Ocala, Florida to begin shooting, the French writer had once-again re-written the entire film on instructions from the co-executive producer, an Indian chap named Bachoo Senn from India/London. It was a joke but once on location, there was little we could do.

All the young actors and actresses were having sex with one another (not that we cared). The acting was appalling, although I did take great pride in casting Dale Midkiff and Andrea Thompson, both of whom went on to somewhat successful careers. I gave up my dreams of the film business (having obtained my BA in film from Univ. Miami, Fla.) and now find the entire event amusing. I currently practice law on Wall Street. The only good thing to come out of that film was my daughter (now 19) who was conceived on location. Hope this clears things up for some readers.

By the way, I played the gas station attendant only because they needed someone and I happened to be there! Perhaps I stole the show."

Fantasy Filmfest

2008-09-10T13:21:00.009+01:00

I've been in Germany for a few days, as a guest of the Fantasy Filmfest, a great festival which tours round eight German cities across August and September. I was over to present screenings of 'Mum & Dad' in the last two cities on the tour, Munich and Stuttgart. Munich was first up, and after a ridiculously early start in the morning (my flight was from Stanstead at 8am, meaning I had to get up about 5), the first thing I had to do when I got there was to go and do an interview for the French/German TV station ARTE, along with Mark Tonderai, the director of 'Hush', also playing at the festival. The interview was outside one of the cinemas being used for the festival, which was a great little place with a cool courtyard outside and some homemade horror decorations like this: as well as a hanging noose, a plate of eyeballs and something which I saw online the other day, but was here in the flesh, a limited edition Barbie 'The Birds' figure:
The interview was good, but quite long, with the camera op roaming around handheld in between me and the director, getting really close-in (which isn't going to be most attractive shot, given that my face, after early rising and hours of travelling, looked like a handful of teabags hanging off a fence), and the questions focusing on the idea of this 'New Breed' of British horror film-makers - there were six or seven British horror films in the festival, most of them by first-time directors - and whether the perversity that runs through 'Mum & Dad' is 'typically British'.

After the interview we had the screening of the film, with a good sized crowd and a brief Q and A. The audience seemed to like the film ("You have made a very weird film" said one bloke, "Congratulations."), but if there's one thing I've noticed about German audiences as opposed to those in the UK, it's that they are very into precision - one person wanted to know exactly what was in the syringe in the film and how often it had to be administered to be effective. Either he was very detail-oriented or he was planning something very unsavoury...

After the film I went back to the hotel to crash out - feeling a bit like travelling salesman (which I guess I was), before getting up the next day to get the train to Stuttgart.

In Stuttgart I got the chance to see 'Hush' - which was great to see, because we've been trying to get hold of a copy (or even a trailer) for Mayhem for ages. The cinema was, again, a nice-looking place, inside and out:

'Mum & Dad' followed on straight from 'Hush' and we had a really good crowd in for the film. Afterwards, a load of people (around 100) stayed on to ask questions, including a lot that seemed to focus on my personal relationships:
- "Have your parents seen the film?" (No.)
- "Do you have any children and will you let them watch the film?" (Yes I do, and no, not until she's old enough (or tall enough to reach it down from the top shelf)
- "Is your wife supportive of the film?" (Yes.)

Maybe they all imagined that I lived on my own, defacing pictures of happy families or something.

The next day it was back to Munich again (for the flight), which meant another 3 hour trainride of this: and this: and this: before I finally got a few hours off in Munich. Then it was on to the airport, where I spent my last remaining Euros on the most Bavarian meal you can get as a vegetarian: before catching the flight home which I spent reading Thomas Pynchon's 'The Crying of Lot 49', picked for the journey because it's a) light but b) so absurdly layered with meanings and intimations of conspiracy that I knew it would keep me going over the whole weekend (but is, however, a dangerous book to read when you're about to go back to writing because you end up wanting to call all your characters daft things like Oedipa Maas, Randy Driblette or Manny DiPresso) and watching nighttime northern Europe out of the window.

Came home to find that we'd been beaten to the festival's 'Fresh Blood' award by Jean-Claude van Damme. Damn, I knew we should have got Chuck Norris and Cynthia Rothrock for 'Mum & Dad'.

Frightfest

2008-08-31T20:10:00.005+01:00

So, 'Mum & Dad' played at Frightfest 2008 - and went down great. We had a good-sized crowd (the Odeon West End is 800+ seats and we were pretty full for the screening), and we got a terrific response at the end. A lot of people stayed for the Q and A, with myself, Lisa, Perry, Dido and Ainsley, with some great questions and comments ("Yours is the sleaziest film I've seen at Frightfest - and I mean that as a compliment"), and a really appreciative round of applause for the actors. Revolver, who have picked up the film for distribution, organised a raffle for the audience, with tickets handed out beforehand and 'Mum' and 'Dad' handing out the prizes at the end. (Hey, maybe that's why so many people stayed for the Q and A...). The prizes were a set of kitchen knives ('Mum') and a toolbox ('Dad') which were both won by happy but probably slightly concerned audience members (I don't know if it's the best time at the moment to be walking through London with a set of knives...). Afterwards we signed a few programmes and spoke with a lot of the audience, with Perry being very popular, especially as he's also in Shane Meadows' 'Somers Town' at the moment. Someone kindly video'd a bit of it and posted it pretty much the same day

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see much else on that day, as I had to do some press for the film, including an interview for Zone Horror and a weird one for Radio One, for a documentary they're doing for Halloween - weird, because the main questions they wanted to put to me were about torture porn, even after I'd said that a) I haven't seen the majority of the films they're talking about, b) I don't think 'Mum & Dad' is torture porn and c) I dont' even know what a definition of the term is. It all felt a bit two years ago.
I was so knackered by the end of the day (and also had to get back to where I was staying) that I missed Frank ('Basket Case', 'Brain Damage', 'Frankenhooker') Henenlotter's 'Bad Biology' which I really wanted to see. I actually got to meet Frank at the Frightfest party the night before and told him that his interview in a book that I've got called 'Incredibly Strange Films' (not the Johnathan Ross book of the same name, but this one which features interviews with people like Russ Meyer, Herschell Gordon Lewis Larry Cohen and Doris Wishman and articles on genres like women in prison film, mondo films, exploitation films, beach party films, Santo films and sexploitation films. It's great.) was really inspirational. He told me that, at the time, he was really embarassed about it being in the book because he'd only really made one film ('Basket Case') - but in a way, that's what's great about it, and about a lot of the interviews in the book - they're with people who aren't fully 'in' the industry and therefore have a whole different approach to filmmaking.

I stayed in London for the next couple of days, watching as many films as I could, including 'Martyrs', 'Let The Right One In', 'Midnight Meat Train', 'The Chaser', 'Eden Lake', 'Fear(s) of the Dark', 'Autopsy' and 'The Broken', and trying to avoid dying of scurvy by only eating takeaway food purchased from a Spar just of Leicester Square. I wish I could have seen more, but I'm obviously much more of a lightweight than the regular Frightfest crowd. Maybe next year, once I've built up my stamina...

Space Pirate Video

2008-08-20T14:42:00.013+01:00

Well, the interview with Film4 went out on Friday, preceding the opening of the FrightFest season on the channel. They intercut me sitting in the crypt with a lot of mini-clips of the film, not spoiling much but giving a good sense of the atmosphere. I thought I came across okay, although my friend Mark (camera op on Goth Cruise, and co-tenant of our office) insisted on rewinding the clip straight afterwards (thanks to Sky+) and pinpointing the bit where I apparently looked 'actually quite insane'. Cheers for that.

In a weekend of screen appearances, I also went to see the cast and crew screening of Mark Devenport's 'Big Things', where I have a tiny role as a pissy pirate working in a fancy dress shop. It was a great turn-out for the film, especially seeing as it was on at 10am on a Sunday morning, and it was really good to see it on the big screen. Mark, for the first time since I've known him, was very nervous beforehand, but it sounded as though they got some really good audience responses. Most of the cast and crew were there, including Johnny Phillips, who is really funny as the on-again, off-again professional actor who auditions for the film-within-a-film. London-based, Johnny has been involved with filmmaking around Nottingham since he worked on Chris's 'One For The Road' as a bullying alcohol management group leader, and was around one day when I was writing the script for 'Mum & Dad'. I needed a story for dad to tell at the dinner table, and Johnny told me one about a friend of his who worked in a warehouse. The story makes it into the film, where it is told by Perry Benson - who happens to be one of Johnny's best friends, and had no idea that the story had come from him. It's like an intricate spider's web of coincidence and fate. Or something.

Also at the weekend, I did one of my periodic sweeps of charity shops in Sherwood, home of a treasure trove of Big Box Eighties VHS Tapes. This time I managed to pick up the second sequel to Psycho, 'Psycho 3' directed by Anthony Perkins himself, which I don't think I've ever seen, but which, apparently, has a plot based around 'Vertigo'..., and also a sci-fi film called 'Space Island' which I mainly bought because, although you can't see it here, it has a holographic cover! (Also, on the back it's got one of those great drawings you used to get on posters which seems to have been done by an artist with access only to the two stills of Ernest Borgnine and Antony Quinn which appear next to it
As the name implies, the film is a space version of 'Treasure Island' starring Borgnine and Quinn. It's a German and Italian co-production, directed by Antonio Margheriti (also known as Anthony M. Dawson), who also made 'Cannibal Apocalypse', 'Seven Deaths in the Cat's Eye' and 'Castle of Blood'. He's got one of those great genre filmmaking careers that also includes titles like 'Hercules against Karate', 'The Unnaturals' and 'The Long Hair of Death'. (Oh, and 'Code Name: Wild Geese'...). Searching around, I found a great tribute website run by his son, which includes loads of trailers and clips.

The third purchase of the day was a real rarity - a DVD of 'Dark Shadows', the gothic Sixties American soap, produced by Dan Curtis ('The Night Stalker', 'Trilogy of Terror').
(I mean, 3 and a half hours for £2.99, that's got to be a bargain... ) I've only ever seen clips of the programme - which went out 'as live' on TV - but the story around it sounds really interesting, and it also partly feeds into another script idea I'm working on, set in New England.

Finally, and most terrifyingly, there was the one purchase I didn't make - this book: 100 per cent nightmare fuel. It's probably the most disturbing thing aimed at children I've seen since this: The Pop-up Safety Book, featuring a tiny clown with a knife and his pet raccoon. "Sleep well, kids. And don't have nightmares..."

I dunno, maybe the scaffolding's overkill...

2008-08-08T13:43:00.006+01:00

Back in Nottingham now, after a few days of Londoning. On Sunday I was doing some shooting for Jeanie's proposed next documentary, filming a very loud rock band in a venue in Camden. Luckily the place provided free earplugs, because I spent half the gig on the stage with my ear next to a stack of speakers, and otherwise I'd probably be entirely deaf by now. On Monday, I had a meeting with the distributors for 'Mum & Dad' (more on that when we make the official announcement...) and then on Tuesday, I was interviewed by FILM4, who are putting on a season of horror films on the channel at the same time that FrightFest is on. Tying in with their 'Generation Next' season, they were interviewing British directors of first-time features at the festival- myself, Johnny Kervorkian ('The Disappeared') and James Watkins ('Eden Lake'). The interviews were shot in a crypt in West London and I had to do some lurking about in the shadows (as befits us fearmongers, I suppose), although I did manage to resist the tempation to try on one of the many religious robes which were hanging on a rail in the room next door.

After the interview I had a meeting with our script editor for 'Empire of Flesh', which was great - I like the fact that we've got someone who's continually pushing me to make the script tighter and whose job is to expose the bits of the story that I've tried to fudge (because they're too difficult to do or because I've not been able to think of a solution to them yet). We had a good chat about the politics (or lack of them) in horror films, and about what makes an audience stay with a character - do they have to be 'likable' or just 'convincing'?

In the evening, Jeanie had her first screening of 'Goth Cruise', for cast and crew and invited guests (and Goths). It was great to see it on the big screen (apart from the couple of shots that I did that were slightly soft...) and it got a great reaction. Even though it was only last September, the whole thing now seems very far away, and I had to remind myself that I was actually there. The film is screening tonight in the States at Convergence, a big American Goth festival in Tampa, Florida. Jeanie went over and filmed some stuff at the festival last year, when it was held in Portland and it looks great - I hope it goes down well.

Back here yesterday, and we're getting on with Mayhem stuff. We're slowly firming up the programme and trying to get some special events sorted out for the weekend. We also met up with Rhys Davies, who is currently filming a zombie feature in Leicester called Zombie Undead, which is an ultra-low-budget production with great effects and make-up. It's a long process for Rhys because he's only got the resources to film a couple of days at a time (at most), so if you feel like helping him get to the end (and you've got some spare money hanging about which you don't mind sinking into a low-budget zombie film), visit their 'Help fund a feature film with PayPal' page here., and become a (rotting) part of zombie cinema's future.

"When he didn't get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in..."

2008-08-07T22:45:00.006+01:00

In a piece of news guaranteed to excite those, like me, who are fans of both comic books and impossibly hard-boiled crime fiction, writer and artist Darwyn Cooke, responsible for, amongst other things, the great recent revival of Will Eisner's 'The Spirit' is working on a comic book version of the Parker books. I hope to god that this is as good as I think it's going to be. The early art looks promising, and I loved what he did with 'The Spirit'.
so it all bodes well. As I've probably said before, reading a Parker story is one of the unalloyed joys of life.

Mother and Dad

2008-07-25T17:00:00.007+01:00

I've spent most of the past couple of weeks writing in one form or another. We've been having a few meetings with people to try and get development funding to make another film, capitalising on the fact that a lot of people in the industry have now seen 'Mum & Dad'. We've had a really good response to the film, but there seems to be a consensus that horror is 'a hard sell' at the moment. (Never a good thing to hear when you're trying to sell horror films). I don't know why this is - although one person said to me that in these credit crunch times, people want to see 'escapist, upbeat' films (citing 'The Dark Knight' as an example...) - but maybe that's just in terms of mainstream box office crossover. It's quite an interesting process, talking to people in the business of selling films, because you get a lot of idea about the potential options available to you as a filmmaker - whether you want to carry on writing and directing (pros: more control, more 'auteur' cache; cons: it takes time to write a film, so taking you out of the loop for a year or two), if you want to try and score a worldwide (including the US) hit (pros: you can make more money, get a 'bigger' career; cons: you probably won't be able to make many films in Britain, with British actors) or if you want to stay in the horror genre (pros: you love horror and it's great fun; cons: 'horror's a hard sell at the moment...').

Anyway, we ended up in one meeting pitching a few ideas, one of which is Empire of Flesh (which I've just re-outlined after getting script notes back) and two others which up till now have only really existed as a bunch of notes and a pitch. One's a science-fiction idea, the other one is a drama/thriller. I've spent the past week trying to work both of them up into short outlines, with the hope of maybe getting some kind of development deal.

At the same time, myself, Chris Cooke and Gareth Howell have been planning the next Mayhem Horror Film Festival. After initially forswearing the idea of applying for funding, we have now found ourselves in the position of actually putting in an application (I don't know what happened - i think I was out of the room at the time...) which led to us huddling round the form for three hours the other morning. None of us is a natural form-filler (there was a point where I saw a small portion of Gareth's soul die (it was like seeing the leg shrivel on a balloon animal) - so we ended up dithering and task-avoiding. Hence these lovely drawings, each bit drawn by one of us without reference to the previous drawing:

I don't think it was a fair game - the other two have both got Arts degrees (as I'm sure you can tell.)

The festival is coming together, though - we're hoping to show a few previews and get some guests along, as well as have a cracking party on Halloween itself, possibly with a repeat of last year's haunting.

In the next few weeks, I'm hoping to get to see some films, both at Frightfest and at the Fantasy FilmFest in Germany, which I'm hoping to be able to visit. (One great thing about this festival which I forgot to mention is that Dario Argento's 'Mother of Tears' is also playing, which means that on every site that lists the programme, my film and his get put next to each other, which I know is a really fannish thing to be excited about, but then I am still a fan...)

It's just weird to have spent so much time watching someone's films, then to find yourself showing alongside them.

Oh, and for anyone who is interested in trying the same route, the next round of applications for the Microwave scheme is now open. Good luck to anyone who's applying...

"meurtres et perversions"

2008-07-15T16:13:00.008+01:00

It's only been a few weeks and already Edinburgh feels like some weird fever-dream involving cars running on blood, Sean Connery's tattoos and Abu Ghraib photos.

Things have been moving on with the film since the festival - on the day after the second screening (and with a fearsome hangover) I took the train down to London to attend a screening of the film for Sales Agents and Distributors (I went back to Nottingham the same night, very dazed and smelling like a man who has been on hot, crowded trains for nearly 7 hours). We had a good turn-out and it seemed to go down well, resulting in a couple of immediate offers and some requests for copies of the film for further deliberation. Since then, Lisa has been fielding all the interest that we've had, and hopefully we should have some deals sorted out in the next couple of weeks...

I also got back to find that the 'Mum and Dad' trailer and info about the film had suddenly started appearing on loads of American horror sites, as well as on sites in Canada, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Lithuania, which was a very weird sensation - it was like the box had now been opened and suddenly everything was exposed to the air.

The film is also going to be showing at another couple of festivals. It's been selected for the German Fantasy Filmfest next month, which plays across eight German cities over 12 August - 10 September, and on 22 August it's going to be playing at FrightFest at the Odeon West End in Leicester Square in London, which I'm really looking forward to.

While everything's kicking off with 'M&D', I'm still scrabbling away, trying to get some more projects off the ground. I've re-outlined 'Empire of Flesh', started trying to put together a basic set-up for 'Katie Cruel', as well as running up a brand new outline for a kind-of-slasher-film called 'Red City', for which I've cannibalised an old idea and mutated it into a new one. (Or rehashed an old script, however you want to put it...) I really want to get moving on something soon - it's been well over a year since we shot 'M&D' and I'm worried that I'll forget what to do...

Edinburgh Film Festival: Day Seven

2008-06-27T21:59:00.004+01:00

My last day at the festival and the second screening of 'Mum & Dad'. This time we were in the smaller cinema, Filmhouse 2, but had sold out before the day, so that when I went to try and get a spare ticket at 9 in the morning, there were none to be had. So, we had a packed crowd in a really hot cinema - I didn't stay in for the film this time, as I wanted to go and chat with Lizzie Francke, who was one of the execs on the film, and a massive self-confessed horror geek. I just came in at the end - it seemed to go well and we had a good turn-out for the Q and A. Olga was there, so she came up with me. I was expecting maybe a bit of an adverse reaction (I know it's not really for everyone...), but people seemed to really like it, although one person was a bit confused by the BBC logo - "They're never going to show it, are they...?". Well that was the initial deal, but we'll have to wait and see.

Earlier in the day, I'd been to see Ray Harryhausen give a talk about his work. It was good, loads of great clips and he was very charming. There was a slight feeling that he and his co-writer (who was interviewing him) had been through this whole thing before (especially when they told a joke about 'One Million Years BC' twice within five minutes), but everybody there had obviously been given so much enjoyment by his work over the years that they could forgive him anything. My friend Sally, who I went with, had her picture taken with him the other day and was thrilled to see him - although he did give her a bit of a shock when he revealed in the talk that the fur for 'Mighty Joe Young' was made out of 'unborn calf'. What with her being a vegan...

