La Horde

From a cathartic, heart wrenching experience with Colin, Mayhem is thrown into sharp relief with its next movie: a preview of the 2010 French language film La Horde. Continuing the zombie theme, this time the undead mean business, in one of the goriest zombie sieges I’ve seen in some time.

When 4 police officers enter a gang hideout to avenge the murder of a colleague they could never expect that they would soon have to ally with his murderers to stand any chance of survival.

From the minute the first zombie bashes down the doors and devours one of the henchmen, before taking 7 full clips of ammunition without even seeming to notice, the film sets off at a frightening pace, racing through the dark corridors and staircases as the unlikely alliance (along with a frankly insane old war veteran) fight for survival, armed with shotguns, chain guns, grenades, and a trusty pickaxe.

The audience becomes encapsulated in the chase, as seemingly the last 7 people alive are forced to watch as one by one they’re picked off, either being bitten or sacrificing themselves to save the rest.

It’s so different to the movie which precedes it and yet it’s equally brilliant. For a genre fan this has everything you could possibly want. Blood, unstoppable amounts of zombies, dark enclosed spaces which leave practically no room for escape. This is going to go down in the books as one of the great zombie genre movies. A fantastic addition to Mayhem 2009!

JAMES GORDON

Mayhem Horror Film Festival Begins!

The Mayhem Horror Film Festival got underway tonight with one of the most hotly anticipated zombie movies in years: Colin. Made on a budget of just £45 (which director Marc Price admits was spent mainly on biscuits), the movie follows one zombie: Colin, as he journey’s through the world of the undead, trying to make sense of his new place in the world.

As with all high profile films, there is always the question of whether it will live up to the huge hype surrounding it, but Colin doesn’t disappoint. This “zombiespective” film is something new and exciting in a genre where there is usually a near universal formula of: Human hero has to survive zombie apocalypse. With this there is no chance of survival. Colin is bitten within the opening 30seconds, and has changed fully by the next scene.

And yet, you find the most humanity in Colin himself. Unlike any other zombie movie, you find yourself actually really caring about the fate of this particular zombie, rather than just seeing him as a mindless member of the horde. The empathy we feel for him is a huge success on Price’s part, as well as that of Alastair Kirton, who plays Colin.

Filmed entirely on a mini-DV camcorder the film has a gritty and real feel to it, with many of the over exposures and other imperfections left in, but it just works that way. As Price asserts in the Q+A which follows the screening; “Mini-DV will never look like film, and if you try it just looks fake and bad, so I decided it worked better as it was” and I have to agree, the film doesn’t suffer but in fact is added to by its imperfections. It gives it a sense of character.

All in all then, a great way to kick of the fest, and if everything is this good, its going to be one hell of a weekend.

Interview with Director Marc Price

James Gordon for Mayhem (JG): I’m here with Marc Price, director, writer, producer, editor and lets face it just about the whole crew for Colin. It’s great to have you here for the festival Marc

Marc Price (MP): Thank you. It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve done so far. It’s so different showing it to a room of people who don’t know the genre and showing it at a horror fest. Here there is no room for error. Either it went well or I was going to get something thrown at me on the way out.

JG: Oh there was no danger of that. The audience seemed to absolutely love it – I know I did.

MP: Thank you so much. You have no idea how much that means.

JG: So, given the incredibly low budget, what did you expect to happen with this movie? You couldn’t possibly have predicted this amount of exposure for it I guess?

