Monday, April 21, 2008

[REC]: The Future of Horror Looks Shaky

It would seem that shaky cameras are cool. The release of Spanish horror [REC] is the latest in a series of horror films shot on a digital camera from the perspective of stressed-out operators who are themselves a character in the story. [REC] presents the ‘footage’ captured by a late-night news reporter and her cameraman as they follow a team of Barcelona firefighters on a routine call to a seemingly innocuous apartment block. A gruesome encounter with an apparently demented old woman quickly escalates out of control, and suddenly the lives of everyone in the apartment block are under threat. With the news team present, all the action is caught on camera, the images becoming increasingly wild and frenetic as the situation worsens.

The digital format is certainly highly suited to the horror genre, with low production-costs and increasing technical flexibility proving especially advantageous for independent filmmakers. Still, mainstream cinema has taken nearly a decade to catch up with the box-office phenomenon that was The Blair Witch Project. Meanwhile, words like ‘gritty’ and ‘real’ are bandied about in the press as critics and paying audiences alike respond to the stylish digital aesthetic. Where younger viewers hail the future of filmmaking, and in particular the horror genre, older critics grumble at the motion-sickness-inducing visuals and the lack of anything resembling a good old-fashioned tracking or Steadicam shot.

Whereas the Blair Witch style arose as much from necessity as from inspired editing on the part of the filmmakers, it seems that replicating the shaky-cam look on a mainstream studio production, where traditional techniques and equipment are well-practiced and readily available, can be just as tricky. It was the handheld, amateur style that provided the hook for the recent Cloverfield. Otherwise merely a bog-standard monster movie, director (and pal of Lost co-creator JJ Abrams) Matt Reeves decided to appeal directly to the YouTube generation by shooting the entire $30m film in a shaky-cam aesthetic, notably against the advice of his production team who didn’t relish the challenge of having to look like they didn’t know what they were doing. Reeves achieved the look by getting his actors to shoot some of the footage themselves, and, indeed, becoming a cameraman himself; “I qualified for the job by being, well…not qualified!” he told reporters on the press-circuit. Being a studio piece, however, the trick was also in ensuring his crack team of professional camera operators adopted an amateur style while still capturing the right shots necessary for both maintaining suspense and driving the story. The result is a riotous piece of filmmaking which, while failing to live up to much of the hype, shows the studios are finally paying attention to the massive cultural influence of multimedia viewing platforms, of which YouTube is the most recognised.

Digital shaky-cam filmmaking is seen by many as directly relevant to the everyday lives of the cinema-going public, a fact which big-budget Hollywood will doubtless be looking to on a larger scale now that Cloverfield has paid off handsomely at the international box-office (a sequel is already in the works). Matt Reeves has stated that his film was “made for an audience that does this daily,” as he refers to the quantity of online material depicting ordinary people simply filming their daily lives. With the lingering spectre of terrorism still very much at the forefront of people’s minds, converging the reality of modern media saturation with times of crisis has been a topical theme since images of the World Trade Center collapse were beamed to a live global audience. Cloverfield is at its best and most poignant early on when panic sets in across New York in scenes deeply reminiscent of amateur footage filmed on 9/11, while [REC] and George Romero’s own Diary of the Dead, an addition to his original zombie saga (and follow-up to Land of the Dead) seen through the eyes of a group of film students, explore the now-common theme of infection and viral threat. With the tragedy of 9/11 in New York, the fallout of 7/7 in London, and then the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina documented by both amateurs and professionals alike to be saturated across television and the Internet, firsthand experiences of a world in chaos are accessible at the touch of a button. Replicating this chaos in fiction filmmaking is therefore fertile filmmaking territory that suits the digital format and is a gift to the horror genre.

This isn’t to say that the character-as-camera-operator is limited to horror. Brian De Palma’s recent Iraq dram Redacted, addresses the media-saturated world head-on. Exploring the lives of a platoon of US soldiers on checkpoint duty in a provincial Iraqi town, the story unfolds primarily through the eyes of a young GI who films his experiences in preparation for a planned film-school application on his return home. The film uses this character facet to iron out the familiar shaky-cam aesthetic (the soldier has raw talent as a filmmaker, after all, so he knows how to use a camera), focusing on the content of the soldier’s point-of-view rather than the style in which he shoots it. De Palma also uses streamed Internet video footage, CCTV and even pinhole cameras to develop the story, in a marked difference from the frenetic style that increasingly characterizes the horror genre.

The problem comes when repetition kicks in. Although still a solid horror, [REC] suffers from a lack of originality, a frenetic zombie film following hot on the heels of both Diary of the Dead and The Zombie Diaries, all of which linger in the shadow of 28 Days Later The question remains as to whether the horror genre can evolve beyond the simple shaky-cam aesthetic, or whether multiplexes will be cursed with a continuous slew of cheap knock-offs. With Cloverfield arguably Blair Witch with a visual-effects budget and a more conventional visual pay-off, it could be that the next true innovation will be left to the shoestring creativity of the independents.

