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Your new movie Remnants
of a Disaster - in a few words, what is it about?
The
narrative is about two assassins who are in a combat simulation as part of
an experimental drug therapy being run by a(n evil) corporation, however
the scientist running the experiment is insane.
Needless to say everything goes horribly and psychedelically wrong
for everyone concerned. Thematically
it’s about mistakes, albeit in quite an abstract, metaphorical way.
How personal and professional mistakes bring you to a point in your
life you don’t really want to be and how you can turn that to your
advantage.
How
did the project come into being to begin with, and to what extent does it
relate to your earlier short of almost the same title, Remnants (Of a
Disaster)? I
just wanted to make a feature length film to see if I could do it.
It doesn’t really relate to the short except the script I adapted
to make the feature was developed from the short, but what I ended up
making isn’t like either of those stories. What can you tell us about your movie's
screenwriter Barry Nyle, and what was your collaboration like?
There’s
two answers to this one:
Dr
Barry Nyle is the main character in a 2010 Canadian film called Beyond The
Black Rainbow which was a massive influence on Remnants
of a Disaster, hence me
misappropriating the name. Basically the script is developed from an
earlier version I wrote a couple of years ago based on the short I did in
2011. It was about an assassin
who’s had an enough but can’t kill herself so tries to get killed by
various other people and ends up in a house with a psychopath.
A guy (who I thought was a friend, let’s call him JP) came in as
co-writer and producer in early 2013, he had access to an amazing derelict
building in Leeds so I agreed to let him adapt Remnants
of a Disaster to work in a
single location instead of a village. But
basically he couldn’t write films, he tried to do it in Quark Express
page setting software and the page count was all wrong not to mention what
he’d written was shit. JP
expected that was what would get shot without any revision or
improvisation because that’s how we’d done a short film. He was also
putting half the budget in consequently he spat his dummy out and walked
out on the project two weeks before shooting taking half the budget with
him. Luckily I’d already had
the notion of exaggerating mistakes and went back to a previous draft of
mine and improvised that with the actors.
Alternatively
here’s answer two:
I’ve never actually met Dr Nyle, he’s a very
mysterious Canadian psychologist who did a lot of experimentation with
psychotropics and hallucinogens on patients with dissociative disorders
and himself and got in a lot of trouble. A lot of people think died in the
80s when he was attacked by one of his patients, but he was just badly
injured and became a recluse. He
contacted me via the internet during the latter stages of the shoot (after
he’d seen the images on the film’s website and Facebook page) and
that’s how his contributions and collaboration continued.
He filmed himself (or possibly someone else) and sent me the video
files (he’s the strange coloured head in the film) and lots and lots of
notes as the edit progressed, we really didn’t have a script, but his
influence on the film was so great I felt he deserved the sole writing
credit. Remnants
of a Disaster is associative rather than linear in its narrative
approach - so how difficult was it to not just lose your story? And do
talk about your associative approach for a bit to begin with! I’d
had the idea of trying to make a film where the viewer puts the story
together themselves based on cliché’s and tropes of the genre and a few
deliberate scenes to point them in the right direction, it’s quite
common at the minute (I’m thinking of Only God Forgives, Beyond The
Black Rainbow, A Field In England). Part
of the idea came from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the story isn’t
written as a straight narrative but collected together in diaries, letters
and memos. What really
crystalised the process was Beyond The Black Rainbow, the director Panos
Cosmatos said the film was based on when he was a child and how he
imagined what films (The Exterminator, Blade Runner etc) were like based on
the VHS box artwork because his father (George Cosmatos director of Rambo
and Cobra) wouldn’t let him watch violent films. So
basically Remnants
of a Disaster is an attempt at combining those somewhat disparate
ideas into a process.
For me, Remnants
of a Disaster has a very experimental, maybe even nouvelle
vague air to it - can you agree to any of this, and what can you tell
us about
your directorial approach? I
do agree though I’m not massively familiar with nouvelle vague
although I remember watching Alphaville,
À Bout de Soufflé and Le Samourai on a famous cult film TV show called
Moviedrome
(presented by Alex Cox [Alex Cox
bio - click here]) over twenty years ago and the existentialism and
style really stuck with me. My
directing of the actors was very lacking because I was doing camera or
sound and supervising whichever one I wasn’t doing so I wasn’t able to
fully focus on the acting. Consequently
the post production process (which was holistically editing/sound/vfx)
effectively became me re-directing the actors, a lot of the scenes are in
a different order to the rudimentary shooting script and dialogue is
replaced or cut up or rearranged. In
one scene I even turned a character into a blob to reshape the narrative
and mitigate a particularly bad bit of acting.
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According to my
information, Remnants
of a Disaster was made on a very low budget - so what were the
challenges but maybe also advantages of that, and would you have done
anything differently with more money at hand? The
shooting budget was around £2000. Most of that was fuel and food, I
already had the equipment and the locations were free.