MP: I was going to go on the horror forums online, set up a few fake avatars and try and get a discussion going about it, saying “I’ve heard about this movie”…

JG: Ah the good old discussion with yourself for 50 posts

MP: Exactly! And then hopefully someone else would stumble into the thread and say “hmmm what’s this all about then” and I would send them a copy. I honestly didn’t think anything else was going to happen with it. We ended up screening at Abertoir which is this welsh film festival, which is where Helen Grace saw it. She asked Gareth Bailey who was organising if there was anything worth seeing and he said “yeah there’s this film Colin”, and she watched it and rang me up and said: Ususally I do web on demand stuff, but I reckon we can get a DVD release. And I sorta said…

JG: “Hmm…yes please!”? [laughs]

MP: [also laughing] It was definitely something like that. So I signed with her and it was amazing. She was much braver pushing the film than I was. I was always much more nervous, just sort of mentioning it here and there, saying maybe you could check this out, and I’d send it to the horror sites for review and stuff, but she forced it on people. I met up with Ian Rattray at FrightFest, and got talking to him about Battlestar Galactica or whatever but I didn’t want to say “Oh you should see my film”, because he seemed to like me. He might not like me as much once he’d seen it. [laughs]

JG: What goes through your mind when, as an independent film maker, the word Cannes hits? When you get that phone call saying that its been booked?

MP: Honestly: waste of money. I’m living in my overdraft. I couldn’t afford to be flying to a foreign country to see my movie. But thankfully Helen [Grace] found us some cheap flights and my girlfriend found a cheap hotel and we just went. It was the most amazing experience. That was actually where this whole £45 thing came from. The point of going to Cannes was to prove we were at Cannes basically. So we wanted to find any article that proved we were there, knowing it would be easier to sell to a distributor. So on the second night Helen slips this piece of paper across the table and it read, without a word of a lie: “Colin, directed by Marc Price, Budget: £800,000” (JG: [gasps] what?!?!) and I basically said: oh crap. If people see this movie and are expecting an £800,000 movie, we’ll be done for. They’ll think we embezzled it and bought a house somewhere or something. But that’s when Helen realised she didn’t know how much it cost. She asked, assuming it would be about £4-500 and I just laughed, telling her it was more like £40, £45 tops. And she said: you have to tell people that. That’s the selling point for this movie. I’d always thought that myself because it would put the audience in the right frame of mind. They’d expect low budget so when you get to the street fight and the house scene at the end, they’d be surprised.

JG: Absolutely. You really do sit there thinking: how did you manage to get so much of this done for so little money. Seriously: I think you did a great job with what you had.

MP: Thank you. Thank you so much for saying that.

JG: Something I really loved about the movie, and you alluded to it in the Q+A was that you didn’t try to hard to fix the imperfections in the shots. There are shots which are massively over exposed…

MP: The bathroom scene in particular

JG: …right! It really works like that though. The contrast of Colin there against this almost white background from the overexposure, it adds this whole other dimension to the movie.

MP: Totally.

JG: What I love about Colin as a character is that, even as a zombie, he is the most human person in it. We’re rooting for him even though he’s a mindless zombie.

MP: That’s what I was trying for. I was trying to get the audience to connect with him in a way they didn’t know if they could, so by the time you get to the scene at the end, where it comes full circle, and you see the road-sign and you realise you’re going into the flashback, the emotional payoff is immense.

JG: Well you totally succeeded on that front. That payoff as he stumbles through the door and you realise that he’s human, and that it’s a flashback to before he gets bitten… my mouth dropped. But it wasn’t contrived either. It worked. Because you felt so strongly about Colin as a character, you almost needed that scene proving that the humanity we bestowed on him wasn’t misplaced. He followed the girl because he did remember her, he remembered the road sign, he remembered everything, and even when he had turned, he still tried to find his way back home to the girl.

MP: Exactly.

JG: Well thank you for talking to us Marc.

MP: No problem, any time!

JAMES GORDON

ScreenLit Closing Party

And so the first ever ScreenLit Festival has come to an end. But not before we see it out with a big party!

Starting with a few thank you’s to everyone who worked on the festival, the cafebar was packed out as Plaster Of Paris, the band from Unmade Beds the final movie shown at the festival, took to the floor.

Clearly pleasing the crowd, they get huge cheers and it’s clear that everyone in  Broadway wants to party the night away.

