Red Kingdom Rising

Director: Navin Dev
Writer: Navin Dev
Producer: Navin Dev
Cast: Emily Stride, David Caron, Silvana Maimone
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: screener
Website: www.redkingdomrising.com

The two dominant strands of British horror cinema - gothic and social realism - collide in Navin Dev’s extraordinary, fascinating Red Kingdom Rising. Our protagonist is Mary Ann (Emily Stride: The Worst Witch), a young woman with a troubled past who has a work placement at a nursery school. It’s curious how many films start out at schools before launching into the main, largely unrelated plot, from horrors like Eden Lake to comedies like Meet the Parents. A teacher (or in this case, nursery assistant) is a solid, responsible position that will instantly mark out our main character as ‘good’ and someone whom we can trust. School-set openers relax the audience, reassuring us that all is well before things start escalating, whether in a horrific or crazy way.

In Red Kingdom Rising, Mary Ann returns to her childhood home for the first time since her father died. It’s an imposing Victorian villa, all dado rails and unexpected steps up and down, often tactfully shot from low angles that emphasise the high ceilings. But Mary Ann’s evangelical Christian mother (Silvana Maimone, who was in a 2008 alien abduction short) barely acknowledges her presence, pausing briefly in her prayers when her daughter knocks on the bedroom door before restarting without a word of greeting.

Her late father (David Caron) was a horologist, forever tinkering with clock mechanisms in his cellar workshop, and Mary Ann remembers the pair of them seeking sanctuary down there from her strident mother. Sometimes her father would read to her from the works of Lewis Carroll. This is a very Carrollian film.

Writer-director-producer Navin Dev has previously made shorts which drew on, and explored the psychological aspects of, the stories of Little Red Riding Hood (Red Hood) and Pinocchio (Tree Man). Here his source text is the Alice novels. The Red King is an important character in Through the Looking Glass but often ignored by cinematic adaptations because he sleeps through the whole book (and, to be fair, there are a lot of characters to get into 90 minutes). But key to that book is the question asked repeatedly in Dev’s film: is the Red King dreaming Mary Ann/Alice, or is she dreaming him?

A slightly splash panel prologue is one of Mary Ann’s nightmares about being restrained by, then disembowelled by, an oleaginous, red-robed figure with claw-like hands - the Red King. Once ensconced back home, she has flashback memories of good times and bad in what she recalls as a matriarchal household. Somewhere along the line these blend into a dreamlike series of encounters with Alice herself (12-year-old Etalia Turnbull, who was in The Inbetweeners Movie!) - whom we may assume to be a younger version of Mary Ann - wearing a yellow pinafore dress and a Cheshire Cat mask. (Kudos to Dev for going with the original yellow dress rather than the now traditional, frankly clichéed, blue.)

Three objects are crucial to the story: the yellow dress itself, discovered buried in nearby woodland; her father’s original copy of Through the Looking Glass (with its Tenniel illustration of the sleeping Red King); and, most importantly, a small door. The back garden sweeps down sharply from the house and this half-size wooden door, small enough for a child but requiring an adult to crouch, is the sort of fairy-tale accessory that sometimes exists in real life. It leads into the cellar but has obvious connotations of Alice’s size-changing encounters with doors. Furthermore one can instantly see how magical this miniature doorway - betwixt the cluttered clockmaker’s workshop of the cellar and the vast, flower-bedecked playground of the garden - would appear to a child. In this film, the small door acts as a portal between reality and the dreamworld, or between different dreams (a melting clock pendulum clues Mary Ann in at one point to the fact that she is still dreaming, or at least in the dream world).

Any Carrollian film which explores the deeper, psychological aspects of the tales rather than just the enjoyable nonsense, will be unavoidably Freudian, and Red Kingdom Rising is no exception. The explanation of Mary Ann’s nightmares is pretty obvious from the start but Dev not only handles the revelation sensitively, he also wisely avoids saving it up for a climactic reveal. He surely knows that his audience will have worked out what is going on, at least at a basic level, well in advance of Mary Ann herself. So he saves this for about two-thirds of the way through the surprisingly short (73 minutes) feature, then elaborates on the situation as the heroine struggles to free herself from whosever’s dream she’s in, seeking a similar release for the younger Mary Ann, the id-Alice who has been her teasing guide into her subconscious.

Though the story itself is gothic, the opening is social realist (the subtext could be either, depending on how you approach it) and Mary Ann’s Ripley-esque vest and jeans identify her throughout as an intrusion of practical, bitter reality into the dreamworld. Wendy Battersbee has a crucial, but underused, role in the prologue as Esther, Mary Ann’s social worker and she recurs briefly as a phone voice shortly after Mary Ann arrives at the house. I would have liked more of that, to be honest (there’s certainly scope for more running time!) because the potential was there for Esther, a guiding voice on the phone in the real world, to balance the younger-self/Alice dream guide. But that’s the film I would have written, this is the one Navin Dev made.

And it’s a hugely impressive feature debut, a visual poem reminiscent of the masters of dreamlike cinema. It’s Gilliam-esque (in a scary way, not a comic one), it’s, well, I suppose the adjective would be del Toroid. (Yes, I like that. I’ll use that again.) Full credit to production designer Anna Mould (who was art director on a short called Job Interview with a Vampire!), to ever-reliable special effects make-up designer Mike Peel (Zombie Diaries, Three’s a Shroud, The Zombie King) and to DP Jamie Havill, who between them create an amazing, immersive visual experience.

Any criticism must perforce be a quibble. A suggestion at one point that Mary Ann’s mother has twisted her Christianity into some form of Devil-worship is skipped over and unexplored. And, as mentioned, more could have been made of the social worker. That’s about all I can come up with.

Red Kingdom Rising is a fascinating film: narratively intriguing and visually amazing (pretty horrific in places too). This is the sort of movie that you come away from really glad that you’ve seen it because it has added something to your experience of the world.

MJS rating: A

Review originally posted 8th February 2012

interview: Kevin Howarth (2003)

My first interview with Kevin Howarth was this phoner, conducted in November 2003 for a Fangoria article.

• More Kevin Howarth interviews: 2004, 2006

I saw The Last Horror Movie in Manchester where it won an award.
"Yes, I heard. I was away at the time. I heard all the news and Julian phoned me and said, ‘We’ve just had this screening up in Manchester.’ Because we’d had a couple before that seemed to go down very, very well. It is thrilling."

How did you get the role of Max?
"I just went up for it like any other actor. I had a phone call from my agent saying there’s this guy, Julian Richards, he’s done a couple of feature films before and he’s doing this horror film called The Last Horror Movie. The usual route: he gave me a time and I went up to Julian’s flat to meet him. I have to say, you get so used to sometimes traipsing across to some part of London and meeting some director and thinking, ‘Oh, here we go...’ It’s just got ‘low budget’ written all over it and it’s the first thing you think of. But I have to say, the minute I walked in there it was just Julian and myself and we sat in the room and he told me all about the film. Then we actually got to talking before he did any filming of me or anything.

"We just chatted about films we liked, directors we liked, the sort of things that we liked, and I could see that he knew what he was talking about, and I think he could see that I knew what I was talking about. We actually got a little bit carried away: ‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘I’d better film you. Can you do these bits and bobs?’ I’d had some of the script faxed to me and that was the thing that really made me interested in going to meet him. The piece that I had sent to me was really good, the writing was excellent."

Was this a monologue?
"Most of the film is like that so it’s difficult to say whether it was one of the monologues itself. I think in actual fact it was the scene right at the beginning of the film where I go into the lift and I’m explaining where I did my first killing right at the top of that tower block. I think it was that piece, if I remember rightly, that I was doing, and then he asked me to do a little bit of one of the monologues to camera. And that was it. We shook hands and Julian said, ‘Great meeting you.' But we’d got so carried away with each other, just chatting like a couple of mates in a bar, that I knew I got on well with him and he got on well with me. Then I heard, later on, that literally within 24 hours he’d called James the writer, he’d called the producer and a number of other people and said, ‘You’ve got to come and see this screen test that I’ve just seen because I think I’ve found my Max.’"


However good you are in person, it’s how you come across on camera that’s crucial.
"Absolutely, that is everything. We’re in the business of making films. I’m an actor, it’s my arse up there on the screen whenever I do a role in any movie. You get hired because of the qualities that you bring that make the role that you’re up for come to life. You can meet lots of people in life, but it’s like I’ve always said, so much of the film industry - especially in Hollywood - is all based around what people look like: are they good-looking? When in actual fact if you really look at most of the great actors and actresses in the world, none of them are gorgeous, none of them are those kind of people at all. Everybody’s got a little bit of something individual about them but it’s that one thing you can’t put a finger on, which is charisma or something. People never seem to be able to say what it is, they just know there’s something that makes you want to watch them.