I dashed straight from there to see the documentary 'Dreams With Sharp Teeth' - about the SF writer Harlan Ellison. He's an irascible, unstoppable, ever-talking, frequently hilarious, often foul-mouthed force of nature - a total gift to a documentary maker. (He described Death as looming over him 'like a Star Trek fanboy salivating over your shoulder') With contributions from Neil Gaiman, Peter David and others (including a just-about-acceptable level of Robin Williams), it was a gallop through his life and opinions, interspersed with clips of him reading from his work. And slagging off everybody from Warner Bros to the man in the car in front of him.

From there it was onto 'Mum & Dad', and with that over and done with, I got stupidly (and very relievedly) drunk, talking with Alex 'Blood Car' Orr about The Best B-Movie Actor Whose Career Should Get Resurrected By Appearing For Not Much Money In A Crazed Exploitation Film. Treat Williams and Randy Quaid were both pretty popular choices. Although I was so pissed by the end, I could possibly also have put forward Gary Wilmot and That Bloke Who Played The Policeman In 'Allo 'Allo. Who knows.

Edinburgh Film Festival: Day Six

2008-06-25T12:07:00.002+01:00

I spent half of yesterday with my other hat on - as co-director of the Mayhem Horror Film Festival - watching shorts in the Videotheque to see if there was anything that we might try and nab for the festival this year. It's quite a weird environment for watching films, the Videotheque - about 25 dvd players and flatscreen TVs lined around the walls of a dimly-lit and library-quiet room, with people sitting there with headphones on. I tried to select as many films as possible, just going by the description in the programme - which meant that occasionally I got a less horror film experience than I was expecting. (I've learnt that if anything says that it 'plays with horror film tropes and iconography' it usually means that it's not scary or disturbing, but slow and pretentious). I saw a good zombie film, which I'd already heard about and had been hoping to get a look of, as well as a very confusing Welsh serial killer film (there was a shot at the end that the music and camerawork was telling me was a reveal - but I couldn't figure out why, seeing as I aleady knew who it was) and a film I was really hoping was going to have a werewolf in it, but ended up being about the Dangerous Dogs Act.

In the afternoon, there was a real treat - a screening of 'Jason and the Argonauts', followed by a book signing by Ray Harryhausen. The screening was on at a beautiful old cinema called the Dominion, just a little way out from the city centre. The screen was great - really big, with two rows of leather sofas along the middle, each with a small table and a footstool. Ray Harryhausen did a brief intro and then we watched the film on a scratchy old print. I don't remember the film being in Academy ratio (which was the first surprise), because in my childhood memory it was just big and epic. I probably haven't watched the film for 25 years because there were whole bits I didn't remember - but certain sequences - Jason being carried to Olympus in the palm of a giant Hermes' hand, the bronze statue of Talos coming to life and of course the brilliant and still technically impressive skeleton fight - which are burned on my memory. Afterwards, my friend Sally got a book signed and I took a picture of her with Ray. (Maybe I should of taken a hundred, just getting them to move ever-so-slightly in between each one...)

Edinburgh Film Festival: Day Five

2008-06-24T16:13:00.009+01:00

My inexperience with working on PCs, and there only being PCs to use in the Delegates' centre, mean that the post I originally wrote here got accidentally deleted by a twitch of one of my little fingers. Which is a total pain in the arse because I'd just written a long review of Duane Hopkins' 'Better Things', which we saw yesterday.

Rachel (who produced the film) and her husband Al (who co-produced) are friends of ours from Nottingham (Rachel produced my short film 'Cry') and they very kindly got us tickets (it was a sold out screening). My thoughts on the film, as I remember them from the original review were something along the lines of...beautifully lit and shot...Bresson-like approach to acting...felt a bit like being on heroin...deliberate eschewing of story...got a bit confused over who was who for the first hour (made note to self to suggest actors wear name-tags next time)...all in all a bit cold...didn't dislike it, but found it hard to fully engage. Just imagine all that, except strung together in an intelligent, witty and perceptive review.

Afterwards we went to another party, this time for the 'Trailblazers' - one of whom is Lisa. This meant that the bar we were in kept showing shots from all the Trailblazers' films, including 'M&D', so I kept seeing Olga's face pop-up above the bar - especially disconcerting because Olga was also in the bar. I met another journalist who said how much he loved the film, and was really praising the cinematography, which was brilliant to hear, because Jonathan Bloom, our DOP, doesn't always get the praise he deserves for doing such a good job with such limited resources (i.e. three lights). Early night tonight (well, before 2 o'clock) because I'm starting to flag. I've obviously not got the stamina for all this.

Edinburgh Film Festival: Day Four

2008-06-23T15:18:00.003+01:00

After last night, I had a bit of a lie-in this morning, before going off to a lunch organised by the festival to hook up British filmmakers and US and British agents. I wasn't really firing on all cylinders, having had about four hours sleep and with the adrenalin from last night now fully exhausted, so I don't think I was the best advocate for myself or the film - one agent said that he'd like to come and see 'Mum & Dad', then said he was worried because he was a bit squeamish and I told him he probably shouldn't then. Not really the best selling technique.

In the afternoon, I went to see Errol Morris's documentary 'Standard Operating Procedure'- his film about the soldiers who took the photos of the torturing and humiliating of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Gharib - which was great - fantastic interviews, beautifully shot and graded - brilliant slow-motion visuals and a real sense of him trying to humanize the people involved. It seems that his attempt to humanize has pissed a few people off (at least judging by the introduction and by some of the questions directed at him afterwards) which I can't really understand. The film clearly points the finger at the people higher up, and makes clear his belief that these people - though not lilywhite or 'innocent' - have been scapegoated by the American government to deflect attention from the themselves. Morris himself seemed to be getting a bit pissed-off during the Q and A session, when it was suggested that he had gone soft on the interviewees. To me, his attempt to humanize these people (who themselves have been villified for the dehumanization of the Iraqi prisoners) makes the film, and I don't think the fim suffers from not interviewing anyone higher up - that seems to be to be another film.

Went to bed early, hoping not to have another anxiety dream like last night, when my nightmare - about the second screening of the film - included the entire audience walking out to go and see Morrissey and my executive producers cutting bits of 'Mum & Dad' into episodes of 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch'. I don't even want to think which part of my brain all this is coming from.

Edinburgh Film Festival: Day Three - 'I guess I don't have to tell you why we're here today...'

2008-06-22T14:51:00.006+01:00

The World Premiere of 'Mum & Dad' was last night at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh, a midnight screening attended by a couple of hundred people, who all braved the pissing rain to come and watch a low-budget horror film filled with wrongness. Myself and Lisa did an introduction and also brought all the cast up on stage - Perry Benson (Dad), Dido Miles (Mum), Olga Fedori (Lena), Ainsley Howard (Birdie) and Toby Alexander (Elbie), all of whom had made it up for the screening. It was great to be able to present them at the premiere because they are all a massive part of the film and bring so much to it with their performances - there wasn't a weak link amongst them.

The film went down well - people groaned in disgust, winced in sympathy and laughed in nervous repulsion. A few people also walked out, but it was always timed with a bit of horror, so I don't mind that (a guy sitting next to us started off with a gasp, then fell forward onto the seat in front clutching his hands over his face and moaning, and then - at the most offensive part of the film - finally bolted for the door...) It was interesting to stay in and watch it with a crowd, trying to guage if they were staying with it, finding out what they reacted to. When the screen went black at the end there was a great round of applause and a few whoops - a massive relief for all of us.

We had a quick drink in the bar and spoke to a few people. Everybody was really nice about the film (I guess if they were going to be horrible they probably wouldn't make the effort to stay around and do it. Unless I'd completely offended them, which is always a possibility). My favourite reaction came from a teenage actor who came to see the film with his dad - he had the same look on his face that I probably had when I saw Halloween when I was his age - wide-eyed and adrenaline rushing. He just said 'That was...fantastic'. Brilliant, I thought, hopefully there's another horror film fan for life.

Because of finishing so late (close to 2am) there wasn't time for too many post-screening drinks, so we poured out onto the streets of Edinburgh and did the classic wandering-around-asking-random-strangers-if-they-know-anywhere-open routine, that ended in abysmal failure. So we just went home.

Earlier in the day, me and Jeanie had been to see Errol Morris in conversation. He was great - we've both been fans of his since watching his TV series 'First Person' years ago on late night Channel Four. He talked about making 'The Fog of War' and 'Standard Operating Procedures', as well as about the difference (if there is one) between interviewing and interrogating someone. He spoke really well and realy carefully, thinking about every single sentence. (The whole interview was projected live onto the big screen at the Cineworld, so there were long 30 second spans where everybody was just looking at his face formulating a thought, like some large-scale art piece or something.) He also told a great story about working with an ex-FBI agent whose partner used to conduct background interviews with people (ie people who weren't suspected of anything but who may have be able to provide background information on their next-door neighbours), by knocking on the front door, flipping open his FBI I.D. and saying 'I guess I don't have to tell you why we're here today...' - a technique which would invariably end up with them starting to cry, and then confessing a bunch of stuff. I thought about opening my 'Mum & Dad' introduction with the same words - but then opted instead for telling how the last time I'd been in the Filmhouse had been to see an all-night horror film festival, including a screening of an Argentinian mutant zombie film (called 'Plaga Zombie: Zona Mutante', if I remember correctly)and how great it was to be back here with my own film. And I really meant it - it felt like coming to a real marker point - the same cinema where 'Cry' first played was now the place where people first saw 'Mum & Dad'. It was really satisfying (especially the wincing and groaning) and a massive relief.

And now I can finally sleep. Maybe.

Edinburgh Film Festival: Day Two

2008-06-20T21:12:00.004+01:00

So, 'Blood Car' was good - full-on trashy (in the best way) low-budget fun, with some great comedy, a few really close-to-the-bone transgressive moments and strong performances. There was even a real-honest-to-God audience member fainting moment, after a particular moment of extreme close-up bloodletting - always good for a film festival anecdote. The writer/director of the film, Alex Orr was there and did a very entertaining Q and A, during which, in response to the question 'What do you plan to do next?', he pitched an idea doing about a version of Jaws with a giant pelican. And what could be bad about that?

This afternoon, I ended up being on a panel discussion with Alex - and Lizzie Francke (now at the UKFC, but previously an Executive Producer on 'Mum & Dad' and a massive horror geek (in the best way)), and journalist Claudia Andrei. The discussion was chaired by Muriel Gray, who is another self-confessed horror geek. We had quite a good crowd for the discussion, which ranged from the political dimension of horror, why low-budget is best and how transgressive you should be as a horror filmmaker (answer: very), with only a brief diversion into talking about screwing kittens (and I've still no real idea how we got into that)(but I'm now bound to get some more really odd search result hits).

Tonight we're going to see another horror film, 'Spike', followed by a party. We've also been joined by a few members of the cast in preparation for the premiere tomorrow night, as well as Gareth, Chris and John, all of whom have made it up in support - meaning that tomorrow night is going to feel a bit like one of our regular horror nights - except in a really massive and crowded living-room...

Edinburgh Film Festival: Day One

2008-06-19T17:56:00.004+01:00

We got to Edinburgh late yesterday afternoon, after a long drive in a packed car (we had a job trying to fit everything in - not because of volume but because we had to transport the film posters - which had to be kept flat - and a big box of promotional bloodstained fairy cakes - which Jeanie and our friend Carol spent most of Wednesday making and which had to be kept strictly upright - alongside a car-sick four year-old. Loading the car was like trying to play a very middle-class, grown-up version of Buccaroo.)

Pretty much as soon as we arrived, we had to get ready to go out again as we had tickets to the opening night film - 'The Edge of Love'- and party. Keira Knightly and Sienna Miller were both there, so there was quite a throng of press photographers and a red carpet and everything. We just nipped in the other door. In the screening, I was a few rows behind Sean Connery, which will probably impress my dad. The party afterwards - 40s themed, to tie in with the film - was great, except they were serving free Guinness, which meant that I got too hammered and got to bed too late. This morning I was regretting it, although luckily I didn't throw up on any film financiers or anything.

This morning was the press and industry screening for 'Mum & Dad' - I didn't go, but Lisa did and said we had a pretty good crowd. I met her at an Em-media brunch do afterwards and some of the journalists who had been to the screening were there. (This was obviously when I started most regretting the Guinness.) We handed out our bloodstained fairy cakes (adorned with the film's logo on rice paper) which seemed to go down well. I spent quite a bit of time talking to a journalist from Empire, Damon Wise, who really liked the film - and a few hours later got a text from Chris to say that he had posted about the film on the Empire website. He also put up a photo of the cakes, which means that all of Jeanie's hard work didn't go to waste. Now if we can only translate cakes in mouths into bums on seats for the premiere we'll be all right.

The rest of the day has been about recovering from my hangover and trying to plan what we're doing for the rest of our time here. I'm hoping to actually see some films, starting with Blood Car tonight. It mentions Russ Meyer, Troma and John Waters in the preview, so I'm guessing there might be an edge of camp to it...

Thatcher, the BBC and Sir Sean's shoulder

2008-06-17T12:21:00.005+01:00

Gearing up for Edinburgh, I got invited onto local radio this morning to talk about 'Mum & Dad'. It was only a brief spot on the breakfast show, but they played a bit of the trailer and I also got to plug Mayhem. On the website they also plug Jeanie's film and mine and Cooke's long-gestating wrestling film, so hopefully everybody's happy. (Except Film London, who I didn't get the chance to mention. Shit.) I really wish I hadn't used the phrase 'the magic of filmmaking' or that I'd used it in a much more ironic way. (At least I didn't say 'the planes are actually another character in the film').

The festival has also put up a new piece about the film, which posits Margaret Thatcher as being responsible for the whole horror of the film (her quote about there being 'no such thing as society' was one of the springboards for the script), which serves her right for fucking up the 1980s.

In other Edinburgh-related news, Sean Connery apparently will be attending, despite a recent golfing injury. Which I only mention, because I just found out the other day, that he's been doing some stealth marketing for us.Thanks, Sir Sean! (I've also learned, from the same site, that Robert Downey Jr. has a tattoo of himself as a superhero on his arm (how prescient) and that 'Bill Murray has a cartoon duck on his shoulder' - although whether that's a tattoo or a Harvey-style figment of his imagination, I don't know.)

Finally, Lisa Trnovski has been chosen as one of the festival's Trailblazers. I'm not sure entirely what it entails, but it means that, thanks to the EIFF, we both now have super-hero aliases: Trailblazer and Fearmonger. Actually, that sounds more like a hero and a villain.

I'm off to the festival tomorrow morning - will try and post while I'm there...

"Dad always has the last word..."

2008-06-15T11:50:00.004+01:00

Beware the fear-monger

2008-06-10T20:38:00.005+01:00

'Mum & Dad' has been featured on the Edinburgh International Film Festival website as one of their horror film choices at the festival. Here's the write-up:

"Rarely does EIFF feel the need to warn audiences of disturbing scenes, but this really is one exceptionally acerbic film, which will challenge even the most hardcore of horror veterans. If there’s one place we can fall back on in dismal times it must be the hearth of dear old mum and dad, but in British fear-monger Steven Sheil’s world there’s simply no escape. Prepare for the worst."

And hope for the best, I guess.

It's great that they're selling the film like that - and it's great to finally become known as an official 'fear-monger' - which, I feel, is probably the best of the monger family to be (much more impactful than 'fish-' or 'iron-'. Although probably less worrying than 'war-'.) And definitely better to be monging (?) fear than monging hate, like this guy (who actually turned out to be the real mind of Adolf Hitler in a cloned body, who attempted to blackmail the nations of earth by threatening to blast them all with a 'hate-ray' from his orbiting space station. Ah, comics.)

From Mayhem to November

2008-06-06T13:50:00.004+01:00

As well as gearing up for Edinburgh, I've also been working with Chris and Gareth on the plans for this year's Mayhem Horror Film Festival. This will be the fourth year we've run the festival, and this year we're going for an even bigger programme, stretching over three days rather than just one night. Obviously that means finding a lot more content, but also gives us the opportunity to do a lot more events, outside of just showing films, that will hopefully give the festival a strong identity amongst horror fans. The festival is planned for the Halloween weekend - Friday 31st October to Sunday 2nd November - and is going to include a shorts programmes (any submissions gratefully welcomed), some special previews, some classics and hopefully a few special guests. We're going to be updating people on the website and on our Facebook page as soon as we get things confirmed. The event is going to be taking place at Nottingham's Broadway Cinema (as usual), including a big Halloween party in the cafe bar on the opening night. Get working on your Halloween costumes now..

"We only wear black until they invent a darker colour..."

2008-06-06T13:18:00.007+01:00

Jeanie's film Goth Cruise, which I worked on as DOP (alongside Mark Bushnell) is now finished. Here's the trailer:
Goth Cruise (the movie) Trailer

The film is currently gearing up for the festival circuit, so hopefully should be viewable in full later in the year.

It all seems so long ago now and it was such a hard shoot in lots of ways - filming people wearing black, in dark locations is always a bit of a challenge, adding on top of that being on a cruise ship the size of a shopping centre and shooting days that lasted from dawn until the early hours of the morning meant that the whole experience has just merged into some weird fever-dream. Still, it was kind of fun. Look, here's me having fun.

And they say Goths are miserable.

I think I'll just act bored instead/And contain the blood I would've shed*

2008-06-01T21:07:00.011+01:00

With less than three weeks to go now until the 'Mum & Dad' premiere in Edinburgh, I'm starting to get more excited/nervous about the whole thing. This week, in the midst of finalising our poster design (which seems to have taken ages, but finally seems to be signed off) I got hold of a copy of 'Shivers' magazine

which features

(As an aside, I have to say, I bloody love werewolves (y'know, as a kind of mythical/horror fiction thing, rather than in a kind of My Car is My Lover way), so it's great to have the film's name and mine seemingly spilling out of a Wolfman's fanged jaws...)

The magazine features a five-page spread on the film, complete with a great selection of photos

The article's written by Alan Jones, who came to the set on the last day of the shoot. I remember talking to him in the 'Green Man' pub, just across the road from the field where we were shooting the end of the film. It had been a boiling hot day (so much so that I ended up with a bright red sunburnt nose, always a great accessory when you're trying to direct an intensely violent scene), and I'd spent about 8 hours in a field full of horses, horseshit and horse-created deep mud furrows which threatened to turn all our ankles as cast and crew repeatedly ran across them, so I was feeling a bit weird anyway - a mixture of utterly exhausted, manically wired, slightly sunstricken, soul-hollowingly anxious and borderline euphoric - which meant that sitting down and talking sense about the whole film was going to be a tall order, but I think it turned out okay. (And I think Alan did a great job of stringing my unwieldy thoughts into a cohesive order). The article does feature me uttering the phrases 'repulsive perversion', 'a power drill pounding the brain' and 'genitalia stapling', all of which should give the casual reader a good enough vision of the film., I hope...

