Me and the sound designer are very 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.
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. Films 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 paradisaical 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.
CinÉireann / April 2018 57