"I think that is the key to film-acting. Because it’s so immediate. It’s not like stage, it’s so immediate, it’s in your face. When you’re on a cinema screen your head is fifty feet high and thirty feet across so everything you do is being noticed. But I’d done a lot of film work before and had got a lot of experience, and he also knew that. I was also the only one, he told me, that left a showreel. I took a showreel with me as well. He watched my performance that I’d done for him on camera, which he was thrilled with, then he put my tape on and he said that was the final convincing moment. Because there was such a diverse range of characters that I’d played on my showreel and he could see the intensity and all the other things that were there.

"I’m very prepared when I go to audition for a role and I’ve got a very close idea to what they’re about. Because I love language and because I love words, to have a narrative piece like that, which is what Max is all about. If you think about it, that is a lot of dialogue in a movie. It’s very unusual to have that much to say in a film these days. You know what it’s like: in most films there is very little dialogue and that’s because it is a very visual artform. In this film particularly, it was a very narrative piece and a lot of it to camera which is breaking all the rules of film-making because you’re looking right down the lens and you’re having to engage the audience. So there were big elements in this film which were against the grain of normal film-making."


Long, unbroken takes direct to camera must be very different from what you’re used to.
"Yes, but that’s the wonderful thing about making a movie like The Last Horror Movie - you know that it’s unique before you even start. You know that the script is unique and you know that the format it’s going to be filmed in is unique so what you do is you think: this is great because this throws all the books in the air again and we’re playing with some other kind of way of doing it. And I love that. I love directors and writers and people working on film like that who are willing to go out on a limb and try something new. And that’s what Julian is about. His whole ethos is about creating something a little bit different, a little bit on the edge. He’d had this idea for a while and I’m so thankful that I got the role and together we all brought it to fruition. Everybody was fantastic. I actually had some of the best times ever on a film on that film. It was great fun, even though it was very intense and we had a short filming period. It was just brilliant, we had an absolutely brilliant time. Everybody’s passion was there, everybody was involved. There were no weak links. We all worked very hard to get that right and I think we did a really good job."

Did Julian show you either of his other films?
"No, to be honest with you, when I work with a director, in some ways I’d rather not see anything that they’ve done. Sometimes I do if I’m a but curious but there are other times when I just think: you’ve got to give people the benefit of the doubt. It’s a new project and whatever they’ve done before is just their work. Everybody learns as they go along. It’s a process of learning; there’s a learning curve that you go through. And from every movie, whether you’re an actor or a director, you learn something new. You take that knowledge into the next project and into the next project and into the next one. I just felt that I didn’t really need to.


"What Julian did say to me was: ‘Have you seen Man Bites Dog? Have you seen The Blair Witch Project?’ and I was going, ‘Well, actually, no. I’ve never seen either of those.’ It wasn’t because I wasn’t aware of them - I was very aware of both of those films of course - but again, I just thought no, I don’t need to see them and I don’t want to see them. Because I think actors who go off and do that start getting influenced by other films and that’s not the way to do it. The Last Horror Movie is a unique project in its own right; we ought to go from scratch and just do it. I’m not one for copying other actors or anything like that. I was very aware of what Max was all about.

"Actually the one person I worked very, very closely with on it was the writer, James Handel. Because I also felt that there was a lot of him in there really. It was his words and his writing. He is a philosopher and you could see where some of this eloquent dialogue was coming from,. But what I also did was I watched him very acutely and I changed my own speaking patterns into the way he spoke. I wanted to get that into Max. There was a certain pattern, there was a kind of rhythm to his speech and the way he delivered his words. I wanted to get that and I also wanted to make sure we got the great balance between the humour and that very chilling stuff that Max does, those horrible, horrible murders. I really wanted to strike the balance there really well because otherwise what you end up with if you’re not careful is a film that’s either too, too grim and there’s no lightenment in it at all, or it’s too funny and it’s not shocking enough. I think in the end what I did and then what Julian and Klaus and Mark and people like that, editing it and putting the film together, did was really strike that right balance.

"I think it was really put together well, I was really surprised. Actually we had a first-run edit, a really rough edit, at one point and I was really, ‘Oh my God!’ It was very short and Julian had cut a lot out; he was just trying to make it pacy. It was just a trial effort - nobody was saying ‘This is the final product.’ It was Julian just testing the waters, just to see what he’d got, for his own mind as well as everyone else’s. But when I saw that I thought, ‘Oh, blimey. There’s not a lot of Max left there now. There has to be more of Max there.’ We talked about it and we discussed it, and James sat down; we all got together and we conflabbed it out and had lots of chats about it all, what we thought and what we didn't think. There was a longer version as well. We weighed the two versions up, then Julian just went off with Klaus with all those comments ringing in his ears and - well, he came up with the goods. Just extraordinary. But it’s all down to him, the way the film looked at the end, it really was. He did a great job on it."

I understand you went to Cannes with Julian.
"We had a ball! I actually had three movies over there. I had another feature film that was there called Don’t Look Back!, that a guy called Nick Sherard directed, but that wasn’t doing very well because he was having problems with the sales agent and it was all getting a bit awkward, that one. I had a short film that was shown there as well, called Whacked, directed by Jake West. I’ve worked with Jake twice because I was in Razor Blade Smile and I did this film Whacked with him as well, so I know Jake very well. And then we were down there with The Last Horror Movie. Simply because Julian had come up with this really clever marketing idea.

"Instead of putting some generic film poster together and putting that all over the place, he flyposted the whole of Cannes, all down the Croisette and round the back streets and everything, with these murder posters. Like a genuine copy of a murder poster with my picture on it, saying I’m wanted for murder! My car had been found at Luton Airport and I was believed to be on the Cote d’Azure. When I got there he started to get phone calls saying that people had seen me in the Majestic bar and in the Carlton and wandering around the place. His girlfriend Rosanna was getting really pissed off because it was her phone number that he’d put on the posters! It was absolutely hilarious. We couldn’t believe the response."

Did anyone actually approach you?
"No-one approached me, but Julian called me immediately, as soon as I arrived at the bus station after the flight, and said we’ve got this meeting tomorrow morning with Hollywood Reporter magazine, the daily paper that comes out every day over there. The woman who is the editor of that saw these posters and picked up on this, and thought: ‘My God, this is a really great marketing ploy.’ She just loved that, so the next morning Julian and I went and did this interview and a little photo-shoot thing with them. The next day, there I am on the back-page of this magazine and this whole article about what a brilliant marketing campaign it was. Of course, that really struck a chord with everybody.

"So the first screening that we had in the Palais was absolutely packed out. Julian was turning people away. Then the next screening we had was absolutely packed out and we ended up turning 20th Century Fox and Miramax away because they turned up late! There was this old French woman on the door going, ‘Non, non, you cannot come in!’ They were getting pissed off and saying, ‘What do you mean it’s full? We’re Miramax.’ And Julian and I were just laughing in the corner, thinking this is getting out of hand, this is ridiculous. It was great for us.


"It got so much of a good response that we had Bill Gavin put an advert in the same paper saying that there’s going to be a third screening. They did a third screening in the British Pavilion and that was packed out as well. That was more a token screening but it went down really well and that was interesting because it was a more regular audience watching it rather than buyers. Because buyers are very funny. They walk in and watch a film for 15 or 20 minutes: ‘Okay, fine, that’s the sort of movie we want,’ or, ‘That’s not what we want.’ And they walk out. It’s weird. It’s crazy. But we had a real ball down there.

"Then Julian got a phone call one night when we were sitting in a restaurant from Matthew Freud of Freud Communications. There he was on his yacht, and he’s a marketing guy, so he said, ‘I’ve been seeing all this marketing thing. Absolutely fantastic! We love it! Is this for real? Is this guy really wanted? Come on down!’ And we all went down to his yacht and had a knees- up on his yacht. So we had a really good time and I think that really kicked it off. And then with Alan Jones and people from Frightfest and they got the buzz about it. It just went from strength to strength. I think a lot of it came down to Julian’s persistence and his hard work, and just me being around Julian when it was necessary helped as well I think.

