interview: Warren Dudley

In June 2017, Warren Dudley kindly answered some questions about his film Cage.

What are the practical pros and cons of shooting a film with one actor on one set?
"I have to say the best thing about working in one location and with one actor on screen is that you can shoot the whole movie in order. You NEVER get to do this usually. It makes telling the story so much easier because you can see it happening right in front of you. The downside I suppose is that you can all get a bit stir crazy after ten 12-hour days in a damp warehouse with just a cage in it -  so you need to really get on with your crew... this was put to the test a few times!"

I’m assuming you wrote this with Lucy-Jane Quinlan in mind. What did she bring to the role and the film? 
"I worked with Lucy on The Cutting Room and thought she was massively talented... and almost as importantly a right laugh. I didn’t audition anyone else for the role which probably goes against all the rules a bit but it just seemed right. Luckily for me her performance was incredible. To bring so much emotion to the part whilst also pulling off an immaculate US accent is quite an achievement. In short - Lucy-Jane Quinlan should be famous and it confuses me as to why she isn’t yet."

What did you learn on The Cutting Room that you were able to use when making Cage?
"Write to your budget. The budgets on both films were similar (about £20K) but with TCR we had multiple locations and a big cast so it gets spread a bit thin. Saying that I am still really proud of it – it still gets some nice reviews around the internet. With Cage I wanted to put all the money on screen. So between Lucas (DOP), Lucy, the talented crew and myself I think we succeeded in making something that looks like it has a bigger budget.

"One Amazon viewer, attempting to be rude, said – ‘If this is all that Hollywood can come up with we’re in trouble’... I took this as a massive compliment! Little did they know it was shot in rainy Newhaven in an old warehouse."

There are two endings on the DVD. Why did you decide on the ending you chose? (I will spoiler-protect your answer!)
"Lucas and I talked and debated for hours on which ending to use and went with the one we did just because we both felt the film may lose some of its impact if you suddenly introduced lots of other characters at the end. I think of all the people who have mentioned the endings it’s about 50/50 so I still don’t know if I made the right decision!"

What aspect of the film are you most proud of? What would you change if you could?
"I like to think that it stands up as a legitimate piece of film-making and not a well-meaning low budget effort. The twist at the start of the third act is something I am pleased with but has really split the audience – some thinking it’s a stroke of genius others informing me that it’s incredibly offensive... often in not such polite terms. I think it’s the former obviously!

"What would I change? I think if I could I would have gone for a metal cage. Once again, we toyed with it for ages but decided that the wood would be so much more beautiful on film... and it is. A lot of people (yourself included) have mentioned that she could have tried to escape with a bit more vigour so in hindsight I would have added a couple of scenes early on with Gracie attacking the cage..."

What are you working on now? 
"I wrote a screenplay called The Bromley Boys which was made last year and stars Alan Davies and Martine McCutcheon. It’s about a young lad in the early '70s who supports the world’s worst football team. I’ve seen the film and it’s amazing – I really hope the footballing public agrees. I think they are hoping for a cinema release late in the year... very exciting.

"Personally, my next one will be another low budget horror called Prankz starring Betsy-Blue English – a film about a pair of YouTube pranksters who get in to all sorts of horror film trouble. We start filming in late August."

website: www.sixty6media.co.uk

interview: Mark J Howard

I reviewed Mark J Howard's debut feature Lock In, a tale of corporate coulrophobia, in 2014. Three years later, the film was released on DVD on  both sides of the Atlantic as Clown Kill, so I took the opportunity to ask Mark for an interview and he provided these great, detailed answers.

What was the original inspiration for Lock In? How well do you think you achieved what you set out to do?
"We’d been renting a huge business suite in a modern office block at the foot of Pendle Hill (home of the infamous Pendle Witches in the 17th Century), to serve as production office and edit booths while we were working on a series of TV ads and other advertising films, and it was a bit creepy at night, to say the least. Pipes would expand and contract, floors creaked, dodgy electrics made the lights flicker and go out and the regular winds barrelling down Pendle Hill would howl around the corners of the building, which kind of puts you on edge when you’re in the building on your own. When you’ve been working at the office for 48 hours straight to meet a deadline, your mind doesn’t always  think straight. Then, on the way out, the lift got stuck, and I hate lifts, almost as much as I dislike clowns, so the seeds were already starting to grow.

"The story developed over the next few months as we workshopped ideas with the already-cast actors. I think we achieved our goal by introducing a creepy new clown, and I was happy with the comedic chemistry with the security guards, but we dropped a major bollock and didn’t notice until we were in the edit. In the original script the clown breaks the fourth wall as he regularly addresses the audience between kills, which makes more sense once you’ve seen the end scene and know where the character of Jenny is at, but in the edit it suddenly looked like we were trying to rip off Funny Man, and not doing it very well. So, at the last minute I brought in my long-term collaborator, actor and comedian Peter Slater, we sat down at the editor and chopped things away, reduced or removed all of Charlie Boy’s one-liners and pieces to camera, heavily toned down Jenny’s drunken pub attack scene, and added more security guards stuff for balance. The end result is one huge compromise.

"During filming one of the leads had serious personal issues going on, and she became difficult to nail down, so that brought a whole slew of new problems that had to be addressed during the shoot. We’d only budgeted for a 21 day shoot, and we managed to shoot it in exactly 21 days, but it was one nightmare after another. I’m happy with the finished film, but if luck and circumstance had been on our side on the day, it could have been so much better."

What aspect of the film do you think works best, and what aspect would you change if you could?
"The personality clashes between shop-steward Gobby Karen and John the Boss are my favourite performances in the film,  Rachel was an absolute revelation, her sense of timing is better than any comedian I’ve ever worked with. She hit every beat, delivered every time, and that’s something I’ve never encountered before. If I could change anything I’d have found a way to reinstate some of the excised clown footage, Roy’s amazing in the role, and some of my favourite scenes are the ones we had to cut out. That’s usually the way though."

How did you assemble your cast, and what effect has Jessica Cunningham’s subsequent reality TV career had on awareness of your film?
"Apart from Rachel (who plays Gobby Karen) and Holly (Sally), the script was written personally for the actual actors who starred in the film. Rachel and Holly were late additions to the repertory company I’ve been building over the last 20 years; so I knew who would be playing what character as  I wrote the script. We’d just come off a series of TV commercials with Jessica, and I’d had a big public row with her in a Costa, and I knew I’d found my feisty office worker that day.

"Two hours after Jessica was confirmed as an Apprentice contestant, my phone went absolutely crazy, as the press bombarded me with questions. All of the major tabloids had found out about her 'clown rape' past and wanted to know more. It was actually my very significant birthday that day and I was pissed up. My wife banned me from speaking to the press in case I got carried away or said something I might later regret, so I had to let Roy (Basnett) do the talking, and as a result we got some great sensationalist headlines in the national tabloids. I imagine some of her fans might be curious enough about the film to watch it, but other than that I doubt her rapid rise up the greasy celebrity pole would benefit the film.

"She’s been really busy these last few months with her fashion brand and new-found fame, so we haven’t managed to catch up on things, but before she hit the limelight we had a chat and she did agree to do the sequel. We had two huge fans of Jessica, who are also top-flight footballers from a famous northern club, make an offer to finance a sequel under the Enterprise Investment Scheme, but a week later the Inland Revenue started cracking down on footballers investing in fake films to offset their taxes, and they got cold feet. Got a great script out of it, though, featuring Charlie Boy’s Undead Army of Clowns. If this first film is well received, and if there’s a market there, the sequel might just happen."

