Interview with Simon Rumley

Ahead of NYX UK’s season of Simon Rumley films in December, the award-winning director talks candidly about therapy in filmmaking, his past fear of contracting AIDS/HIV and being kicked of out BAFTA.

Q: Simon, how pleased are you that NYX UK, the country’s only free-to-air horror channel, are presenting a season of your films?
Very! I've spoken to a few festivals over the years to do a small retrospective of my films, but it's never panned out. So, it's great to see all the films curated and playing under one umbrella.

Q: A tricky question, but which is your personal favourite?
Ha. Indeed. Impossible to say, of course! I love them all (which I wouldn't say about every film I've made) and they all have different qualities and, actually, I'm proud of the fact that they're all so different from each other - visually, stylistically, narratively, aurally.

Q: Is it true that THE LIVING AND THE DEAD is partly influenced by events in your personal life?
Indeed, it was 'inspired' by watching my mother die of cancer which happened only a few months after my father died of a heart attack. I wrote it initially as a nightmare, a way of trying to communicate the emotions I went through during this time. But as a few investors read it, I made it more grounded in a reality before going to the nightmare/crazed extreme that it does go to. But yes, it was a kind of therapy for me and very cathartic.

Q: RED, WHITE and BLUE is a controversial film which you described as a horrific descent into revenge, terror and tragedy. What inspired you to make it?
Well, this was also personal in its own way and came from my fear of contracting AIDS through having one-night stands. Back then, 2009, when I wrote the script, AIDS/HIV wasn't quite the death sentence it was in previous years, but it was still close. I also loved the reaction to The Living And The Dead which we premiered in Rotterdam and then played at many non-horror festivals. The question I got from almost everyone was 'Is this a horror film?' I liked that duality of the film's existence and wanted to do something similar with RWB - a horror film which isn't obviously a horror film...

Q: One of the powerful themes of RED, WHITE AND BLUE is the relationship between sex and death – which you again take on with ‘Bitch’ in the horror anthology LITTLE DEATHS. What drew you to the story?
Well, as above, but with RWB, I wanted to get across that contradiction of doing something that is supposed to be very enjoyable (sex) being also something that could kill you. With Little Deaths, the story is more a perverse revenge story so less about the death aspect and more about how love goes bad.

Q: Your short film THE HANDY MAN, draws you into the world of serial killers. Was it this theme that attracted you to the project?
The theme and the well written script. I didn't write it, but it won a British Short Screenplay Competition as judged by Kenneth Branagh. It was a neat, twisted, twisty, self-contained script which was a perfect vehicle for two great actors. It also had that timeless American Gothic feel to it and reminded me of paintings by Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth. It was very evocative, therefore, too, and I felt we could have a lot of fun with it.

Q: What was it like directing Greta Scacchi?
Fantastic, as you'd hope and expect. She was a great collaborator, asked good questions, brought her own identity and interpretation to the character. As with all world-class actors, every take was compelling, and the hardest thing was deciding which ones not to use rather than which one to use.

Q: You’ve been described by Screen International as one the great British cinematic outsiders. Does this chime with you?
Ha. Well, it's nice to be called 'great'. And I'm thinking that some of the other great British cinematic outsiders would include Ken Russel, Powell and Nic Roeg. They were all summarily ignored by the greater part of our industry and if I'm lumped in with them, then very happy. And, yes, given the amount of support I've received from the industry at large, it does chime with me, and I was even kicked out of Bafta because I was too busy writing/producing/directing RWB in Austin to pay my membership on time.

Q: You’ve just written your first novel, THE WOBBLE CLUB. Are you pleased with the reception?
Yes, very much so. It turns out it's a lot harder to get 'official' reviews for novels than it is for films but so far, the few I've got have been overwhelmingly positive which is gratifying. And I recently received the first reporting and have already sold half the first print run in about five weeks so much better than I was expecting!

Q: it deals with the very tricky subject of eating disorders. How challenging was it balancing sensitive issues with a darkly comic undertone.
Well, I was reading Martin Amis' The Information during some of the writing and that was quite informative in its own way. A lot of his humour comes from word play and there's a fair amount of that in my novel but it's also been fantastic to hear people tell me they've had laugh out loud moments with The Wobble Club. There's a laconicism to the humour, I think, and it's never directed at the characters; I wanted them to maintain their dignity throughout.

Q: What projects are you currently working on?
Well, I have a few films in development/at casting stage. A couple are horror, a couple revenge type thrillers, a crime noir. Come January, I'm hoping to return to novel-writing if none of the films happen and that's more obvious horror than The Wobble Club...