(This article was first published on Close-Up Film. Click here for a full review of [REC])

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

"Sly's seen it... Lovely to get his blessing!" Garth Jennings and cast discuss Son of Rambow

Mild motion-sickness isn’t perhaps the first thing you expect to feel in north London’s Holborn Studios. That’s until you realize that much of the office-space is actually located on converted barges, with a gently bobbing quay providing a walkway onto the snappily-named Eagle Wharf. This is the base of production company Hammer & Tongs, founded by director Garth Jennings and his producing partner Nick Goldsmith. Here Jennings awaits the press to discuss his second feature, Son of Rambow, along with his young stars Will Poulter and Bill Milner, and co-star Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson). All are in good humour, as you’d expect given that the film has proved a hit on the festival circuit, and its long-awaited UK release is only a few weeks away.

Set in 1982, Jennings’ film tells the story of two ten-year-olds - the quiet and sheltered Will Proudfoot (Milner), and school troublemaker Lee Carter (Poulter) - whose discovery of Stallone’s classic action-thriller First Blood inspires them to shoot their own action-packed sequel. Jennings, dressed in casual jeans and T-shirt, reckons that his young stars are largely responsible for the film charming festival audiences and critics alike. “I think if people like the film, it’s normally because they like these two,” he smiles, “You know, you can do all the best writing and all that stuff in the world, but actually it’s very hard to find people of their age with that kind of confidence.” Lucky, then, that the boys showed up when they did, as the production team was coming to the end of a fruitless five-month casting period. “We had to sort of stop casting and start moving on with pre-production, and they were both - even though they’re in the room, I would say this anyway - exactly right for the parts,” says Jennings, adding, “It was one of those instant, easy-peasy decisions.”

While the boys snap up most of the attention, Hynes plays Mary, Will’s mother. As the Proudfoots are part of the strict Brethren religion, Mary has imposed a blanket ban on television and films, making Will’s accidental exposure to First Blood all the more potent. Hynes, perhaps still best known for cult TV favourite Spaced, which she co-wrote and starred in with Simon Pegg, describes her rare, non-comedic role in Son of Rambow as “a one-off”, adding, “To play a straight role in a film like this is a gift, I mean it’s a sort of career highlight, really.” Her enthusiasm for the role even extended to the costume, despite the Brethren’s conservative tastes: “I loved it!” she laughs, “It’s like Little House on the Prairie, with the button-up shirt.”

Jennings drew inspiration from his own childhood in writing the screenplay. “This was phenomenal!” he exclaims as he recalls his own discovery of the original Rambo. “We were playing in the forest everyday, and then here’s this guy with a knife and a stick who takes on two-hundred guys – he only kills one of them, and that’s by throwing a rock…” Even, however, after the success of his debut feature, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Jennings found the £3.5 million production-budget was still far from easy to secure for Son of Rambow, as it didn’t seem to track with industry expectations. “We weren’t making another loony space movie, or something with a robot,” he sighs, “No, seriously, people were saying, ‘Nice… but have you got anything with robots, or some puppets? Puppets would be great.’”

With the budget eventually secured, taking a step back in terms of production size was a relief for Jennings, who, having come from a background in music video production through Hammer & Tongs, found the big-budget studio experience to be sometimes cumbersome on Hitchhiker’s. “We [had] got to do it exactly as we wanted to, but we suddenly inherited all this studio stuff,” he explains, “We had a load of people, it means you’re a lot slower, it’s harder to get what you want, just the numbers… So it was rather nice to do Son of Rambow and go, right, you really don’t need all that stuff.” Cutting back on the studio fat meant Jennings could also pay more attention to his stars. Hynes describes how the production’s small scale helped preserve its charm: “They’ve solved problems with the film within their own sort of creative team, which has meant that it’s kept its heart.” As Jennings banters back and forth with Milner and Coulter in the Holborn Studios barge, they offer a glimpse of how much fun the shoot must’ve been. “It was an amazing thing for a director to have people who just, I mean when you say ‘Can you be dragged a hundred feet along the floor really fast by the kite there?’ (imitates the boys) ‘Yeah, cool,’” Jennings gushes.

The boys weren’t allowed to do their own stunt-work (“if something happened, that would be the end of everything,” Jennings grimaces), although Milner admits to a boyish rivalry with his co-star: “During filming we had like an ongoing competition who could do the most stunts, but they were always a bit petit!” Milner remains the only one of the two to have seen the original First Blood, strictly for research purposes of course. “It did help me, kind of, play my character a bit more,” he offers, thoughtfully. It turns out that Milner’s more into Spider-Man (“He’s a dangerous lad! And he goes to school! He’s doing his GCSEs, and he’s fighting crime at the same time!”), while Coulter’s cinematic inspiration is Ethan Hunt: “I remember when I was about ten years old coming out of Mission: Impossible and being generally convinced that I was a secret agent!”

Son of Rambow was originally scheduled for release last summer, but legal problems restricted it to the festival circuit instead. Jennings and Goldsmith had gone into production not knowing who owned the rights to First Blood (Son of Rambow uses clips of Stallone, and, of course, the correctly-spelt name), but discovered afterwards that, in Jennings’ words, “people own different parts of Rambo”, which complicated things. Jennings describes the production mentality, with a wide smile: “[We thought] we’ll just make it, and it’ll be good, and then they’ll see it and go, oh alright, and, er… that was unbelievably naïve.” Luckily, the legal issues have all now been sorted, and the film even has the seal of approval from Rambo himself, to Jennings’ obvious delight: “Sly’s seen it, and he gave me a very, very nice review, yes, he was very sweet. Lovely to get his blessing.” Lets hope Son of Rambow gets the box-office reception it so richly deserves.

(This article was first published on Future Movies)