"And then Bill Gavin of course who is just one of the best sales agents in the business without a doubt. Absolutely superb. He’s an older guy, he’s got 45 years in the business, knows exactly what he’s doing. He really went for it and he really knows how to deal with these people. So it just picked up such great interest there and it just went from strength to strength. What can I say? It has started to get picked up for all these other festivals. And the reviews. I’m sitting here because I’ve just printed off this press package that Julian’s put together. We haven’t had one bad review, it’s unbelievable. I’m thrilled and flattered and everything, but you just think: ‘Woh!’"


I think it’s going to be the indie hit of next year.
"I think it’s heading that way. I’ve got a strange feeling that if it’s handled in the right way by Metro Tartan and they really give it a big push, I think yes, it could turn out to be something really extraordinary. It could end up going through the roof. The only thing that seems to crop up now and again is you do get people going, ‘Hang on, it’s meant to be a video.’ But in all honesty, when you sit there in the cinema and you watch it, you forget all that. I think people look at it and just take it for what it is. If people just do that and take it for a film, and just get into it, I think that it really doesn’t make any difference. I sat there at Frightfest and I watched 460 people go absolutely ballistic about it. Now, if you can do that in one cinema, you can do it in any cinema."

I just was glad I didn’t rent it on video.
"I had a joke with Julian: maybe we could make some real money out of this on the side. We could set up parties for city boys because they’d want to frighten their girlfriends and then we turn up at the end! So we had a real laugh about that. We really have had some fun. But I was there at Frightfest and I saw the response, it was an extraordinary response. And I was there at Raindance and well, look, we won Best UK Feature Film. We couldn’t believe it! We just started thinking: this is really cooking."

It’s one thing to get awards at genre festivals, but Raindance is a mainstream festival.
"What was interesting about that is I went along to the awards: ‘You must be there, Kevin.’ I was so tired and I was almost falling asleep. I was so glad that they had the awards before the feature film that was going to be shown. I knew that we were in the running with three other movies for the Best UK Feature and I knew that we were possibly also up for the Audience Award. I think that was the one that we thought: well, maybe we’ll win that one. We really didn’t think that we’d win Best UK Feature simply because of the genre of the movie and the way it is. When we looked at the panel of judges that were judging the Best UK Feature at Raindance, you’d got Stephen Woolley, you’d got the Guardian’s film reviewer, Sadie Frost and Samantha Morton, Trudie Styler who’s a producer, the guy who wrote the script for East is East.


"I looked at these people and I thought: none of these people are going to go for this film, it’s just not their kind of thing. So then when we won it, I just looked down the row at Julian and at James the writer and we just looked at each other and thought, ‘Fucking hell! This is now turning into something that we really didn’t expect to happen at all...’ It was funny because Julian went up to get the award off Sadie Frost, and apparently she said to him, ‘Really great film but you scared the shit out of me.’ It’s got to the point where we just think: well, anything can happen now. There are no guidelines anymore, you can’t delegate for how any of this is going to go. Initially you think: okay, it’s a low budget feature. You just have to think that somewhere along the line it’s going to work.

"But I’ll tell you what, when I was working on it, there was one particular night. You know the monologues that I do to camera when I’m sitting in the room, I did all of those monologues in one night. That’s the way I work. If I get a script I get it so under my belt that I even know everybody else’s lines. Even more so on The Last Horror Movie, simply because I had to make sure as an actor that the words were coming out of my mouth as if they were just coming out of my mouth. I’m not trying to be egotistical here but there are a lot of actors that would probably have got that wrong, and they would have just fed it scripted. And the whole point of that is that it’s really happening there and then, and you have to believe that this guy is just talking to you, there and then. It’s just coming out of his mouth and he’s making it up as he goes along. I wanted to make sure that was a big, key element so knowing the lines and everything was crucial to the whole thing. And all the car monologues, even though they were at different points in the film, I did all of them in one night as well. So we worked very hard on it and we wanted to get it absolutely right.

"One night, when we were doing the monologues, it was about half past three in the morning and we were still working away and the First AD came in, this Australian girl, and she said, ‘Okay guys, we’ve got to go soon. We’ve got to get out of here. It’s getting a little late, Julian. Are you going to carry on going with this?’ And we all just totally ignored her! She realised that we were in this kind of zone and she just walked out of the room and left us to it. In the room were me, Julian, Chris St.John Smith who’s an absolutely brilliant cameraman. You have to give him a mention because he’s not just brilliant at what he does but such a lovely man. So calm, so generous, so ready to alter things if necessary in a really lovely way. We were all in this room, and the sound guys, and we just thought: let’s carry on with this, we’re just doing it and we’re in this zone and we’ve got to get this. Everybody has the same passion about it as I did. There was no one weak link, you didn’t have some sound guy whistling and scratching his arse. Everybody was really focused and really involved. And I can’t thank all of them enough. They were absolutely brilliant, everybody was brilliant on it."

What’s this you’re doing in Cornwall right now?
"I’m shooting Cold and Dark with Luke Goss, who I believe you know. I’m seeing him tomorrow; we’ve got a scene on Perranporth beach. I’m playing the co-lead with him. He’s playing an undercover cop and I’m playing an undercover cop but I’m playing his boss. I’m playing this character called Mortimer Shade and he plays this character called John Dark. But my character, Mortimer Shade, is really, really mysterious. He’s this guy that all the other cops look up to, almost in awe. He’s not married, he doesn’t have any children, and he has this extraordinary wardrobe. He loves clothes and there’s all these scenes in this tailor’s shop. He’s just got this extraordinary outward appearance with all these clothes and everything - and yet at the same time he’s this really cool vice cop.

"Am I allowed to give the story away? He ends up with this kind of virus inside him called The Grail and of course all hell breaks loose. He becomes then a cop who can’t die. And Luke is this guy who’s trying to come to terms with this: ‘How do I deal with this? He’s my boss and I go along with him and I understand his theories and what he’s thinking and all the rest of it - but what do I do about this? He’s taking me into territory where I don’t want to go.’ In the end, his character betrays me and then I come after him. It’s looking fantastic. Andrew Goth is the director. He did a film called Busted, I believe, with David Bowie and Goldie. He’s absolutely fabulous because he’s one of these directors who, visually, knows exactly what he wants. He’s a great fan of Sergio Leone and David Fincher and he wants to shoot this movie almost like a sort of spaghetti western look about it. Big close-ups on eyes, and stuff like that.

"It’s got a decent budget, there’s a lot of people behind this one and it looks like this one’s going to go big time as well. They’ve made pre-sales already and we’re only a week into filming. And of course because Luke’s in it and he was in Blade II and Frankenstein and what have you, New Line Cinema are tracking the movie, keeping an eye on it. Luke is cooking at the moment. But it’s a great role to get, this Mortimer Shade, a totally different role from Max, a different kind of darkness about him, and this is very filmic: big 35mm stuff and looking beautiful."


What do you you think of Julian as a director?
"The thing about Julian is that I know he’s a director but he’s become now such a close friend that you don’t really divide the two sometimes. What I do love about Julian is he knows what he wants, and he knows what he wants visually as well, but he’s a wonderful actor’s director. From my personal experience with Julian, as an actor, he appreciates and understands my creativity and my input. He knows that I know what I’m doing and he allows me to do what I do. It’s just little things that he needs to tell me and I love that. Because I’m one of these actors who doesn’t like to be directed too much; I like to comes up with the goods and I like directors who allow me to give them anything they want. I can play around and give them lots of different versions of whatever they want, and I can come up with that without them having to tell me too much. The most I want a director to tell me is: faster, slower, louder, softer. That’s about all I want to know.

"Because I’ve done my homework as an actor when I turn up. I’m ready and I’m ready to go when they shout, as simple as that. That’s my job and that’s what I get paid for, and I’m ready to do it. What I love about Julian is he knows that about me now. I’d love to do another movie with Julian and I think he’s got things in mind to do with me again, which would be great, and some of them, funnily enough, aren’t horror films. He’s actually got a script of a sort of darkly romantic comedy; he wants me to play the lead in that and I’d love to because I’m an actor and I want to play different things. I don’t want to get tied into some sort of horror genre thing.

"One thing I will say, one last final thing about The Last Horror Movie: I realise Fangoria have jumped on it and I realise that’s a great banner to go under, but I do believe that this film is a crossover movie that mainstream movie-goers would love to go and see. I don’t think it’s just a film that horror people will want to go and see. I think it will cross genres and you’ll get all sorts of people going to see it. That’s what I really hope happens because then it will go to a much, much wider audience and that can only do the film good. At the end of the day, we make movies in the movie industry, we don’t make movies for two men in a barn with a dog. You make a movie because you want millions of people to see it. I just hope that this really crosses over and you start to get different kinds of people, a different audience, watching it, a mix of audiences watching this movie."

website: www.kevinhowarth.com

interview: Daljinder Singh

In April 2014, after I had reviewed The Library, the film's writer-director Daljinder Singh kindly answered a few questions by email.