Fri 8 Dec @ 21:00 – RED, WHITE AND BLUE (2010) *Channel premiere

Fri 15 Dec @ 21:00 – THE LIVING AND THE DEAD *Channel premiere

Fri 22 Dec @ 21:00 – LITTLE DEATHS (2011) *Channel premiere

Following all three films is a special presentation of THE HANDY MAN.

nyxtv.co.uk

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Interview with Simon Rumley

Ahead of the UK premiere of his latest film FASHIONISTA at Horror Channel FrightFest Glasgow, Simon Rumley reveals why he’s a fan of drugs in film and his planned foray into London gangster land…

Q: ‘Fashionista’ finds you back in Austin after ‘Red White and Blue’. What excites you about Austin so much? Could ‘Fashionista’ have been set anywhere else?

SIMON: I had such a great experience on ‘Red White & Blue’ for so many different reasons that it was only natural that, at some point, I’d return to Austin. With Tim League (exec producer), Paul Knauss (co-producer) and Karen Hallford (casting director) I’ve got a great bunch of friends who also happen to be great collaborators and they form the core of both films’ Austin based crew and most probably without them neither films would have happened. Beyond that, I love the unique style of Austin, the food, the music, the cinema, the clothes, the neon lights, the bars and of course the people. And although it’s a place which is constantly growing, it still feels it has an intimacy which places like LA or New York or London lack.

Fashionista’s evolution was very much a response to when I went back there in 2014 for a few days after spending a time there in 2009 and 2010 and noticing how much it had changed. Like most interesting places in the Western World over the last 5 years, it’s become gentrified; there’s more sky rise flats, more traffic, more upmarket restaurants and less locals. And, like most places which have been gentrified, there’s an erosion of some of the things that made it exciting in the first place. 

The whole vintage shop phenomena was such a massive part of the Austin that I knew in 2009 and although there are still a lot of these shops, there’s definitely less - even the one we shot in had to relocate literally two weeks after we shot there…So the lead character’s obsession with clothes in the film and her transition from vintage mash-up to designer clothes is probably not something that could believably happen in many places; I’m not sure Fashionista could have been set anywhere else in that case…

Q: It’s a film about addiction, from sex and body image to clothes and identity, but not anything drug-related. You didn’t want to throw that into the mix?

SIMON: I’m a big fan of drugs in films but, to be honest, I think all that needs to have been said has been said so I’m not sure what I would have been able to add to the genre. I’ve always been interested in a period drug film - Alastair Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend for example would offer a different perspective on the subject and I’m currently reading Johny Barleycorn by Jack London which is about his relationship with alcohol - not memoirs of an alcoholic as he’s keen to point out but alcoholic memoirs, set in 1913; fascinating to consider the power of alcohol through the ages. 

I watched Christiane F again as research for this film and films like Requiem For A Dream and Trainspotting offer definitive investigations into contemporary drug addiction so I’m not sure what the point would have been but more importantly, the film is about consumerism and clothes are something that everyone can relate to. It’s so easy to buy anything these days and clothes seem to be the epitome of the consumer’s purchasing power. Given that it’s a phenomenon that hasn’t been explored in cinema it felt ripe for investigation.

Q: All your movies are so unique, your subject matters, locales and atmospheres feel so new and virtually unexplored. Is that the only way you can personally approach film as an artistic medium?

SIMON: Ah, thanks!  From an early age, I’ve always thought that to make a mark, you should try to do something different, individual and unique. I think this belief is ultimately mis-founded; it might have worked at the beginning of the ‘Midnight’ phenomena for people like Lynch and Jodorowsky and Waters in the early/mid 70s but we’re living in such a culturally anodyne time that increasingly, people really just seem to want things that are similar to things they already know and understand and are thus non-challenging.

In terms of my own creative evolution, I definitely have tried to make every film different from the previous one and much of this is done through structure, editing and the visual aesthetics of the film. The structure to ‘The Living and The Dead’, ‘RWB’ and ‘Fashionista’ are completely different from each other as is the editing and the visuals. It keeps it interesting for me as I continue to explore what cinema is and what can be done with it as a medium.

That said, I’ve been trying to do more straight forward, linear films for a while now but things just haven’t worked out that way…

Q: Once more you completely pull the rug out from the viewer’s feet with some major surprises. Do you think of them first and build your story around them, or do they evolve organically?

SIMON: Yes; interested to see how people react to these moments! They all evolve organically to be honest although there were a few deliberate decisions to make some reveals as late as possible in the film.

Q: This contains flashbacks, flash-forwards, in fact flashes everywhere! How did you cope continuity wise?