What are your favourite slashers and/or clown horror movies?
"I was never a fan of the Halloween films (though I’m a big fan of the third one), but I loved the first couple of Friday the 13th’s. I abandoned that franchise when I went to see Part 3 in 3D on its initial release, and the projectionist got the lens assembly on wrong and completely ruined the presentation. Huge fan of European slashers, especially love Stage Fright and Amsterdamned, but don’t watch clown films. Like I say, clowns and lifts, not my bag. I don’t think I was abused by a clown as a child, but I think something must have happened to fuel my unease about them. The new adaptation of It looks fun, though, but Tim Curry’s a hard act to follow."

What have you been working on since finishing Lock In?
"Adverts and pop promos have been the bread and butter that keeps the wolf at bay, We’ve shot a big zombie film set in Liverpool, about a terrorist attack on Ellesmere Port petro-chemical plant, just at the moment they are destroying an experimental battlefield biological weapon developed by the Russians and seized in Syria. The resulting gas cloud threatens an extinction-level event as it slowly creeps across the UK in real time, turning the victims into blood-crazed zombies. The film is called Undead Air and will hopefully be ready by the end of the year. It’s quite heavy on visual fx, but I’ve a great team doing some amazing work.

"At the moment we’re  just prepping our new docu-drama American Psychopath – the Ripper of Whitechapel, which is a period piece bringing a post-modern, fresh perspective on the Jack the Ripper case. We’re shooting this in 4K and Super 16, with the murders being covered by raw and grainy Super 8 on my trusty old Beaulieu, filming begins second week of May for three weeks. Because we’re still having to work on promo films for clients, our more narrative films tend to take forever to complete, but we’ve a delivery deadline for the Ripper film so it’s all hands on deck. Both films will feature the same cast and crew, with a few additions, that made Lock In."

Finally, can you tell me a bit about the super 8 films you used to make with Tony Luke?
"I miss Tony so much, and it doesn’t feel like fifteen months since we lost him. We got to know each other in the very early '80s. We were the same age, both at secondary school, both making animated super 8 monster movies,  and we both contributed to Junior Filmworld, a magazine/newsletter for wannabe junior super 8 Spielbergs. Tony lived in the North East and I lived in Manchester, so hundreds of miles apart, but he used to ring regularly and we’d post our only prints of our latest films to evaluate each others work. We’d swap ideas, script notes, designs and special fx techniques we’d discovered, and generally encourage each other.

"He found a supplier in the States who could provide T rex latex skins, all ready for you to insert an armature into, and he was off. His films always had more pazzaz than mine, my always came back with the note 'Sorry, your splices didn’t go through the projector too well'. Tony was my first animation collaborator, albeit long-distance, and somewhere I’ve got a box of photos of his animation creations, including his first Satannus puppet. I need to find it and pass it on to his sister Fran for the archive.

"When we premiered Lock In I spoke to Tony, he asked me if I’d be interested in directing a project he had in mind. I was busy, I said if he could postpone a few months I’d be able to discuss it further and commit. It never happened. A few months later Tony started with his back and neck pain, and he had to focus on getting better. I was sure he’d beat it again, he was a real fighter. It’s a weird thing when someone you’ve known since you were kids dies, makes you put things into perspective. Facebook hasn’t been the same since he left."

website: www.clownkill.com

interview: Grant McPhee

After I reviewed arty Scottish vampire chiller Night Kaleidoscope, director/producer Grant McPhee very kindly answered a few questions by email.

In what way do you consider Night Kaleidoscope to be ‘punk rock cinema’?
"It's more an attitude. We took the  'don't need permission' and DIY approach from punk, rather than the spikey haired three-chord version. And I think that's an attitude that every indie filmmaker should take. Just get out there and do it.

"Additionally, it was a pretty rocky production. I had fantastic production support. I like controlled chaos, so there is always a strong semblance of structure - just with an ability to improvise within that. Unfortunately everything that could go wrong went wrong and it became very much an adapt-to-survive approach. All very seat of your pants. There was no script as such. I was shooting a feature for a friend that finished on the Saturday, we filmed on the Monday and I went onto another feature the following Monday. Just picking up a camera and making it up - which you can tell in a fair few places! It's more an attitude of production - as the film is really a bit prog rock! You can achieve special things working this way, but it does not always work out and what you gain in places you lose in others."

Why has it taken three years to be released?
“Due to the shear amount of other work I had on, the film just sat on the shelf. I just had no time to look at it, or even think about it until I could squeeze in one day in 2015 for a pickup. My day job was taking about 15 hours a day and I had a documentary to finish - we had a TV and large festival slot for that but had not actually finished the film, so every second was taken up. A few days without sleep.

"Without knowing what we had in the can we managed another pickup at the end of 2016, for what we assumed was needed. It was edited fairly sporadically from mid 2016 as our editor had to work on it in between jobs. This was the first time we really saw it, and realised we needed an extra couple of scenes. Again it went a bit 'fly by the seat of your pants' and I ended up covering my hotel room in tinfoil, getting Patrick, Jason and Kitty around and throwing blood all over the place. Not sure what the other guests made of that, but we had no complaints. So, although it was started a long time ago it was only put together very quickly towards the end.

"There was actually very little post production work done. Nearly all the images were made in camera. I just held a couple of pieces of glass at angles in front of the camera. One with food dye on it and the other to reflect or project images onto it. The only real bit of post was a shot of eyes turning white."

How satisfied are you with the way that the film turned out?
“In some respects it's amazing there is a film there. But really nobody outside of your friends or other filmmakers care how little time a film took to make, or how small the budget was. Films only stand on how good they are.

"The film is what I wanted to make; in that respect I'm happy. Overall I just wanted to try something different whether it was a failure or not. Some of it worked and some, well not as much. Mainly not having a story! I think you're certainly right about the repetition, though I was very keen on a visual art film with poetic flourishes. I just maybe put a bit too many in! But I'd rather have a film that got one star where we'd tried something that was different than three stars for something that's like every other film.

"I just have no interest to try and copy anyone, a style or a current genre. And if that means some people hate a film, I'm fine with that! I can see where the flaws are, but that's also something I'm happy with. it's a bit more human. People these days are not allowed to make mistakes and learn. Things are too neat and shiny. Rough edges can be good. I'm most satisfied with what I've learned. That's the way to progress. I'm not afraid of failure, what you learn from it is important to your next movie."

What exactly is a ‘Digital Imaging Technician’?
"Ha, a Digital Imaging Technician - also known as a DIT is a geeky guy who sits next to a DoP at a monitor and manipulates the image to suit the DP's intended look."

What is Tartan Features?
"Tartan Features is part of Year Zero Filmmaking. It's a bit like an indie record label where a collective of film-makers make micro budget feature films that share a certain vision. We've made about 13 so far - it's open to anyone in the world. It just happens to have started in Scotland but you don't have to be from there. We've had a few good successes. One film allowed the director to go on to have a well-funded next feature. At its heart it's just people who get up from their seats and make a film, help grow an industry and learn. Here's a link (click on the pictures for more info on each film) - www.yearzerofilmmaking.com/tartanfeatures"

What’s next for you?
"I'm a week away from shooting a new feature. This time something very different  It has a story for starters. People do and say things without 15 minutes of trippy visuals (only five). We're taking two weeks to make it, the budget is more, we're paying everyone. We've got a great cast, script and crew, and I'm very excited. It's a little like Blood on Satan's Claw, Picnic at Hanging Rock and less Night Kaleidoscope. You'll definitely know it's one of my films though. I'll tell you all about it soon!"

interview: Mark Redfield

After I saw Mark Redfield’s superb version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde at Manchester in 2002 I knew that I had to find out more about this film and the people behind it. Mark kindly obliged with this phone interview in January 2003 and subsequently asked me to write some insert notes for the DVD release of the film, which I was delighted to do, incorporating some of the quotes from this chat.

