In a small island community, a troubled young woman falls for a mysterious outsider who empowers her to escape her oppressive family. When he comes under suspicion for a series of brutal murders she defends him at all costs and learns what she is capable of. Michael Pearce's debut feature, Beast, is a wonderfully confident film full of mystery and fine performances.
Cin É: One of the first things that captured me is the difference in pacing between shots that are taken outside and those are taken inside. There seems to have been a deliberate move for slow and steady movements for interior shots and more dynamic and energetic shots for exterior.
Michael Pearce: That's quite perceptive of you. I had talked with my DoP and we wanted to have two very distinct looks. The character is kind of trapped between two worlds. The world of her family and her community and we wanted that to feel oppressive without being too heavy handed about it, but we wanted to give that feeling of unease and discomfort. And so we used very slow tracks and slow zooms and we kept the camera kind of static with odd framing. And the editing was more slow pace than deliberate. generally those scenes are when she's inside. and then when she's outdoors and particularly when she's falling in love with Pascal we wanted it to have a more organic feeling. Predominantly they are handheld scenes and the editing is more
impressionistic it plays with
continuity a lot and it's more guided by emotion. We kind of break these rules as well but we wanted to set up a sort of general philosophy based on where she is, who she is with, what she is feeling. And then we were going to have a different aesthetic approach to that.
What it does for me is really heighten the tension. Then when you add in some very atmospheric sound into the mix you get a film that triggers multiple senses.
very big fans of [David] Lynch and how he can very imperceptibly take you down into a very psychological place without you noticing. I think sounds can be almost the most expressive part of the film because it's the part that can go through the back door. You won't notice too much if your heightening the sound as cinema is such a visual medium. You can affect the audience in a much more psychological way with the types of sound design. So me and the sound designer were constantly asking ourselves questions about how to do it without distracting the audience. How can we make this root more firmly with the subjectivity of the character through the sound design? Whether that's just an ominous tone that is reverberating through the background when she's at the house or something that's a little bit more warm and intimate when she's in nature. And it felt like there was something comforting about the sound of birds or wind or the forest. And we tried to push it along hopefully without breaking that relationship with reality.
It reminded me in a way of Under the Skin which uses sound in a more oppressive fashion. I think it's the isolation or the different landscapes. We don't see Jersey often on screen or we don't see parts of Scotland as often on screen.
Well that's good because I'm a huge fan of that movie. And it's also nice to see filmmakers making movies about the specific regions that they are from. Like Francis Lee making God's Own Country and Clio Barnard making Dark River and Lady Macbeth being set in Durham. Film's don't all have to be set within a few miles of Hampstead Heath. You can explore different landscapes. In some ways we felt that our film was quite un-British. I'm from Jersey and it's only a few miles away from France, so I was very much influenced by French filmmakers. Bruno Dumont shoots around Brittany and the landscape is quite similar. And I thought about Claude Chabrol type thrillers or Claire Denis. Sometimes they're even more of an influence than British filmmakers. We want us to really use the island and the paradisiacal nature of that type of landscape as a juxtaposition to the crimes instead of trying to draw tension from the landscape. Traditionally in a thriller you would draw the tension from the landscape and from the mood and from the weather in order to make it seem more ominous. And I felt that we had seen that a lot of times in British movies and they can all feel very gloomy. And that can be great and I love some of those movies, but I felt that it felt more genuine to adapt to the scenic side of Jersey and the area that I grew up in. It is very beautiful. We just used that as some kind of counterpoint to the horror of the crimes that had been committed. We are maybe a degree or two or more there and we may have allowed ourselves a bit of artistic licence to grade in another couple of percent of warmth. We happened just to shoot in a summer that we were very lucky with the weather. So we kind of embraced that. Of course there are other influences like Badlands, which is one of my favourite movies. West Texas looks beautiful as it's all shot at sunset and with that type of landscape you have the horror of these crimes, which are very brutal, but they're set within this incredibly beautiful landscape. I thought that maybe there's something more interesting about the way he sort of rendered that as a sort of fairytale. It felt a sort of fitting reference point for us, as opposed to making a dark gloomy British thriller. There's a lot of them about, and I love them. They're great. But it just didn't feel genuine to me because I'm from Jersey.
We had that here with John Michael McDonagh's Calvary. The landscape of Sligo is beautiful, but the events happening in the film are horrible.
I like that one. I like when what you are seeing is kind of incongruous what is happening in the story and in the setting. There's something there that I find quite striking.
There's a duality to the location in Beast and there seems to be a duality to all of the people in Beast as well they all seem to be hiding something.
Yes, all of the characters in one side of themselves, and they're hiding something. They might even be hiding something from themselves. I think it's very interesting to go there. When we were developing the script there was often the question about what are the characters lying about. Because we all keep secrets from other people even in a small way. And then deeper question was what are the characters lying about to themselves? And that kind of duality about what is above the table, what's below the table, and Jersey seeming like this safe and wholesome place, which it is, but it can still be the epicentre for some sort of evil character. You have this wholesome perfect family and there are families that I would have visited when I was a kid. Some of my friends families and then when I went behind the front door I realised that I found something not quite sinister but chilling about the hierarchy within certain families. Some of my friends had a very differential relationship to their parents and the family that I'm from we are more like mates than we are like parents and children. Seemingly perfect environment, seemingly perfect community, seemingly perfect households and relationships and people, and then when you poke behind those facades you see something unexpected. It's a very different movie but something like Blue Velvet was a touchstone thematically. It has one of the best openings I think in cinema. and the whole movie is about what is happening behind these forgotten American towns. Finding out the dysfunctionality behind seemingly normal domestic environments I think that's very interesting.
In many ways it's Kafka-esque. It's that pretty normal story with just one element changed.
Yeah it kind of gave us confidence. We kind of made life difficult for ourselves where you've got this film about serial killer stalking an island, but there's no murders on screen. And we're not following the detective hunting the killer. We're not hunting a macabre psychopath. We are really following a character who is on the periphery of these stories. That actually takes a lot of tools away from you as a filmmaker.
A Walk on the Wild Side:
Director Michael Pearce talks us through the making of Beast
Words: Niall Murphy
56 CinÉireann / April 2018