As the band finish their set the DJ’s take over blasting out brilliant tunes, while the revellers make sure the bar staff don’t get a spare minute the whole night as the drinking and revelling continues.

As the party nears its climax, the complete staff, everyone from the front of house, to the projectionists, to the DJ’s, to even my humble self, assemble on the staircase in front of the huge ScreenLit sign that has adorned the staircase all week, for one final photograph before we all go our separate ways.

In a week then which has had a UK premier, a rare masterclass from a Screenwriting legend, a whole bunch of talks and Q+A’s with so many greats in British cinema and books, and of course a whole range of amazing movies, this party is just the cherry on top of the cake.

I don’t think it would be presumptuous to say: This will not be the last time Broadway hosts a festival like this! Roll on next year!
JAMES GORDON

Nottingham Writers Studio presents: Show and Tell

The premise of this event was to see (and hear in the case of one radio play) 3 screenplays, and then hear from the writers on how they had differed from the original script or the original premise.

Washdays, a short film about a boy who has a problem with wetting the bed, and isn’t sure how to deal with it, was originally supposed to be a story for weekday series Doctors, however when the script editor said that he wouldn’t take it the premise was adapted into the potent film we see on screen today.

Bollywood Jane the story of a white girl who gets involved in Bollywood cinema was going to be a TV series when the concept first came to light, however, the script was never picked up, and eventually the story is adapted for a BBC radio play and this is the form we hear it in.

This then is the world of screenwriting. As the writers are quick to point out (echoing Paul Schrader in his masterclass earlier this week) “There is the film you write, the film you shoot, and the film you edit”, and those are 3 very different entities. Just because you have an idea to start with, don’t be surprised if it turns out to be something very different by the time you’re done with it.
JAMES GORDON

Red Riding Trilogy

Based on David Pearce’s noir novels of the same name, the Red Riding Trilogy are a brutal and epically sad collection of movies that provide an enduring yet rewarding experience. Screened back to back here at the ScreenLit Festival, this is a 5hour stint not for the faint hearted.

Based on a series of child abductions and murders, the fictional story draws on real-life events (such as the Yorkshire Ripper Murders). It presents a bleak view of the corruption and tyranny within the West Yorkshire Police force, and right from the very beginning you can tell why this whole series is rated 18.

The 3 films cover 3 different years: (The year of our lord:) 1974, 1980 and 1983

The first movie follows young journalist Edward Dunford, a new crime reporter on the Yorkshire Post, who sets out to prove a connection between a series of child abductions after one young girl, Clare Kemplay, is found dead shortly after her abduction, brutally tortured, raped and murdered.

The second follows Peter Hunter, a squeaky clean senior detective, assigned by the Home Office to report on how the West Yorkshire police were dealing with the Yorkshire Ripper murders. But in a world where corruption is everywhere, can even the cleanest of men stay out of its grip?

The final piece of the puzzle, follows John Piggott, a solicitor who, after another child is taken, realises the man originally convicted of the murders has been framed. Working against the corruption, he finds an ally in Morris Jobson (David Morrissey), who, after so long deeply embroiled in the corruption of the police force, finally realises it is time to right the wrongs and follow a new path.

That is not to say that Jobson, or Dunford, or Piggott are heroic characters. They may be working to uncover the evils and the wrong, but ultimately they are all responsible for their own wrongs. No one truly escapes the problem, and sometimes to try and ensure that some good can prevail you have to do wrong.

This series is really not for the weak-stomached. It is very graphic, and even the most avid horror fan, used to blood and guts, as I am, cannot be prepared for the sheer visual brutality you see in these 3 movies, particularly the last one. TV has not been this powerful for a long time. A superb adaptation.

JAMES GORDON

Moon

In space they say no one can hear you scream, and this has never been truer than in this paranoia driven story of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) who, towards the end of his 3 year stint living alone on a moonbase harvesting energy, finds himself encountering strange hallucinations of his daugther.

