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A Conversation with Jeremy Lovering about fear


In Fear
09 March 2014

Driving, lost and tormented in the night, primal fears of the dark and the unknown give way to fear that you have let the evil in, or that it is already there.

From Big Talk Productions, producers of Shaun of the Dead, Sightseers, The World’s End and Hot Fuzz. Directed by Jeremy Lovering, starring Iain De Caestecker (Joss Whedon’s AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.) and Alice Englert (Beautiful Creatures, Ginger and Rosa).

In Fear comes to Blu-ray and DVD on March 10 and The Fan Carpet’s Marc Jason Ali had the pleasure to chat with writer/ director Jeremy Lovering about the film, he tells us about his influences, why he chose his cast and what he’s up to next…

 


Congratulations with the film, you must be thrilled with the response it has had?

Yeah, no I am, really, genuinely, thrilled is exactly the right word. The biggest thing for me is the different kind of spread of people in the audiences, from people who are totally savvy with the genre and they’ve embraced it in a way that I was quite apprehensive about because obviously if you’re making a film in a genre, you want to know that the genre fans get it, so that was really exciting.

And then having different screenings in different places like Salt Lake City public screening or the Dublin Horror Festival or the broad level, that’s really surprised me and thrilled me.


And of course FrightFest…

And FrightFest yeah, that was the big one for me, that was thirteen hundred people who could turn on me pretty quickly I thought and they didn’t, they seemed to really like it.

In Dublin as well, the horror festival there, what was great was; the fans that had been going there for so long, they were the ones coming up to me afterwards saying ‘this is great, we like it’. That was a massive g-up, it really was.

 

In Fear is an apt title because the film is a study of fear, and I would imagine the best way to study fear is for you and the actors to work on instinct in the moment? Therefore improvisation becomes the perfect tool to exploit for your intentions for this film.

I would say that’s true, absolutely that’s true, and I wanted to create a situation where the actors felt the fear, and that fear is a state of mind, therefore as you say, they haven’t got the safety net of a script or the comfort of knowing they’re going to live tomorrow or they’re going to survive the story, and the fact that they didn’t know what was going to happen or how it was going to end meant that they were in a constant state of anticipation if you like.

And there are primal fears that we all have, well we don’t all have, but when you put someone in a dark room and don’t tell them what’s around them, they’ll start to get edgy anyway. If you’re lost or you’re with somebody you don’t really know and then if there’s something out there, and then you start to think it’s the one next to you that’s tricking you, so all those things are kind of fairly primal and I think to achieve that in a very authentic experience like you say, if for the actors to not know what was coming and to not have a script was probably the best way I thought to achieve it.

The improvisation came from, I had a script, I had pages, I had sides of script, I had dialog, what I found, which was interesting for me was that, and I think this is different than with something like Blair Witch where you’d abandon them and leave them to their own devices, I wanted to manipulate them a bit more and control it a bit more.

I would put them in a situation, and watch their first reaction, and insist that in the edit that became the first thing because I wanted to keep that authenticity of the first reaction.

And obviously they start discussing what happened or how they’re going to get out of there, that would be when I’d step in and talk to them, give them different pieces of direction; so the boy would get a few lines and the girl would get a few lines and then I’d take them in different directions so I was constantly playing with their levels of conflict with each other so that they weren’t totally improvising but they were improvising within certain parameters. Which meant that I could always up the stakes and keep them on edge and I could always stop them from feeling that they’d worked out what was going to happen.


The cast is fantastic, what was it about these three that told you they were right for the film, obviously there is a huge amount of trust and faith to essentially go into a film blind?

Yeah, I think that’s true, it’s funny, you spend all this time as a director trying to build up trust very quickly and with this I had to make them trust the fact that they couldn’t trust me. So after a while, they couldn’t turn to me, they couldn’t ask me what was going to happen because I would never give them the same answers.

I knew that that was the process I was going to undertake, so I had to find actors that were very confident in themselves, in terms of who they are in this world in real terms, so that they could them put themselves in a fragile situation where they didn’t have the normal safety net like we just said and they weren’t going to kind of break down or collapse or get angry and walk off.