With more money I would have paid the actors and shot it all in one
go instead of over several months. The advantage of having no money is I
could do whatever the fuck I wanted so I experimented and learned.
Do talk
about your locations/sets for a bit! The main location was Queens
Mill in Castleford West Yorkshire, they basically let us shoot whenever we
wanted sporadically over a two month period in return for me running a
filmmaking workshop with local high school students.
The location in the opening sequence is a community theatre (that
was shot in 2012). Two of the
the other locations were houses where I lived and one was my current
office before we moved into it. Basically
I used whatever I could get into and made it fit. What can you tell
us about your cast, and why exactly these people? With
the exception of Laura Louise Whitehurst I’d worked with everyone else
before and being completely honest they were the only people who would do
it for free. Waleed lived near
me at the time (he was in the short film as well) and Laura O’Donoughue
had agreed to do the original version of the Remnants
of a Disaster feature (as K, the
‘bad’ assassin) after we worked on music video together, the others I
done various short film projects with.
A few
words about the shoot as such, and the on-set atmosphere?
On
set atmosphere was really good 90% of the time, positive and upbeat
despite the fact the temperature inside the Mill was pushing 30C, it was
the hottest summer in years and the building was wood so it became like a
sauna and incredibly energy sapping.
There
was one day where one actor/crew member was particularly negative and
abusive to another actor (not the two Laura’s who were both incredibly
professional), which resulted in a really bad atmosphere on set all day.
Ironically the scenes we shot that day were particularly good,
particularly the final fight scene in it which we shot in 55 minutes.
Anything
you can tell us about audience and critical reception of your movie so
far? Mixed, it’s won an award
at a small festival, most people just don’t get it but even then
they’ve been engaged. Some
people have hated it (including someone who worked on it because their
role got cut down) and it got flamed on Facebook by another film producer
who obviously just didn’t get it but that’s cool as long as it
provokes a reaction. Any future projects you'd like to share?
I’m part of a film making
collective in my home town with some friends, as part of that I’ve just
produced a feature which I’m also editing.
We’re working on a dark sketch show pilot which we’re shooting
in the new year and also developing a horror feature (probably a slasher)
film which I’m going to direct. Doing
the score and sound design for Remnants
of a Disaster has got me back into music
production in a big way so I’m buying hardware synths and drum machines
to use instead of the software I’ve been working on for the past few
years. Keep an eye out for new
LaptopAcidXperience material.
What
got you into filmmaking in the first place, and did you receive any formal
training on the subject? When I failed all my high
school exams and realised I wasn’t going to be a fighter pilot or
astronaut I decided I wanted to make films. About the same time I got into
cannabis and didn’t do much for the next ten years except stack shelves,
make techno music and write down the odd film idea.
Unfortunately it took me another ten years after that to teach
myself the skills to do it, I have no formal training, I’m completely
self-taught. What can you tell us about your
filmwork prior to Remnants
of a Disaster? In 2010 I started a
production company called StudioLAX and I’ve lost count of the number of
shorts and music videos I’ve made. I
made my first short in 2002 at university (I was a mature student) - although I studied IT I borrowed a video camera and used their computers
to edit on. In 2003 I got a
job editing football highlights for small football clubs and in 2005
became a cameraman and editor at Blackburn Rovers football club when they
were still in the English premiership.
The run and gun ENG style of gathering content I learned there has
really influenced how I work now, fast, efficient and cutting in the
camera. How would you describe yourself
as a director? Dangerously unqualified but
learning on the job. Filmmakers who inspire you? Takeshi Kitano, Daniel
Myrick, Robert Rodriguez, Ben Wheatley, the Coen Brothers. Your
favourite movies? Blade Runner, Sonnatine, Drive,
Beyond The Black Rainbow, Blair Witch
Project, The Objective, Dredd, Kill List. ... and of course, films you really
deplore?
I
hate the Lord Of The Rings films, they’re really dull (or at least the
one I half I could be bothered to watch were) and people rave about them
like they’re this amazing achievement and cultural event when they’re
just really average and a waste of effort.
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Prometheus
was a mess, a massive insult to the Alien fan base and I like
Alien: Resurrection. However I was
surprised after twenty years of average and disappointing films when
Ridley Scott made The Counsellor which I consider to be up there with his
best work.
Christopher
Nolan is incredibly overrated, I just don’t get it.
His films are superficially interesting but lack any real depth or
intelligence, but because they’re ever so slightly offbeat and use
practical effects people go nuts for them.
Your/your movie's website, Facebook, whatever
else?
http://studiolax.co.uk/index.php/remnants
https://twitter.com/RemnantsFilmUK
https://www.facebook.com/RemnantsFilmUK
Anything else you are dying to mention and I have
merely forgotten to ask? Just to say thanks for the opportunity to promote
such a niche film as Remnants
of a Disaster and I look forward to reading your reviews
of ‘other’ films old and new. Thanks for the interview!
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find Roger Armstrong at adultvideouniverse.com