Kept in a state of seclusion, as the live satellite link to Earth has stopped working, he lives with only his friend GERTY, a robot brilliantly voiced by Kevin Spacey, with a smiley face on its monitor which changes depending on the robot’s mood.

At first this seems like a relatively pleasant experience.  Sam is lonely but he is within just 2 weeks of ending his stint, and he and GERTY seem to be getting along ok. Things change when Sam’s moonbuggy crashes and he awakes back in the base to overhears GERTY making a live transmission to earth – something he thought impossible – and very soon finds himself encountering a man who has his face, his body, his memories. Has he gone mad or is this really happening? What is going on?

Director Duncan Jones has, by putting his protagonist somewhere no one can help him, truly created the perfect metaphor for paranoia. When there is only yourself, and the monotony of life, how can anyone remain sane, and what does reality even mean?

A film that will excite sci-fi fans, and enthral fans of a thriller based on the elements of paranoia. When this is released on July17th, it’s a must see!
JAMES GORDON

Bang Short Films at ScreenLit Festival

This hour long programme of 9 shorts, from directors based in the Midlands, highlighted the immense level of talent across the region.

Highlights included music video I Don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, a cartoon in which a cynical man is walking along a street, singing about how he refuses to believe in the super natural, in ghosts, aliens or (as the title suggests) the Loch Ness monster, while being berated (although he doesn’t realise it) by aliens the whole way through the movie.

On a completely different front we get a (sort of) Bollywood style piece Guy Noo Bhajan, about a magic cow which has seemingly fallen from the sky into a young boy’s front yard, only to inexplicably become part of a Bollywood dance number. Don’t ask. You had to see it. It was brilliant though, just trust me on that.

Again another different style of movie comes in 3 Mans and 9 Ladies, a piece in which 3 street-wise young guys find themselves in the world of country rights protestors, living in tents and a caravan which they’ve rigged to a system of pullies so that it sits in a tree. This juxta-position of the city boys in the country is highly effective, and gets huge laughs from the crowd, as it is simply so out of place.

Finishing the series was Shane Meadows Docu-short King of the Gypsies. It tells the story of a bare knuckle boxing champion, nicknamed the King of the Gypsies, after his father before him. He follows the family line, and becomes world champion of this gypsy fighting circle. Although now retired, he has said that in the business, one never really gets to retire, unless they’re on 2 crutches and can barely move. Until that point it really still is just a waiting game until the next fight begins.

With a full Bang Shorts festival coming to the Broadway from November 27-29, this short (excuse the pun) taster was enough to whet the appetites of the crowd, and it will be very interesting to see what comes of that festival as we get to see more great shorts from the region.
JAMES GORDON

Hillsborough and Jimmy McGovern Q+A

Even 13 years after its original airing on ITV, Jimmy McGovern’s immortal dramatisation of the events of the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans tragically lost their lives at the FA Cup semi-final in 1989, is still seen to be the definitive version of events as we know them. It also explores the inquests which followed, which, despite huge levels of evidence that the police were to blame for the tragedy, no one has ever been prosecuted for.

This then is a story of the ultimate injustice, and a story which the families of the 96 dead, who formed the Hillsborough Families Support Group, wanted to get told. They gave McGovern access to their stories and under the careful eyes of lawyers both for the families, ITV, and especially the West Yorkshire Police, the film was made.

The movie uses actor reconstructions with actual archive news footage, showing that this is not a Hollywood exaggeration, this is the actual horror of nearly 100 people being killed. Indeed, the scenes during the opening of the movie, in which you see the fans being crushed around the gates of the ground, building up to the eventual crush as they are all forced into one pen which is already over flowing (while others remain almost empty), make for totally uncomfortable viewing.

McGovern said that upon showing the film to the families of the dead upon its creation they were completely silent for almost half an hour after the film ended, and he knew from this it had succeeded. He also said that they had had an almost unprecedented amount of access to the script. Any page of the script which involved a certain family, that family would have to OK that page. McGovern did not want to get anything wrong, and this pays off on screen, and you truly get the feeling that this is an authentic version of events.