What was the inspiration for The Library?
"Years ago before I went to university I had a summer job in a local library. It was very quiet most of the time and you were often left to your own devices. Libraries are naturally quiet places so when you're on your own it's easy for your mind to play tricks. You think you've seen something when really it's nothing. Or you hear 'strange noises' when it's probably nothing more than noisy old drain pipes. Your imagination runs wild and you start believing it's something more sinister! You have to go down lots of stairs into basement storage sections alone, you start to get a sense of isolation and tension. It's more or less psychological and I wanted to play with this aspect in The Library.

"As a child I remember hearing that the older kids in the area would go to the village library, take out a book on black magic and play the Ouija board at the back! Of course with time these rumours would take on a life of their own and started to involve the poor librarians who worked there. The rumour or local urban legend aspect was quite interesting - and I wanted to incorporate that into the narrative. Isolation combined with imagination and rumour can be quite dangerous.

"I love books and have always been a huge fan of libraries. For some reason any ideas I had for my first film always took place in a library. Because they're seen as being passive places, you can come up with interesting things to happen inside them. I always thought a library would be a great place for a ghost story. I started to think of the kind of library it would be - typical quiet small town library that has a bad reputation. The kind of people that would work there and a basic plot premise. The story started to come together quite quickly after that."


What is your background/experience in film-making?
"My background is mainly in theatre. My work had largely been visual and I was always more comfortable with visual forms of story telling. I had wanted to move into film-making for a while and then finally the opportunity arose. The Library is my first feature film. I managed to partner up with a number of local organisations so that I could get in-kind support for a limited period of time. Everything came together surprisingly fast and within a few short months, we were ready to roll."

How did you assemble you cast and crew?
"I had known Sibylle Bernardin (Lucy) before and had previously directed her in a theatre show. She believed in the project and took on the challenge of playing the main character. I needed a strong actor in the role of Lucy as she is seen in almost every scene. It's very challenging in that sense and I knew Sibylle would bring a sympathetic and intelligent edge to it. Leann O'Kasi who plays the deceased character of Claire is an experienced actor and director herself. She also happens to be a close friend of mine. Like Sibylle she liked the project and wanted to be involved. Kathryn Walker is also someone I had known before through theatre. I had originally wanted an older actress to play the role of Mary, but Kathryn was able to bring out the ambiguous and sinister edge to the character which was needed.


"I wanted to make sure that we involved local talent as well. This can be difficult sometimes but I was lucky. The local council, newspaper and other organisations helped us by putting out the cast call. Auditions were held over a number of days and I managed to find some real gems in Jay Martin, Aimee McKee, Stephen Bellamy and Faridah Rimmer. Bradley Carpenter (Gregory) had come along at the last minute on the final day. His audition was fantastic and I was taken aback when he told me he was still in sixth form. I was very lucky to find the cast I did. The film has a small cluster of characters so it was important that each person fitted the character and was able to establish a good chemistry with their co actors. We had some additions to the cast during the shooting schedule. Louella Chesterman came in as Mrs Clusker at the last moment when our original actress had to back out. Madisson O'hara who plays the little girl was the young daughter of our Make Up artist. Her mother put her forward for the role and she was perfect.

"The crew was made up of a number of individuals from the area. We had recent graduates such as Matthew Thomas and Jessica Reed as well as others who had experience and wanted to be involved. As was the case with the casting, crew calls were put out and I managed to get the technical team together. After the filming was over the same method was employed for the post production team too. I was lucky that I managed to come across some fantastic young and committed talent such as Adam Clayton and Samuel Allen. Vista Films agreed to come on board and take on the mammoth task of sound and other post production elements. The crew worked exceptionally hard and as was the case with the casting, the right people took up roles that they were able to do justice too.

"The Library is not just my first feature film but also the first feature of the majority of the cast and crew too. It would be an understatement to say that we were all swimming in the deep end."

What aspect of the finished film are you most pleased with?
"As a director it would be very difficult to pinpoint just one thing. I think the performances are very strong. The sound and overall framing of the story is also solid. On a whole the film had no budget whatsoever, everything was done with in-kind support alone. With that in mind the film in itself is quite an achievement. I wanted to tell a simple story in a simple but compelling way and I think that's been achieved."

What has the response to the film been like so far?
"People who have watched the film have liked it. I think it has a traditional horror streak running through it which people have found refreshing. Word of mouth will be very important and we hope the film will go on to find it's audience."

What are your plans for the future?
"I hope to continue making more films. I'm noting down ideas at the moment. Hopefully a strong idea will bubble to the surface and become my second feature."

interview: Julian Richards (1997)

This was the first of several interviews that I did with Julian Richards, on this occasion for the theatrical release of Darklands in 1997. Little did either of us know then that this film was to become one of the three cornerstones on which the 21st century British Horror Revival would be founded (along with Andrew Parkinson's I, Zombie and Urban Ghost Story from Genevieve Bujold and Chris Jones). A small extract from this was published at the time in SFX.

• More Julian Richards interviews: 2003, April 2006, August 2006, 2014

Darklands has been in development for seven years. What was the crucial thing that made it happen now?
"It was really a combination of things, I suppose. Essentially, the Lottery came about. It was the first time that funding came available in Wales through the Lottery for production finance. So when you get a producer like Paul Brooks who has his own private sources of investment, he makes low-budget films and he seeks to make a budget through pursuing 'soft money'. Soft money is anything from an Arts Council grant to a tax break. So he would be looking at tax breaks in Canada through Telecom Canada or Section 35 in Ireland. He'd been looking at subsidies in Germany, but when the Lottery came about, suddenly he could go for a purely British-financed project. Plus by playing the Welsh card, we were a bigger fish in a smaller pond. It was far less competition. In fact, when we applied for the Lottery I think we were the only application at that time for a production in Wales. So it just so happened that Paul put in £250,000, the Lottery put in £250,000, and that's how we got to make the film.

"I'd spent six or seven years in a vacuum beforehand, talking to people who could talk the talk but they couldn't deliver the money in the end. They had their hands tied because it was money from television or from the BFI or from British Screen. They have a certain agenda, certain criteria, and Darklands didn't really fit. I suppose the other thing that attracted Paul to the project was that Craig Fairbrass wanted to do the film. He wanted to do it because it provided an opportunity for him to prove that he is more than an action man, that he can act and that he can show a more vulnerable side to himself. To put himself forward as a Harrison Ford as opposed to a Schwarzenegger. So that's what his angle was. He had a three-picture deal with Paul. He'd already done Beyond Bedlam and Proteus, so he chose Darklands as the third project."

How much has the script changed over those seven years?
"I originally conceived the idea in my final year at Bournemouth Film School, probably '88/'89. It was the story of a guy who works in a one-hour photo-developing shop. I had a friend who worked in one of those shops and it was amazing some of the photographs that would come through. He had his own private collection stashed away at the back of some of the more extreme photographs. I just thought of the idea, almost like Antonioni's blow-up, that this guy comes across a load of photographs which maybe depict some kind of murder or a religious sacrifice or something. He dupes the photographs and he starts investigating what's going on and what's behind them.


"There was a girl in the photographs and he recognises her as somebody who walks past the photograph shop every day. He gets involved with her and she leads him into the cult.. That's how it started off, but I eventually changed it to a newspaper reporter. It was only about two or three drafts in that I began to realise the potential that the story had for dealing with some of the issues that it deals with in the subtext. Being a film set in Wales, to do with the cultural issues, social issues and political issues. So I changed it to a newspaper reporter because I figured it would be more useful."

Was there a chance of the story slipping into the supernatural and actually raising a demon or something?
"Aha! Well, there was a thought of doing that. I know Paul at one stage did suggest bringing in something that suggested that what these guys believed in actually existed. But I wanted to avoid that because I don't believe in all that stuff myself. I believe it exists in people's minds. What interests me about a religious cult is not that they can invoke demons but that they believe that they can. I think that was more interesting. It's more psychological than fantastic."

Tell me about your early short films that won various awards.
"When I started film-making I was 13. My father had a super-8 camera and he used to film holiday footage of us. I watched the whole process of the super-8 films coming back from Kodak in the post and him projecting them and then editing them. Because I was a big film buff at the time, I thought, 'I've got everything that I need here to make my own film'. So I got my school friends together and on weekends we shot my first film. It was called The Curse of Cormack. I'd never written a screenplay before, so what I did was: I used to collect House of Hammer magazine and there was a comic story in that called The Curse of Cormack, so I basically made that."