*possibly quite arcane musical reference explained here

Terminal of terror

2008-05-21T15:25:00.004+01:00

Since the news about our Edinburgh screening came out, both myself and Lisa have had our heads down trying to promote the film as much as possible, with our limited resources. We've been working on getting a couple of poster images sorted out (we're going to need them for the festival) as well as getting a logo designed for the title. I'm no designer, so it's been a bit of a trial and error process, although we did get some time with Franki of designers Franki and Jonny to help us with the design and with figuring out a (cheap but effective) strategy.

Almost as soon as the Edinburgh announcement came out, I found a post about the film on a US website called Quiet Earth. It was great to see them pick up on it - the first mention the film has had outside of the UK - and I ended up sending them the trailer and some stills. It was really exciting to see the film start to take on a life of its own, outside of what we were doing.

We also got a mention in The Times, in a sidebar to an article about the festival. It was a real surprise to get mentioned here, especially as no-one's really seen the film yet (although The Times did send someone along to interview us on set). I think the airport setting helps - Heathrow has been so much in the news this year, and the idea of 'horror' and 'Heathrow' going together is a good in-point for journalists. Along with the other biggest news story this year, the story of the Austrian cellar (which got mentioned to me about six times last week in relation to 'Mum & Dad'...), it looks like we've got the most zeitgeist-y (sorry, that should probably be 'zeitgeistig'. My German tutors would be despairing...) film of the year.

The Josef Fritzl case is an interesting one - it's almost unbelievable in the extent of the abuse that took place, but also in the ability of Fritzl to sustain a normal existence alongside it. It's a real case of someone with a truly distorted version of family and parenthood, someone who has created their own world and sees little wrong in it (the classic 'I'm not a monster' claim...). It's a real reminder that real life can be even more twisted and perverse than anything horror filmmakers could think up (although I would conceivably exclude Frank Henenlotter from that claim...)

At the same time as sorting out the promo stuff for M&D, we've been moving forward on 'Empire of Flesh'. We had a meeting last week with Celine, our script editor, which was great. She had a lot of good things to say about the script, but also some big notes about structure, timeline and characters, which I need to address in the next version. It was good (if quite intense) to spend time talking about the script and trying to pin things down which I'd been vague about. Both Lisa and Sol were there, and Celine said it was great that they were both 'not scared' of saying things about the script - which then occasioned twenty minutes of me trying to defend something that I'd written but which nobody found clear. 'Scared', sheesh...

Mum & Dad: not suitable for children...

2008-05-09T23:19:00.004+01:00

The line-up for the Edinburgh International Film Festival was announced this week and the great news for us is that we're in it.

'Mum & Dad' is going to have its world premiere at the festival at midnight on Saturday 21st June at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh, with a second screening on Wednesday 25th June at 10:15pm. The slots are great - especially the midnight screening, which shouts out 'horror' (as well as 'time to get pissed beforehand'). The film is in the 'Night Moves' section of the programme, which, although it sounds a bit like a 1980s George Benson album, (or maybe an early Nineties straight-to-video erotic thriller starring Jeff Fahey and Shannon Whirry..) should be quite interesting and eclectic, including films from South Korea ('Cadaver'), Spain ('Shiver', 'Time Crimes') and Denmark ('Just Another Love Story').

Lisa and me and some of the cast are going to go up for the festival, and in between now and then we've got our work cut out trying to publicize the film as much as possible so that we get good crowds for the screenings. To that end, we've put together a trailer, which you can see here.

I'll post more stuff about the film, either here or on our facebook page as and when we manage to sort it out...

Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Folk

2008-04-25T22:52:00.007+01:00

While I'm waiting to get some script feedback on 'Empire of Flesh', and with 'Mum & Dad' in the midst of having a raft of marketing materials (albeit a small raft, like a matchbox tied to two lolly-sticks) designed for it, ready for us to embark on our first screenings (more of which at a later date...), I've been working on another story idea. I hate waiting at the best of times, and although I've got some teaching work on, it's not enough to occupy me until EoF kicks back in, so I've started doing some research for a new project, titled 'Katie Cruel'. I think it's going to be a slightly harder pitch than either M&D or EoF, because it looks like it's going to be a bit more complicated structurally, but if anyone asks, I generally tell them that it's like a cross between 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?'
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...

A Butterfly that Stands in the Centre of the Ever-Widening Pool of Red and other great imaginary films

2008-04-15T17:49:00.003+01:00

As a belated addendum to the previous post concerning titles, an email from my friend Gareth featuring a great link, landed on my desk a couple of days ago. No discussion of film titles should, of course, omit the greatest titling genre of all, the giallo!

Lengthy, lurid and often only very loosely connected to the plot, giallos feature titles such as 'A Lizard in a Woman's Skin', 'The Black Belly of the Tarantual', 'Short Night of the Glass Dolls' (directed by AIU favourite Aldo Lado) and 'Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key' amongst many many others, and now this site allows you to generate your own, along with a handy synopsis. My own favourites so far have been 'Six Dead Orchids in an Eagles' Talons', 'Five Victims for the Maniac with the Eyes of Jade', the evocative 'The Madman Laughs in a Field of Lillies' and the actually quite great 'My Heart is an Assassin With Bloodstained Lips.' Hey, maybe I can nick that...

Bad Friends, Phantoms and The Boss

2008-04-11T21:29:00.007+01:00

In conversation with Chris Cooke the other day, he was talking about a title for a film that he wishes he'd used - 'Bad Friend'. (Apparently, the actual film with that name is a horror about a man who orders a zombie off the internet). It sounds like a Cooke title, as the unreliability and often corrosive nature of friendship is one of the themes that often crops up in his scripts (speaking as his friend, yeah, that is weird and slightly discomfiting), so I told him he should just nick it. I mean, who's going to mind? It's not as though the original is that well known (and for that matter, there's at least four other films called 'One For The Road'...). 'Mum and Dad' got its title courtesy of me reading about 'The most notorious Exploitation/Sex Hygiene film ever made!', and just anglicizing it. I don't think that anyone's going to get the two confused (and I don't even mind the link to the other one - in fact, it just increases the exploitation element that I tried to get into the film).

I like thinking up titles - I can spend days doing it, sometimes longer (and sometimes still not get anywhere - some of my projects have been gestating for years, slouching slowly towards becoming scripts, and I still haven't got good titles for them - with others, I've got a great title, but precious little story to go with them.) I don't think that there's any real formula to it (although there's probably whole chapters in some scriptwriting manuals dedicated to finding the perfect title) - I guess it's more to do with finding something that has the right feel for the film.

The first horror short I made was called 'Autopsy' (although for a long time it was labouring under the distinctly underwhelming 'Phantoms' (which sounds like a terrible made-for-TV-drama, or a terrible conjunction between Dean R. Koontz and Ben Affleck). I think 'Autopsy' came about through reading an Alan Moore comic that listed the dictionary definition of the word as being both 'an examination and dissection of a dead body to determine cause of death' and 'Personal observation or examination; seeing with one's own eyes'. Because the film was about a woman investigating the death of her brother and being quite skeptical about the prospect of some supernatural force behind it, thus being propelled into a first-hand witnessing of it, it seemed to fit. Also, it had a more horror-filmy feel to it than the wet 'Phantoms'.

Next up was 'Cry' - and I think the film had the title pretty much from the off. In the orginal script, the film was going to feature the famous cursed 'Crying Boy' painting, kind of like this: (Note: there are very many different versions of the 'Crying Boy' painting, which was reputedly cursed, but I always had this one in mind because when I was a kid it used to hang over our stairwell at home and creep me out.) Anyway, despite the painting getting lost from the script, I still kept the motif and I liked the idea that the film would start and end with a cry. I didn't, at the time, realise that it sounded like a weak rip-off of 'Scream', probably one of the most famous horror films of the time, but there you go.

'Through A Vulture Eye' came from a line in Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart', which was a direct influence on the script, while 'Awake' was pretty self-explanatory within the context of the film, although even now I'm wishing that it had a more dynamic title.

'Deliver Me' was another one of those projects which didn't really have a proper title for quite a long time. I think I eventually got the title from, of all places, Bruce Springsteen (stay with me..) - I love the 'Nebraska' album and one of the lines that's featured in a couple of the songs is 'Deliver me from nowhere'. The line stuck in my head and one day it just butted up against a thought about faith healing and then it seemed to fit. It's not as though the essence of The Boss permeates the very fabric of the film - more like in listening to the album something hooked into the spot where I was thinking up the feel for the film. (My next film, a zombie massacre, is going to be called 'Wrap Your Legs Round These Velvet Rims and Strap Your Hands Across My Engines'...)

A title I always wanted to use, but never was able was 'Provisions For Survival In A World Less Fantastic'. I wrote a script with that name which got rejected from Cinema Extreme (alongside every other script I ever submitted to them, the fuckers), which was a story about a bloke having a mid-life crisis and going to live in the woods. The title itself comes from a line in a Thomas Pynchon book, 'Mason and Dixon'. I remember reading the line, liking it, memorising it and then never being able to find it again, so it's most probably misquoted (and I can't even go back and check - the book got mangled years ago, during my days as an usher, when I had an altercation with a boozed-up Spaniard (which was a bit less dramatic than I've just made it sound - I wasn't having a smackdown with El Cid or anything)). Although long titles are sometimes really pretentious and annoying (and possibly even so in this case), sometimes they feel right. (While searching for Cooke's 'Bad Friend' film on IMDB, I also came across the fantastically lengthy 1914 silent short 'The Fable of the Fellow Who Had a Friend Who Knew a Girl Who Had a Friend' (which already sounds like a contemporary Hollywood romcom, probably starring Ryan Reynolds and, making her screen debut, I dunno, Rihanna). The same writer also did 'The Fable of the Preacher Who Flew His Kite But Not Because He Wished to Do So', 'The Fable of the Kid Who Shifted His Ideals to Golf and Finally Became a Baseball Fan and Took the Only Known Cure' and 'The Fable of the Kittenish Super-Anns and the World-Weary Snipes' which sounds like a Joss Whedon series waiting to happen.)

Sometimes a title doesn't come to you even when you've finished the script. The last project I put in for Cinema Extreme (blah blah fuckers blah blah) was called 'Damaged' which was relevant to the story, but still sounded quite generic, and also awakes memories of the Jeremy Irons artfilmsexfest 'Damage' (which probably isn't good). I recently started tooling around with the project again, but still couldn't come up with a better title. Maybe it means it's not meant to be. Or maybe I just need to get The Boss on the case...

Eye Crawling in a Sex Noise Sandwich

2008-04-11T21:12:00.004+01:00

As a follow-up to this post from a few days ago, I'd like to further report a worrying trend among those people who find themselves directed here: No, it's not the constant hunt for 'sex noises' (or even 'nasty sex noises'), but rather that search term sandwiched in between. What the hell is going on out there? I mean, first it was 'it feels like something is crawling on my head' and now its 'why does my eye feel like it has something crawling in it'. Jesus Christ, people, go and see a doctor. I can't help you.

Pissy actor

2008-04-03T22:35:00.004+01:00

I'm not the only person who's been busy making a low-budget feature in Nottingham over the past couple of years. My friend Mark Devenport has also been working on a film, which is just nearing completion. Produced by Luke Dennis (of Anonymous Room Productions) and co-written with Tony Claasen (who also plays the lead role), Big Things is a comedy about a frustrated bike courier trying to make a low-budget feature film. Mark and his crew have been filming on and off for over two years, with a hardcore of crew, including DOP John Ross, who have stuck with the project for the duration.

Although the film involves a lot of people I know - Chris Cooke and Donna Bowyer have both done some additional camera work, Micaiah Dring (from 'Cry' and 'Mum, & Dad') plays Tony's girlfriend in the film, and Ruper Proctor (King of Short Film) and Johnny Philips, both from 'One For The Road' have parts in the film - I haven't been involved. At least, I wasn't until last week when Mark asked if I'd play a small role in one of the new scenes they're shooting for the film. Which is how I ended up dressed in a Seventies shirt and a pirate hat, as the shop assistant in a fancy dress shop for an afternoon last week. It was just a short scene, a couple of minutes long, between me and Tony. My direction from Mark was that my character was 'pissy' - he thought that was something I'd be good at. Although there was a basic outline for the scene and there were a few lines that Mark and Tony wanted to get in, it was left quite open for me and Tony to improvise the dialogue for the scene, which we managed to hone down into something workable (and hopefully funny).

I'm not an actor, although in common with most people involved in low-budget filmmaking, I've ended up appearing on screen out of necessity (or as a favour to a friend) a few times in my career. My last notable part was probably in another Mark Devenport film, 'Still Life' where I was dragged in at the last minute to play a guy auditioning for a role in a porn film. (It'd probably be wise to stress at this point that the audition was more like a job interview than anything more 'physical'). I was told to take my shirt off and put on a leather jacket, sit on a sofa and answer the questions fired at me. I decided that my character Terry Leather (a name we pulled out of nowhere, or more likely, from the fact that I was wearing the leather jacket) would be quite matter-of-fact about what he did, almost as though he considered it akin to plumbing. (Weirdly, a character with exactly the same name appears in the new film 'The Bank Job', played by Jason Statham. Probably with a shirt on.) (In the same film I also ended up being a body double for one of the lead actors, who had to go to work one day when he was needed for some scenes. I played his hands in a couple of cutaways and, with his hat on my head and a big light behind me, his shadow on the wall.)

Prior to that role, and probably the reason Mark thought I'd be up for it, I'd played the lead character in a film that I'd made called Valentine, which was all about a man tied naked to a chair. Not having made a film before (at that time), I had no idea about where to get actors from, and even less confidence about convincing somebody to take their clothes off and let me strap them to a dining chair, so I ended up doing it. (It was very tastefully done, though. Nothing to frighten the horses.) The film seemed to go well (despite the trauma of having to watch myself naked on the big screen at Broadway during one of the early Bang! film festivals), but made me certain that I didn't want to carry on acting in my own films.

In a way, although I've got no ambitions in that direction at all, I think it's good for directors to put themselves in that position (I mean acting, rather than being tied naked to a chair) - it helps to have an idea of what is going through an actor's head, at least to a small degree, when they're in front of the camera and being directed. Trying to remember your lines, stay in shot, not bash into the mike or the furniture and on top of that, be convincing, is a real job, and it's good to have that in mind when you come back to the other side of the camera.

Apologies to all those who were directed here by Google looking for something completely different

2008-04-03T22:15:00.006+01:00

I know I try to cover a variety of subjects here at AIU, and the watching and making of horror films often leads me down some dark alleyways, sometimes causing me to enter the most random and potentially disturbing of phrases into Google, but even so, the most recent list of search terms which have led peope here makes for some strange reading. And that's not even mentioning the person who was looking for"man making sex noises", or the individual who was desperately seeking "how much coal can a barge carry". And as for the lone Googler who was moved to enter the words "it feels like it something is crawling on my head" into the search engine at two minutes past four in the morning - well, that's just fucking terrifying.

Trans-continental terror

2008-03-23T19:00:00.009Z

For the first time in ages we managed to organise a horror night on Saturday, this time a trilogy of trans-continental terror. First up was Aldo Lado's 'The Night Train Murders' (ka Don't Ride on Late Night Trains, Last Stop on the Night Train, Torture Train and Xmas Massacre, apparently). I've been wanting to see this for a while after watching Lado's 'Who Saw Her Die?' a couple of years ago, a brilliantly miserable giallo about a child-killer featuring a resolutely downbeat performance by George Lazenby (and a score by Ennio Morricone which I aped for my short film 'Deliver Me').

'Night Train Murders' is an Italian version of the 'Last House on the Left' story, but with certain significant differences. The story concerns two young women friends, played by Laura D'Angelo and Irene Miracle (the first in a triumvirate of Argento actors in the film - she later played the woman at the start of Inferno), taking the night train to Italy to visit one of the girls parents.(Incidentally, the numerous scenes of people smoking on the train brought wistful sighs from the two ex-smokers in the room, like they were sharing a Proustian moment of emotional memory. Except with fags instead of madeleines.)

Also on the train are two young criminals, Blackie and Curlie (I know, they sound more Bash Street Kids than sadistic killers), played by Flavio Bucci (who later played the blind piano player in Suspiria) and Gianfranco de Grassi. They establish their thug credentials early on, by mugging an admittedly pissed-up Santa Claus in broad daylight. The train is packed, standing room only, and as the women and the thugs search for a seat, we meet the other passengers, a carriage full of jovial Nazis, a group of priests, one of whom, it is implied, has a paedophile's eye (although his travelling companion suggests it's 'just a twitch') and a carriage that is occupied by Pat Butcher, Winston Churchill and Michael Foot. Also in this carriage is a smartly dressed posh woman, played by Macha Méril (who later played the psychic in 'Deep Red' - another strong influence on 'Deliver Me' - it's like this film was made for me...) Outwardly respectable, a hint to her true character is revealed when she drops a book letting free a pornographic photo which she hurriedly puts away. Not soon after, on going to the toilet, she is assaulted by Blackie, who locks himself in with her. The assault turns into mutually consenting sex (importantly, there's no idea that the woman is enjoying a rape, more that she is character who likes to keep up appearances, but is actually quite debauched).

When the train is forced to stop because of a bomb scare, the two young women are pointed towards a near-empty connecting train which will take them home overnight. Unfortunately for them, also joining the train are the two thugs and the posh woman, now seemingly in cahoots. With the carriage cut off from access to the rest of the train by a faulty door handle, the two women are subjected to a series of assaults, growing in violence and coordinated mainly by the female character, who is constantly pushing the two men to go further. Also joining in on the act is a middle-aged middle-class passenger who is also trapped in the carriage by the faulty door handle, who begins by voyeuring the whole scene, then is pulled in (it has to be said quite willingly) to rape one of the girls. The whole sequence is filmed in a blueish light, with a soundtrack, led by harmonica, which incorporates the sound of the train and makes the whole thing relentless and grim. As with 'Last House...' the attack ends in the death of the two young women. The thugs and the posh woman then leave the train at the same stop where the girl's parents are waiting. I'd really forgotten how big fur was in the Seventies. Anyway, through a set of random circumstances/contrived coincidences, they all end up at the house of the parents, none of them aware of the identity of the others, until a report about the discovery of two women's bodies comes on the radio...

'Night Train Murders' is truly horrible and wrong, but much less sleazy than I was expecting. The main way in which the film differs from 'Last House on the Left' is in the implication of the complicity of the middle-classes in the violence - the middle-class characters in the film also pointedly discuss 'violent society' at a number of points in the film - with the main antagonist - at least in terms of driving the violence if not participating fully - getting away pretty much scott free at the end. The film is nicely shot, especially the train sequences and is full of great little details - like the carriage full of 'Seig Heil'-ing Nazis, or the Santa mugging - as well as moments which stick in your mind for long afterwards.

Next up was the Thai film 'Shutter', about a photographer and his girlfriend haunted by a ghost from his past. Although pretty much full of East Asian horror cliches - ghostly woman creeping around/appearing out of nowhere/looking through her long black hair - the film was full of authentic jumps and had a nicely evovling story concerning the central character. It's recently been remade in the States and it'll be interesting to see how much of the story they stick too.