Can you give me some background on Redfield Arts?
"Basically I decided to stop messing around with the theatre here on the East Coast and get down to the serious business of trying to make some movies. So I found some space in Baltimore where I have an edit suite and a scene shop and a place to store costumes and that kind of thing. I have some stage space; I found a warehouse. And I decided to concentrate on that. I started Redfield Arts about four years ago and got the space about three years ago. It took about a year to a year and a half and that’s when we started to bear down on Jekyll and Hyde.

“Now we’re selling Jekyll and Hyde, we’re in post-production with a drama called Cold Harbor about four brothers coming to grips with the suicide of their father, and a kids’ fantasy film called The Sorcerer of Stonehenge School. That’s in post-production, and hopefully that will be finished in May or June. We’re doing effects and editing, and we’re developing the next couple of projects for 2003 now that we’re in the new year."

Why did you start with Jekyll and Hyde?
"I’m not really sure, in some ways. We did it as a play about ten or eleven years ago. My producer and writing partner, Stuart Voytilla, he’s based in San Diego; when he was here in Baltimore and we were working together, we were doing a number of things. I had a couple of theatre companies, one of which was called New Century Theatre. We did a gamut of things: we did Clifford Onett’s Golden Boy, we did some Ionesco, we did some Shakespeare, we did The Tempest, The Front Page. We did a typical American rep kind of thing where you just do a little bit of everything-in-the-world theatre. It was sort of an actor-manager company, much like Redfield Arts is now: I’m out there raising the money and spending the money and I’m also the actor-director, so some things in some ways haven’t really changed.

“So I said: you know, it would be kind of fun to do something where I could show off, something I could sink my teeth into. We thought about it and said: no-one’s done a Jekyll and Hyde for a while. People would want to come and see it because people are going to ask, ‘How are they going to do that?’ It’s like Ben Hur. If you do Ben Hur, you’d better have a chariot race on stage and people are going to ask, ‘How are they going to do that?’ In some stage productions they’ll cast two actors - which is always kind of a cheat. So I thought: let’s do this because we could have a lot of fun with it.

“We wrote this play, we adapted it, and created a lot of new stuff on our own. I sort of stole some ideas from what I had read about an Orson Welles production, where the set was primarily black velvet - so you didn’t have to have a lot of scenery. You let the audience’s imagination work and that way we can more very cinematically through a number of scenes. We can be in alleys, we can be in the hospital, we can be in Jekyll’s house. So the initial adaptation of the play was in some ways cinematic. Then when we got around to turning it into a movie, we threw the play out in a lot of ways because it wasn’t working. We invented new material but kept the spirit of the thing and kept the thrust of Stevenson and the play - then it became this whole new animal.

“There was all kinds of new invention that we put into it because we could. I felt we could have some fun with Jekyll and Hyde and I wanted to keep doing fantasy pictures; maybe that was the other reason to do the film. I looked around and said, ‘Even though there’s a hundred Jekyll and Hydes, including The Nutty Professor, there really isn’t one right now on video or television.’ This is no scientific polling, but I would turn on the cable stations here and you would always get the ‘32 Fredric March or the ‘41 Spencer Tracy. I would go to the local blockbuster and you would have all the recent Draculas and Frankensteins. There really isn’t a Jekyll and Hyde out there so maybe we could take a cheeky attempt to get one out on the shelves and have people see it.

“Then there was the other thing that we had experienced. People in the beginning, when we were raising the money: ‘Why do you want to do Jekyll and Hyde? It’s been done.’ Then I would ask them: ‘Do you know the story?’ and people would say, ‘Well... he turns into this bad guy, doesn’t he?’ So they really didn’t know it. Of course the fans did, but by and large people really didn’t know it. So I said let’s take the risk, on such a low budget, and let’s try to do something. So that’s how Jekyll and Hyde came about."

What impressed me was that, apart from the last half-hour, your script is the first version to be filmed like the book.
"We really think it’s in the spirit of Stevenson. It may not exactly be the letter of the law. There are no women in Stevenson, there’s a lot of other invention woven through - and of course we made everybody younger which typically you do anyway. But that struck me as true too. There are recent adaptations - that I don’t want to help publicise! - in the last couple of years. There’s one with one of the Baldwin brothers that is a modern retelling where he and his wife go to Hong Kong and she is somehow murdered. This is all based on a synopsis I read somewhere. He goes to this old Chinese gentleman and gets this mystery drug and somehow he starts to take it, I don’t know what happens in this thing. And it’s called Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde! So there are a lot of versions. And as much as I love Cushing and Lee, I, Monster doesn’t quite do it in some ways.

“So we really tried to stay with the spirit of Stevenson, using Utterson as the detective, and that fed into some other things. People say ‘I know the story’; well, they know a lot of stories. They know James Bond’s going to win. It’s always the ‘how’ - how are you going to get there? If the themes that you can withdraw from something still excite you, then it’s worth hearing it again. So hopefully we have done something that is entertaining. And what seems to be sometimes so obvious is to look at the original source material and there are things that people are missing. You hear this about Frankenstein! There are wonderful things in the Kenneth Branagh Frankenstein - and then there’s wonderful things that are still missing. I’m finding that out: we’re researching now a project now - I don’t want to get into too much detail - a project about Captain Nemo. And there are marvellous things in Jules Verne! Great as the Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is, and there are wonderful things in the Harryhausen Mysterious Island - but they’re miles away from who Nemo really is."

Apart from anything else, he’s Indian.
"Absolutely, which is a fascinating thing. I’ve just discovered that there is a French television version from the 1970s with Omar Shariff, very hard to find. But anyway it’s one of many projects that we’re very far from, we’re not anywhere near production. But I am definitely staying in fantasy. Two out of the three projects that we’re talking about tend to be fantasy/horror orientated. Not so much science fiction, I don’t know why, but they tend to be towards horror or fantasy. Maybe I find more leeway there to talk about people and find stories that I like. You tend to do things that you liked as a kid. You tend to come around to that.

“The reality is, I think, and this is kind of self-conscious in some ways too, is that I’m really in love with the Hammer pictures. And that I think was a very, very obvious conscious influence. Hammer, because of their budgets, are very compact. They’re very rich and they’re dense in their design. The Universal pictures had height! I think the screen was squarer. From Frankenstein to even the lesser-budgeted ones, they had height to the sets. Whereas what you get in the Hammers - or the Corman Poe pictures maybe - is you get a bit of density. That art direction - maybe those were heavy influences."

Given that your background was theatre, how did you assemble film-making people?
"For me, the eye has always been on movies, from the beginning of time that I can remember. I fell in love with movies, I wanted to make movies. I’m old enough just to remember having super-8 film, playing with animation and stop-motion as a teenager. like a lot of people I knew that I wanted to do that, even from childhood when I was playing and my first acting classes that I had when I was a kid. But the theatre was accessible. You could walk in the door, in the town that you lived in - here in Baltimore for instance. You could get involved and then, my God, you’ve got everything. You just go crazy.