So the first thing was to find people who were willing to embrace the entire process and they understood that it was going to be filmed in that way and all of them loved it, they loved the idea of it, and obviously that was a great starting point, they were like ‘ok cool, let’s see how it goes’ and they’re all very cool people; they’re centred and laid-back, they’re not neurotic or angsty, so, immediately I knew we were just going to have a good journey together.

In terms of the character types, I had archetypes in my mind, the story I wrote was very much with archetypes, and the whole thing was written as a fable any way, it’s not meant to be a piece of social realism, but, I wanted it to be as real as possible without it being totally realistic.
So I needed actors who could kind of reflect the things that I was interested in exploring; Iain for example is the kind of guy who understands what alpha male is, he’s quite sort of ‘you don’t need to be like that’, he’s not a violent person, he grew up in Glasgow and his mates would always try to throw the first punch, but he’d always try to make the joke to try and get out of a situation before it became violent.

So the real Iain reflected in some ways the issues I was interested in; i.e. How far can you push someone before they become violent? Is violence a necessity or inevitably of fear? And is it born from fear and therefore avoid it? And all those things he’d sort of experienced in his life, he maybe didn’t analyse them but they were relevant, and he’s a skinny, little guy, so when I was looking for Allen’s character it had to be alpha male, had to be physically and emotionally dominant, had to be quite charismatic, and a bit of a bully, and Allen was able to do those things because he’s a very strong personality anyway.

Similarly Alice, I was looking for someone who was a mixture of some level of vulnerability, some level of wanting the world to be nice so therefore being in denial, someone who was ultimately a survivalist, ultimately would protect themselves, and had heroic qualities if you like but also had lots of flaws and I think Alice had pondered on those issues anyway in her life, and she was only seventeen, so she was relying on intuition and she was was very smart, very savvy, but at the same time, her life experience wasn’t, so she hadn’t lived everything, so there was still that level of discovery in her.

So all those things came in, to mix with the characters and the actors, I met loads of actors who were just brilliant, I’m quite spoilt for choice in Britain at the moment, but some of them weren’t the personality that would’ve worked.


In a previous interview you stated that you deliberately didn’t go back to look at any films, but certain films did have a bearing on it. Are there any directors who have had an influence on your directorial style and approach to filmmaking or more specifically had a bearing on In Fear?

Yeah definitely I think I said that because there are films I’ve watched over the years that have kind of distilled into making In Fear, and there are ones that are obviously more technically relevant; I mean Duel for example is one film I did look at again, just technically because I wanted to see how Spielberg had kept interest using a very confined location; i.e. a car, and how did he keep that interest turning over. There are others obviously like Road Kill or Joyride as it was renamed in America which were shot in vehicles and I looked at those for the technical reasons.

Spielberg brought in a new shot, a new angle every sequence and what that did subconsciously you were stimulated, you weren’t aware of it, and you wouldn’t be able to articulate that, but that’s what he was doing and just weighted the fear and just kept those angles changing.

Thematically I suppose Straw Dogs, Deliverance and Southern Comfort those, since I first saw them, this ordinary bloke becomes violent and so thematically they were relevant, and The Vanishing was something just for tension, I didn’t look at it again because I didn’t think it would stand up, it was the 80’s wasn’t it? I didn’t see it that long ago, but I don’t think it’ll stand up to the scrutiny, but then there’s other films like Them; a modern, contemporary horror or psychological thriller I suppose and The Strangers, which is kind of the same film, I had seen those when they came out but I didn’t want to go back and watch those because I didn’t want it to weigh too heavily.

But I guess Polanski, what the touchstone is for this sort of film, for me, Repulsion and Knife in the Water were two very dominant films when I was thinking about this.

And The Hitcher obviously, yeah The Hitcher because of the way it uses the psychopath and what he wants from his experience, that was probably a very direct link and unashamedly so.
They’re all great influences, I’ll watch them all again.

