them are quite low budget, but they were creating these sort of mythical backdrops. They became reference points. Of course Hitchcock has some influence with his female lead psychological thrillers like Shadow of a Doubt and Suspicion. It's almost like a Hitchcock setup but I want to shoot it like somewhere between Lynch and Malick. It has to feel really naturalistic at some points and really psychological at another points. You might be setting yourself up for a fall with those touch points. Aim high. I suppose I was pitching a movie that hadn't been done in the UK much before. There wasn't a format because I wanted to have it with this fable quality. I was really interested in how directors with more arthouse aesthetic were starting to work with genre. Someone like Lynne Ramsay when she did We Need To Talk About Kevin and now You Were Never Really Here. I thought wow she's got such a curious eye and there is such a focus on details and she's really getting some sort of poetic visual rhythm in her films, but she's working with much pulpier material. Someone like her quite a big influence. So it was a whole manner of films, from older ones like Hitchcock and Chabrol, to the masters like lynch and Malick, to up-and-coming filmmakers.
Some of our filmmakers here, like Lenny Abrahamson are working in the same sphere and also working with FilmFour. They seem to be allowing artists to make what they wish to make.
They have been really fundamental in the development of a lot of careers, like Steve McQueen, Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Shane Meadows, and Yorgos Lanthimos. There was a year, maybe 4 years ago, in Cannes where they had four films in competition. I don't think that any other production company or financier had had that. I found out really unique. They invest in quite a number of films, and they have notes, it's not like they just write a cheque, you collaborate with them. But they try to encourage filmmakers to find the uniqueness in their voice. And I think it's great that they can invest in them and help artists find voices. I felt very at home and supported by both them and the BFI. And even though I really love to work Stateside and work with U.S. talent, there's a part of me that feels really supported by the BFI and FilmFour. Ideally they could still come and work on my projects even if they are filmed on the other side of the pond. And they're making bigger films, the likes of Three Billboards. They are expanding their canvas and types of films that they want to be involved in,
as well as encouraging new voices. It seems like they are not mutually exclusive aim to make really thoughtful and hopefully cinematically daring stories told with like a sophisticated type of filmmaking, but also reach audiences. I think that as long as there's the possibility to do that I want to be in that game. these are the types of films that I always return to, those films that were made in the 70s, like Chinatown, The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver. That period has so much romance for me, because they were making films that were entertaining and they were captivating stories, but they had so much depth to them. They had characters and so many dimensions to them.
What has changed since then?
It's harder now as you can get pushed to either end of the spectrum, you are encouraged towards making the massive blockbuster, or you stay in the arthouse silo. That middle ground has disappeared or moved to television now. As long as there's the chance to make medium budget films that seduce and challenge an audience that's just what I want to aim for, and Beast was my first experiment in making something that was kind of playing with genre but it was really an excavation into a character. Genre is the Trojan horse in which you can smuggle in to an audience what you really want to talk about. and for me that's kind of like a human question, like a human predicament,a very complicated moral question, and you're using parts of the genre language to try and captivate an audience and seduce them into the cinema. And then once they're in there seats you can give them a tasty and complex meal.
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CinÉireann / April 2018 59