Finally we had the Seventies Australian eco-horror film 'The Long Weekend'. Essentially a two-hander about a bickering married couple going for a weekend trip to the beach, the film is quite slow and eerie, but does feature a zombie manatee, and you don't get to write that phrase very often. The performances were great and it had some nice moments of absolute HusbandDickery (although to be fair, there was quite a lot of WifeDickery as well) - particularly the bits where he just pisses about, fucking up the environment for the heck of it. (As soon as they set up camp, he starts chopping down a tree - when his wife asks him what he's doing it for, he just shrugs 'I dunno'). Interestingly, the director Colin Eggleston is also listed on Imdb as having made, the year before, a film called 'Fantasm Comes Again' an Australian softcore portmanteau, featuring, amongst other things, 'Explicit Sex, Anal Rape,Lesbianism,Male Frontal Nudity,Nude Wearing Glasses and Non Statutory Female On Male Rape'. I've got to say, I'd never heard of him before, but he's bloody versatile.

With that (and with John Ross having, customarily, fallen asleep on the sofa) we were done. Next up, with the release of 'The Third Mother' imminent, we might plan on an Argento trilogy, although myself and Cooke might end up being the only takers...

Circles and spirals, and the benefits of spending time on the dole when you're young.

2008-03-22T12:32:00.007Z

I've loved Max Ophuls' films since the BBC showed a short season about 15 years ago. I was in the midst of my dole/temp daytime tv years at the time, so an afternoon spent indoors watching films like 'The Reckless Moment' or 'Letter from an Unknown Woman' was both a cheap and priceless joy.

I picked up Ophuls' 'Madame de...' about six months ago and it's sat on my shelf since then (alongside the 30 or so other DVDs I never get time to watch), until I finally dusted it off the other night.In some ways, the story is a typical 19th-century-novel-style tale - a flighty and flirtatious married countess falls in love with an Italian diplomat, leading to an overwhelming and ultimately destructive passion - it could fit in alongside 'Anna Karenina' or 'Effi Briest' - but then, as with all Ophuls films, the actual plot isn't what pulls you in, it's how the story is so brilliantly conveyed through his use of camera and sound, and the highly sophsticated but deceptively simple way he reveals character.
One of the themes of 'Madame de...' is fate - the plot is moved along by a set of earrings which the countess pretends to lose at the beginning of the film - lying to her husband, from whom they were a gift, in the process - but which she actually sells to a jeweller to pay off some debts. The earrings move around owners and countries until they come back to the countess, now loaded with a whole different significance, transforming them from inessential trinkets into symbols of an almost addictive and debilitating passion. Exemplifying the theme, Ophuls often uses the same camera angles and practically the same shots when filming scenes in the same location but months or even years apart, stressing the almost pre-ordained nature of the characters' actions - it's like once they set their path, they're stuck in a groove, able only to repeat the actions of the past.

One of the greatest sequences is that which shows the countess and the diplomat falling in love. Arranging to meet at a series of dances - the only times when they can, without too much suspicion, be physically close to one another - Ophuls segues elegantly between four locations, four dances, all the while keeping the music, and even the movement of the characters in their dance, continuous. Not only is the sequence seemless, but at the same time as the characters are spinning around in each other's arms (each one repeatedly taking the place of the other, emphasising their perfect fit) and moving round the bandstand, the camera is moving around with them. If you were to plot out the movements of camera and actors throughout the sequence it would look like a spirograph drawing, but on screen it's incredibly powerful and effortlessly effective. And later in the film, during another dance, the camera moves through the ballroom, even through walls, to stay with the couple, emotionally echoing their feelings for each other - they literally can't take their eyes off each other, can't bear to be apart - and we as an audience are made to feel that too. (As an extra on the disc, there's an interview with the filmmaker Alain Jessua, who worked as an assistant to Ophuls and who talks about how much he valued the actors, and that these long and complicated takes were intended to aid performance, by giving a continuity to the emotions of a scene.)

The performances throughout are great (including another director, Vittorio de Sica (The Bicycle Thieves) as the Italian diplomat) and what's really great is that all the roles are given some complexity, including the husband, who initially turns a blind eye to his wife's flirtations - because he's got affairs of his own going on - but who can't bear to see the pain that living without her lover brings her.
It's often mentioned how elegant Ophuls is, and his camera movements are brilliantly smooth and considered and powerful, but he's also quite a tough director - he can really make his characters suffer, especially in the name of love (never more so than in 'Letter From and Unknown Woman'). In 'Madame de..' he takes a couple who almost pride themselves on their superficiality and condemns them to feel more deep emotions than they can ultimately handle. Like the earrings which cause all the trouble, his films are both glittering and diamond-tough.

Reincarnation, madness and spanking

2008-03-13T21:35:00.006Z

Thanks to free FilmFour and the temporary resumption of our satellite feed (for 24 hours at least, after a couple of days of no TV due to a combination of the scaffolding that next door have put up to fix their roof, and the apocalyptic weather) I got to see a film that I've been meaning to watch for ages, Johnathan Glazer's 'Birth'. After the great surprise that was 'Sexy Beast' I was looking forward to what Glazer would do next, but somehow never got round to seeing 'Birth' - I remember that at the time it suffered from mixed reviews, but the set-up always sounded appealingly mad - woman on the verge of remarrying is visited by a ten year-old boy who claims to be her dead husband.

In a way, it's a B-movie kind of set-up - it's a high-concept idea of a kind, and it could conceivably be done on quite a small budget, as it's all about the idea and the consequences of dealing with it, and largely takes place in a series of apartments. Weirdly, I think the success of 'Sexy Beast' might be the thing that hinders the film. Far from being a B-movie, the film is expensively cast - Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Anne Heche, Danny Huston - and lushly photographed. It's a slow-paced, atmospheric piece with a minimal amount of cutting and a lot of scenes played in lingering shots or in single takes. It feels like 'cinema' rather than a 'movie' - with all the attendant problems that brings. 'Cinema' isn't throwaway or daft or (too) mad. It's big and clever and 'about' things. But when you've got a set-up as nuts as the one in 'Birth', it's hard not to get frustrated when silences and looks and lingering shots replace what you might find in a B-movie - daft explanations using made-up science or cobbled-together mystical nonsense thrown in to keep the story moving. 'Birth' feels like it tries so hard to make you feel what it would really be like if such a thing happened - straining to have you feel sympathy for how Kidman is seduced into believing that her husband has returned - while at the same time distancing you with it's cool and measured atmosphere, that you end up just getting frustrated that no-one is asking the right questions - and Kidman's character, far from appearing as the sympathetic woman so in love with her dead husband that she is willing to believe this incredible story, feels like a bit of a gullible sap.

I think it all comes down to madness - like I said, the set-up for the film is very weird, but there are few moments that actually exploit the madness of it all - rather the film feels like it's trying to work with psychological and emotional realism. If the film had been cheaper and more 'throwaway' - less 'cinematic' - than it might have been easier to go with the madness of the story, and really make the audience feel how nuts the whole thing is. There's only one real bit (and it's not where Kidman shares a bath with the boy, that just feels too 'huh?' to really convince), that had that streak of madness, and it was the bit where a character really lets go - Danny Huston as the husband-to-be, feeling cuckolded by a pre-pubsecent, chucking the little brat into a room, sealing the door with a piano and proceeding to spank him violently. It was a bit of a breath of fresh air (I know that sounds weird...) to have a character in the film go 'fuck this, this is nuts' and really lose it.

It's not that the film isn't good - for the first half at least, it's got a great sense of foreboding and the kid who plays the boy does it brilliantly, but somehow the film doesn't quite work - you never really get inside it in the way that it feels like you should. Maybe with a bit less money and a lesser face than Kidman (and with the concomitant lack of 'importance' around the film) it would have had more of an edge of madness to fit the premise. But then no fucker would have gone to see it, probably...

Exposed in soho

2008-03-07T17:14:00.002Z

Last week we had the cast and crew screening of 'Mum & Dad' - the first cinema outing for the film. It was at the Charlotte Street Hotel in Soho, where they have a small 67 seat screening room in the basement. It was a good turn out, and though I was nervous as hell beforehand it seemed to go well (at least nobody came up afterwards and punched me in the face, which always counts as a positive in my book)

There were representatives from a couple of festivals there, both of whom seemed to enjoy the film - it's just a question of waiting to see if they want to screen it.

It was great meeting up with the cast and crew again, although even after the screening I still couldn't properly relax - it's weird - seeing the film with an audience has the effect of making it seem new again, but at the same time it feels really exposing - like walking out on stage without any trousers on.

It feels good to get the screening behind us, although it's far from the end of the process. Now we've got to sell the thing...

The Black Milk of Hell

2008-02-22T20:32:00.007Z

With ‘Mum & Dad’ finished and the first rough draft of ‘Empire of Flesh’ sent out to my producers Lisa and Sol to read, I feel like I’m in a bit of a dual limbo – waiting to get responses. To stave off the bad thoughts, I’ve started working up a few more ideas which I’ve had hovering around in my back brain (and in various notebooks, Word files and the backs of envelopes) for the past couple of years. There’s a couple of feature ideas which I’m developing – one’s a kind of sci-fi film set in an alternate version of today which is built around themes of identity, terrorism and Victorian values, and a second one is another horror film – inspired by Night of the Eagle, Suspiria and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, involving modern witchery. Also, I’ve been discussing with Chris Cooke, Gareth Howell and John Ross the idea of putting together a portmanteau film, in the vein of ‘Doctor Terror’s House of Horrors’ or ‘Asylum’, with each of us contributing a segment. It’s something that we’ve often talked about over the years and it’s an appealing idea, but there’s always the worry (at least for me) that you end up making something that’s too much of a homage or too spoofy. Especially hard to pull off is the framing sections, without it ending up looking too hokey. Still, it’s early days, and I did start thinking about an idea, based around the idea of two crime fiction co-writers falling out. It’s provisionally called ‘Wet’, and I’m hoping that if it comes off it’ll give me a chance to do a dream sequence, inspired by the great one that was in ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’.

The trick with each of these projects, as they’re all ‘genre’ ideas, is to figure out how much you go with the genre and how much you go against it, what you take and what you leave. Do you take a genre story engine and hide it under a non-genre design or do you take the design and form of a genre piece and use it to tell a non-genre story? I suppose I always try and cook up all the elements that are influencing me for a particular story – whether they’ve come from real life, other films, books, photos, comics – and bounce them around enough so that they meld into a new thing that works on its own terms rather than just as homage (or, to put it less politely, rip-off), kind of like burying the influence inside the body of the work rather than wearing it as a human flesh-mask.

Maybe the trick is trying to make sure that the influences are as diverse and far-flung as possible – not just ripping off your favourite genre film, but stealing from a variety of sources.

One of my favourite writers at the moment is a comic writer called Matt Fraction. He’s the writer of Casanova (a sci-fi adventure which references everything from Michael Moorcock to Barbarella to The Beatles to Fellini), The Order and The Immortal Iron Fist, in which (along with co-writer Ed Brubaker), he's taken what used to be a pretty second-string character (a 70s kung-fu millionaire) and invented a whole new back history for that character's superhero legacy, allowing him to throw in as many pulpy, Golden Age adventure story elements as possible.
From manga/martial arts style character names:including the great Fat Cobrathrough to, in the latest issue 'The Immortal Iron Fist: Orson Randall and the Green Mist of Death', a group of Russ Meyer-style Cowgirls from Hell and the Son of Frankenstein. (A previous issue also featured another group, the Harem Harlots of Harlem, which is either a very great name for an all-female team of New York based, machine-gun-toting Chinese villains, or the worst).

What's great about it is that the whole thing works both as a homage and as a modern take on those kind of Golden Age adventures. Fraction's never afraid to throw in a whole raft of allusions and references, keeping the whole thing afloat by a narrative propulsion that means that you're never too far away from someone getting kung-fu kicked in the face. (Even the moves have great names:'Cudgel of Misfortune', 'Whirlwind of Impending Doom', 'The Black Milk of Hell')

Of course, The Immortal Iron Fist is firmly in one genre (the superhero comic) while being heavily influenced by another (kung-fu movies), with a host of other pulp genres flying in as need be, so it's not exactly the kind of thing that I'd look to be doing with film, where it's harder to be as throwaway (in a good way) as it is in comics. But the sleekness of it is very appealing - the melding of the genre elements and references with a new and orginal story so that it's always the story that's pulling you along, dragging you through the pulp rather than asking you to stand there and admire it.

Two heads

2008-02-14T11:33:00.005Z

We're in the process of organising the cast and crew screening for 'Mum & Dad', and had to come up with an e-invite image, so we put this together.
It's just a provisional image at the moment (and I know we probably won't be able to have 'fuck' on any of the posters (or maybe not even 'f**k' or 'f%*k' or f*ck') but seeing as this is going out to people connected to the film I thought we'd leave it on for the time being. ) but hopefully it conveys a good sense of the film.

Some killings

2008-01-31T13:17:00.001Z

In amongst a couple of weeks of personal life ups and downs - family stresses,sicknesses, taxes - I forgot to mention that 'Mum & Dad' is finally all done.Very remiss, I know. Still, it's not like it's taken up most of my brain for the past 18 months or so...

We watched the film off the DVD the other night at a friend's house, projecting onto their wall so it looked nice and big. I was really happy with it - I guess I'm so used to it now that there aren't that many surprises left - I think I know what works well and what could work better - but seeing it with a small audience and getting their response was great. It was like finally watching it as a film. Obviously, things like credits and logos help to cement the film as a 'proper' thing, but also knowing that there is nothing more that can be done to it (I mean in terms of money and time) means that when I watch it now I'm no longer watching an edit, but a finished film.

Next up, at the end of February, is the cast and crew screening (still to be confirmed) and then starts the long slog of trying to get the film out at festivals, seen by distributors and hopefully into cinemas. Or onto DVD. Or at the very least on its own page on IMDB, complete with dismissive reviews from internet punters. (I remember when Chris' Film 'One For The Road' came out on DVD in amongst the good and great reviews were a few really negative ones, some of the most dismissive coming online. There was one on Amazon which was really scathing, including the immortal line, in regard to the photography (which I was partially responsible for), 'prepare for your eyes to be raped'. Jesus, steady on now. )

In the meantime, I'm trying to get on with 'Empire of Flesh'. What with Jeanie still being in her 'Goth Cruise' edit and everything else going on, I've not had the time on it that I would have liked, so over the past week I've been really trying to crack on with it. I'm into the real meat of the horror part of the story now - I think I've killed five people this week (and permanently crippled another) - which tends to go a bit quicker in the actual writing, but probably takes more time up with planning and choreographing. Still, it's getting towards the end of the rough draft now, so hopefully by the time the cast and crew comes up, I'll have something approaching a first draft proper. It's going well, pretty smooth and linear. There's a bigger cast this time - about 20 speaking parts, with 7 or 8 primary characters - and a larger location, and there's a lot more blood and flesh than in 'Mum & Dad', but the themes are broadly similar and hopefully it'll still have the same mix of horror and domesticity.

Unless people hate that mix when they see 'Mum and Dad', in which case it'll be something completely different...

Turds like coal-barges

2008-01-18T20:36:00.000Z

Recently, BBC4 has been running a season on pop music. Along with some great archive stuff - full editions of Top of the Pops from 1967 or 1978 - and some quirky documentaries - like Paul Morley examing 'Pop:What is it good for?' by going to interview the bloke from Mud who wrote 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' - and some really quite irritating stuff (my tolerance level for middle-aged, middle-class men in suits nodding along to Wyclef 'up there with Bob Marley' Jean CDS** (which, admittedly, wasn't very high in the first place) has plunged dramatically - they have also been showing some pop films - the Mayles' Brothers 'Gimme Shelter', Ken Russell and The Who's 'Tommy', hitting a peak (at least for me) last night with a rare screening of the Slade movie 'Flame'.

Made in 1975, but set about ten years earlier, the film is a drama starring Slade as the glampop group Flame, apparently based on a lot of real-life events, recounted by Slade to the writer during a lengthy American tour. I've heard about the film for years but never had the chance to see it before now. And it truly was, as someone reviewed it 'the missing link between A Hard Day's Night, Kes and Spinal Tap' (although, to be fair, no-one's probably ever tried to make a link between Kes and Spinal Tap before).

Starting off with a shot of a bloke having a piss (nothing like setting your stall out as far as dirty realism goes), the camera does a pretty elegant track down the front of the house and out into a marquee in the garden where the band-that-will-be-Flame are playing a shit wedding gig with their overblown, fat Elvis of a singer, Jack Daniels (played by Diana Dors husband Alan Lake)(who, apparently, looked and acted in real life exactly like he is in the film). Cheeky Dave Hill, apparently the lad-about-town, looker of the band......uses his guitar to lift up a girl's skirt, gets seen by a boozy guest and the next thing you know there's a full-on wedding fight going on. Cut to the blackest, grimmest factory you've ever seen in your life, where we find the soon-to-be-Flame-drummer working. A couple of minutes in and already it's great - funny, cynical and well-filmed with some pretty good performances all round.

The film's got the look of the late Sixties/early Seventies distilled into an almost perfectly grim form - every other shot seems to be filled with boarded-up windows or overflowing bins. The texture of the film is piss, booze and tobacco (there's a hell of a lot of smoking and drinking)(and quite a bit of pissing), and at every moment where there's an option to make something look as fucked-up and desolate as possible, it's taken.

One of the best examples of this is where drummer Charlie (Don Powell) goes back to his home town and visits his old factory boss. The scene is staged with the two walking down a canal bank and under a bridge, the boss pushing his bike and talking about how when he was a kid he used to swim in the canal: "Mind you" he says, "it was always more turds than fishes. You used to see them float past you, like coal barges." There's a lovely kind of poetry there - a poetry comprised of childhood innocence and shit.

The story of the film is the classic rock film trajectory of struggle-success-everythingfallsapart, but it's done with humour and style and the band always seem convincing. It's not perfect - it's hard to tell how much time is supposed to have passed in the film (four years apparently, but it feels like about 3 months), and some of the sound is appallling. Also, you sometimes want to see more of what the band are actually doing, in terms of their career and in terms of their interpersonal relationships - the film focuses probabaly a little too much on the subplot of agents Tom Conti and Johnny Shannon battling to control the band - maybe because it was felt that they, as more 'proper' actors, could carry a lot more of the scenes - with the result that it's one music film where you actually feel you want to see more of the band. But for all those faults, it's still great, with nice little touches (Noddy Holder's character is called Stoker, after Bram - maybe because his first band, patterned on Lord Sutch, is called The Undertakers and has a ghoulish stage-act) and odd little moments (as part of The Undertakers stage act, Noddy sings from inside a coffin, which is fine, except each time they cut to the shot, there appear to be, without any explanation, three moving hands in the coffin.)And part of it (I don't know which part) was apparently filmed in Nottingham. Which means we can legitimately claim it as part of the East Midlands cinematic heritage.

Bet it was the bit about the turds.

**(go to about 39 minutes to see what I mean)

Happy endings

2008-01-12T17:56:00.000Z

Back to London this week for an intensive few days attempting to finish off 'Mum & Dad'. With the sound mix done, we had only the picture to sort out, and Lisa organised to do it at Rainbow Post in London. Of course, our limited budget meant that it was always going to be a fairly condensed process. I got there on Wednesday, by which time the whole film had been conformed (basically turned from rough, compressed offline into proper HD) and they had made a start on a couple of the corrections (getting rid of booms in shot, extraneous crew shadows, that sort of thing) and a composite shot which I had always had in mind, but had put off really thinking about until the online. So, in two and a half days, we basically had to grade the film, do all the titles and sync it up to the sound mix. Luckily, the online editor Steve, was a fast worker and we managed to plough through it at a respectable rate. Actually grading the film doesn't take that much time - it's more the decision-making that can be laborious. Having been aware of the lack of budget and the concomitant tightness of the schedule from the moment I started writing the script, I've got used to making my mind up (for good or ill...) really quickly - and at this point in the process, I really wanted the film to be done, so we just got on with it.