Was that one of Van Helsing's Terror Tales?
"Yes it was! So it took me three years to make that. From then on I probably made a horror film in super-8 every year, until I was about 18 and it was time to apply for film school."


They were all horror films?
"They were all horror films. Evil Inspirations, The Girl Who Cried Wolf: they were all horror films! Then I went to Bournemouth Film School. I found film school wasn't horror-friendly. In fact, to quote the head of Bournemouth Film School: he said (a) he hates students, and (b) nobody in the film school is going to make a horror film or a film with a car chase. The emphasis was on other things. Film school is an incredibly competitive place and not everybody gets to direct their film, so you have to play the game a little bit in order to get your film made there. I had another tutor there, Derek Warbank, who said, 'Well, I can see what your influences are, but they're all about other films. How about yourself? Who are you? What have you got that's unique to say?' I decided to take him up on that and I thought what I need to do is put the camera a bit on myself and my own experiences.

"I suppose at that time my only experience in life, predominantly, was school. I made a film called Pirates that was about three stereotypical characters that I'd come across during school: a body-builder 'jock' kind of character; a punk, rebel kind of character; and a college boy, A-stream character. In their summer holidays, they all get a job in a DIY warehouse. They're being exploited by their boss for cheap labour. They're all very different to each other, there's a lot of acrimony, but they find a common enemy to unite against, which is this boss that's exploiting them for cheap labour. He's involved with the import and export of pirate videos. They uncover that and decide to sell the videos themselves, in order to make up for the lack of money that they're earning. It's a kind of action-comedy-drama, but essentially focusing on three characters.

"For the first time I was dealing with human issues in a film as opposed to just pyrotechnics. I was dealing with what Derek Warbank at Bournemouth Film School called 'cinema of the heart'. The film was quite successful - it won the Celtic Film Festival - but it was kind of comic-book still though. It still wasn't in the social realist tradition that I think I was heading at that time. I began to discover Ken Loach; films like Kes which is one of my favourite films. And Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Mean Streets. I began also to discover the French New Wave. It's funny that everybody discovers the American New Wave before they discover the French New Wave when it worked the other way round. And some brilliant Italian films, Vittorio de Sica's films: Bicycle Thieves, A Miracle in Milan.

"All that stuff broadened my horizons. So my next film, Queen's Sacrifice, was even more autobiographical. It was still kind of a comedy. It was the story of a young chess player from the Rhonda valley, who is taken up by his history teacher, who was a chess player in his heyday but never quite made it to win the British Chess Championships. But he believes that he can achieve his ambition now through his young protege.. It's a mentor/protege story. He takes his young charge to Bournemouth for the British Chess Championships, but the kid's about 14 and he's just discovering girls. He falls in love with this girl and he's more interested in her than winning the competition. So it becomes almost this dramatic and comic conflict between the traumas of first love and bringing the trophy back to the moribund coal-mining town which he comes from.


"I used to play chess and chess was a big turning point in my life. At school, to begin with, I was quite slow, I was almost remedial. I was quite good at art and painting, I used to get a lot of attention for that, but in terms of maths and English I was way behind. But I was a good chess player, and I ended up winning the Newport Chess Championships and the Welsh Chess Championships, and I played in the British Chess Championships. I played Nigel Short and lost! But it was a turning point for me because suddenly I was doing something considered to be academic, and shining at it. That gave me the confidence to turn my schooldays around into something a bit more positive than they at that time were. So I wanted to make a film about that, and I also wanted to make a film about the conflict of choosing between a love interest and your career, which also interested me strongly at that time. So that's Queen's Sacrifice and that won the British Short Film Festival.

"When I went to the National Film School, I made the last in that trilogy. It was called Bad Company. Again, it's a portrait of my home town, Newport in South Wales. It's about a guy who at school was very good at art but not that academic. He didn't have much parental support and rather than continue in education after school, he left early and got married early. Basically he's frustrated and getting sucked into a life of crime through his association with a couple of dodgy characters. He ends up beating his wife and he's never recovered from the experience of that marriage breaking down. Until he meets an old friend from school; a girl who is now in art college. She rekindles his talent for art and pushes him in the right direction. At the same time, his flatmate is pushing him towards robbing the DIY store that he works in. There's a final denouement at the end where he decides to leave crime behind and apply to art school, and he gets in. Essentially, I was wanting to say with that film that education is a way out for somebody trapped within a small town existence."

Then Darklands?
"And then Darklands, because I always knew that I would come back to the genre. It was the genre that got me into film-making and I suppose I had a long-term plan. And the long-term plan was: I knew that most of the horror films I'd seen were weak in characterisation and plot. I wanted to go on a big learning curve, then bring all I'd learnt back to the genre and uplift it."

Is Darklands a melding between the earlier horror stuff and the later realistic stuff?
"Very much so, yes."

What about your script for Celtic Warriors?
"Celtic Warriors was how I met Craig Fairbrass, because originally I didn't go to him with Darklands, I went to him with another script. What happened was that I'd given up on Darklands, I'd put it in the bottom drawer, because it was quite an ambitious project: lots of locations, lots of characters. I needed about 1.5 million to make it. So I thought, 'What I need to do is write something that can be done cheaply - maybe for about 200,000 - and do it the same way that they did Leon the Pig Farmer: get tax incentives and money and just do it.


"One of my favourite genres is the siege film: Assault on Precinct 13, Zulu, The Thing. I just love characters that are caught in a claustrophobic location and they're being attacked by something from the outside: Night of the Living Dead, Maniac. So I came up with a little twist on that. It's set on an island off the west coast of Ireland, and this island is famous historically because it was the last stand of the Celts against the Romans, where a famous Irish warlord was killed. There was also a massacre of the Druids there by the Romans. During the First and Second World Wars, the island was used as a place for experimenting with biological weapons. And there's a crop of magic mushrooms that grow on the island, the fly agaric mushrooms that the Celtic warriors used to take before going into battle so that they would become berserkers.

"So the whole thing was based around that. What we have is an illegal archaeological dig on the island, and we also have drug manufacturers on the island who are using the mushrooms to create a new smart drug. A SWAT team is sent in to arrest the drug dealers. Meanwhile, the archaeological dig unleashes the curse of the warlord, the wrath of warlord, which basically means you get reincarnated Celtic warriors; berserkers covered in tattoos who go on the rampage. Eventually the SWAT team, the drug manufacturers and he archaeologists find themselves in the derelict farmhouse that the guys are using to manufacture the drugs in, being attacked by a reincarnated Celtic warrior army. It's kind of like Assault on Precinct 13 meets The Evil Dead. So maybe I'll still make that somewhere along the line.

"When Craig read it, he liked some of the themes I was dealing with, but he said, 'It's too horror, it's too B-movie. But there's themes in here that could be a lot bigger, and Paul's looking for a $20 million/$30 million action movie. Maybe you could set it in LA and maybe you could make it more like Highlander.' I took it to Paul and Paul said, 'Yes, I'm looking to make something like Highlander. I like some of the Celtic themes that you're dealing with. Is there anything you can do to provide me with something as a big action vehicle for Craig in LA?' So I though,t 'What are my two favourite films in that genre? It's got to be Terminator and Highlander.' So I thought I'd combine the two and came up with Warlord, which I'm writing now for Metrodome.

"That's about reincarnation and time travel. It's about a Celtic prince and a Viking princess who want to marry, but when they try and marry the wedding is interrupted by the king, the princess' father, who is against the marriage. He challenges the prince to a duel and kills him. The princess decides to enlist the support of a wizard to create a poison that she can drink with her dying fiancee, whereby they both die but they're reincarnated 2,000 years later. So the story's told from the point of view of this young couple in LA who don't realise what their heritage is, what their past is. They only realise it when a Viking warrior appears in downtown Los Angeles with a quest to prevent them from getting married the second time."


What were your feeling about teaming up with Metrodome, given their record of Proteus and so on? Any worries that you might end up with another rubber monster?
"Not really. Paul, I found, was useful in many ways because he was very realistic as a producer. He knows what the problem is with the industry here, especially as far as making low-budget, independent genre films goes. And he just says, 'Well look, get on with it.' Sometimes you'll go into a situation where you know you're not ready, but the thing is that you never will be ready. You have to make compromises and you have to learn to make compromises work, and that's one thing I learned from Paul. You've just got to get the job done. At the same time, he would come along with some quite creative contributions to the movies, too. Some ideas he came up with were really terrible and I'd tell him so and he'd say fine. He wasn't dictatorial in any way; it was very much a creative and collaborative process.