 


There seems to be a deliberate lack of information or exposition offered to the audience, Is this a little gamesmanship on your part?

Yeah, definitely, I think without a doubt I wanted to avoid all the backstory that you normally get in the genre and so there were two areas where that was relevant; one is that you don’t know where these kids are from, you don’t know what job they did or do, does she live in London? You don’t know, she’s got a funny accent, he’s obviously got a Scottish accent, but you know.

I wanted to avoid all that because I wanted it to feel more like a fable than anything else, and that genre often clutters up and sometimes brilliantly, I’m not criticising it, I just wanted to try to do it without it so that all of us could relate to this couple in a way that I don’t think I would’ve done if I had known everything about them, I find that often a problem when I’m watching something, that you hear the backstory and then you have to forget about it in order to relate to the characters. So I deliberately wanted to try that, and then it was important to me that you don’t see what happens in the pub, the inciting moment if you like, the instigation is not there, you just don’t know what happened and I was interested in the different version of events and you’re making choices very early on as an audience member, very early on you’re making choices about who you trust and who you believe and that’s key to the characters themselves not knowing who to trust or who to believe, but more importantly, it makes you very unsettled as an audience because I think we are used to being told this is the truth, this is fact, within the film and what I was deliberately doing was saying you don’t know, none of this may be true and it just kind of wrong foots you from the word go so you’re not really trusting what you’re seeing.

 

Having explored the grey area of the psychological thriller/psychological horror, would you be interested to write-direct a pure horror film minus any other genre trappings?

I think that’s really interesting, I think, there’s one at the moment which I’m looking at which is pure horror, I wouldn’t write it because the writer’s already written it, but no, cause it’s a brilliant script and it’s really interesting. I think what is is, is when you’re casting, and you’re talking to an actor about why they should want to do it or why you want them to do it, and what you’re looking for, and if  if it’s just pure horror, I mean The Ring to me is pure horror up to a point, if that script had landed on my desk then, I would’ve done it like a shot. Let The Right One In or Let Me In again, I don’t know if those are pure horror, I don’t know what you would call those.

In my mind, horror is a genre that’s shifting all the time, there are so many sub sects, but yes I would be happy to do a pure horror depending on what type of horror it was.

The first Saw I would done like a shot, but the second I wouldn’t have done because the first had been done, does that make sense?


Yeah, it does, you don’t want to re tread old ground as it were…

I want to try not to and also I think there’s an interesting thing, and Saw is an interesting one, and Ring as well, there aren’t many horror sequels that have been… and Alien if you call that a horror, the second one is extraordinary, so it depends again what you’re calling horror, but I think the first one shows how horror can work on so many different levels; it’s terrifying and at the same time it gets under your skin, it’s psychological, it’s body repulsive, it’s all of those things and then the second one becomes a watered down version of the first one. And that to me, if that’s what you’re calling pure horror where it just relies on gore rather than suspense or tension and it relies on shock rather than development and character, then I think that’s when that becomes less interesting to me.


Do you have any memorable moment or moments from making In Fear?

Yeah, lots, there’s one that was really funny where I kind of realised how brilliant everything could be, but we basically sent them off on their own in a car and rigged the cameras to film them, and whilst they were away there was all this extraordinary stuff like the tyre burst, they had a near crash, they saw a member of the public who they asked for directions to the hotel, the guy pretended that he knew but he obviously didn’t because it didn’t exist and all these things were going on and it was so brilliant. But we had forgotten to tell them that we could only film for ten minutes and the rest of it was wasted, so two hours later they came back and they had all of these wonderful experiences in their life but none of it was on camera, and I think that was the moment I realised the limitations. One day we’ll be able to film everything in real time, but that was a moment where we realised there are limits, there are constraints.


I’m interviewing you for The Fan Carpet, and we want to know what you are a fan of?

Blimey! Many things!  That’s a tricky one, I’m not a fanboy of anything in particular, I’m a wayward fan of many things I would say.

 

 

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IN FEAR COMES TO BLU-RAY AND DVD ON MONDAY MARCH 10