There are scenes in the movie, checked by ITV’s creative controller for accuracy (which do stand to be true), of the Police deliberately trying to cover their own responsibility, the commanding officer ordering his men to write nothing down, and even the pathologist phoning a police officer to force him to change his story so that it fits the official line when it comes to the court case. They played up the idea that a crowd of drunk unticketed fans caused the problems – something which, when one looks at the evidence, simply isn’t the case, something which Lord Taylor’s enquiry revealed, placing the blame with the Police.

And yet, despite definitive knowledge that this went on, the police were still not prosecuted, and the Hillsborough coroner’s enquiry returned a verdict of accidental death for all the 96 dead.

This then, is the point of McGovern’s movie. While the families are unable to get true justice by seeing those responsible punished for the horrific events of that day (and the tremendous cover-up which followed), the movie could vindicate them. It could tell a story which no one else would tell.

This is the power of cinema. The ability of the pen or the typewriter to have tremendous power over public opinion, and which brought the blame, in the minds of the public, completely to the door of the West Yorkshire Police.
JAMES GORDON

Five Minutes Of Heaven and Q+A With Guy Hibbert

Five Minutes of Heaven, starring Liam Neeson and Jimmy Nesbitt, is a fictional drama about a real life event. It is about a man having to face the person responsible for the death of his brother, a murder that happened due to religious differences in Northern Ireland. Guy Hibbert won the International Award for Screenwriting at this year’s Sundance Festival,  and his script looks into how one man can so be affected by watching a murder that he can want to kill in return, and whether this is ultimately the right way to go.

Hibbert remarked that the process of going to film was very strenuous because, as its based on real peoples lives, Hibbert wanted to make sure that every single thing was OK’ed by them, right down to having to ring them when Neeson wanted to change one word of his dialogue, no matter how irrelevant or minute a word it may have been.

This was very difficult for Hibbert. He had to write a movie in which effectively, in the hypothetical fight, both sides had to win. This meant a huge issue in which over two years of negotiation and collaboration with the two men eventually found the compromise we see on screen.

Made for BBC2 Five Minutes of Heaven was originally screened in April (with an additional showing on BBC1 the following night in Northern Ireland). The film was very well received and is now touring the festival circuit before eventually being released for cinema internationally over the next 18months.

Following on from Hibbert’s earlier film on Northern Ireland, Omagh, this piece is superb, and it is clear that, after all the work that went into agreeing the final script, it was wholeheartedly deserving of the best screenplay accolade it received.

Guy Hibbert Interview

Speaking after his screening, Guy Hibbert spoke to the blog about the process of making Five Minutes of Heaven.

James Gordon for ScreenLit (SL): I’m with Guy Hibbert, who wrote Five Minutes of Heaven. I’d like to start out by saying how much I enjoyed the movie. I’m actually half Northern Irish myself, my dad’s from Belfast, so I have quite a strong idea about The Troubles, and I’d just like to say I think you did a great job telling the story without being bias towards either viewpoint. Something you were saying in the Q+A is that you spent a lot of time with Joe and Alistair the two guys from the movie. Can you tell me how you went about getting these two guys to tell their stories after all this time?

Guy Hibbert (GH): The guys have never met in real life [except for the night on which the movie opens] although they do meet towards the end of the film. So, living in London, I went to Belfast, over the period of 2 years. Working with them on different days so they would never walk into each other in a corridor or anything like that. We went through a process of asking “What if you had met”, suggesting different dramatic scenarios to them. Role playing and alike. It’s like drama therapy to some extent. It’s rather a serious method, because we’re dealing with the most dramatic and traumatic moments in their lives.

SL: Indeed. And when you were first approached by the BBC about doing another Northern Ireland movie after Omagh, did you ever feel like the movie might never get made? Like you might never find that story?