The good thing about the arse-about-tit way that we've ended up doing the post (normally the picture post would come before the sound) is that seeing the film in its original HD for the first time as a cut already made me feel really good about the film, even before we started grading it. I'd got so used to seeing it really compressed in the Avid suite (and even more compressed on the screen at Spool when we did the sound mix. No fault of Spool's, but because of the way they got the video and had to process it to get it in their machine, it was like watching the film through a tea bag), that seeing it as it was shot was a real joy (and a massive relief - I'd woken up the night before fearing that the whole thing was going to be out of focus.)

The way we went with the grade was, for the most part, to desaturate the image a little, while crushing the blacks - essentially making them fuller and blacker. With the exteriors, we went a little harsher, partially because of the nature of the original footage, but also partly to make it seem more ugly, in keeping with how the film gets more garish and fucked-up as you get towards the end.

I left late on Friday night with only the end credit sequence left to do, which Steve and Lisa are going to do on Monday morning. Then, all going well, we should have, by the end of Monday, a finished (at least to HD master) version of the film. And I can finally have an answer to people when they ask, 'What's happening with your film then?'. I can't quite believe that we've got to the (an?) end. I don't think it's going to feel properly finished until I get it in front of a cinema audience - that'll be the point where it feels like a real film. And we won't have the excuse of 'well, there's still work to be done on it, of course' anymore...

Stranger in the night

2008-01-06T20:16:00.000Z

One of the great things about the Christmas holidays is that terrestrial TV channels bung on a load of stuff which normally wouldn't see the light of day (actually, seeing as how most of what I'm talking about was shown between 1 and 3am, it still doesn't, but you know what I mean). This year we had successive nights of classic Val Lewton horrors like 'Cat People', 'Leopard Man' and 'Curse of the Cat People', as well as appearances by films like 'Build My Gallows High' (like 'Leopard Man' and 'Cat People', directed by Jacques Tourneur) and Nicholas Ray's fantastically bleak 'In a Lonely Place' (possibly even more downbeat than the Joy Division song which nicked its title). I don't know what happens - maybe the guy who usually programmes the late night stuff gets in early to book out the whole of Christmas off, so that the only people left in the office are a bunch of noir nerds and horror geeks who just riff on what they want to put on -

"How about 'Cat People'?"
"Jacques Tourner? Great - how about 'Build My Gallows High' then? Same director."
"Well if we're going noir, how about 'Stranger on The Third Floor'"
"'..."
"You must have heard of it - proto-film noir? Peter Lorre? Elisha Cook Jr.? It's a rare and underappreciated classic!"
"Fuck it, let's stick it on at half past two."
"Yeah, it's a great film for insomniacs, drunks and lonley stoners!"
"Especially as its laced with dread, foreboding and a sweat-soaked paranoid edge! Great."

Not being awake, pissed or caned, I taped 'Stranger on the Third Floor', since I'd never heard of it, and watched it a couple of days later. It has the reputation for being one of, if not the first, film noir, pre-dating John Huston's 'The Maltese Falcon'. A lot of the classic noir tropes are there - the high contrast lighting, the voice-over, the sense of dread - plus, it's got a great extended expressionistic dream sequence.

The story concerns a struggling reporter who gets his big break by apparently witnessing a murder. He fingers a homeless man as the killer after finding him at the scene. The man, Elisha Cook Jr, desperately pleads his innocence, which really strikes at the heart of the reporter's girlfriend. When the reporter goes home to his grotty little rented room, he finds, yes, a 'stranger' right there on 'the third floor' - Peter Lorre. Lorre flees, but then the reporter worries that his next door neighbour has been killed - but worries even more that if he goes in to discover the body, he too will be fingered as the prime suspect (for reasons which we discover in a series of flashbacks). As his paranoia grows - along with a previously absent empathy with Cook's situation - the reporter falls into the aforementioned dream sequence - all looming shadows, Dr Caligari-like sets and cackling lawyers. It's great. From then on, with the reporter under the cosh, its up to his girlfriend to try and track down Lorre - who no-one remembers seeing, despite Lorre looking unforgettably weird (like a cross between Pete Doherty and a housefly).

It's a terrific film - and really good to get the chance to see. The leads (John McGuire as Mike Ward
Margaret Tallichet as Jane) are okay, but a little forgettable, but all of the supporting cast are great especially Lorre, who just seems to be having fun - I mean, he's playing a maniac who's motive seems to be "I'm just fucking nuts, basically", so why shouldn't he?

God, I hope that regular scheduler guy caught that vomiting bug over Christmas, or next week it'll be back to darts or Ewan McGregor and Charley bloody Boorman again.

Ho(rror) Ho(rror) Ho(rror)

2007-12-21T20:32:00.000Z

Just in time for Christmas, we've finished the sound mix for 'Mum and Dad'. Now, with the visual post scheduled for January, the time when I will actually have a 'finished' version of the film - finished enough at least so that we can have a screening - is rapidly approaching. I really can't wait to get the chance to see the film with an audience - I feel like I've been coccooned up with it for so long on my own that I can't really see it with any fresh eyes anymore, so seeing it with a bunch of people who haven't seen anything of it (or, when we have a cast and crew, a bunch of people who will probably have forgotten what it was that we shot), will be very liberating. And horribly frightening.

At the same time, I've been trying to plough on with 'Empire of Flesh'. With Jeanie in her edit for 'Goth Cruise' almost full-time, I've not been able to work on the script full time, so I've tried to get into the same mode of writing I had with 'Mum and Dad' - ie. not waiting for inspiration to strike every time I sit down with a pen, but just plunging straight ahead, with the attitude that it's better to have something rather than nothing (and if it's shit i can always revise it at a later date when inspiration has belatedly struck). I've done about 40 pages - pretty much the first act of the film. It needs cutting down and revising, but I'm hoping that the structure and characters are at least becoming a little bit nailed down. Over the past couple of days, with the deadline of Christmas, I've probably knocked out about 12 pages, which is fairly good going for me - maybe the deadline is the thing that prompts me to get my arse in gear. (Earlier in the week, when I was finding it harder to get into gear, I wasted about half an hour assigning computer voices to my characters in Final Draft (scriptwriting software) and getting them to read out swear words. It was a bit like staging an all-Stephen-Hawking version of Shameless.)
I'm trying to get a move on with the script so that we can start putting together a plan to get some production funding early next year. The only stumbling block at the moment has been actually getting our script development money from Em-media, which we got told we'd been awarded a couple of months ago, but which has yet to make an appearance, despite me moaning on about it to the point where I'm actively irritating myself. The closer we get to Christmas and the more appeals we make to get the money, the more I feel like Bob fucking Cratchit.

As a final horror-themed precursor to Christmas, we had a special Horror Night screening of Bob Clark's classic 'Black Christmas'. Predating Halloween as a holiday themed horror, 'Black Christmas' is the story of a sorority house being menaced by obscene phone calls (and they are truly, horribly obscene and wrong and creepy) from a stalker-killer (mostly filmed in super wide-angle POV). It features Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder as a fantastic lush (I don't know if there's a 'Black Christmas' drinking game, but there probably should be) and John Saxon as the head of the most inept police force in Canada (or maybe it's supposed to be set in America - who knows, they sound Canadian anyway). It's a great horror film, despite being almost completely blood-free, with a terrific ending, and might be set to be our annual festive viewing choice.

Back in the New Year.

Oh, and Tiny Tim says "God bless us, every one!"

A Proper Family Christmas

2007-12-12T13:53:00.000Z

After some waiting around (for studio time and music) and some setbacks (namely the person who was going to be doing our mix going down with appendicitis the day before the mix was due to start), we're finally in the studio doing the sound mix for 'Mum & Dad'. We're doing a reel a day - even though we're not delivering on film at the moment, we still have to break things down in that way because of the potential of going there in the future - spread over three weeks - again a result of rescheduling -which is going to take us right up to Christmas. Lisa's also managed to find somewhere to do all of the picture post-production, which we're hoping to get done by the end of January. Christ it feels like it's taken a long time. I guess the thing is, the actual work - cutting, mixing, sound design - hasn't taken that long, it's just that the whole process has been spasmodic - an intense month or two here, followed by a barely-progressing batch of weeks, followed by another intense week or two. But we're nearly there now.

The funny thing is, the closer we get to the end, the more nasty the film becomes - doing the sound mix yesterday, Greg, the sound mixer, was talking about how bleak and horrible a certain bit was - which is obviously the intention, but it's only now as the film gets closer to being whole that it all comes together and starts working properly as a horror film.

As well as doing the mix, I've also been trying to sort out how the music is going to work in the end sequence. After initially claiming not to want any music at all in the film, I ended up soundtracking a Christmas sequence with five songs. Obviously, because we didn't have a composer on board - and also because I wanted the music just to be like a normal British family Christmas - we ended up using a load of Christmas hits. When the cut was okayed, we were already in the process of investigating whether it would be possible to use these tracks and for a while a couple of them seemed hopeful...But then our lack (or rather absence) of budget told and we ended up getting nothing. Which has meant we've spent the past month or so getting new tracks to fit in there. It's weird, having lived with the cut for so long with the original tracks in (which I pretty much always knew we were unlikely to get) now trying to listen to it with a whole bunch of new music, but any audience who sees it won't know what was there, so hopefully, as long as the music fits tonally, it'll be fine.

I never imagined that we'd still be working on the film at this late date (I remember saying to Lisa in about July that there was no way I could afford to still be working on 'Mum & Dad' in January...(and it's true, I can't afford it)), but I guess it's quite apt to be listening to loads of Christmas music at the moment - even if the 'Mum & Dad' version of Christmas isn't exactly the most festive scene, it still somehow gets you in the mood...

Gore, Flesh, Sex Noises and Animal Cruelty

2007-11-16T23:15:00.000Z

I started off the week with some additional filming for Jeanie's Goth Cruise project, which involved filming a couple of interviews with Goth (or former Goth, or never Goth in their hearts but described as such in the media - it's a tricky definition...) musicians, Andi from the Sex Gang Children and Wayne Hussey from The Mission and The Sisters of Mercy

We shot the interviews in 'The Tudor Room' at a place in South Kensington called The Gore Hotel. (I found a dressing gown in the room's closet which just said 'The Gore' - I was half tempted to pinch it and wear it next time I make a horror film, like some wierd Hefner/Argento hybrid)
The interviews went well, despite the normal problems of shooting dark people against dark backgrounds (especially people who don't ever take off their dark glasses) and we got some great anecdotes off Wayne Hussey about recreational drug use and afternoon quiz shows, which hopefully will make it into the cut.

Back in Nottingham, I started work on the 'Empire of Flesh' script. Having already produced a short (8 page) outline, I'm having a go at moving straight into a script. I did have the option of doing a step outline - basically all of the scenes laid out one by one, usually 20-30 pages - but I'm not sure that it's the best way to go. In my experience - as with 'World of Pain' - step outlines tend to get bounced around for months, with notes from execs going back and forth, and just when it gets okayed, you suddenly realise that you've got to translate a prose document into something with dialogue and action. Going straight into the draft at this point feels right, but might mean that it's a bit of a slower process.

On Thursday, I had to do another change of heads and get back into 'Mum & Dad', because we had our ADR session booked. This involved getting most of the primary cast back to rerecord lines which the sound designers deemed necessary - because of being off-mike or with excessive background noise. It was great to see them again - Perry (Dad), Dido (Mum), Ainsley (Birdie) and Olga (Lena) - although a bit nerve-wracking for me because none of them had seen any of the film, and I'd decided (maybe foolishly) to offer them the opportunity to watch the cut before we went into the session. Perry and Olga were both champing at the bit to see it (not so sure about the other two, though..), so we put it on for them. I totally chickened out of staying in the room with them and went off to listen to some of the (excellent) sound design that Tom and Ben at Spool had been putting together.

When I came back, the film was just finishing. Luckily, they all seemed to like it (although I had said to them beforehand that even if they didn't like it, they had to act like they did so that I could make it through the rest of the day.) - Olga even giving me a big hug. Not sure if it's what they were expecting and I know it's difficult for actors to watch themselves with impartiality, but it was a really good response.

Then it was on to the ADR. There weren't too many lines to have to re-record, and a lot of them weren't sync, but we still had to do a bit of lip-synching, especially on one very noisy breakfast scene. They were all great at it though, matching rhythm and timing perfectly. It was like they'd never been away.

As well as getting the lines redone, I also got some additonal sound effects - breathing, gasping, snoring, being-stabbed-in-the-neck, that kind of thing, as well as making some more 'specialist' requests - 'Could you do some more aggressive wanking for me?' is a phrase that tripped quite comfortably off my lips, before I'd even registered it. Yes, loads of sex noises and cries of pain + one noise from Perry that was a weird mix of the two...

With the ADR in the bag, and the sound design moving on, we're getting ever closer to finishing the film. (Although we still do have to find some cheap, royalty-free porn.
Curse my lazy hide!)

We ended the week with a double-bill of films at home. First up was the Pixies documentary 'loudQUIETloud' - following the band on their reunion tour. I love The Pixies - I went to see them a couple of times in the late Eighties - and to me they were the best band around at the time. The film shows them getting back together and heading out on tour - and basically, from about 3 minutes in, you realise that they are the least communicative four people ever to work together - at least when it comes to talking to each other. It's hard to remember one single meaningful conversation any of them have together throughout the film. But that's one of the things that makes it interesting - everything seems buried and weirdly mysterious - where the songs come from, how they write, how they work together - and the fear that you're going to see a band you love revealed as charlatans or idiots is dispelled. Yeah, they're all dsyfunctional (except Joey Santiago, who looks about 10 years younger and healthier than the rest of them) and unhealthy and uncommunicative, but when you see them on stage it's just like watching them twenty years ago.

We followed up the Pixies fiilm with something a little more hardcore - 'Cannibal Holocaust', which I got for my birthday from my brother. I'd never seen this although Cooke (who, let's not forget, spent the entire Eighties in a small flat watching video nasties) had and was very excited about seeing it again, albeit with the caveat that it was horribly exploitative and wrong.

And, yup, it was.

It was still interesting and well made and worth a watch, and did actually have a 'message' about exploitation. It's just that the film itself is so nasty that it's hard to fully get behind it. Chief among the nasty elements were mutiple brutal rape scenes (which were at least acted) and some real animal slaughter. I counted a muskrat, a snake, a spider and a pig, all slaughtered for real on camera (Cooke tells me that the First AD walked off the film the first time he saw this happen. Which I think would have been my reaction too) - with the most gruesome by far being the beheading and evisceration of a giant turtle which was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen.

I know the intention was to try and show how savage the so-called civilized Americans are (it's them who do all the animal-killing - as well as burning children to death and raping village girls) - and it works in putting you on the side of the 'savages', but in terms of horror, it takes you out of the film and makes you more aware that the effects when humans get killed, though really well done, are just effects. All in all, though, it was really well made - certainly influential for the likes of The Blair Witch Project - and had a clever structure and interesing 'film-within-a-film' techniques. It was just horrible to watch. Which I guess is the idea.

Still, it had a nice theme tune, an easy-listening-style instrumental which you could almost sing along to - 'We're going....on a Cannibal Holocaust...we're going...to be eaten by cannibals...". I can still hear it now.

Mayhem III: Chucky, ghosts and pig-man freaks

2007-11-01T21:26:00.000Z

Last night was our third annual Mayhem Horror Film Festival at Broadway in Nottingham. We screened a 100 minute programme of local, national and international shorts, featuring killer clowns, zombies, pig-man freaks and a shot of a small child repeatedly punching an equally tiny Satan in the face. I think we (me, Chris Cooke and Gareth Howell, the co-directors of the festival) put together a really strong programme this year and the audience response seemed to bear that out. We had great numbers for the night as well - nearly sold out (in fact if Arcade Fire hadn't been playing just round the corner on the same night, I'm sure we would have done (selfish bloody French-Canadian alt-rockers and their cinematic, folk-influenced chamber pop)). After a brief intermission, we came back with a special preview screening of 'All The Boys Love Mandy Lane', a new American slasher film. I hadn't seen the film before last night (having been cruising with Goths for a couple of weeks) so I was keen (and slightly apprehensive) to see what it was like. Luckily for us it was great - really well shot with a great soundtrack and a real black heart. It's got twists, but ones that you kind of have an inkling of by the time they come, so there's no moment (unlike in, say, Switchblade Romance) where the film is in danger of alienating its audience by totally pulling some revelation out of left-field. In fact, the actual key moment of turnabout in the film is so brilliantly shot and staged, and the subsequent fall-out so black, bloody and pessimistic, that it doesn't really matter if you've seen it coming. While not exactly a gore-fest, there are a couple of really horrible moments, including one that made me suck air in through my teeth (a reaction I think I last had watching Takashi Miike's 'Imprint') and although it featured a typical bunch of selfish, sex-obsessed American teens, for some reason it didn't have me willing them to die quickly (like in 'Cabin Fever'). All in all, I think it went down well, although I know some people found it too generic and didn't think it pulled off what it was attempting. I think it came close enough.

After the screenings, Broadway bar were having a Halloween party (which we'd organised to have some kind of synchronicity with Mayhem) which featured a lot of fancy dress. Winners of the first prize were Sam Hawker (runner on 'Deliver Me' and "Mum and Dad', and local filmmaker) and his girlfriend Claire who came as Chucky and a very bloody Red Riding Hood. Second prize went to a man in a neck brace and blood all over his head (I think he was in fancy dress, it could have been that a taxi driver was taking the piss and had dropped him off telling him it was A and E) and third prize went to an actual ghost:I don't know if you can make it out, but if you squint you can just about see its outline hovering in the background between me and Cooke...

In which a brief moment of happiness on the receipt of some good news is immediately swamped by needless pessimism

2007-10-31T15:21:00.000Z

Yup, after what feels like months of hanging about (because it HAS been months of hanging about) we've finally * got picture lock on 'Mum & Dad', which means we can move on to the sound mix, dub, conform and grade. Because in my head the film is cut, I keep forgetting that I have to go on and do a load more work on it, but at least it feels like we're in the final run-in and a lot of the variables and possibilities have now been reduced. The finished film still feels quite far away, but it is actually in sight now.

We've also heard that we've got the development money for 'Empire of Flesh' (my next horror feature script) confirmed, so I'm going to start work on that as soon as possible. At the moment I'm hoping (like an uncommonly optimistic idiot) that we'll be able to shoot it next year, but knowing how development works in this country - and how many first time feature-makers struggle to get their next film made - I maybe shouldn't set my heart on that. The good thing about having had such a speedy turnaround on the development. writing and production of 'M+D' makes me feel that I can work quickly when I need to, but I know that as the budgets get higher (not that much higher, mind - I think at the moment we're still looking at around a £750,000 budget, which is ultra-low, rather than micro-budget) the possibilities for full creative freedom get smaller.