“So very early I was acting, very early I was into design, very early into directing. But all along it was ‘but I want to be making films.’ And there have been some false starts over the years: projects that I think are still good scripts that I tried to raise money for. It’s difficult, just incredibly difficult to raise private money when you haven’t done anything. You have some good theatre credits behind you but people look at you and they somehow can’t make the imaginative leap. It takes a little bit of time. So in some ways the film-maker in me was always there. It’s just that I also love the theatre. It was easier and cheaper to get into. By the time I got round to producing my own plays it was certainly a lot less expensive than producing anything on any kind of film. So it took me a little while and there were a couple of false starts along the way."

Where did you find the investment for Jekyll and Hyde?
"It’s still what I’m doing in some ways, although I am talking now, pitching some much larger budgeted scripts - as a matter of fact just a couple of days ago - to producers who are attached to larger, familiar Hollywood companies. I had some meetings in New York. So it has slowly cracked the door open, to be able to talk to some people. But basically I just went to rich people, I kept knocking on doors until somebody sat down long enough to say, ‘I think you’ve got something and I’ll take a risk with you. I’ll get involved.’ In some ways, maybe compared to some other film-makers, we were a little luckier there because it really didn’t take so long.

“We had the original Jekyll and Hyde investor pull out a month before shooting began. And this was devastating because when you’re working on such a tight budget, we planned it, like my theatre background, I just planned everything. The company had a little bit of money and the first stuff that was shot was the stuff in the Carew house. I had a little bit of money and I said: ‘If we delay we’re going to lose the momentum. We’re going to lose the actors that we’ve put together here at this stage, and we’ve booked the locations.’ We shot some of it in a museum and I said, ‘We’re going to lose this.’

“So I had a little bit of money and I found the investor that came through within a matter of three weeks. So the first investor took the better part of a year to find, talking to many people - and it was one person, interestingly enough, too. Some movies you have many people putting money in. But I’ve been lucky in the pictures so far that we have found people to come on board. So we found a guy, Terry Woods, who’s the executive producer, who said, ‘I see something great here.’ We had shot for a week actually! Because I had just enough money to begin shooting that August. We were shooting the location stuff because in Baltimore here on the East Coast we have a heat situation where it can get kind of brutal, and I wanted to make sure that we got the location stuff done first before we moved into the sets in the studio. Then we were very lucky, because within three weeks of meeting with Terry he said, ‘I’m in with you’ - and then we were able to do it."

Did you shoot on DV?
"It is a digital picture. Most of everything that we have right now is digital. That helped us a great deal with the budget. Cold Harbor, the drama, was shot on film, so things are kind of a mix right now. What we’re planning for 2003, the horror pictures are primarily digital."

Where has Jekyll and Hyde been shown, apart from Manchester?
"We completed the picture - and this is fascinating - and we sent a rough to Gil. He responded relatively quickly - and I don’t know why that surprised, whether it was politeness or he liked it. From the moment the sound mix and the film was finally completed, it was a matter of weeks before the Manchester festival. So we got that finished just in time because he liked it and accepted it. So Manchester was first.

“Then a few weeks later - it seems that everything has been happening in four-week increments since then - it was shown in Los Angeles at another festival called Shriekfest where it also won. It won two awards there, including something they did for me called the Shriekfest Award for my hyphenate status as an actor/producer/director. They had also - and I didn’t know this until a week before Shriekfest - accepted another film that I played the lead in, a science fiction picture called Despiser which a fellow named Philip Cook made. That’ll be on video sometime in the Spring. There’s no date for that either. He went ahead and signed a contract for American and European distribution. I don’t know what else he’s got at this point but I know sometime in the Spring it’ll be out. There is no date yet for Jekyll.

“Then we did our premiere. We missed a deadline. There’s this new thing, the New York City Horror Festival, that some folks are doing. They started as film-makers. It’s funny, we missed the deadline but they e-mailed us on the day of the deadline to tell us we didn’t make the deadline, so I’m not sure what that was about. Then in November we had our Maryland premiere here in Baltimore. Everybody of course had been hearing about things and wanting to see it. Other than that, we have sneaked it at a couple of horror conventions on the East Coast and we’re continually being asked: would you show it? So we’re probably not going to do any more festivals at this point, we’re just going to wait and see what the release date on television and video will be - which will be sometime this year."

So have you got video distribution sorted out?
"We are now sorting that out. Actually just before Christmas we were presented with three offers so we’re seeing what happens now between now and February. There’s the AFM in February. Now that the holidays are over and people are getting back to business and can look at the film, we’re giving it some more time, seeing which might be the best company to go with. But how this thing works: there might be five different contracts for all the territories in the world as we work on this throughout the year."

I guess that Maryland is not a hotbed of film-making activity.
"It is and it isn’t. The internet and digital are the great levellers. Where, ten years ago, if you took a stick and threw it five miles you could hit another film-maker, well gosh, you could drop it outside your door now and there’s someone who is thinking about picking up a digital camera and doing something. There is so much going on everywhere. So there are more people working in Maryland right now - and I think that’s the same everywhere. There are friends of friends who are talking about things everywhere.

“One of the things that we do to help pay the rent at the studio is design and build props and sets for commercials or for other films or special events. There’s the whole thing of a corporation wanting to do some sort of theme party. But there are a lot of film-makers nowadays; nobody you’ve heard of yet, some of them just like me. Maybe they’re coming up and coming out and we’re just getting to know people. Obviously if you go to New York, two and half hours from me, it’s much fiercer and there’s a lot of people up there. But I’m very close to DC, only thirty minutes from DC. So all of a sudden, exponentially, you’ve got people trying to do independent film there. So it’s interesting how it has sort of exploded, certainly in the last five years.

“And in distribution, in the film world, digital has become accepted. It’s because of Lucas pushing and the fact that Rodriguez on the higher-end Sony 24fps video did Spy Kids 2, technically on video. Distributors are coming round to it. I think the festivals were the ones who tipped that over because there was a time just recently when they didn’t want to project anything on video, you had to have a print. That’s all gone, that’s all changed. So I think once the cue starts to come from the distributors and the festivals, all of a sudden people are empowered and they’re saying: ‘I’m going to make a film.’ I’m just seeing a lot more people. I’m getting calls from film-makers, saying: ‘What advice can you give me? I’ve been reading about you. What’s going on?’

“Hotbed, I don’t know - but there are more than I thought would have been in Maryland. And of course Blair Witch sort of comes out of Maryland. I think that also empowered a lot of people who maybe could put the equivalent of $5,000-$10,000 together. That might make a good demo but believe me, a lot of the films - and I’m sure you see a good number of them, and this is not trying to be cheeky because I do know where Jekyll lives on the scale - but I’m seeing a lot of terrible stuff. Because five or ten thousand dollars doesn’t really do anything. Everybody has such great ideas. Or they’re making a zombie picture which they think is manageable and it really isn’t!"

The crucial thing in any Jekyll and Hyde film is the make-up. Where did you get yours?
"I had tried to get a production off the ground called Conjuring Aurora which is in production. It’s a comedy about a guy, played by me, who’s a magician who dreams of the big time. He dreams of the Vegas thing, the television thing, the Lance Burton thing - but he’s doing children’s parties and he lives in his van. He’s at the lowest end of his tether and through a series of circumstances, helping a friend out, he runs into a woman who dumps an eleven-year-old girl on him, who claims to be his daughter. Well, this shocks him no end. And they spend the film trying to find Lucy, the mother, and are they really father and daughter?

