Interview with Chris Smith - Co-Writer and Director of Consecration

 

Ahead of the European premiere of his psychologically disturbing supernatural thriller, CONSECRATION, at FrightFest Glasgow 2023, director Chris Smith talks about the supernatural side of religion, filming in Scotland, and his encounter with a pregnant sheep.

Another FrightFest, another Chris Smith movie! Why has FrightFest always been a key component to your release strategy?

I feel very fortunate to have been brought into the FrightFest family. I was very lucky that my first film, Creep, was included and then I got very lucky with the dates of release of my subsequent films. Severance was shown the night before the festival started in 2006 and then of course there was the spectacular Premier for Triangle at the Empire Leicester Square. FrightFest has also shown Black Death and Detour. They didn’t bother with Get Santa but that’s their loss. FrightFest is the best audience for any director.

Where did the initial CONSECRATION concept come from? 

For a long time I’ve been trying to come up with a movie that was about the supernatural side of religion. If you look at Christianity, so many elements of the story are supernatural - the power of miracles, bringing someone back from the dead and then Jesus reappearing after his crucifixion. This requires belief and it is believed of millions of people and my story is not questioning that. I didn’t want to make a film that from an atheist stand point because to me there are more interesting questions to be asked from the position of a believer. I wanted to look at the miracles and say: “What would happen if somebody was born today that had the power of Christ? What would happen to that person 300 years ago? What would happen to that person in a modern context.  What if that new Messiah was a woman? These thoughts were basically the seed of the idea for Jenna’s  story.

You co-wrote CONSECRATION with producer Laurie Cook. Who came up with what?

So, I was kicking some ideas around with Jason Newmark who was the producer of Triangle, and Jason said that Laurie, who I’d collaborated with on The Banishing, had a treatment that may tie in nicely with my desire to make a religious film. Laurie had come up with a story of a priest that arrived from Rome to reconsecrate a church where there’s been a murder. I took that basic idea, which I really loved, and just wrote the first draft of the story we have here. Laurie then came in after that first draft was done and he wrote a draft over the top of it and then we just went back and forth with it till it was finished.

You have described CONSECRATION as “A film about the nature of religion and how defining one thing as divine creates a false opposite that is heretical”. Can you explain more?

I’m interested in the idea that people believe there will be a second coming and I tried to imagine how that might actually occur. How would those miracles be demonstrated and what would be the church’s position on it. Would the person be vilified? Certainly in the past they would. If it were a woman she would be a witch. I love digging into this stuff.

You’ve also called CONSECRATION your scariest film yet. Why do you think that is?

For me personally, anything that deals with fundamentalism is scary. So in that context only, this would be the scariest, along with Black Death. It’s impossible for me to answer really. Creep is the film that time and again people say is my scariest.

You assembled a great cast including Jena Malone and Danny Huston. You must have been pleased they responded so enthusiastically to the material?

I’m absolutely thrilled at the cast of this film but to be honest. I’ve always been very fortunate with the actors I’ve worked with. I love working with actors and that passion is recognised by them. I’ve always been a huge fan of Jena Malone, so when she responded so passionately about the material I was thrilled. Originally the story was going to be set in America but then we investigated Scotland and we found this amazing castle on the edge of a cliff in Skye.  Jenna was already attached and there was absolutely no way I was going to lose her, so she had to polish off her accent and become English. I’ve loved Danny Huston since Ivan’s XTC, which is still one of the best movies ever made about Hollywood, so when he signed on too I was in fairy tale land. But the whole cast were amazing. Some of whom we’re cast the old fashioned way from audition tapes. Eilidh Fisher who plays the young nun Meg, Thoren Ferguson who plays the policeman, both local Scottish actors and both great. 

And playing Mother Superior is the brilliant Janet Suzman. How did you tempt her out of retirement?

I was very lucky to have worked with Janet Suzman on a TV show I shot in South Africa and so, as soon as I came up with this Mother Superior character/ Nurse Ratched type,  I immediately thought of Janet. Not because Janet’s remotely like Nurse Ratched but because she’s not! She’s delightful. She’s just a brilliant actor from the John Hurt/ David Warner school. A proper legend.