"I'd heard things about Paul, I'd heard things about Metrodome, but in the end I have to say: for me it was a very good experience. Apart from the fact that sometimes we had to compromise too much. because they didn't have that much money, we didn't have that much money to make the film. So things like: we needed to do some pick-ups at the end of the film, and Paul didn't have the money to fund it, so I had to fund it myself. But I was determined to make the best film that I possibly could. It wasn't a jobbing film for me. I know, for instance, with Beyond Bedlam, Vadim Jean was brought on four weeks before they started shooting. For him it was a jobbing film. The script was a mess; it didn't really tell its story well. Proteus: well, I suppose that's another story, I don't know much about Proteus. But I'd been with this project for seven years, the script was good, and I think that if you've got a good script, then that's all that matters. A good script and a good cast are 70% of the job done. I think the problem with Proteus and Beyond Bedlam is that the scripts weren't that good, and sometimes the cast weren't that good either. So that's 70% of the job not done."

What's the distribution deal like?
"I'm about to find out this afternoon how many cinemas it's going to go out in. But the release is October 24th. I know there's already a couple of cinemas in Wales that have called me up, that want me to go and introduce the first night. The NFT in London, there will probably be another two or three cinemas there. I imagine about 20 prints are going to go out on the UK theatrical circuit. The film's sold to every country in the world, bar the US. We've had some offers from some US distributors. but they've not been good enough yet for us to go with them. So the film, financially has done well. At this stage, a year after completion, it's returned its investment. And so the next five years or so will be profitable."

Will overseas versions be dubbed or subtitled?
"Probably a mixture of both."

Do you have any control over translations? It could end up as a Carry On film in Korea...
"I saw The Black Mask recently in Germany. That's been dubbed into English and the actress they've chosen just seems... I think when you go and watch a dubbed film, you know that it's dubbed and you try and take that into consideration."


Are you finding that people from whatever relating country are relating to the film's themes?
"I think the themes that the films deals with are global in the sense that nationalism is beginning to re-emerge as a problem - if it's a problem at all. But iy is beginning to re-emerge and we've seen what happened in Yugoslavia, and we're seeing what's happening in Russia. I suppose in Korea they have the North and South divide, so at some point it's going to happen there. I think it definitely does translate. I'm quite surprised sometimes how aware people are about what's going on in the film. For instance, two French critics came up to me in Valenciers and said, 'If they're trying to preserve their race, how come they choose a black prostitute to conceive the child? And why does the girl who eventually conceives Fraser's child have a Jewish name?' I had to say, 'Well, yes, I never thought of that.' Essentially my answer to that is that there are black people and Jewish people in contemporary Wales, and it's a contemporary story. It's not about fascism as such; it's about racism, it's about nationalism."

It's about being Welsh as opposed to Celtic.
"Yes, I suppose so. But the flipside of that is: one of the first werewolf films was set in Cardiff, with Lon Chaney Jr - The Wolf Man. I suppose at that stage Universal were picking places on the map that people knew nothing about: 'Oh well, nobody knows about Cardiff. We can just reinvent the place.' And that's what I like about people's ignorance, internationally, of Wales. Often I've met people  who'll say, 'Where's Wales? We've never heard of it before.' I quite like that because it's a mystery. I can reinvent it and I can deal with mythology in a way that is far more open. That's essentially what America has done with its film culture. I was talking to a guy from American Cinematographer, Dave Williams, a few months back. He was saying that he's never seen anybody pull a gun - and he lives in Los Angeles. We watch American films, then we go over there and expect them to be dodging bullets. We don't have a tradition in this country for creating myths out of the world that we live in. We're not that imaginative, we're too affected by realism and documentary."

How did you choose your cast and crew? The cinematographer in particular seems to be getting a lot of credit - and rightly so.
"It was a funny story with the cinematographer because originally we were going to shoot the film on 35mm and I approached Bernard Leyton, who shot Young Americans, to shoot Darklands, and he was very interested in doing it. When we dropped to 16mm for budget reasons, he was no longer interested because it was too much of a compromise for him. So that meant that I couldn't waste any more time seeking a really well-grounded cameraman. I had to go with somebody for whom this was going to be their first feature. So I went for Zoran Djordjevic because I knew him, I'd been at film school with him. But since film school he'd done a lot of second unit work for Andre Seculas - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction - and I just figured that he must be well aware of the process now and eager to get in there and do it himself. So I gave him the first break. But it was really difficult for Zoran because he had to come up with a look for the film that would translate in blow-up from 16mm to 35mm. It involves putting up a lot of lights, and that takes time, it takes money, which we didn't have. So often myself and the cameraman were at war during the making of the film, because we both needed time which we didn't have. Zoran would often steal my time, and sometimes I would try and steal his. It was difficult and very fraught, but sometimes it takes that to get a result."


The visuals, especially the steel works and industrial architecture, are very nice.
"What I did with those is: we didn't have much time to shoot those during the making of the film. I had a friend who lived in Bristol who had his own super-16mm camera, a documentary film-maker. So I said while we're shooting, can you just go out and get as many shots of the steelworks as you can. We ended up with about 30 or 40 compositions of the steelworks at various times during the day, and we just staggered them throughout the film. It's amazing how they embellish the film, creating the atmosphere and the world that it takes place in. Otherwise it would all have been anonymous interiors."

What problems did you have with Welsh nationalists and so on?
"One of the reasons, I suspect, why I didn't get anywhere with the film in the first six years of trying in Wales is because people were aware of some of the issues I was dealing with, and they didn't particularly go for it. In the end, when the Lottery made their decision, there was no Head of Film in the Welsh Arts Council, so they sent it up to Scotland, and Eddie Dake in Scotland made a decision. Which is kind of nice because sometimes I think that the whole system in Wales can get so anal - dealing with issues that are so small and parochial and taking them so seriously - that they'll just make films that will only work in Wales. If that at all. So it was good to get objective support for the film.

"The film screened in the Aberystwyth Film Festival and I had a couple of people outside the cinema came up to me and said, 'That's the worst film I've ever seen. How dare the Welsh Lottery support such a venture. It's racist. It's full of primeval fear.' - which it is. Primeval fear: that's one of the essential fear factors I was dealing with. In terms of the racism, I've experienced racism from Welsh language people, being a non-Welsh language speaker, and this is me biting back. But at the same time, I would say the film's a fantasy. We're dealing with extremism and it's not meant to be a true representation of what goes on in Wales. Even more, the Head of Aberystwyth Film Festival, who is now the Head of the Arts Council in Wales and who's a nationalist himself, said, 'It's a sign of confidence in your culture when you can make a film that's dealing with things negative and derogatory but in a fantastical or comical way.' I agree with him."

What did Channel Four say when you tried to get funding?
"Channel Four said it was too down-the-line horror, too genre. What they meant by that was that they couldn't believe 100% in the world that it was based in. It wasn't realistic enough for them, basically."

Who was it who said it had 'no contemporary resonance'?
"BBC Wales said it had 'no contemporary resonance'. They completely missed the point. I sometimes wonder who these people are that get employed in film companies and TV companies to read scripts and decide what gets made and what doesn't. Because they're not film-makers; I don't know what they are. I think that things should be more driven by film-makers. Rather than me having an anonymous relationship with these people in Channel Four and the BBC... I don't know them, they don't know me. I send a script in, and they pass. They don't know my work, and if they did then they would understand the whole thing a bit more. It's kind of quango-ish in the end. I think they make films with who they know."


Will the tax thing announced in this year's budget affect films like this?
"Um, I don't know the full ramifications of that, actually. I don't know whether that's a tax break for investing in films, or whether you don't have to pay tax on your production. Which I suppose is a saving of 17.5% on every budget. I don't know."

Do you have a lot of contemporaries. Did you just luck out in getting this made?
"There are a lot of people. At the same time, a lot of people I went to film school with who wanted to make feature films, they find themselves ten years on making corporate videos, maybe pop videos, maybe commercials, but not features. Because there isn't really an industry that exists. It's very hard to make a living out of being a feature film director in the UK, it's almost impossible. I'm still not doing it. I don't have the cash-flow at the moment to take me from one day to the next, because with Darklands all my wages went into the film, I didn't get paid. If it wasn't for the social security system and me keeping my overheads to a minimum, I wouldn't have been able to afford to do it. They've decided to get themselves into a situation where they have much bigger overheads than I have which they have to pay for, so therefore they need to work to live. It's unfortunate because they're trapped. They don't have the time to sit down for two years writing a script and not earning a penny."