“I had thought of this a few years ago. I had a little girl who played Tiny Tim to my Scrooge, and her mother was my attorney at that point! And this kid was fabulous, just charming. This brewed and I came up with a little story. She has since graduated from college. So I thought about it. I saw another little girl, watching a piece of theatre a few years ago, and that kind of reminded me of the story. Then along came The Sorcerer of Stonehenge School. To make a long story short, there is a sequence at the end of the script when my character is supposed to jump 40 years into the future. So I hunted around and I found Robert Yoho.

“Years ago we didn’t do Conjuring Aurora. We shot the bulk of the stuff with the little girl back in August, then when the leaves turn green again we’ll complete the picture - because I needed to get the stuff with her before she started to physically, bodily change too much. Pre-teenagers tend to suddenly shoot up! That’s when I first met Bob. I looked at his portfolio and I said, ‘I’m going to need to do a really successful age here. We’re going into Dick Smith territory here.’ This is a comedy drama where I want them to believe the characters.

“Well, when I originally set the film up of course we didn’t make it, but I had met Bob, and Bob stayed in the back of my mind. He was the first person I called and he said, ‘Of course I’m going to do it!’ On stage, I didn’t really do anything, I just changed the vocal and the physical and mussed my hair up. I had a dentist make a set of teeth and that also helped impede my speech to a degree. I played with a lot of rolling my Rs and melodramatic things with Hyde. So we got talking about him.

“The first thing that went out the window, the first thing we agreed on, Bob and myself, was to get away from the primitive primate idea. Remember that for a number of years you couldn’t see the Fredric March version. When we were growing up it was the big mystery: why did they take it off the market. But everybody saw the photographs in Famous Monsters of the ape-like make-up. That’s the first thing out the window - we just don’t even go there. Then I think in talking about him, the key for me in some ways - and it doesn’t come up too obviously - is not the idea that he drinks the potion. Like the Tweety and Sylvester, where Tweety drinks the potion and becomes this other Tweety. I think the idea is that Jekyll drinks the potion and drops his mask. That’s what’s underneath. So we said: why don’t we think of a satyr, think of the Devil, and think of the Joker? Think of the medieval image of a grinning devil. And there’s one idea of taking that to its conclusion that didn’t fully get realised. In hindsight, when you’ve lived with a picture, you say, ‘Oh, there are all these little things I would have liked to have done.’ One, for instance: in setting it in 1900 and pulling in some of the modern technology, I really, really wanted, in hindsight, to put a 1900 automobile in Jekyll’s laboratory.”

What was the make-up idea that didn’t get realised?
“Some of the sketches actually have these bony horn things that have broken through the skin. It looks like a big zit on his forehead. But if you look carefully that’s actually starting to happen; there’s this white breakthrough on the other side as the ridge begins to build up. So we pulled back and that’s as far as we got. Stage three. Because some of the sketches have this kind of horn coming out. Perhaps I was a little nervous about that. In such a rapid conclusion, in the dark, people might say: ‘What the hell is that? Is that a piece of banana stuck on his head?’ I was really worried that we wouldn’t know what it was without him suddenly getting cloven hooves or something. We pulled that back but that’s really the idea; it’s his psychological side, it’s dropping that mask and then fantasising that. Well, if it went to its extreme, he’d have horns. It’s very, very subtle. The prosthetics just help pull his face. Even when he’s grimacing I’m trying to do it while physically staying grinning, but the prosthetics help that.”

interview originally posted 4th June 2005

interview: Edward R Pressman

I interviewed legendary producer Ed Pressman on a double decker bus at Shepperton Studios in June 2006 when I was visiting the set of Mutant Chronicles.

When did you first become attached to Mutant Chronicles?
"I think it was 1990. I was introduced to the property back in 1990 and started developing it. I don’t know the exact years but I think in 1992 or so we were supposed to start doing it with Fox. Steve Norrington was supposed to direct it. We had it set up right after The Crow came out, but that came out in 1994 so my years may be a little mixed up. But we had it set up at Fox and Steve wanted a young actor named Russell Crowe. Fox said no way. He’d just come out of a film that Brett Leonard directed at Paramount that didn’t do very well so they didn’t want Russell Crowe.

“I was feeling pretty bullish about the project and when Fox said they wanted to cut the project by five million dollars I said we didn’t really want to do it. We’d set it up elsewhere which I thought we’d do easily. Maybe a bit over confident. We didn’t set it up elsewhere very quickly and while we were trying to do that, New Line offered Steve Blade.

“So we lost our director and it remained dormant for many years. Then I met Simon Hunter five years ago and we talked about it but it didn’t go anywhere. Then a year and a half ago Simon said he had a way of doing Mutant Chronicles that was very different from what we’d talked about in the past and very different from what we’d talked about with Steve Norrington. He would like to show us a sample of what the film might look and feel like if we would sponsor a seven-minute presentation using the new technology which he’d become familiar with over the intervening years.

“He used a lot of the technology that Rodriguez had used in Sin City but Simon hadn’t seen Sin City. This was his own version of that but applied to a very different genre than Sin City was. So he did this seven-minute trailer which was very impressive. Based on that we were able to attract Thomas Jane and John Malkovich and even before we had the full cast, Nigel Green came in and other distributors around the world which enabled us to make the film purely based on Simon’s vision as presented in that seven-minute trailer."

Do you think it’s to the film’s advantage that it’s being made now, rather than the 1990s, given how effects technology has advanced?
"Absolutely. From what I’ve seen so far, the film has a very original look. It’s not derivative of so many films that came after Blade Runner and looked at the future in a certain way. Even after The Crow, there was a kind of cinematic vision that was often imitated. Simon’s vision is quite original and to make a science fiction film which is like the opening of Saving Private Ryan with mutants is a very striking, new way of doing such a movie, which wouldn’t have been possible to do back then."

Shooting an advance promo is something that micro-budget films have done but hasn’t really been tried in a film of this size before. Do you think that’s a sales model that will become more popular?
"I think it certainly should be. I guess it depends on the kind of film being made. This had a very distinct, immediate effect. Just by seeing one minute of it you got the point. Certain other films may not have such a visual sensation that a few minutes would clearly indicate. For a certain kind of movie where you’re trying to show a certain style and visual approach that’s something different, I think it is a good idea."

How has the script changed?
"Oh, the script changed radically. After the Mutant Chronicles script was first done, there were things from that script which got used in other movies like Pitch Black and its sequel. They almost seemed derivative of what the original Mutant Chronicles script was. So we had to really reconceive it and Simon wanted to reconceive the story and the script so that it wasn’t derivative of itself or the films that followed it. A lot of work was done, ironically with the original writer because Simon went back to Phil Eisner after going through four other writers. In the intervening years there were five writers that took a hand in doing versions of the script and in the end it came back to Philip who was not attached to his original words and made some major changes under Simon’s guidance."