The thing is, what I've always wanted is to be able to make a career out of this. I have no problem with working at the lower end of the budget scale (obviously I couldn't afford to make another £100,000 film again, unless I win the lottery or sell a lung or something), and I've got ideas for at least another 3 or 4 features - one set in America, a kind of cross between 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane' and 'Suspiria', and another one which is tentatively called 'Lifestyles of the Great Dictators' - and my real fear is just to get stuck in development (like the ongoing saga with 'World of Pain'. Don't even ask) for years. I guess the thing to do is just to keep moving on - it's just that because of the nature of the industry, unless you're entirely self-financed, you're always going to be waiting on someone else's say-so.

Christ, I've not even finished one film and I'm already moaning about getting funding for the third or fourth - filmmakers really are a whiny bunch. Or, more likely it's just me.

Happy Halloween..

*'finally' in this respect does not actually mean that anything has strictly been finalised, because we still have to make one or two small adjustments, but we don't have to produce screeners for anyone again, so once we've made those changes we're set.

Things I Learned on Goth Cruise

2007-10-28T19:05:00.000Z

1) Cruise ships are insane. Or at least the one we were on was. Called ‘The Explorer of the Seas’, it was like someone had taken a shopping centre, a holiday camp and a hotel and put them in that machine that turned Jeff Goldblum into ‘The Fly’,then painted the outside white and the inside with every colour known to man, using hallucinogenic and sedative-laced paints, filled it full of low-paid but hyper-enthusiastic service staff and food and thrown it on the sea. It was 200 feet tall with 14 floors and had a full-size theatre, an ice-rink, a casino, a climbing wall, a basketball court, a spa, a gym, an English pub, a three-storey dining room, a running track and a nightclub. If someone had told me, halfway through the cruise, that there had been an extensive cave system below deck 1, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye.

It was a strange experience in many ways – mostly because we were working while everyone else was on holiday, so we didn’t really get the chance to relax into the whole concept of the cruise, but instead had to keep somewhat of a detached eye. This meant that we were constantly being freaked out by stuff – on day two someone mentioned that they changed the carpets in the lifts every day. What for? Well, there’s a panel in the middle of them that has today’s day on it –‘Monday’, ‘Tuesday’ etc. It’s actually someone’s job to go round every night after midnight and update these carpets, just so that you know what day of the week it is at any given time. On a cruise which lasts five days. That is batshit fucking insane.

2) When you are following a group of Goth men wearing kilts up a steep staircase, using a handheld camera which you are keeping very low, be prepared for what you are letting yourself in for.

3) Goth is a broad church. One of the questions Jeanie was asking was ‘What is Goth?’ and we got a lot of different answers, but one thing that summed it up for me was one night when I walked from the Café Promenade – the shopping street that ran through the centre of the ship into The Chamber, the nightclub which was holding one of the official Goth dances. The promenade, filled with pensioners and families browsing the shops was playing The Ramones’ ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’, while the Goth night was playing ‘Touch Me’ by Samantha Fox. For a brief moment while I passed from one soundtrack to the other, it was like someone had punched me in the mind.

4) 17 hour working days won’t actually kill me. On Wednesday, I shot my first shot – the ship arriving into port at Bermuda - at 8.45am and my last shot – Goths in a hot tub – at 1.45am. I think that the overall lack of sleep across the shoot was a major contributing factor to all of us feeling gradually more nuts as the cruise went on.

5) The reason why some people are starving in this world is that about half of the food that is in existence is on that cruise ship. Predominantly free of charge – you only really ever had to pay for booze – the cruise seemed to be designed in response to an intense paranoia that going without food for more than an hour at a time might actually kill you. After a while you just get used to it – we’ve all put on a ton of weight during the cruise, despite the fact that I was moving all day long and sweating copiously during intense handheld camerawork sessions – but when you find yourself loading a plate with four desserts and six different cheeses because you’re still a bit peckish after the enormous dinner you’ve just consumed, you know things are starting to go a bit awry. This is compounded to a ridiculous degree when you find yourself at a buffet in the dining room at 12.30 at night, surrounded by ice sculptures, eating sushi and cheesecake.

6) I am not Goth. Yeah, okay, I’ve got a bunch of Sisters of Mercy and Cure records – 12” remixes and everything – and I like horror films, but I’m not a massive vampire fan (although I do really like ‘Near Dark’) and I don’t really like wearing black (although the slimming nature of the colour would probably be an advantage right at this moment). I think I’m more dark on the inside.

7) I am not rock 'n' roll. In New York, we went to film at a shop in Greenwich Village, interviewing a guy called Jimmy. Jimmy was nearly 50 years old but was dressed like he just stepped out of a Billy Idol or Poison video in 1984. He was a massive Stooges fan who was Passionate (with a capital P) about clothes. His trousers were the lowest-cut and tightest I have ever seen. He lived in a basement apartment with no windows painted deep pink and lit by darklight. On his back he had this tattoo: I asked Mark what his tattoo would be. He said 'I've had enough'.

8) Towels can be creepy. Coming back to our cabin one night, I found that the bed had been made and that sitting on the top sheet was a towel folded into the shape of a rabbit wearing Jeanie's sunglasses. I thought this was weird, until I found out that this was a thing that the cabin staff do - look: As the days went on, there were others - including, in Mark's room, a weird monkey hanging from a coat hanger suspended over the foot of his bed. It looked like a pagan curse or something. The strangest one was probably a manta ray. Not that it looked really odd, but just because it made me think - how many animals do you have to go through and try and shape a towel into before you hit on manta ray? I know that the staff on these cruises receive a really low basic wage and have to make up their money in tips, and also that they work insanely long hours, so I don't have any problem with them having a bit of fun, but I do worry about their states of mind. I felt mad after less than a week on that ship - they do it for months.

9) Cruise ship staff are remarkably friendly and laidback. I was expecting problems with trying to film around the ship but in fact it was surprisingly easy. No-one ever said 'no, you can't film here'. We set up a jib in the middle of their dining room on a really busy night and instead of getting pissy and scowly about it, the waiters ducked their heads expertly under the treacherous swinging weights and never said a word, except to give us a smile and ask if they were going to be on tv. Maybe they went back to their cabins afterwards and preyed to their weird animal-towel god to wreak his vengeance on us at a later date, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

10) I don't get seasick. On the way back from Bermuda the ship hit some bad weather and started really moving about on the water - which was quite worrying considering the size of the thing (a few Poseidon Adventure moments flashed through my head) - causing a lot of Goth tottering, but also leading Mark, Victoria and Jeanie to feel really queasy. Myself, Alex and Monika (the rest of the crew) were surprisingly unbothered. Weirdly though, once back on dry land, all of us felt a bit strange walking about - like we kept wanting to try and compensate for the ship's movement even though it wasn't there any more.

11) Filming seven foot tall Goths in seven foot tall cruise cabins gives you a bad back...

Goth works in mysterious ways

2007-10-12T19:46:00.000+01:00

On Monday I'm off to New York, as DOP on Jeanie's "Goth Cruise' documentary. We've got a week in the city, then five days on the cruise itself, including a couple of days in Bermuda. I don't know what to expect, but all I know is that there is the potential that I will be sailing through the Bermuda Triangle with a man dressed as Satan, which is both a potentially terrifying omen and a great pitch for a B-movie.

Octoberhem!

2007-10-12T19:25:00.000+01:00

Mayhem, the horror film festival I help to run (alongside Chris Cooke and Gareth Howell) is gearing up for its third appearance at the end of this month. After missing our usual slot of May - basically because we were all too busy to be arsed to do it - we've opted for the traditional night of all things horror-ble - Halloween.

We've got a 90min selection of shorts - some local, some international, all good - plus a preview screening of 'All The Boys Love Mandy Lane'. There is a website here, which has news on the festival as well as hosting a number of horror shorts, including my two films 'Cry' and 'Through A Vulture Eye'. And yes, that is a blatant misuse of my festival co-director power.

There is also a Facebook group for those people who do that. Like I'm pretending I'm not one of them.

An Overdue Update on the State of Mum and Dad

2007-10-12T19:01:00.000+01:00

It's been a bit of a frustrating time, the past few months, as far as M+D goes. We did our 'brutal' cut, got some notes back, then had to wait a few weeks for some additional notes from another one of our execs who had been out of the country, then, because of a change in personnel at the Microwave scheme (Mia Bays has taken over as exec in charge of the scheme for Film London), we had to have a meeting with all the Execs and us together, where we presented our notes on the cut, then we had to wait until Leo had some time to fit us in to make the changes, then we finished* our cut, which we are presenting as my Director's Cut, and then there was a postal strike so we couldn't get the discs out to everybody, but now, eventually, the cut has gone to the Execs and hopefully we'll get picture lock and be able to move on the the film, our lives etc.

In the meantime, myself and Lisa, along with the Director (Eran) and Producers (Ben and Rory) of the other greenlit Microwave film 'Shifty' were invited down to take part in a panel as part of this year's Microschool in Shoreditch. (This took place at Shoreditch Town Hall,a venue I used to go to as a young man, where they held a regular club night called Whirl-y-gig. It was very odd to be back there, considering the last time I was in the building was probably New Year's Eve 1990 and I was totally off my head, dancing very badly to the Stone Roses (Christ, this makes me sound like some terrible faux-raver/90s casualty - it was really only a brief period in my life. And I always preferred the Happy Mondays.) It was good to meet up with the other team and get the chance to share experiences. Hopefully the group found it useful (although, judging by this blog I found, I'm not sure that many of them are horror fans...)

It was good to do the panel and realise that it was only a year ago that we were in the same situation, pitching the film to get the money. Even if the past few weeks have seemed to take forever, it's actually quite a quick turnaround, especially seeing as the script had only been first developed a couple of months earlier. Of course, the whole thing could yet drag on like a terrible fucking soap opera plot, but let's hope not...

*NB: 'finished' in this instance may bear little or nor relation to the idea of 'something being at the end', dependent on whether we get approval of the cut or not.

Parker Portland Pneumonia

2007-09-13T16:02:00.001+01:00

Well, it turns out that the horrible virus I had a few weeks ago was actually pneumonia - something that didn't actually get properly diagnosed until I'd done a long-haul flight to Canada and spent three days coughing and sweating in a strange bed. Luckily, I got hooked up with some expensive and strong Canadian drugs and started to feel better, but it was a bit of a horrible way to start a holiday.

We were in Canada for Jeanie's brother's wedding, but also used the opportunity to do some filming in Portland, Oregon (just a short flight over the Can/US border) for Jeanie's new documentary 'Goth Cruise'. One of the people she's following for the doc - an 'Elder Goth' called Sean - lives in Portland, so we went over to get an interview and some cutaways with him. I thought Portland was fantastic - largely helped by the fact that we were staying in a great hotel called the Ace, where they played the Ramones in the lobby, everyone who worked there looked like they were in a Jim Jarmusch film, and the rooms had Thoreau quotes and owls painted on the walls (or at least ours did...) Across the road from the hotel was a cinema called the Living Room Theaters, which was a fully digital, six screen arts cinema and bar. After feeling ill and tired, it was great to go somewhere and have a really good night out - we got two for one on tickets, the cinema was all double seats (with tons of legroom) and they served cold draught Guiness (in an actual glass) which you could take into the cinema with you. And Jeanie got some paprika flavoured popcorn which they made fresh and brought into the cinema for us. The difference between the film-going experience there and the usual UK film-going experience was so great, it was unreal.

The film we went to see was Lars von Trier's new comedy 'The Boss of it All', which I think is going to be premiering in this country at the London Film Festival. I hadn't heard anything about the film beforehand - in fact, I thought von Trier had been making a horror film - so I had no real expectations, but it turned out to be the most enjoyable thing I've seen him do since 'The Kingdom'. The film is about the boss of an IT company who has pretended to his staff that he isn't the real boss - and that all the questionable decisions (firing people etc.) in the company have been made by the (fictional) guy above him - 'The boss of it all'. When some grumpy Icelanders want to buy the company, they only want to deal with TBOIA, so the actual boss has to employ a local actor to pretend to be him - a decision which backfires when he accidentally becomes known to the rest of the staff, all of whom now want to voice their displeasure at his years of 'leadership'.

It's a good set-up and a funny film - but it's also typically full of von Trierisms. While watching it I kept thinking, 'Blimey, has he just got rid of having a camera operator now?' because the film is full of odd jump-cuts - the camera moving from one angle to one very slightly different angle and back again - odd framings, jumps in sound and white balance - almost as though no-one were really looking through the camera or controlling it. In fact, von Trier claims that the film was filmed in what he calls 'Automavision' - a process whereby a computer was controlling what the camera was doing. ('Automavision' seems to be a phrase coined only by von Trier - I can't find any description of how the computer works, or what exactly it controls.) There's a good description of the effects of the process by David Bordwell here.

Von Trier also narrates and appears (in a reflection) in a wobbly zooming crane shot talking about the film (which his voiceover describes as 'a comedy, and harmless') and one of the characters talks about life being like 'a Dogma film'. It's very playful, but still engaging and the shooting style and tricks don't actually hinder the enjoyment - it's amazing how robust a narrative can be, even when subjected to a lot of stylistic messing about. Makes you think that a lot of what people think of as being 'cinematic' is just gloss.

Also in Portland they have a great bookstore called Powell's, where I managed to get hold of a second-hand copy of a Parker book called 'Breakout'. For those not familiar with the violent world of Parker, he's the creation of Richard Stark (aka crime writer Donald E. Westlake) and began life in the original novel 'The Hunter' aka 'Point Blank', later made into the classic film with Lee Marvin. Parker is the most hard-boiled of hard-boiled criminals, a serial heister who is like a machine when he's working - hard as nails, terse as sin. Each Parker book (and there's 20+ of them since the 60s - with a break during the late 70s and 80s) is quite formulaic - Parker is working a heist with a crew, one of whom he suspects to be a weak link (but with whom, for one reason or another - like he's the inside man, or he's the money man, or he's the lead guy's brother or something... - he has to carry on working). The heist goes wrong and Parker loses the money and then has to kill some people. And because you know more or less what you're going to get every time you open a Parker book, it's a pure joy to get a new one. And in my still-pneumonic (?) state, heading back on the plane over the mountains to Vancouver it was great to read about Parker breaking out of prison through one library and attempting to heist a jewel wholesaler's by tunneling through another.

Back in Vancouver, I recovered from the infection and managed to have a good time, with only a (thankfully) fitful internet connection to keep me in touch with what was happening (or not happening...) with 'Mum and Dad'. More on that later.

Edgy and dull...

2007-08-22T20:27:00.000+01:00

For the past two weeks, pretty much since the minute we finished the latest version of the cut, I've been feeling terrible - some horrible virus/infection that has left me with a horrible barking cough like old man Steptoe as well as aching muscles, constant headaches and a relentless fever. At nights I wake up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head - fuck, I've got Springsteenitis. It's horrible, I've been trying to carry on working, but I feel like an old man, just lying in bed and blah blah bla-blah blah

Yeah, well, enough moaning. Tomorrow I'm off to Vancouver for two weeks for Jeanie's brother's wedding, so work-wise I'm going to be on a bit of a hiatus. As far as 'Mum and Dad' goes, we've had really good feedback from the execs for the last cut, although they do have some fine-cutting notes (which we don't have yet, unfortunately, or we could have got on before I went away...), so we're going to have to wait a couple of weeks to get back into it. It all feels like things have slowed down, but I guess it's still relatively speedy. It's just that people keep asking me how it's going and when they can see something, and I'm even boring myself with saying, 'soon, soon...'. It's just difficult to keep the same level of concentration on the project when you're not actually working on it, it's just running in the background. Hopefully, we'll be done by Halloween...

We found out the other day that 'Deliver Me' has got into the Munich Short Film Festival Bunter Hund, which is great news. I kind of feel like the film's been a bit orphaned - I had to go off to do 'Mum and Dad' as soon as we'd finished (before the grade was even done - Lucas had to bring it over to set so that I could approve it), Tina's been working pretty much constantly as well, and Em-media don't seem to be that behind the film - maybe because it fell between two Development Execs, so no-one really felt ownership of it. It's such a different film to 'Mum and Dad', but in a lot of ways probably more of a development of the other shorts I've done. I"ve had some really good feedback on it - but then I've also had really good friends tell me it's 'not their cup of tea'. I hope it finds an audience somewhere.

When I get back, I'm hoping to start work on the next script 'Empire of Flesh' - we've applied for some development money, and hopefully if that comes through I'll actually be able to afford to do it. If not, store vacancies at Lidl start beckoning again...

The Meat loves Dave

2007-08-08T10:30:00.000+01:00

After a slightly uncomfortable hiatus in the 'Mum and Dad' edit (we left off midway through our 'brutal' cut of the film, and having it hang around like that has felt like spending the last couple of weeks being followed round by a three-legged animal still sniffiing aorund for its misssing limb (not a pleasant image, really, and one that seems to have jumped into my brain straight out of a scene from Lucy McKee's fantastic May)), I'm on the train back down to London, headin back to the suite and trying to block out the tinny blare of someone's iPod playing a hellish dance version of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' from somewhere down the carriage.

The past couple of weeks have felt a bit disjointed and random, and I feel like I'm having to reconstruct the state of concentration we had earlier in the edit (as I say that, the train I'm on has just passed a goods train carrying several tons of rocks and graffitied on the side with 'Dave loves the meat') and not get distracted (the iPod is now playing Survivor's 'Eye of the Tiger' at what must be ear-bleedingly loud volume - oh, hang on, now he's switched to Avril Lavigne's 'Girlfriend'. Christ, it's like listening to Trent FM through a sock. Worn by a fucking idiot.)

Anyway, I'm hoping that by the end of tomorrow we'll have a cut that we're happy with and which we can present to the Execs as our cut...

Please, brutality...

2007-07-27T13:32:00.000+01:00

It's been a tough couple of weeks in the edit. After canvassing feedback on the last cut and collecting more notes (primarily from Sol and Lizzie, our Execs), we're midway through a 'brutal' version of the cut which has seen us lose almost 10 minutes off the running time - bringing us closer (despite my moaning and bitching to Lisa about having to cut stuff - but then, what do I know?) to my original stated aim of 83mins. (I don't know about anyone else, but when I look for the running time on the back of a DVD box, I'm always hoping that it's somewhere in the 80s - makes you feel like the film's not going to be fucking about too much.)

We've ended up cutting out a lot of dialogue, compressing some time (while, strangely, expanding it at the same time) and, I think, making the film stronger. But now, due to other work commitments for Leo, and childcare commitments for me (Jeanie's off at Britdoc this week), we've had to take a break. This is one of the problems of the budget - if we had more money, we could just book Leo until the end of the edit, but as it is, he has to take on other work for the company. We're still trying to get on with stuff over the phone and email, but it's quite difficult at this point in the edit - it's a time when you really want to be feeling the length of cuts and the edit points, by viewing them in context of the rhythm of the whole piece.

In the meantime, we've also started to get a little more press about the film. There was a recent article in Screen International all about the Microwave scheme -Click to enlarge.

I'm not sure how I feel about the whole 'Film Idol' idea - what does that make 'Mum and Dad' - Will Young? Michelle McManus?

