offers to young people. If your choice is I can either starve and allow my family to starve or I can fight for the British then it becomes a lot easier. You can't be persecuted for that choice. He is persecuted in the film by the other people in the village who are extremely hostile towards him. And we continue to be hostile towards these people because we've written them out of our historical record. They didn't do anything wrong.
Another thing that works very well in the film is the sound design, which evokes that sense of place and of feelings of unease. And particularly when the action switches to the other place.
Brian: That had to have it's own texture. It was a real challenge that sequence, not just in terms of shooting it, but also in terms of coming up with something that we could achieve on the budget and would have its own space other than what you've seen in the film so far. So we followed that through on the sound design too. When you have that moment when the ghosts all appear around them their voices are whales. It's the one piece of sound design that I did in the film. I took whale sounds and distorted them and added delays and echoes and looped them. David described it beautifully in the script, and I can't remember the words he used, but they needed to be something other than what you naturally associate with what you are seeing. We ended up using the whales to create this siren sound.
David: Because it's the sound of desire. When whales call out it's because they are calling for a mate. And so much of the story operates on that border between sort of desire and repulsion or terror. A lot of these calls that we hear and are startled by, the screeches that we hear from foxes and such, these are all mating calls. So there's something interesting about that.
Brian: Again it needed to be alien. If it is the obvious choice then it's the wrong choice.
From a practical point of view that sequence must have been difficult.
Brian: It was incredibly difficult. We had another ending, but David brilliantly changed it when we realised that we didn't have the budget for it. We were going to flood the house. David then came up with the brilliant idea of inverting the house beneath the house. it was amazing. It was far easier to execute, but still incredibly difficult. Initially when he dives through the trapdoor and swims through the house that was done relatively simply. While we were in Lofus Hall we shot a number of empty plates and then in our swimming pool sequence a few months later we filmed Eugene Simon swimming against black and we matched the shots and super-imposed them and added at the compositing level a load of dirty water on top. It was pretty convincing. So you then go "he's swam through the house, where does he end up?" And there had been a lot of discussion about murky underwater lakes and reeds and stuff, but actually the smartest idea, and the one that felt like it represented the film best was this kind of void, a black void. Just a space. And it also cost nothing because we could just use black curtains in the swimming pool. But it was incredibly difficult to shoot.
What is your process for something like that?
Brian: I storyboard my films start to finish, so for that sequence I storyboarded it and then myself and David sat down one day and we went "that's great, but we can't shoot that, we won't have time". So myself and David went through and we kept cutting it back until the only thing that was left in terms of the storyboard is the essence of what the idea was about. That's what we shot. And even then that was incredibly difficult to get done in the time that we had. If you are shooting above ground, and if you are really fast, you can do late 20s to mid 30s amount of shots per day. Underwater that drops to about 10 or 15. It's incredibly slow. That's what we did, about 15 shots per day over four days. It was very very difficult to achieve, but I think that the end result works. If you imagine that if you are in that sequence, and we finally reveal who these ghosts are and what they look like, that we need Charlotte Vega and Bill Milner to do all of those. Every shot that you see in the film was shot multiple time s so that we could have multiples of Bill and Charlotte. The underwater section was shot in two spaces. One was Cheeverstown swimming pool, which is a shallow pool and it was really easy for them in that environment. They never got cold. They could stand up in there. We did all of the close-up shots in there. And then we did two days in Blanchardstown swimming pool, which goes from 3 metres to 5 metres and that is incredibly cold. So that was extremely difficult. All of the wide shots were done there over two nights. We had an underwater cameraman called Rob Franklin, who did Planet Earth, he's one of the BBC underwater guys. He turned up with this trailer on the back of a four-wheel drive with everything that you could possibly need. The underwater camera and an iPad so that you could control it from outside the water. It was amazing. The DoP Richard Kendrick lit it, but Rob did all of the underwater shots. He had this facility to speak to the cast while they were underwater. they couldn't speak back, but they could hear him and that calmed them right down. They felt very confident as he could explain everything to them. He made that process far easier than it might otherwise have been. It was never chaotic. It was always smooth. We had divers under the water and they were able to stay under for 5-10 minutes at a time and then they would come up and take a break. When we shot there were always divers in the frame and we had to get rid of them. Thankfully Charlotte is like a fish. She grew up in Sitges which is a seaside town so water holds no fear. And Bill as a busy working actor had done a lot of stuff and he's done quite a bit of underwater stuff so he was confident as well. So we were quite lucky with the two of them. And then Eugene Simon is a bit of a warrior. He just wants to get in there and do it and he just went for it. He has asthma actually, but he just went and did it. He was very impressive underwater.
You mention that Charlotte is from Sitges. And you got to play Sitges as the Closing Film.
Brian: It was great for her. She told us of the first short film that she had done and it had played in Sitges and she went to the premiere on her scooter as she only lived down the road. It was great that festival. It opened with The Shape of Water and closed with ours. That was a nice symmetry. And I discovered when I saw the film recently that they both have underwater climaxes. Just missing out on the Oscar nom.
You won an award in Molines...
Brian: Yeah, we won in Molines and it's gone down well. When it finds its audience they like it. It's not a hardcore horror. It's a very different beast to Let Us Prey. I enjoyed the opportunity to mix it up. I may move away from horror for the next one, although I am working with David again on another.
CinÉireann / March 2018 37