When you met Simon, had you seen Lighthouse and what did you think of it?
"I thought Lighthouse was a very impressive first film with a very modest budget, a successful job. With Simon himself and getting to know him, the biggest impression was seeing his command of the technology which was very impressive. Again, that was through the process of working with him on this little seven-minute trailer. It wasn’t simply talking about what he could do but actually executing it and coming in under budget, and getting to know him. When we first met, I remember that the director he most admired was David Lean so he was actually bringing a storytelling element to a different kind of genre and I think that’s a great combination, to not just be about the effect and the appearance but also to know about good storytelling. As a film-maker, I think he’s going to have a very bright future."

There’s a very long post-production schedule and it’s not out until 2008. How can you maintain the interest of distributors and audiences in something that takes that long?
"That’s an interesting challenge and that’s something that we’re wrestling with right now. My initial impulse is to announce with a teaser ad in the trades that production has begun on the Mutant Chronicles but it doesn’t make sense to say ‘coming spring 2008’. Do you want to start laying the groundwork on something that’s so far away or does it make sense to lay low until further down the line?"

Do you see Mutant Chronicles as a potential franchise?
"Yes, I certainly do. The world of Mutant Chronicles is very rich and there are many stories that could be told. It’s something we’ve always felt and I think Simon agrees. The first film is going to be very bold and R-rated and tough, something that’s not trying to compromise in any way on what a film should be. Down the line we could soften it up and appeal to a broader fanbase but right now we’re going for the hardcore audience."

You seem to have a lot of interesting projects in development. What’s coming up next?
"From an effects point of view we have an interesting movie coming out in November which is called Fur which is a film Steve Shainberg directed, the fellow who directed Secretary, with Nicole Kidman playing Diane Arbus and Robert Downey Jr paying this very hairy man. Kind of a compilation of all the freaks that Diane Arbus photographed are in the person of this almost wolfman character that Downey plays and the relationship between the two. We just finished shooting a film called Sisters which is a remake of the Brian DePalma movie."

That’s Douglas Buck’s film, isn’t it?
"Doug Buck is the director and he’s done a splendid job. We’re seeing the first cut, the director’s cut in two weeks. It stars Chloe Sevigny and Stephen Rae and a young French actress named Lou Doillon. We hope to have that ready to show the world at the end of the year."

A lot of people have been waiting a long time for Doug to do a proper movie because his shorts are so extraordinary.
"We were introduced to him through another film-maker named Larry Fessenden who was executive producer on the film. He told us how Doug was such a fan of Sisters and introduced us to his shorts, so that’s how that got going."

I notice that you’re also lining up a remake of Phantom of the Paradise.
"That’s right. That’s something which we’re looking for the right director because the original Phantom has a real cult following. There’s a convention every year in Vancouver now for Phantom of the Paradise fans and they invite Gerrit Graham and Bill Finley and treat them like kings. I think doing a film about the music business today could be a very exciting movie but until we find a film-maker it’s just an idea right now.”

website: www.pressman.com

interview: Robert Pratten (2006)

In June 2006, two years after our first interview, Robert Pratten sent me some photos of preparations for his second film, MindFlesh (adapted from the Buddhist horror novel White Light by William Scheinman). He also kindly answered some e-mail questions about the project.

What made you want to film this book and have closely have you followed it? (Presumably you have moved the story from San Francisco to London...)
“I met Bill (the author) in Phoenix at the World Horror Convention in 2004. I read a couple of his short stories and they were brilliant. I asked for more and liked them and when Bill told me he was working on a novel I said I wanted to be the first to read it! So, around November or December 2004 when I got Bill’s novel White Light, I just couldn't put it down and I called him to option it straight away. Since then I've been working on the adaptation to the screen, moving the story from San Fran to London  - which was easy - and translating the characters' thinking and internal dialogue to visual images and actions - which was hard!

“Then, at Cannes 2005, a producer and I pitched the project to Thai production companies to get the film made out in Bangkok. We struck lucky and on July 7th, while the bombs were going off in London, I was in Bangkok discussing how we were going to shoot the film there - having rewritten the script and set it in Thailand. By November 2005 it became clear that, although we had half the money from Thailand, the other half from the US wasn't going to come through and I decided I would shoot in London again! So it's been a long process but I have to say quite an enjoyable and exciting one.”

What exactly is ‘Buddhist horror’?
“Well, I could say ‘anything horrific written by a Buddhist’ which sounds like I'm being a smartarse but I mean it's a horror film or novel by someone with a different world view - a Buddhist point of view. There are various Buddhist views expressed in the film but I guess the key one is the idea that our minds create our own reality and that a single thought can change our environment. Bill is actually a bona fide practising Buddhist who, among other things, teaches meditation to prisoners in San Francisco. I'd like to be a Buddhist but I'm just not disciplined enough!”

What cast/crew names can you give me at this stage?
”The lead male role hasn't been cast yet but we do have our goddess - a French actress called Carole Derrien - and Chris Fairbank (Alien3, The Bunker) will play a character called Verdain who's a rather nasty parapsychologist. On the crew side, I'm delighted to have Patrick Jackson (London Voodoo) on cinematography, Arban Severin (Steven Severin's missus) composing and, of course, Sangeet Prabhaker as our prosthetics wizard!”

With the monster, why have you gone for a good old-fashioned suit instead of the CGI that one might expect?
“However much money you spend on CGI, the monsters still look like CGI monsters. With prosthetics I can get a monster that better integrates with the photography but also with the action. Inside the suit is an actress called Charlotte Milchard who is absolutely fantastic. It's still early stages - there's about another three weeks of work on the suit - but Sangeet and his team (Satinder Chumber, Andy Fordham and James Adams) have crafted a work of art. It's been very rewarding discussing the character and backstory of the creature and seeing how Sangeet has interpreted that into his sculpture.”

What did you learn from London Voodoo that you are able to apply to this project?
“Well, everything really - none of that experience is lost. What's different about MindFlesh is that it's very effects heavy including stuff shot against green screen so technically that's interesting and challenging in equal measure.”

When do you expect to start shooting and when might we expect to see the finished film?
“First day of photography is October 2nd 2006 but I'm aiming for a January 2008 release date. It'll take about a year in post-production - probably about six months just rendering the effects!”

website: www.conducttr.com
interview originally posted 23rd June 2006

Behind the scene on Mindflesh

interview: Robert Pratten (2004)

Robert Pratten wrote, directed and produced one of the best British horror films of recent years, London Voodoo. I spoke with him by phone on 16th April 2004; part of this interview appeared in Fangoria but most of it has not been seen before. (Two years later, I interviewed Rob again as he prepared his second feature, MindFlesh.)

Where did the original idea for London Voodoo come from?
"I think the original idea came from the murders in the Thames. They dragged up a young boy’s body who was the victim of a ritualistic killing. That got me interested in investigating bit more. As I looked into voodoo, which people were saying it was first off, I found not the religion that’s often shown in films as being nasty and evil, but a religion that provides comfort to a lot of people. And I thought, maybe I can take a look at this and do something different with it."

Were you looking for a subject for a horror film at the time?
"Yes, I wanted to make a horror film."

Something that you could do without a lot of effects and make-up?
"Yes, exactly. I was thinking in terms of the development of the genre, and some of the earliest films I like are by Roman Polanski like Rosemary’s Baby. If you look at it, the genre went through the slasher period of the 1980s and then we were getting these comedy parodies and so on. So I thought: where do I go? I don’t want to keep making stuff more and more violent, so why don’t I go back and try and do something that looks back, with a bit of suspense and intrigue, rather than have all the gore and violence right in your face."