Anyway, the same issue featured the annual Screen International 'Stars of Tomorrow' spread, which counted both Jeanie and Tina Pawlik (my producer on 'Deliver Me') as two of this years SOTs.

Also this week, BBC Film Network put up a short video of a set visit they did, including interviews with me, Lisa, Perry, Dido, Olga and Simon (FX).

It all seems like ages ago, the shoot. It's weird how, after being so long in the edit (not that we've been that long - the whole thing's been relatively quick), you forget about the whole process of filming the thing and just concentrate on the footage. Watching the BBC video back reminded me of how much fun it was to actually shoot the film (fun obviously tempered by intense continuous schedule-pressure) and how much work it had been to actually capture what we've got. Although, having said that, if I never have to visit the room that contained the set for Lena's bedroom (where I'm interviewed) I'll be happy. All I can remember is the heat, mingled with smoke machine and man-musk. Delightful.

Fine cutting

2007-07-06T13:43:00.000+01:00

After the rough cut screening of the week before last, and gathering notes from various sources on the cut, we're now moving into fine cut territory - responding to the notes we've had and attempting to tighten, heighten and brighten (actually, more like darken, but that doesn't rhyme) the film. It's a different kind of editing, in a way, where you find yourself revisiting scenes you may have first faced weeks ago and trying to do things you either hadn't ever thought about, or thought about and discarded or thought about and tried and not quite succeeded in doing. Notes here are really helpful (mostly...) - it's good to treat every viewer as just an audience, no matter whether there an exec or a mate - and generally most notes won't just come from one person, they'll have been reiterated (or echoed, or tangentially touched upon) by someone else. So, myself and Leo try and attend to them. But this is quite a complicated process at this stage (especially if the note includes the phrase "I'd like to see more of..." because at this stage we're pretty much using every available portion of the footage, bar the clapperboards. (And if we could digitally remove them, we'd probably end up doing it.))

So, a note might be something like "This scene seems a bit talky, can you try and lose a couple of lines?" -

First off, the director part of me thinks either A) "Yeah, I wonder how that would work" (in that it doesn't immediately feel like a wrong or painful suggestion) or B) "No, that's a terrible idea, what the hell are you thinking?" (in that it does). If it's B, I have to suppress the urge to express the sentiment, and think it through for a while - just because a suggestion sounds wrong and painful on first listen, doesn't mean that it hasn't got something in it...

If it's A, then the next stage is that the writer part of me thinks about it, concurs and then wonders which lines would be best to cut (while at the same time feeling intensely self-critical and self-chastizing - "Idiot, you could have lost those lines from the script before we even shot and saved everybody's time!" Writers are a whiny bunch.) Then myself and Leo have to look at whether it's actually feasible to do in terms of the edit. This encompasses a number of intertwining areas:

1) Performance - in cutting out the lines, we are also artificially truncating an emotional and dramatic line which the actor will have created in the scene - getting from A>B>C in the script as convincingly as possible. If B suddenly goes missing, the jump from A>C may now seem weird (it's a subtle thing, but it can disrupt the whole flow of a scene.)

2)Continuity - cutting can also mean a jump in physical action - again, the real-time movements of the actors in the shot will now be reordered. This can be especially difficult if none of the shots are clean (a clean shot features just one actor in close-up, without any part of the other actor(s) infringing on the shot. If part of another actor (i.e. back of head or shoulder) is fringing the shot, it's known as dirty). If the whole scene is shot in dirty midshots or close-ups, then with 2 actors over maybe 3 or 4 takes of maybe 3 or 4 different set-ups (dirty midshot Mum, dirty midshot Lena, dirty CU Mum, dirty CU Lena, for example) then continuity of action really is critical. If continuity is the same over all takes of all shots (say 4 takes each of 4 shots = 16 different versions of the scene and innumerable (actually it is calculable, but by someone with a better grasp of maths than me (I dunno, 48...?)) opportunities to cut the scene together. If the continuity is off, though, something as simple as someone leaning back at a different time across the different shots and takes can mean that your options get narrowed down considerably, even so far as only a couple of options (which might not encompass the best performances...) or maybe even none at all (which is when you have to bung in a random cutaway and hope that no-one notices. Or reads it as symbolic or something.) Cutting a couple of lines out can be a problem in a scene with good continuity of action (because of the reasons outlined in 1)), but in a scene where the continuity is loose, it can be a nightmare.

3) Pacing - sometimes you can't just cut something out because the timing (which you are artificially altering) feels off. So you have to find something to bridge the gap, or extend (or compress) a moment - a pause, a reaction shot, a random cutaway (again with the cutaways...). This means maybe nicking an earlier or later moment from a take - in effect trying to create the effect that an actor gave a reaction they didn't give (because they didn't know they had to give that reaction at the time because they didn't know that some arse of a director was going to cut some lines which some slacker of a writer should have edited out of the script at an earlier stage...).

Sometimes it all comes out all right, and you can get away with quite substantially re-ordering a scene from the way it was written and shot. And sometimes just cutting two lines can cause a massive headache and loads of work. I blame the writer. (Directors are a cowardly lot.)

Whitby World of Horror

2007-06-27T15:45:00.001+01:00

After a hectic week last week - which included having the first rough cut screening of 'Mum and Dad' for our execs from Film London (which went really well - there's still work to be done, but it seems to be working in the way that we want, which is a relief, especially after spending 15 hours in the edit suite the day before, trying to get it finished in time...) - I needed a break - which was lucky, because I'd already arranged a trip to Whitby, home of Goth, for a weekend of watching horror films along with my friends Chris, Gareth, John and Matt. This was planned as a kind of response to an art project which Jeanie had taken part in earlier in the year - albeit on a much smaller scale, with less talk about art and more watching of horror DVDs.

We hired a cottage near the town centre and basically spent the weekend nights watching films, and the days wandering about lovely (although constantly pissing with rain) Whitby. It was great.

After a five hour drive (including a detour to Yarm to pick up the keys, and torrential downpours for most of the journey) we got there Friday evening, had a few pints and a curry (in the hottest curry house in England - that's hot as in 'sweat dripping off your nose onto your poppadums', as opposed to 'spicy'), then it was back to the cottage (which we had managed to rearrange into a mini cinema, thanks to borrowing Jeanie's projector and rearranging all of the sofas) to start watching.

First up was one of the original Kolchak pilot movies, 'The Night Strangler'. Kolchak is always good fun, especially in his dealings, as I've mentioned before, with his editor Tony. 'The Night Strangler' is a story about a murderer with the face of a corpse draining the blood from young women on the streets of Seattle and it's a great piece of entertainment - obviously filmed on a budget, very quickly - there's one scene, where Kolchak has a great long speech revealing his theory where Darren McGavin half-fluffs a couple of lines but just keeps going - obviously aware that there wasn't going to be the chance to go again.

Next it was the French film 'Ils' (They) which came out earlier in the year. It's a lean, stripped-down atmospheric horror about a middle-class couple in an enormous house in Romania who get menaced by some intruders. It's an effective piece, but as it went on it kind of lost me a bit - I'm not sure there was any more to it than a drawn-out chase sequence, and the only idea seemed to be that kids in hoodies (especially foreign ones) are really scary.

Finally we watched a film I've been wanting to see again for years after seeing it on TV, 'Night of the Eagle'. Starring Peter Wyngarde (who spends much of the film in the highest-waisted trousers I've ever seen, puffing on endless cigarettes and smouldering (with brooding sexuality rather than fag-ash)), it's a great British witchcraft film, with a brilliant sequence set on a beach at night, which is one of the most atmospheric moments in British horror. The film also features a classic case of Husbanddickery from Wyngarde - a devout non-believer in the supernatural, whose entrenched contempt for his wife's belief in witchcraft leads almost to their deaths. The film also features a climactic sequence in a school with some great (though simply acheieved) effects work. All in all, it's terrific.

After a long lie-in, we spent the next day looking round Whitby, before going back in the afternoon to watch the rough cut of "Mum and Dad'. I was obviously very nervous about showing this, but wanted to get people's feedback. After about twenty minutes I had to leave the room (I'd watched the film twice through already in the two days before, and I was feeling too self-conscious), but the feedback I got from everybody was really positive, even with the film in still quite a rough state. There were a few helpful suggestions about things we could add or take away (at this point it's probably worth saying that it's MUCH EASIER to take stuff out than it is to add stuff - we're down to pretty much the bare bones as far as additional usable footage goes), but generally it seemed to go down really well, which was a massive relief.

With that out of the way, we went out for a pint and a walk on the pier and the beach, with John taking some moody photos along the way. Here we are acting like an extremely unathletic song and dance troupe:
And here we are looking like some dodgy Eighties rock band who have reformed for the cash and are now condemned to a life of greatest hits gigs around the north coast of England.

That night, we watched three more films, starting with George Romero's Martin. I don't know why Martin isn't more acclaimed - it's fucking great. Maybe it's because Romero is just seen as the Zombie guy, but the story of Martin is terrific - about a boy who may or may not be a vampire, who is sent to live with his elderly 'cousin' (a bloke who looks like Colonel Sanders and constantly greets Martin with a growl of 'Nosferatu!' while pressing a crucifix at him (that'd get on your nerves after a while, wouldn't it?)). The film plays with the ambiguity of what is the truth about Martin throughout, but it never feels like you're being shortchanged by not getting a definitive answer. Instead, it creates an atmosphere which is all to do with intolerance and lack of communication and the intransigence of religion, creating sympathy for Martin, while at the same time never shying away from the fact that he is murdering people and sucking their blood.

After Martin we watched a section of Dead of Night (in the interim, while stopping for a coffee break, Chris had been reading out his 'Ghost Stories of Whitby' pamplet which included a tale about a ghostly puppeteer...) - the famous ventriloquist's dummy story with Michael Redgrave giving a fantastic performance. Again, as with Martin it's always kept ambiguous as to whether the character is just mad or is in fact being influence by his devilish doll Hugo.

Next up - and putting a final nail in the coffin of the night - was 'The Incredible Melting Man', which both Mat and Chris had described as 'great'. A low-budget tale of space journey gone wrong (basically ripped off wholesale from 'The Quatermass Experiment') with decent effects by Rick Baker, it's one of the worst things I've ever seen. And not in a good way. Obviously struggling to make feature length, the film is padded out with shots of the IMM walking, very slowly, across hills and fields, with random shots, like this one of a nurse fleeing a shockingly understaffed (one nurse, one doctor, no security) military hospital, slowed down to half speed, just to pad out a few more seconds. The acting's rubbish, the script is non-existent and the pacing's appalling. By about half and hour in we were all willing it to end (the idea of actually GETTING UP AND TURNING IT OFF obviously being wholly alien to us), but on it crept, like badly-made slug, leaving a trail of crappy scenes behind it on the carpet.

The next day, we ventured out on a boat trip:
Got drenched, obviously.

Then we went back to the flat for one final film, Jack Clayton's 'The Innocents'. Weirdly, I'd never actually seen this all the way through before, but had obviously heard loads about it. Combining some of the themes of the weekend (Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde, madness and ambiguity, and a variation of Husbanddickery in Redgrave's Uncledickery - 'I want you to take sole responsibility for these children. I do not want to be bothered with any of it while I am whoring my way through London.' (I've paraphrased a little.)), the film is gorgeously shot by Freddie Francis, brilliantly performed, deeply creepy (especially the lad who plays the boy) and truly disturbing. A great end to the weekend.

It was great to get away and watch some films - combining horror with British coastal tourism (chips, rock and pissing rain), and we're already talking about another one, maybe in Gareth's caravan in Wales (Four wheels of horror?). It would be great to do it again - as long as we don't have to watch 'The Incredible Melting Man' again.

Dyson Fly Death

2007-06-11T20:10:00.000+01:00

Going upstairs to get some clothes for Betsy (my three year-old) this morning, I noticed an ominous low buzzing sound coming from the spare room. Gingerly pushing open the door, I found the windows covered in lethargic, swollen flies, like some terrible omen of doom. Noticing that they seemed to be coming out from the chimney, I stuck a broomstick up there and down tumbled - amidst a handful of crumpled pages of a decade-old Nottingham Evening Post (and another plaguette of flies) - two pigeon corpses. One was bloated, its head sunken into its puffed-up chest like a steroided bouncer, the other just a skeletal framework of bones and feathers. So, while Betsy watched Lazytown, I was stuck trying to hoover up flies from the windows and ceiling (the windows, I newly realised, had been painted shut when we had the outside of the house painted last year, so there was no other way to get the flies out) like in some extremely poor Ghostbusters roleplay.

The reason I'm at home and not in the edit is that Jeanie is also editing at the moment, a pilot for her new documentary Goth Cruise. She has to have it done by the end of the week, so it's the only way we can really both manage to work at the moment. I'm going to be back in London on Wednesday till Friday to pick up where Leo and I left off last week. At the moment, we're about an hour into the film. We're spending a lot of time just picking out little bits and pieces from the footage to feed into the cut that Leo made. With some scenes, obviously, there is a bit more to do and we more or less start from scratch, but a lot of the time it's just about making small but crucial adjustments. Now we're into the middle part of the film, a lot of what we're working on is about making the family dynamic really work, as well as upping the perversity of it all. And sometimes it's just little things - we inserted a shot - only about a second long - of somebody's foot slipping in some blood during some action, and that really helped add to the texture of the scene it was in - just a little reminder of the presence of horror, even in what is quite a 'normal' scene.

Away from 'Mum and Dad' stuff, I found a Korean webpage this week featuring loads of stills and a review of my short film 'Cry'. Not speaking Korean, I got Google to translate for me, and it came back with this.

"Fragmentary horror film of Steven [swey] one supervision of British native in fragment of psychological thrill [le] it is.
(The body and mind it sleeps weakly but at the minutes when there is a heart disease lonely autumn)
The [li] in the face which knows all blood seven A with one which it is confined in the plan which is isolated.
And after biting from, child voice one demon to release oneself, the [li] Oh situation,
It inflicts a threat sometimes and it creates a fear atmosphere.
The [li] it knows but and it does not shake rarely. The [le] polyvalent demon writes a last means,
The [li] the hazard which gets the freedom of oneself by self-will force it displays the force which is powerful. With the demon which the [li] it knows finally it is faced with and the place…
From first until end the beginning and end consistency with the dark screen there is a possibility of feeling the fear of the power which is powerful
[pul] It is a [le] D one work.
Unique rain [cyu] will freeze with [pul] the horror movie peculiar hand which is used from place [tu] [heyl] [tu] technique, and
The realism of the set which puts around the blood in all wall is living freshly the horror fragmentary public opinion excellent work
It is a work which it calls. Director: Steven Sheil | United Kingdom
[len] [ning] The time is 8 branch families quantity. Once sentiment it tries with joyful mind and it wishes."

I'm guessing it's a postive review. My favorite bit is "The body and mind it sleeps weakly but at the minutes when there is a heart disease lonely autumn". Which doesn't really bear any relation to the film, but sounds pretty.

Melon Smash Meat

2007-06-03T21:22:00.001+01:00

I've been trying to spend as much time in the edit suite as possible over the past couple of weeks - in between looking after Betsy (Jeanie's been away filming in America for her upcoming Goth project). We're getting on well, I think - we've gone through the opening twenty minutes and worked them up, and inserted a lot of the second unit plane stuff which we shot, which really helps sell the idea of the airport. The week before last was mostly taken up with working on one long sequence in the film, where Lena wakes up in her room for the first time. The scene relies a lot on sound, and because that sound wasn't there while we were filming - and there wasn't ever really time to schedule it in as a separate bit of sound recording during the shoot - we've had to improvise and try and come up with some of the sounds ourselves - pinching them from other bits of the film and sound effects libraries as well as generating them ourselves. Leo, the editor, cajoled a woman from Speade (where we're editing) to come in and voice some stuff - all of which seems to work really well - and I brought in a bag of stuff from Tescos to experiment with. Because some of the sounds we need are quite violent and fleshy, I bought some heavy fruit - a melon - something that snaps - rhubarb - and a large piece of pork. We tried hitting the pork with a hammer, which gave us some good stuff, but I wanted to try and get something heftier, so then tried hitting the meat with the melon. While part of me was concentrating hard on trying to find the perfect sound of a body being flung against a wall, the more self-conscious part of my brain couldn't help but question the appropriateness of a grown man kneeling on a carpet smashing at a piece of pork on a glass coffee table with a large melon.

At the end of this week, we did a playout and I brought the rough cut of the film back to watch with Jeanie. It was a weird experience - as always - revealing things about the film that you'd either not fully realised or somehow managed to blind your mind to, while at the same time feeling too familiar. It gave me The Fear a little - although Leo's done a fantastic job in getting us to this stage, there is still a long way to go and I do need to start working a bit faster if we're going to get through it - but I think everything is more or less there to allow us to get what we need. It's just such a massive job, and everything takes time - although to be fair, it was only a year ago this week that I was on my way down to have my first meeting with Sol about the Microwave scheme, and it was only really on the train down that I came up with the pitch for 'Mum and Dad', so to go from nothing to rough cut in twelve months is pretty good going. Of course, there's still the cut to finish, the grade, the sound mix, (hopefully) the blow-up and we've got to sell it, so it could be ages yet before it's even Out There, but at least now some kind of end seems to be in sight - eh, Dad?

Excitement, regret, guilt, terror

2007-05-20T21:09:00.001+01:00

I was at a car boot in Bottesford (just off the A52) a few weeks ago. Got a reasonably good haul - some big box 80s horror VHS tapes (more of which to come in a later post...) + a whole pile of Fortean Times magazines for a quid, so that wasn't bad. About halfway down one of the aisles, there was a middle-aged woman with a blanket spread out in front of her, filled with the usual car boot items - clothes, crockery, paperbacks, Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits on vinyl - and, near the front, a row of VHS tapes with handwritten labels. Always on the look out for more obscurities, I took a closer look - and found that they were all labelled 'XXXX Porn' (that's one X-ier than normal porn), with titles that included the deeply evocative 'Dripping Snatches'. At the time I remember thinking, 'who the hell would buy a second-hand VHS tape of possibly homemade porn from a car boot sale?'.

Then, this week, in the edit suite with our editor Leo, we watched a scene from 'Mum and Dad' wherein there is supposed to be some porn playing on a TV. Not having the rights to any actual porn at the time of shooting, we just shot a blank TV screen, deciding that it would be something we would composite into the shot at a later date. 'What we really need' Leo said 'is some kind of dated homemade porn where it doesn't matter about copyright.' At which point I realised (not without a splinter of shame lodging itself forever into the forefinger of my soul) that I am exactly the kind of person who should have been buying 'Dripping Snatches' from a car boot sale in Bottesford.

Ah well, hindsight's a wonderful thing. In the end, Leo got someone from the office to nip out and buy some porn (luckily the editing house is situated in the middle of Soho) which we're going to use in the interim, although it does mean that at some point we're either going to have to licence some proper stuff or come up with our own. (And by 'we' I mean 'anybody else but me').

Leo's got a rough cut of about 90 minutes at the moment. I watched it through on Thursday and had the customary mixed bag of emotions flow through me - excitement, regret, guilt, terror (y'know, the basics). Some bits of the film are already working really well (Leo's been working like a dog over the past few weeks), but some areas really need work and are giving me The Fear about whether we've actually got the footage to sort them out. At certain points I was kicking myself for not getting more coverage (although how that would have been possible on the schedule we had is difficult to imagine) or for not shooting things in a different way.