SIMON: Ha! Good question. The script was written exactly how it ended up on screen so I’m not really sure anyone really knew what was going on apart from me and so continuity was a big issue. Continuity is an incredibly tough job and I usually find continuity people incredibly annoying and often not very good at their jobs. The only great continuity person I worked with was a woman called Helene Oosthuizen who did Club Le Monde and The Living And The Dead with me and I’d love to work with her again but generally I try not to have continuity people on my film since they slow the whole process down and often confuse it. On ‘RWB’ we didn’t have one, on ‘Crowhurst’ we didn’t have one and perhaps somewhat recklessly we didn’t have one on ‘Fashionista’.

This could have been a massive disaster since there are many scenes which chronologically flow on from each other but appear in the script in a non-linear fashion. The producer and I spent a lot of time making sure the shooting schedule accommodated this and we were also incredibly lucky to have an amazing Costume Designer, Olivia Mori, who not only sourced all these incredible and different clothes (I think Amanda Fuller’s character had over 100 changes) but also spent a lot of time working out the exact linear chronology of the piece. We met up two or three mornings and went through her interpretation of the script, just to make sure it was correct. By the time we finished this, it was watertight in her mind but even then things could have gone wrong but, thankfully they didn’t. But yep, this was an

incredibly challenging film but everyone, Olivia, especially, came through with flying colours.

Q: How would you crystallise your own directing style?

SIMON: Every script is different so I try to direct the script in order to get the maximum drama/tension etc. from it, using editing, music, camera angles etc. as a means to do this. This is probably why every film looks and feels slightly different.  

Q: You give director Nicolas Roeg a name check in the end credits. And you gave Amanda Fuller and Ethan Embry BAD TIMING to watch before shooting. Is he your main inspiration here?

SIMON: Yes - I watched a few films such as Safe by Todd Haynes, Christiane F by Uli Edel, A Woman Under The Influence by John Cassavetes and Lost Highway/Mullholland Drive by David Lynch. But yep, Bad Timing was the main one and I gave it to Amanda and Ethan to try to offer a rough idea as to how the film would end up visually. As far as I remember, that jumps pretty much back, forward and everywhere else. I’ve always been a massive fan and was incredibly fortunate to get the opportunity to work with him on my previous film ‘Crowhurst’, which he exec’d produced. I’d always wanted to try to make a film which has the kind of structure he’s best known for and having spent some time with him, I thought it was a now or never kind of situation.

Q: You’re working with Amanda Fuller again, why do you rate her as an actress, because she fits into your own weird universe the best?

SIMON: Not specifically that per se, but most actresses wouldn’t have had the courage to do what she did in ‘RWB’ or even ‘Fashionista’ so now you come to mention it, that must be something to do with it! She’s absolutely fearless which helps and she’s a complete natural, able to turn the emotions on and off like a tap which also helps. Added to this, she’s a lovely person and completely reliable so it’s always a pleasure to work with her and the results are always fantastic. I’m sure we’ll work together again sometime!

Q: Do you prefer being a resolutely cult director? ‘Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Word was a departure for you. How do you plan balancing artistry with future commercial opportunities?

SIMON: After ‘The Living and The Dead’, ‘RWB’, ‘Little Deaths’ and my ‘ABCs of Death’, I made a decision to go more commercial, something I’m still working on but hope to crack with my forthcoming films. Johnny Frank Garrett was supposed to be the first film in this direction but for various reasons, that didn’t work out exactly how I’d hoped. That said, I’ve been very lucky to make 8 feature films and 2 anthologies and generally had the freedom to do what I wanted with them. If you keep the budgets low enough, these films are still ‘commercial’ in as much as they make their investors’ money back. That said, I’d like to work on a larger canvas, get paid more and get the films seen by more people so that’s definitely my intention henceforth.

Q: And finally, what’s next?

SIMON: I’ve got three projects which are shaping up well. The first which we’re planning on shooting towards end of March is a period based London gangster film about two  guys called Jack The Spot Comer and Billy Hill. They’re the missing link between Peaky Blinders and The Krays and there’s a fantastic story to be told about the ups and downs of their relationship and who, ultimately, was the King of The London Underworld. Given how this country maintains a fascination with gangsters, it’s incredible this story has never been told before because it’s ripe for dramatisation. 

Of the two projects after that, one is a revenge thriller set in post Brexit England and the other is a thriller set in the Mojave desert about a couple who are being shot upon by a sniper, based on an excellent novel called ‘Eyeshot’ by a very talented young writer called Taylor Adams.

FASHIONISTA is showing at the Glasgow Film Theatre on Sat 25 Feb, 11.45am as part of Horror Channel FrightFest Glasgow 2017.

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