Is there a bit of a Val Lewton influence there?
"I don’t know. We went travelling. We went to Miami, to New Orleans obviously and to Cuba. What we found in Cuba and Miami particularly was Santaria, which is a kind of offshoot of voodoo. People have integrated it as part of their lives. I thought, well, this is the voodoo that I want to show; not the voodoo of The Serpent and the Rainbow. I didn’t want to do that kind of thing because it was set in London and I couldn’t have people rushing around cutting the heads off chickens. I needed to find a new way in. I tried to find the spiritual side of voodoo, rather than the shock tactic of voodoo."

How long did you spend researching voodoo before you wrote the script?
"It went on in conjunction to be honest. It started off with just the few bits I knew, with a little bit of web research. Then I continued to write it as we went travelling and investigated, and in the first draft of the script, which was probably after about three or four months, one of the people who reviewed the script said, ‘It reads like a voodoo handbook’! So I had to cut back a bit on the voodoo and stick more with the plot and the main characters. So in total it took about nine months to finish the script and sixteen drafts."

The people with knowledge of voodoo that you spoke to, what did they think about their beliefs being the basis for a horror movie? Were they a bit cautious?
"Oh yes! Absolutely, because as a group they feel much maligned. Every voodoo film that comes out shows them as these evil types. When we got talking, we actually interviewed a white voodoo priest called Ross Hagen. He’s quite well-known in voodoo circles! In fact he’s the only properly initiated voodoo priest in Britain and he’s been very supportive of the project. In fact on the DVD there’s a twenty-minute interview with him. We went to interview him, the documentary unit, and then we’ve intercut his interview with bits from the film. In the film we don’t really explain the voodoo as such, we just get on with the story. then if you look at this interview, the significance of some of the things they do is revealed in that. He’s been quite supportive, particularly because we are showing it to be a religion that gives people comfort in their lives."

Where did you get your funding?
"It’s financed privately. We mortgaged our house to provide the bulk of it. My wife is a chartered accountant and she’s quite well connected with different people. We put together the script and a selection of the short films I’ve made as a package, then we went and got that. Once we had Steven Severin on board things moved a lot faster because he was somebody outside our circle of friends that had faith in the project. To be honest, it really gathered momentum from that moment on."

How did you get Steve Severin on board?
"I used to be a punk before I went into corporate life, so I’ve always been a Siouxsie fan. I was listening to the Join Hands album; there’s a track on there called ‘Icons’ with pounding drums and I was listening to that as I was writing the script. I thought, what about Steven Severin - this is right up his street, if you look at the different themes which are explored in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ music. So I e-mailed him via his website, just a four-line thing saying, ‘I’m doing this film about love and sacrifice and it involves voodoo in London.’ It was a long while because they were touring at the time, but he got back to me - I was amazed he even responded. I’d forgotten about it and got on with the script. He said, ‘Oh yes, I might be interested. Send me the script.’ So I sent him the script and he got back to me and said, ‘It’s refreshingly clear of all the usual clichés. I’m interested - let’s meet up.’ Then when we met up we found we both liked the films of Nicolas Roeg and David Lynch so we had stuff to talk about. Then what we did: in the film there’s a couple of montage sequences and Steven wrote the music before we did any filming on those. Then I was able to listen to that and think of different images before we went into filming, so it’s been quite a collaborative thing in that regard."

Where did you find your cast and crew?
"The crew is mainly friends of mine from film school and other people we’ve worked with on short films together. The cast, some of the supporting roles like Roy Hollett who plays one of the builders, Steve Halloran who plays the boss, they were the best actors from the short films that I’ve made. But the leads - Doug, Sara, Vonda - we auditioned them. We went through the Spotlight casting directory, looking for people with film experience and then had them in for an audition."

What sort of short films had you done?
"A mix really, because I was at the London Film School for two years so I’ve made seven in total. Three at the film school as part of the curriculum and then another four afterwards on DV or super-16. They’re a mix, they’re not really out and out horror films but there’s a couple there that look at spirituality, life and death and suchlike. But nothing that you could stick on the DVD! I treated those really as training exercises because when I gave up work, I gave it up to make a feature film. I knew that was what I was getting into so I just tried to make as many films as possible and explore different things each time I made one."

Did you shoot the feature on DV or film?
"We shot on super-16 then all our rushes were telecine-ed and put in the computer at home here. What we did was we edited in Avid Xpress DV and we output the cut film onto DVD and VHS in order to do the test screenings. Then we output the EDL, the edit decision list, the negative was cut and that was scanned at high def into a computer in Switzerland, professionally graded and then printed back to 35mm. So now what you see doesn’t resemble DV, now it looks like we definitely shot on film, thank goodness."

There’s a lot of night-time stuff where the cinematography is crucial.
"Exactly. It looks really nice now and we’ve got a Dolby digital surround track - so when the bass comes in, you really feel it! It’s a different experience in the theatre!"

There’s a British horror film revival. Do you feel part of that?
"Yes, I do. I think it’s good to be part of that. I’ve already started writing my next one and that’s going to be a British horror. I think it’s good and I hope that the revival continues."

Did you want this to be a distinctly British film?
"Yes, I did. I’m from London obviously and I think one of the ways that film-makers make their films original is by drawing on things from their past experience. Sometimes I think people try to be original but their stuff is so quirky, so original that no-one can relate to it. So I think just drawing on your own personal experience, that makes it original enough - to have stuff in there that audiences can relate to and yet still use the genre framework. Bodies in the basement, possession - they’re things that followers of horror films look forward to seeing and they want to see how you’ve done it different this time. So that’s what I tried to mix in."

What reaction have you had from screenings?
"It’s been really good. The best thing we did was a test screening back in September. There was 160 people, mainly horror fans with a mixture of goths and Swedes thrown in as well. They anonymously filled out questionnaires and we asked them about the pacing, which scenes they liked, and so on. We cut about another five to seven minutes from the film, mainly from the start of the film, before we committed to the final edit. And that helped no end! The last screening we did was in Phoenix at the World Horror Convention last weekend and people were coming up and shaking my hand going, ‘Outstanding!’ We’ve mainly showed it in the States and they really like it."

Is that because it’s so British?
"I think it’s partly that. We thought that the reaction would be good because 28 Days Later had done so well. But the reaction we’re getting is not so much because it’s British but because it’s - to quote one reviewer - ‘going back to the glory days.’ People in Phoenix, what they said they liked is that it credits the viewer with some intelligence. That’s what they really like about it; somebody taking their genre seriously and not tongue-in-cheek with a little wink at the camera: ‘Of course this is all nonsense.’ That’s really the type of film I wanted to make. I wanted to make a serious film, although there’s light-hearted moments in it, but I wanted to try to be as realistic as possible - like the Polanski ones."

You’ve got this deal with Heretic. What other deals have you got?
"No-one else as yet. We started the screenings in America then we’re spiralling out. We’ve had a good reaction in the UK but we’ve not signed with anyone yet. We’re still talking with different people. And the same is true with international sales. Bearing in mind that we only printed the 35mm at the end of January so it’s literally hot off the press."

What’s your next film?
"I don’t want to say too much about the plot yet because I know from before that when you’re developing the idea it changes quite a lot. But it’s definitely a horror movie with a little bit of science fiction, and it’s set in England again; not London but the green belt somewhere. At the moment I’ve done about 90% of the script - but it’s the other 10% which takes 90% of the work. What happens is you find a lot of half-baked ideas; some get thrown out and some get baked through fully!"

website: www.conducttr.com
interview originally posted 9th August 2005

interview: Chris Ruppenthal

Chris Ruppenthal was the Supervising Producer and writer on Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I interviewed him by phone on 22nd February 1996 for SFX's big Lois and Clark feature.