FrightFest Glasgow is in Scotland obviously, so where did you film CONSECRATION on location here?

We filmed all of the exteriors that you see on the Isle of Skye. There’s an old castle on the edge of the sea and we used that as the old broken down Monastery. The interior of the monastery is all set in an old ex-monastery on the outskirts of London which fortunately has been deconsecrated. I have to say, I’ve fallen in love with Scotland as a result of being here so much. I’ve been up to the highlands twice this year already. Once to go up Ben Nevis with my son, which nearly killed me and then once to go hiking around Fort William. It’s no wonder the Queen loved the place, it’s gorgeous.

A smooth shoot? Any challenges or anecdotes you can share with the class of 2023?

Once I was sitting at the monitor and a sheep came up to me bleating. The sheep then gave birth to a baby lamb in front of me. You don’t get that on the King’s Road!

Finally, what’s next?

I’ve written a war movie which I’m trying to get made set in Syria. I’ve also got another horror movie that I wrote some time ago but couldn’t quite finish. It’s very much an old school gory horror with a serial killer but deadly serious in tone.

CONSECRATION is showing at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Sat 11 March, 3.45pm, as part of FrightFest Glasgow 2023. Chris will be attending.

Interview with Chris Smith ahead of FrightFest Glasgow UK premiere of Detour

Ahead of the UK premiere of his latest film DETOUR at Horror Channel FrightFest Glasgow, Chris Smith tells us the importance of FrightFest, his love of ‘film Noir’ and  his hatred of reality TV…

FrightFest has premiered all your genre movies CREEP, SEVERANCE, TRIANGLE, BLACK DEATH, except GET SANTA obviously. Is this positioning an important part of the rollout process for you?

Firstly let me apologise for being away for so long and thank you for having me back. I wrote ‘Get Santa’ because I'd just had a son and was feeling like I wanted to do something that he could watch in the next 15 years. I expected the film to take a year to come together but it ended up taking four years. My son was by that time old enough to come to the premiere with a few of his class mates.

Back to the question, Frightfest is extremely important, not just to me personally, because it's always an honour, but it's important to the birth of the film. The Frightfest audiences are the first people to see it, the first to comment on it and it's nice that they're such committed fans. Putting a film out there, freeing it from the confines of the edit suite is exciting, but also scary. Frightfest, because of the audiences passion and knowledge of genre, make the process what it should be, fun. 

What was the main inspiration for the DETOUR script? Many have commented on its multi-narrative SLIDING DOORS-style vibe. Complicated to write the two sides of one story?

‘Sliding Doors’ and ‘Run Lola Run’ both came out the same year.  I must admit I was never inclined to watch ‘Sliding Doors’, but I know that, like ‘Run Lola Run’, it deals with the concept of different destinies being forged by blind change. Though actually neither of these films were an inspiration for ‘Detour’, which came about by chance.

It was early 2007 and I had just finished writing ‘Triangle’ and was in LA trying to finance it. I'd liked the film ‘Disturbia’, which had been a big hit and so for about three months Hollywood was trying to make Hitchcockian thrillers. An exec came to me and said she'd like to cook up a modern version of ‘Stranger's on a Train’. I think my brain was so wrapped up structurally from writing ‘Triangle’, that instead of two characters deciding to murder each other's wives, I cooked up one character, seemingly facing two destinies, based on one moral choice: To kill or not to kill? 

Was it complicated to write? Certainly not in comparison to ‘Triangle’ but it offered different challenges. I was really keen for the characters to shine through more than I'd achieved in Triangle, and this is tricky because you're asking the audience to question the narrative, rather than simply immersing them in a classical structure, and then you're also hoping they feel empathy for the characters. That is the main challenge for any film that makes you aware of the film making process.

DETOUR is full of film noir references, from the HARPER poster on the wall to the clip from the 1945 B movie classic DETOUR by Edgar G. Ulmer. What is it about the film noir idiom you like?