How did your stint on Brookside come about?
"When I finished film school, I sent out my showreel. A year later I got a phone call from Mersey TV. They called me up and said, 'Come along for an interview'; I went for the interview and got the job. So I was there for six months doing twelve episodes. That was an invaluable experience, because at film school I made these three short films. We shot for half an hour; maybe two or three weeks. That's two and a half minutes a day. At Brookside, suddenly we had to do a half-hour episode in two and a half days: 15 minutes a day. So it was a huge learning curve for me to make that work. I think without it I probably wouldn't have been able to get through the Darklands schedule. So it was invaluable."

Is there much room for creativity in directing a soap opera?
"Every now and then you can be a little creative, but on the whole no. It's a situation where you've got so little time that anybody who goes in there to do the job will come up with the same answer to the problems. So there's nothing to distinguish you from the next guy; there's only one answer to how to shoot this scene, and you've only got half an hour to shoot it. So yes, it is dissatisfactory and six months was certainly enough for me. I think I would have got pretty depressed if I'd have carried on."


Why did it take you six months to shoot twelve episodes?
"It's a six-week cycle. What you do is you get the script, which you prepare for two weeks; on the third week you shoot; then on the fourth and the fifth week you edit and put the sound on; and it goes out in the sixth week. You've got other directors doing other episodes, so it's a continuous cycle. There are about three or four directors working on it at the same time."

Are you going to do more of that?
"I need to earn some money right now, so if somebody came to me with an offer to work in TV, I'd take it up. I particularly like This Life. That's revolutionised soaps, it's left all the others behind. I think it would be very difficult for me to work on anything other than something in the vein of This Life. Because for me the rest is history now."

What about the corporate/pop video side of it?
"Pop videos and commercials I'd like to do, actually. One or two a year, just as a little side thing. But I haven't had the reel to get me that kind of work. Now I've done Darklands, the Pagan sequences and action scenes will help me get commercial and pop video work. That's how a lot of feature film directors survive. People like the Scott brothers; they essentially do two, three or four commercials a year. And commercials pay big money. You can get two grand for a week's work at least, and that's enough to tide you over while you're focussing on the features. Again, it's a danger. There's so much money in commercials.

"I have a very talented producer friend who I was at college with, who went to LA and is living the life of Riley. He's got a big Beverly Hills house and the whole lot. He still hasn't done his first feature; he's doing commercials. He's enjoying himself, but I still got the sense when I was there talking to him in April that he was a bit jealous that I'd done my first feature. He's got ideas in the pipeline, but his whole lifestyle now is dictated by commercials. As soon as he stops doing them he's in trouble, I suppose, because he's living a bit of a hire-purchase life as well."

In researching Darklands, what sort of research did you do into Pagan rituals?
"The Paganism that exists in Darklands is a bit of a fusion. When Keller appears at the end in his red robe, that's really more of a Satanic image than it is a Pagan image. But the Green Man and the Red Man are all based around a real life Pagan ceremony that takes place in Edinburgh on April 30th called the Beltane Fire. It's an annual event. Four thousand spectators turn up and watch these guys go through their performance. I went along and witnessed it and I was so impressed by it that I basically lifted it and put it in Darklands. I wanted to get the original guys involved, and they were helping me out to begin with, but when they read the script and realised that it was a horror film, they pulled out."

What about the influence of things like Arkaos?
"It was the evolution of the idea, actually. Because I'd lived with it for seven years, it was always in the back of my mind and I found that every year would pass and I'd see something or I'd come across something that worked in the world I was trying to create. I remember going to see a performance of Arkaos in Battersea Power Station, where they had the metal sounds and the whole post-industrial side of things mixed with Brazilian tribal dances. What I loved was this mix of the tribal and the ancient with the contemporary post-industrial. I thought, 'That's what I'm trying to get at with Darklands.' So it worked for me. I wanted to avoid some of the stereotypical images that you have of religious cults and of people walking round in robes chanting and stuff. I thought, 'Maybe this is a good way to do it. Maybe this is how these people live. They'd probably be a circus act or a bunch of performers.'

"I remember going to see Arkaos with a friend who knew somebody who was in the show, so at the end of the show we went back to the caravans that they live in and spent the evening there. It was like being in Tod Browning's Freaks. It was intimidating, but a lot of fun at the same time. It was such an unusual world. So I just felt that it worked. Also, a friend of mine had made a documentary about Test Dept called Notes from the Underground. I'd seen that, and I saw images in it of guys banging bits of metal and stuff. I thought, 'Well yes, instead of chanting, maybe this is what they're doing because of the steelworks thing.' I thought that really works too. And I listened to an album that Test Dept did with a Welsh performance group. I listened to it, and it was a mixture of Celtic folk singing with hardcore industrial percussion - an extraordinary mix of the old and the new, and it had a religious feel to it too. Then Test Dept did a brilliant show up in Glasgow called The Second Coming. It seemed that whatever angles Test Dept were coming up with, I was linking with because I was thinking the same way, just thinking, 'Yes, I can use all of that.' So the Beltane Fire, Test Dept, Arkaos and others were really inspirational to how I was going to depict the Pagans."

Where di the music for the Pagan scenes come from?
"The track at the end of the film, over the credits, of that Celtic singing: when you hear that singing you immediately think of Ireland and Irish singing, and people don't associate Wales with the same kind of singing. But that kind of singing exists in Wales. The Welsh language, when it's sung, is very beautiful. So that was good for me. It think it's one of the unique parts of the film. We basically took that sort of music and we said, 'Okay, we'll run it along the same lines as this, and then we'll mix it a bit with Terminator.' We wanted that hero music for Craig, especially towards the end when he's going to fight his way out. That sound from Terminator is very metallic sounding, so we took a little bit from that.

"The only sequence that doesn't quite fit that palette is the Halloween homage, if you like, of Rachel being chased around the house by Carver. The guys who composed the music came up with an industrial score for that which just didn't work because that sequence is about suspense. The music, although it was dramatic, wasn't suspenseful. I said, 'Look, we've got to come up with something a little more Bernard Herrmann for this. It's got to be violins and chase music.' So they went for that. But I think if they'd have had more time, they'd have liked to have made that more industrial as well. I feel it's a bit of a pastiche."

When she backs towards the window, it's obvious what's going to happen, but it still makes you jump.
"There are two ways to do a jump scene - it's the old Hitchcock thing. Do you show the bomb underneath the table, and wait for the audience to go, 'My God! It's going to go off! Do something!' so that they know it's going to happen but the problem is when is it going to happen? Or do you just have two people talking at the table and suddenly: Bang! There are two jump scenes in Darklands. One is the one that you mention which is where I've shown the bomb underneath the table. You know what's going to happen. The fact that you know it's going to happen creates suspense. The other jump scene is in the train, when he look out the window and he backs away and the guy jumps him from behind. That's a big surprise, that's a bomb going off without any warning."

Was the train an old BR carriage?
"It was too expensive to get any Railtrack line. The way they've gone with privatisation, it's impossible to get any sense out of them in terms of having to get a carriage on a certain track. So we found a private line in Lidney. It was a bit of risk because they only had steam trains, and they only had a mile-long track, so we had to run a train back and forth all night. But in the end, they were very supportive. They gave us three days' use of the whole station that they had.

"That train sequence is actually based on a real life experience that I had - although not quite that bad. I can remember whilst I was at Bournemouth Film School, having to catch the train from Bournemouth to Newport. At that time, they were really old, dusty, beaten trains. I got onto a carriage that had no lights. I sat there and just thought, 'Maybe the bulb's gone.' The train departed and went through all these tunnels. What amazed me was that when there are no lights in the carriage, the lights in the tunnel produce all these danse macabre shadows and images all around the train. I just found it so frightening, I thought, 'Wow! I've got to put this into a film some time.' Then finally when the train pulled into the station at Newport I tried to get off and I couldn't because all the doors were locked. I realised that I'd actually got into a closed carriage, so I had to call for an attendant to come and open a door for me. I was determined to find a way to put that into the film."