When did you come on to the series?
"I came on in the middle of November last year. About the middle of season two."

As Supervising Producer, are you pretty much running the shop?
"Well it's pretty much clear. There's Executive Producers, Brad and Eugenie and Bob Singer, and then there are two Supervising Producers under them, me and John McNamara, and other people under us. But I'd say we're all pretty much equals in some ways, in how we write our scripts and deal with that. Then in the final moments is when the Executive Producers will have final say on script dialogue or casting or anything else like that."

When you're writing a script, do you have to pitch the idea?
"What we usually do is we all sit around in a room and try to determine where do we want the series to go for the entire year, and then in the shorter term, where do we want to go in the next three or four episodes, if we have a story arc. So then we say, 'Okay, I'll take the wedding episode, then we'll do one here where this happens, after the wedding' and there's a three- or four-part arc about Lois and Clark getting married and what happens afterwards. Then we will generally discuss: 'Okay, you're doing this episode. We need to set this part of the story up, or resolve this part of the story arc, or whatever.' Then we individually go away and write a short outline of what we'd like our own individual episode to be.

“Then we turn in the outline, everybody reads it, we all sit down again and give notes to each other on the outlines. We can say, 'Gee, I think the end of act two is sort of weak,' or 'Boy, I love this thing. Can we have more of Lois and Clark doing this?' Or simple questions like, 'Now why did they find the bent spoon outside the doorway?' and you go, 'Well, it's obvious isn't it? Because of this…' So we just go over it and, if we need to, we revise that outline and go over it again. That gets the final stamp of approval and then we go off and write a script."

Some of the things that are happening in the series are pretty major. Do you have to clear them with DC Comics?
"Every script we write, when we have an outline for an upcoming episode we send an outline to DC Comics. And the President of DC, he sends notes back to us with his comments on it. We take those into consideration but we are not slaves to them. It's not only DC but more how our own studio, Warner Brothers, and also how ABC Network feels about this thing. They had some concern about Lois finding out that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, so we had to allay their fears and tell them, 'Don't worry, the series won't die once she finds out. There are plenty of good things we can do with her knowing about Superman.' So it's much more the network and the studio rather than DC. DC's been pretty supportive of what we do. Even if they don't agree on it – which they often don't – they still remain pretty supportive."

Do you think the series has a natural lifespan, or will it go on indefinitely?
"I can see it going on for quite some time. I certainly can see no difficulty in the series going three or four more years. Then we'll have been on the air for six years, and after six or seven years, I think almost any series gets a little tired. But I think certainly Lois and Clark could go on for a number of years and be quite entertaining, and just slowly and surely move forward in the progression of Lois and Clark and their relationship."

What did you do before Lois and Clark?
"I've done a lot of things. I worked as a consultant on two episodes of The X-Files. I worked on Quantum Leap for three years. I worked in London on a short-lived American series called Teddington Cross. It only aired one time – the pilot – in England but I had offices in downtown London and we shot out at Shepperton Studios. It was a sort of mediaeval family drama and it starred Nigel Terry, Cheri Lunghi, James Barker, among others. Jonathon Firth was in it. Then before that I worked on Moonlighting and I also worked on a comedy called Sledge Hammer. That was what I first started writing on in television."

Is there a difference between working on fantasy series and more realistic series?
"All the series I've worked on have all been character driven. As science fiction-y as Quantum Leap can be or even Lois and Clark can be at times, they're very much character driven and that's certainly what appeals to me. And usually male-female character driven, the romantic angle. It can be different. I find some shows just don't appeal to me. There's something about that man-woman battle of the sexes that I find very entertaining and enjoyable to write about and explore. I think that helps separate it from other series.

“As far as the science fiction attitude, we try not to view it ourselves as science fiction. We have a dual personality: one is the Lois and Clark relationship which is our main focus; and the second one is an entertaining villain that sometimes is just comical, sometimes a little serious. That appeals to me because it stretches your mind. What's fantastic that you can come up with that's not so unbelievable as to be a turn-off, but also is entertaining? It's trying to balance those two worlds – relationship along with fantastic action – that's fun and a challenge."

I get the impression from people that Lois and Clark is a fun series to be on.
"It is a fun series to be on, it really is. You have to take it with a grain of salt because we sit there in intense discussions, debates - if not arguments - about some aspect of a story. Then suddenly we'll all go, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait a minute! We're talking about a guy who wears tights! I guess I can believe that a mad scientist would do this.' We have an episode that's filming right now where there is a device in it called the 'vibro-whammy'. It's so ridiculous and wonderful-sounding, and then you have debates over this imaginary thing: 'Well, how does the vibro-whammy work?' 'Can it really do this? I don't think a vibro-whammy could do this to a person?' So then you make up rules about what a vibro-whammy can or cannot do. This was a script by David Simpkins and it's just a wonderful device. It's a perfect example of a wonderful thing you can do which will help the story along. You create this imaginary evil machine, and yet it helps the Lois and Clark relationship in a way. So that's one of the fun things about Lois and Clark."

What are the cast like to work with?
"They're very nice. Dean and Teri just have that magic chemistry. There is some special vibe that goes on between them that comes across on screen and makes it enjoyable to watch their relationship. You really want to invite them into your home and figure out what's going to happen to them this week. They pretty much will do anything you say as far as: 'Lois is thrown into a giant mud-vat and then is chased across the airport runway.' Teri Hatcher's game to do that."

It does seem that nearly every episode finds some way for Teri Hatcher to get into some interesting costume. It seems like people are going out of their way to say, 'What can we get Lois to dress up in this week?'
"I confess, we sometimes think about that. Also I think Teri is very proud of her looks, and rightfully so. So I don't think she's averse at all to doing that. She won't do anything too risque or too revealing but she's happy with the way she looks, and we're happy she is!"

You've got to be careful. It's a family show.
"Exactly."

What about the minor characters like Jimmy and Perry? Do you prefer to integrate them into the action or use them as comic relief?
"It varies from episode to episode. Sometimes there's only room for them as comic relief or to help explain story points or exposition or something like that. Other times, it's very interesting to have the emphasis on a story about them. Towards the end of Season Two of Lois and Clark we did a story called 'Target: Jimmy Olsen' which was obviously about Jimmy. And there's one in season three coming up called 'The Dad Who Came in from the Cold', which is about Jimmy's father appearing. Then we've given Perry White a little bit of a character arc this whole season, season three, which is: he breaks up with his wife Alice, who we've never really seen, and starts to enter into a divorce with her, and then will go through the trials and tribulations of starting to date. As an older, middle-aged man dating, he's a little leery about the whole thing.

“So we try to give all our characters a little bit of an arc so they aren't just totally comic relief or something else. It's difficult to juggle all these plotlines in every episode, so some episodes have more Jimmy and Perry in them than others. Or something will happen when we find a character that we like and it helps. There is a scientist, Dr Klein at Star Labs who first gets introduced I think, in 'The Dad Who Came in from the Cold'. We've just found out that we'd like to use Dr Klein. We like the actor. We'd like to go to Star Labs and have a little comic moment with him. He's fun. So sometimes there's just a fortuitous and happy discovery."

Interview originally posted 18th December 2005