The beginning of the film was a place which was really rough, so we started with that, and over the next couple of days managed to get it into a much better shape. It's not perfect yet, but it's working a lot better than it was, and hopefully sets us up a bit for the more difficult stuff we've got to get into next week.

Leo's really good to work with - he's really into the film and has got a good handle on the material, so I don't worry too much about the actual editing side - it's more a question at the moment of whether the restrictions that we were working under during the shoot (money, time) have left us with a selection of material that's a little too spartan. We'll see.

Mum and Dad - Bonus Photo Post

2007-05-14T22:27:00.001+01:00

In the aftermath of the shoot, things have been pretty quiet - Leo Scott, the editor, is working hard to put together an assembly - I'm going down this week to have a look - and Jeanie is gearing up for her shoot in the States, so I've just been dealing with getting back to relatively normal life. Got a rejection email from Cinema Extreme on Friday (which is practically the dictionary definition of relatively normal) and started working a bit more on the outline for my new project 'Empire of Flesh', which I'm hoping to start writing properly over the summer.

In this lull, I've had the time to get the rest of the images of the shoot off my phone. They're all a bit random (I didn't really have time to fully photo-document the whole thing) but they give a bit of the feel of the making of the film. So, in the entirely random order that Blogger has decided to upload these images...

This is my comically distorted face through a magnifying glass (kind of like those you find in a dentist's surgery) which I found in a deserted room when we were shooting at the University of Nottingham building - formerly Carlton TV. The only other things in the room were giant piles of empty plastic water cooler bottles. What can I say? It was a night shoot, at the end of the shoot, and you take your amusement where you can find it.

A view of the field from the relative comfort of the temporary shelter we had erected in the field. This was the view my parents would have had of events - the only thing missing is me galumphing across the piles of horseshit towards the sun-baked cast and crew to impart another nugger of directorial wisdom like 'that was great, but can you do it again with less hopping.'

This is actually a bit wierd. I found this amongst the props in the cellar set. It's a guide to making cocktails and the reason it's strange is because my Mum and Dad had the exact same book in their house when i was growing up and it really intrigued me. (We had a bar in the living-room - hey, it was the Seventies, everyone had one - and it was kept behind there in amongst the optics.) Seeing it in this setting gave me a bit of a weird feeling. Like when I saw that the T-shirt that Elbie was wearing one day had the number 35 on it - the number of my Mum and Dad's house. Okay, let's not alert the Fortean Times or anything, but little things like that do add up. To what, I don't know...

This is me, standing in a shower cubicle while we shot the bathroom scene (it was the only place I could be and not be in shot) with Jonathan Bloom (D.O.P. , sans his customary beret and scarf) checking a text message or something.

Ah, the old 'photo of the slate just to prove you're making a proper film' shot. We ended up shooting (I think) 445 slates. It was going to be 444, but we had a kitty on who was going to guess the final slate total and I fixed it to allow Ainsley to win, totally stabbing Alex (Sound Recordist) in the back. And he's practically my brother-in-law. I have no shame.

Another shot from the FX bathroom. Where you go when you need some fake teeth.

This is Barry, Focus Puller and Steadicam Op. in a custom-designed T-shirt by Jo from Costume. Shortly after this I think he added to the fake blood on his T-shirt by cracking his head on one of the gruesome hanging tools in the Tool Room.

The FX bloodbath.

The Green Man pub in Bedfont, where we had lunch. Very patriotic round that way.

A horse, non-plussed.

Mum and Dad's bedroom. Not really much horror in there. Unless you count the dolls, which are always pretty freaky.

There are also a couple of publicity photos for the film out - one on this site - which also carries interviews with Olga and me (and, for the record, I do know that George Romero didn't direct 'Night of the Evil Dead') - and this one:which appears, currently, on the Film London site.

Curiously, both sites dub me 'A New Hope for British Horror'. If that's so, it means that my next film will be darker and better, the third one will be ruined by weird little teddy bears and the next three will all be CGI-laden dull-a-thons featuring petulant teenagers and Jar-Jar Binks. Wow, it's like a glimpse into the future...

Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Seventeen

2007-05-08T14:04:00.001+01:00

The last day of the shoot - and everything felt very strange. Because of the shift from nights back to days (or at least lates - today was 12 till 12) and the travel day we had, it was nearly two and a half days since we shot, so that feeling that you get at the start of the week of having to gear yourself up again was magnified. Also it was strange because we're in London, and I'm staying at my own parents' house - in the bedroom I grew up in - and filming in a location that I've walked past a thousand times - a field at the end of a runway just outside Heathrow. Also, our unit base is at Bedfont Football Club, next to the Rec where I used to play as a kid. Suddenly I feel about 6 years old again.

The field is a great location - at least in some respects - it's facing the end of a runway, so planes take off directly overhead every couple of minutes, and it's got landing lights in it, these weird yellow plastic towers spaced along a line towards the runway. It's also got about twenty horses in it, which we constantly had to herd about during the day to stop them encroaching on the shots. Obviously, it's a bit of a problem for sound, what with the deafening roar of a jet overhead thirty times an hour, but luckily, there's not really much dialogue (at least not during the day stuff).

We started, as usual, slowly - Art Dept had to reconstruct part of a fence we made in Nottingham to sell the location, so that took a while - then there was rigging Barry's Steadicam which he was letting us have for the day, and then setting up the corner of the field we were using as a base. It was also blazing hot - meaning that within a couple of hours, I had a sunburnt face, at which point (despite about twenty people advising me to do it earlier) I put on some suncream. We eventually turned over at about 2 - then had to wait for planes to come into shot. I don't know if we managed to actually get any great stuff of jumbos roaring overhead (and it's something that we can also work with in the edit) but I thought that, seeing as we were there, we should try and get some if we could.

While we were doing the Steadicam stuff, my Mum and Dad turned up. I didn't get the chance to speak to them much, but I'm really glad they came and I think that the cast and crew kept them entertained. Although what they made of Perry's blood-stained dress I don't know...

Time seemed to vanish today (as usual) and when the blocking for the climactic scene wasn't working out, I had to come up with a quick alternative - not least because we were starting to lose light (losing light, gaining light - it's always something...). We ended up rushing through the final through shots, staging them in a slightly different way, but hopefully getting some good stuff. Oh, and we also managed to kill a sofa (not ours - we found it in the field.)

At lunch, I had a quick chat with a couple of journalists, (including Alan Jones - who has written extensively on Argento (I had to reign in my impulse just to talk about the new Third Mother film for the entire thing). He was really into the script - and said that he had it pegged as a 'Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girlie' homage from the start.)

Then it was into our final session - a night shoot in the field. Again, night exteriors seem to take forever - but we managed to get it all done - our final shot being a long lens shot of Lena, Birdie and Elbie walking silhouetted past the lights of the airport. And that was it - back to Bedfont Football Club for a quick drink and then back to my parents' house to have a long lie-in.

Everybody was asking me if I felt weird that it was all over, but really, it hasn't had time to impact yet. Also, the minute we finished, my brain started filling the void with a million other things - the edit, my next script, how to pay the mortgage while I finish the film - so that, in a way, the energy I put into the shoot is probably just going to morph into another set of concerns. Also, I'm so used to shooting now that the scale of what we've done hasn't really hit home. 17 days for a feature is really good going (especially picking up a day during the shoot), and I'm hoping that we've got all we need to tell the story. I know I've had to change things here and there because of time and budget constraints, but it's never felt like I've had to compromise the film too much - in fact, I feel that, with the aid of a great cast and crew, I've actually been able to make a lot more of some things.

I'm going to miss working with everyone on that intensive a basis - but it does make me really determined to get another filim of the ground as soon a possible, so that we can do it again. That's the trick - to try and make this a regular occurence, rather than just a once-in-a-lifetime deal. Even if it means working on a low budget all the time (although maybe not always this low), it'd be great to just carry on making twisted and perverse little horror films for the next few years. Although, I'm getting ahead of myself - I haven't even got this one done yet - and there's still a long way to go...

Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Sixteen

2007-04-30T10:18:00.001+01:00

The last shoot day (night) in Nottingham, and we were still in the offices - we're using a location which used to be Carlton studios, just off Lenton Lane - somewhere I've been quite a few times before in the past. Carlton TV left there a few years ago and now it's used by the University of Nottingham, but there are still the remnants of the TV station there - including an enormous empty studio, with a massive lighting rig, plus a props store. It's actually quite a good place to be, kind of like being in school out-of-hours. Everybody can spread out and be comfortable. The only problem with the place is that mobile phone and walkie-talkie reception is terrible, so we had a couple of occasions tonight when we were waiting to go for a take but couldn't track down key members of the crew because they were out of reception range.

We also had a group of extras tonight, including a couple of people I know - Dena Smiles and Yvonne Varnier. It was good to see them, although I did apologise to Dena for scandalously underusing her.

We got on a bit quicker tonight, although as soon as we went outside to do the exteriors (involving extras and van driving (with a cameo role for Trnovski as the bus driver)) things slowed again. It's weird, it feels like we've got a load of people and quite a lot of equipment, but realistically, we're still working on quite a reduced crew and with a limited amount of resources and it's when you try and do things like tonight that you feel it - Jonathan had lost a big light so had to be quite creative about how he employed the other lights we had - the kind of thing that makes you have to rethink your blocking and staging just to accommodate the fact that you want your characters to at least be visible.

As it got towards dawn we still had one more scene to do - the opening of the film. I wanted to do a shot from outside, looking through a window down a very long corridor, with Lena turning to walk away. We set up the shot, with light quickly building outside, then waited. And waited. And waited. Because Olga wasn't there - she was down the other end of the extremely long corridor where the make-up room was, getting her hair redone for continuity's sake. But with the bad reception, it meant that nobody knew that. Cue lots of frustrated moans from people, as it was getting brighter by the second. Eventually, we got Olga back and managed to get the shot, and the scene, just in time for dawn.

And that was it. While everybody derigged, I went into the enormous empty studio and found a battered football that someone had left there and me and Toby (Elbie) had a kick about. While I did feel bad about not helping with the derig (typical director), it also felt great to expend some energy, runing about and lamping a ball across the studio. It's only when I get the chance to relax that I realise how tightly wound I've been over the past couple of weeks.

Of course, we're not finished yet - we move down to London on Monday to shoot the ending of the film in a field near Heathrow. That's if the weather holds, of course. If not, there might have to be a hasty rewrite involving all the characters finding shelter in an empty warehouse.

Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Fifteen

2007-04-30T10:17:00.001+01:00

Got in at about half six this morning after the first of our night shoots at the office location. It was weird going from days to nights – having a lie-in and then being able to relax a little bit during the day wasn’t necessarily a good thing – when we all arrived at the office it felt like it took longer than usual to get back into our stride, and before we knew it it was ‘lunchtime’ (11.30) and we’d only just finished the toilet scenes. The location was great though – finally having some space to spread out felt really good, but then maybe that – and the fact that we’re coming to the end of the shoot – gave the whole night a bit of a half-term feel.

I thought when we first arrived that I wasn’t going to be able to last through the night – I was so knackered today, and couldn’t lie in as long as I wanted to – but the more we went on, the more the adrenalin kicked back in, and by the time we had lunch, it felt more like a normal day again.

Then problems started to kick in – it started getting light in the windows behind the actors, making it really difficult to make it look like nighttime – the problem hampered by the fact that the camera – which had been playing up a bit all night – suddenly decided it didn’t want to work on the batteries, so we had to track down a mains power source, meaning that the last shot we did is going to require some grading in post to make it match.

By that time everybody was flagging anyway – I looked up to frame a shot at one point and saw Olga lying on the floor half-asleep – so we wrapped ten minutes early – then me, Jonathan and Andrew had a chat about the schedule for tomorrow – when we really need it to get darker quicker and lighter later, or, more realistically, to work a lot faster than we did tonight. Will force-feed everybody coffee when they arrive, maybe

Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Fourteen

2007-04-30T10:15:00.001+01:00

Second day in the cellar and a stupid amount of pages to get through again – basically due to trying to fit all of the scenes orginally scheduled for two days into a day and a half. We started with the biggest scene and got it pretty much done before lunch, but then had to go straight into blocking the next one. At which point, after 14 and a half days and 350 slates, my mind just went blank. I knew what was happening in the scene, but for about fifteen minutes I just couldn’t think about where to put the camera – like I’d burnt out that bit of my brain. Jonathan was suggesting things and I just couldn’t tell if they felt right. Then Lisa and Andrew and Caroline (script supervisor) all started to make suggestions as well and for a moment I really really wanted just to walk away for half an hour and get my head together. But the demands of the schedule mean that half an h our of doing nothing could cripple us for the rest of the day – we had to clear that location tonight – so I just decided on a first shot and thought – whether it was the best shot or not – it would at least get us going again. And once we got Olga, Ainsley and Toby in and started shooting, things seemed to resolve themselves and we managed to get everything done that we wanted to. But it did make me think that next time (when or if ever that might be), I’m going to try and ask for a little more time in the schedule. Because working like this again is just going to break my brain.

Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Thirteen

2007-04-25T19:54:00.001+01:00

We actually managed to finish early today - albeit only twenty minutes, although compared to the last few nights' rushing around it felt positively leisurely. This morning we had to pick up a couple of bathroom scenes which we'd had to postpone from ten days ago due to Olga's illness (and the concurrent loss of our original location). Because of the new location, it meant that my original plans for the scene had to go out of the window a bit and I had to try and reconfigure the same action with different elements. Hopefully it's all going to work. Because of the cramped space, I had to spend most of the morning standing in a shower cubicle to watch the monitor, although at one stage, just for a change, I got to straddle a toilet.

After lunch, we moved to our new location - the cellar. The art dept. have done a fantastic job (as usual) of making the space look as small and weird as it is in the script (the actual cellar is massive) and it was surprisingly easy and enjoyable to shoot in there - despite the dust which seems to permanently hang in the air. This afternoon's scene is one of my favourites in the script - we used it as an audition piece as well - Birdie's big teenage temper tantrum. It's one of the least horror-ful scenes in the film, but it's got some nice character stuff in it and Toby (Elbie) and Ainsley (Birdie) were both fantastic - as they both had been during casting. It was a good day, all in all - we've got another big one tomorrow in order to get us back on schedule after the lost day, so I'm really hoping we manage to get that all done.

Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Twelve

2007-04-24T21:05:00.001+01:00

Bit of a gruelling day today. Well maybe not gruelling (it's not like I was mining coal or gutting chickens or anything), just strangely hard-going. I don't know whether it's because we're into the third week and the tiredness is really starting to embed itself in me, or whether being in that house for so long has started to drive us all stir-crazy, or whether it was just having Christmas yesterday - whatever it was, I was finding it difficult to really keep going today. Again, because of the relentless, steaming, rivet-popping juggernaut that is our schedule, we had to pick up a whole set of (short) scenes which we missed yesterday, then move onto a bit of action which in the script is quite simple, but which by necessity I had to turn into a complex piece of action. (Basically, because of rushing things the other night, I got us into a situation where Lena had to have a chisel metamorphose into a knife in the space of a scene - which meant engineering some threeway hallway tussling between chisel-wielding Lena, knife-wielding Birdie and chisel stabee Mum.) Because of the complexity of the blocking (and none of us being experts in stunt coordination) the whole thing took longer than scheduled for and we had to carry it over until the end of lunch. For the second day in a row my lunch-'hour' then disappeared as we had to go and view the cellar location, which is being dressed in preparation for the next two days. As soon as we got back from there it was time to start again...

Not having the time to step away for half-an-hour really has an effect - it's like you don't get the opportunity to reset your brain - it just all rolls into one big mush of people saying things and doing things that you have to try and organise in something like a recognisable pattern. When it finally came to the day's biggest scene, I just felt knackered. Which is a shame, because it's one of my favourite bits - Dad's foot massage. The performances were great - luckily - so hopefully we've got a scene that works, but it didn't feel like I was firing on all cylinders.

By this point time was really getting tight - and we still had two - admittedly short - scenes to do. With only about 40 minutes left till wrap, we had to be really inventive and hone the blocking down so that we could still get all the action, but we could keep it to a minimum amount of shots.

So, we ended up doing two scenes in two shots - which must be some kind of record for economy in terms of the shoot as a whole. And actually, they both ended up working really well - thanks to some great lighting by Jonathan and terrific performances by Olga and Perry. Yeah, the whole thing is essentially a bit of a steal from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but then again I must have referenced that film in every interview I've done so far (and I had three more today, from Rotten Tomatoes, BBC Film Network and Film London, again eating up any spare moment I might have had (although I'm not allowed to moan about it as Lisa reminds me that we still need to sell the film (and they weren't actually too bad in the end))), so maybe it's only right that I nick a bit of it as well. I mean, everyone else does.

Mum and Dad Shoot - Day Eleven

2007-04-23T22:13:00.001+01:00

Christmas is supposed to be one of the most stressful times of year, so the prospect of spending the whole day trying to film Mum and Dad's Christmas (a nearly seven-page scene featuring the largest amount of cast - seven - and the biggest prosthetic effect we've got in the film) all in one day wasn't exactly enticing - especially when we also had set visits thrown into the mix. Today we had Sol from Film London who is our (very supportive) exec, plus our Unit Publicist and our Stills Photographer, plus a video documenter from Film London, plus a journalist from Empire and a journalist and photographer from the Times. Because it was raining it meant that we couldn't go outside (our usual lunch space) so every time I stepped off the set - a garish mix of blood and tinsel - I couldn't go more than two paces without bumping into someone. At one point I stepped off to catch my thoughts and try and figure out a bit of blocking and ended up bouncing like a pinball from one doorway to another (all occupied by journalists or photographers) until I ended up bouncing back onto set. So my mind got a bit fried. Calm as I was trying to be, the fact that we didn't turn over until midday (after being on set at eight) really put the pressure on for the afternoon and we had to work like dogs to get everything done in time.

One of the hardest things was not having the time or space to myself, even for a couple of minutes, that I usually get. Over lunch I agreed to sit down and be interviewed by the writer from The Times, who started off asking me about "torture porn" and how I felt about it. As much as I tried to distance myself from 'Grindhouse'/'Hostel' style gratuitous exploitation violence for the sake of violence, I'm not sure I managed to convince him that 'Mum and Dad' was going to be anything different - especially when it does feature a woman being tortured (albeit only really in one sequence). When the photographer took me upstairs and snapped me with a row of torture implements in front of my face I suddenly got the fear that I was going to be stitched up - potential headlines started running through my head - 'Inside the mind of a torture pornographer' or 'face of evil' or 'stop this sick bastard' - but we'll have to wait and see. People keep telling me that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but I'm not entirely sure that's the case. There are also points where I look at what we're filming and wonder - like many people who don't get horror - why on earth somebody wants to put stuff like this on the screen. That's the weird thing about filmmaking - especially when you're a writer/director - it's a little too revealing of the dark corners of your own mind.

Mum and Dad Shoot - Bonus: Views from inside the SFX bathroom

2007-04-22T19:18:00.000+01:00

Simon's table for creating stabbings and the like

Reference pictures of Mark Devenport (amongst other things) who is playing the ill-fated Van Man

I don't know what this is about