I've always loved Film Noir. I think it is, or rather was, the cornerstone of indie cinema. These are films often made often on the cheap and yet always brimming with colourful characters, taut story lines, and scenarios where a happy ending feels impossible, instead of inevitable.

 

The film that has always had the biggest effect on me is Fritz Langs' ‘The Woman In The Window’. My film ‘Detour’ is arguably more influenced by that, than the Ulmer movie that we reference in the film and borrow the title from. That said, both films contain a character who crosses a line and finds that the forces that drove him there, and the company he now keeps, will never let him free again.

A great cast of new and up-and-coming stars – Tye Sheridan, Bel Powley, Emory Cohen. You certainly know how to pick them, Eddie Redmayne in BLACK DEATH for example. Is it a knack?

Liam Hemsworth got his first role in ‘Triangle’ also. Is it a knack? I don't know. To me if you can't see that those actors are talented you're in the wrong job. When I got the audition tape from Liam Hemsworth I literally walked it around the office with my jaw dropped showing people. It was so glaringly obvious this boy was a movie star. It was the same with Eddie and all three of the leads in ‘Detour’. 

Tye Sheridan's performances in ‘Joe and Mud’ were electric. Emory Cohen lit up every scene he did in ‘The Place Beyond The Pine’s’. With Bel Powley it was a little different because I met her having seen nothing. The rumour mill was reporting that she was fantastic in the film ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ but none of us had seen it The casting director loved Bel and the financier was happy to cast her on what he had heard, so I met her blind. We got on immediately; I thought she was so cool, funny and smart that I basically cast her on the spot. 

Great chemistry between the three leads - was it there from the beginning, or did it evolve gradually?

It was there from the beginning I think but the little choices we made in prep helped it along. We scheduled well so that we did all of the scenes in the house first; just me and Tye and Stephen Moyer. That gave us a real foundation so that when Emory and Bel joined the film, at the end of the first week, we were already working like a well-oiled machine. This gave me more time to concentrate on them, but their instincts were so good that there was very little in the way of notes.

Great solid anchors by Stephen Moyer and John Lynch too, whose maturity contrasts with the young cast on purpose?

Absolutely. They're the grown-ups but they still have their own problems and in some way are more immature than the younger characters. I think they're both great in the film.

DETOUR was shot in South Africa. How was filming there? 

It was shot mainly in South Africa but we also spent a week shooting in LA and Las Vegas. I love South Africa, it's a wonderful country, with great crews and so it was a no brainer to shoot it there to help with the budget. It also looks just like California. 

You’ve said the lighting owes a lot to Edward Hopper’s paintings? Can you elaborate?

Me and my designer joke that all feature films are either Edward Hopper or Carravagio. Film-makers use either artist as their inspiration, either consciously or unconsciously. With Hopper the emphasis is on framing and production design. With Carravagio the emphasis is on using practical lighting and contrast. This film is a Hopper.

It’s a film you want to watch again the moment its finished to see if you can catch all the clues and mis-directs you didn’t see the first time? Do you consciously like to manipulate your audience?

I'm a huge fan of Kiarostami. I'm drawn to film-makers that make you question the film-making process. Lars Von Trier is another I greatly admire.  Everything about film-making is fake and the film-makers' job is to make you forget this, but there's pleasure in being reminded too because it makes you engage in an entirely different way. 

I can't watch reality TV. It's ridiculous. The one thing it's not is reality. You see survival programs where someone is walking across the Sahara desert. Is he going to make or die of thirst? Give me a break! Behind the camera there's 20 camels packed full of water for him, the camera crew, the sound man, the medic, the fixer, the camel shepherd and the camels. There's probably a helicopter standing by.

I like stories where we acknowledge this deceit and try to make a feature. If you still feel tension when you are simultaneously acknowledging the artifice of the process, then I think you're doing something good. 

And finally, what’s next for you?

I'm working on a horror movie about a serial killer called The Judas Goat and a thriller called ‘The Undertaker’. Hoping to shoot either of them by the end of the year.

DETOUR is showing at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Sat 25 Feb, 4.30pm as part of Horror Channel FrightFest Glasgow 2017.