What about the pig and the goat. Presumably 'no animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture.'
"That's right. We had three pigs. One was real and alive and is now called Darklands, living happily ever after on Cardiff City Farm. Another one was a dead pig that we got from a slaughterhouse. And the third one was a rubber pig that we used for the throat-cutting scene. It was quite distressing filming the pig being hauled out of the carriage. The farmers that brought the pig along - that's how they move pigs. They grab them by the ears and they just haul them. And when you do that to a pig it squeals. The whole crew were really uncomfortable. I was loving it because I knew that what they were experiencing, the audience would experience and that's part of the whole thing. It's really quite distressing.

"The goat we got from a taxidermist. I think the idea, for me, is something that's not Paganism. It's a Satanic image, the goat with the horns; it's Dennis Wheatley. I wanted that shot in Silence of the Lambs where the cops are running through the room after Lecter's escaped from his cage, and there's an almost cruficied guard, transfigured by light. I was going for that, really. Obviously I couldn't have a metal wicker man, a big statue of a wicker man, so I just thought: 'What can I come up with? Well, with the crucifixion there were two criminals either side of Jesus, so maybe I can have the pig and the goat either side of Craig.' Hang them upside-down, which is Satanic, which is a fusion of all these things."

What about the scene in the church? Was that tricky?
"It was, yes: 'We'd just like to put a dead pig in your church, please.' We used a real church for the shots of the vicar arriving and coming in. But for the reverses, his point of view, we used a deconsecrated church that we found. But even so, it took weeks to get that church and go through all the wrangling. It was in a tiny Welsh valley town, and all the houses were built around the church. We had to sneak the pig inside because we really didn't want to let people know what we were doing in there. Even though it was closed and deconsecrated, it still did feel like it was sacrilegious.

"I can remember the line producer saying to me, 'Are you sure that you want to go ahead with this? Are you sure that there isn't a God? Are you sure that you won't get punished for what you're doing?' I said, 'I'm an agnostic. I don't believe in that kind of stuff. It doesn't worry me.' He said, 'Well, it worries me!' We were in the church, the pig was hoisted up over the altar, it was bleeding down onto the altar. I was watching all the blood seeping into the carvings on the altar and I just suddenly got a really bad feeling. It was about four or five o'clock in the morning when I was driving home and I drove through a roundabout without realising. the roundabout had left and right but no straight ahead, so I went straight through a fence into a field, wrote off my car and was concussed for a day."

website: www.jingafilms.com

Zombies from Ireland

Director: Ryan Kift
Writers: Ryan Kift, Sian Davies
Producers: Ryan Kift, Sian Davies
Cast: Lots and lots of zombies plus some blokes from Big Brother
Country: UK
Year: 2013
Website: www.facebook.com/ZombiesFromIreland
Reviewed from: YouTube
Watch now – YouTube link at end of reviews

Here’s a fun little zero-budget feature which is far from being the worst zombie film that you or I have ever seen. Though thoroughly generic and cut-price for most of its 80 minutes, nevertheless there are several imaginative, original or memorable sequences which repay a watch – especially as the whole thing is free to view on YouTube anyway. In addition, Zombies from Ireland breaks new ground by being, I believe, the first feature-length British horror film shot dual-language with some scenes in English and some in Welsh (with English subtitles) and the first (partially) Welsh language zombie film.

There was a Welsh language horror film shot in 1974, Gwaed Ar Y Ser: Why Is This Man Green!?, which was rediscovered a few years ago, had a screening in New York in 2011 and possibly a broadcast on S4C in November 2013. About 30 seconds of this is online. There is also a 2009 short on YouTube called Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers), probably a few others too. But none of them have zombies.

The set-up of Zombies from Ireland is that prisoners in a Dublin gaol are being used as the subjects in unethical experiments to find a cure for swine flu. The British Government takes an interest and arranges for half a dozen of the test subjects to be brought to London, but to maintain secrecy they are shipped across the Irish Sea to Anglesey in a small private boat. But one or more of them turns into a zombie, the boat crashes on rocks (unseen of course) and one or more of the surviving zombies make it ashore where they set off a gradual chain reaction of gut-munching and infection.

All the above takes up the first 20 minutes, with scenes shot in laboratories and a real gaol cell (apparently). Added production value was provided by a quick trip to That London for establishing shots of things like a Tube station and the headquarters of the British Medical Association. There is no evidence of footage actually shot in Dublin but a large part of that ‘first act’ was shot at sea on a (very small) boat (provided by Go Angling My Way Sea Fishing Trips, who have several pages of photos from the shoot on their website).

More production value comes from the use of the Tank School in Usk, Monmouthshire which is here renamed the Marcus Akin Tank School Fuck Yeah. Akin, who has wannabe-Wolverine sideburns, was apparently a housemate on Big Brother in 2009, thereby giving the film some token D-list name value, a value which is doubled by the additional presence of Big Brother contestant turned local radio presenter Glyn Wise who was on the show in 2006. Frankly, there may well be other reality TV ‘celebrities’ in the cast but I wouldn’t know them. I wouldn’t have known either of these two except that so much play is made over their names that it seemed worthwhile googling them.

Disappointingly, despite various shots of tanks and other military vehicles in sheds and driving around fields, that’s all we get. There is no zombie interaction during these scenes. No zombies attack a tank, no tank attacks any zombies. A real missed opportunity which sadly knocks this generally enjoyable little movie a notch or two down on the scale of ‘how well do they achieve what they set out to do with what they had available.’ Dude, you had a freaking tank. In a zombie film.

Instead, all we get is five minutes of comedy swearing (in English) from Mr Akin before he sets off up a country lane, encounters a shuffling zombie and lays it out with a couple of punches, albeit sustaining a bite in the process. For added comedy value, this fight features some Batman-style kerpow-captions. (Glyn Wise subsequently fares better, casually swatting away an attempted zombie attack outside the gym with a handy badminton racket.)

Another highlight is a televised wrestling match where two hulking zombies clamber into the ring and lay about the wrestlers and referee while the hapless TV commentator attempts to describe what is happening. Amusing and silly (and satisfying for Santo fans) though this sequence is, it nevertheless suffers by being inexplicably shown entirely by filming a TV screen rather than using the actual TV footage itself.

Although most of the film is played for laughs, the actual zombie attacks are generally played for horror. These include an old lady sitting reading her magazine in the middle of the woods (as you do), a young couple dragged from their car and (later) a stoner played by director Ryan Kift. The closest thing to a central character is a blonde woman who was on the boat and somehow made it ashore, played by co-writer (and tattoo model) Sian Davies, who features in the one stand-out scene of real drama. Struggling through the woods, she eventually finds the couple’s abandoned car. In a single take, she throws herself inside, lock the doors, collapses into tears and then, seeing her face in the rear-view mirror (as do we – it’s filmed from the back seat), she spots a gaping wound on her cheek, which she pulls apart, sobbing and yelling in terror and confusion. Eventually she summons up the strength to start the car and drives off up the lane before being brought to a halt by a locked gate, by which time the zombie infection is starting to take hold.

This is a terrific sequence, the sort of thing that we watch these movies for. It’s followed by a flashback showing us her previous life as a lesbian pole-dancer/whore who bites a client’s dick off while noshing on him. A similar life-passing-before-her-eyes sequence occurs when the old lady is killed, except that her memories are all of charity shops. That could have played up brilliantly if the pole dancer had died first, but the old lady is the first victim so we don’t really appreciate the contrast the way we could have done.

The film’s climax is its most impressive – even iconic – scene as a hundred or so zombie extras lurch across the traffic-less Menai Bridge, spreading the infection to the mainland. Shot at dawn, this is a terrific sequence, ably intercut with footage of two comedy policemen who see the zombies on CCTV but assume they’re protesters demonstrating against plans for a second bridge (one of the coppers is watching a TV ad for ‘Beb-Stesion’ featuring Sian Davies). A post-credits gag harks back to the swine flu experiments which we have all forgotten about by then.

Shot over a period of months from summer 2010 to spring 2011, Zombies from Ireland premiered at Blaenau-Ffestiniog on Halloween 2012 and subsequently screened at Bangor University in February 2013 and at Caernarfon in July. I’m listing it as a 2013 release because in August that year it was made generally available via the Tube that is You. Apart from Rift and Davies, the massive cast and the bands on the soundtrack, the only credit is for make-up artist Anwen Peters who clearly did a terrific job on both undead and victims on what was, I imagine, a non-existent budget. If nothing else, Zombies from Ireland is a great show-reel for her.

Got 80 minutes to spare? Enjoy zombies, wrestlers, Big Brother, military vehicles, tattooed blondes or some combination of the above? Got a high tolerance for low budget horror? This could be the perfect movie for you.

MJS rating: B