GH: Yes. I had a friend of mine who worked on Omagh, and also Bloody Sunday with Paul Greengrass, and he did a research document over about 6months for me. There was nothing I felt could be turned into a movie. I began to feel like I might have to cancel the whole movie. But then I found Alistair. Found out about his story and through that tracked down Joe, and once I’d met these 2 guys I knew I had my movie. It took 2 years to get to that stage, and then 2 years to get the movie made.

SL: The film was screened in the UK and Ireland on the BBC, whereas internationally it is a theatrical release. Would you rather have had theatres here?

GH: That’s a great question. You get 3.5million people watching on TV. This is an art house movie, so in cinemas you might get 30000, if you’re lucky. In Ireland especially, a lot of people watched it. It had lots of press attention because it had their two biggest actors. You’d never have got that reaction in cinema, and it was key that Ireland saw it. So I was quite pleased it got the attention there on Television. The trouble with TV though is that 2years work is over in one night. And if you were to clash with an England game, or an Emmerdale special, your two years would be finished for nothing. So in that respects we got the best of both worlds, because we have the general release around the world and festival showings.

SL: On that front congratulations on your [Sundance screenwriting] award by the way.

GH: Yes, that was great wasn’t it.

SL: How did it feel to find out you had Jimmy Nesbitt and Liam Neeson attached to what you’ve admitted was an art house movie?

GH: I met Jimmy before writing the script, so I knew he was attached. Liam though, I didn’t know him, so I wrote him a letter. It was a begging letter actually, saying basically “I’d love you to play this part, I understand if you’re busy though.” All this sort of thing. Anyway, Liam lives in New York, so I Fedex’ed him the script on the Wednesday, and on Sunday night I get a call, saying “You don’t know me, but my name’s Liam Neeson. I’ve just read your script, and I’d like to talk to you about it”. So we talked for about an hour about the story, and when we were done he said “I’d like to do it”, and that was that.

SL: That’s amazing. Well good luck with the theatrical release Guy!

GH: Thank you so much.

JAMES GORDON

Paul Schrader Masterclass

Keynote speaker for the festival, Paul Schrader, packed out Broadway’s biggest screen yesterday as he gave his screenwriting masterclass based upon a course he teaches at universities in America. The class, usually taught over 10weeks, had to be condensed for this exclusive UK appearance but the audience are unlikely to have felt cheated as he crammed so much into the hour and a half he had, giving hints and tips on how to take your idea from concept to screen.

Schrader began by saying that he was not going to talk about the practicality of screenwriting, as this is the stuff you can learn from books and even pick up yourself (as he did, having not read any books on method), but rather that he would be talking about his personal philosophy of screenwriting.

He said that his class, which is open to everyone, began with a crowd of people, which by the second week would be whittled down to just 10. He wanted to find the people with the most interesting problems, which he would work with over the course of the weeks to take that problem and turn it into a screenplay. He tries to get his students to equate their problems to a metaphor, which is then explored within the screenplay. One example he draws on is his own experience writing Taxi Driver. Living in his car, effectively a broken man, he realised Travis Bickle, a mirror effectively of Schrader at the time, and Taxi Driver’s central protagonist, along with his cab – his “metal coffin”, were the perfect metaphor for how loneliness can lead to the sort of self-destruction Travis suffers in the movie. He announced that this sort of story-telling – drawing on your own problems but by morphing them into someone else’s – was to him a form of self-therapy, and only by getting this character on the page could he really come to terms with his own issues and move beyond them.

This highly unorthodox approach to teaching sets this man aside from others in his profession. “The man is a visionary” I hear someone say as we are all leaving.

Across the course of two hours (including a Q+A which, judging by the amount of questions people had, could easily have gone on all night), Schrader holds every ear in the house constantly. You could truly hear the proverbial pin hit the ground.

If there was ever going to be a Keynote speech  to really define the very values ScreenLit was hoping to represent – screenwriting, directing, and a process which filmmakers share, this really was it.
JAMES GORDON