British director Simon Rumley is the talk of the alternative festival circuit, and his latest feature Red White & Blue is a must-see at FrightFest this week. A slow-burning ‘artsy’ horror set in the slacker capital of the world, Austin, Texas, it unravels like a modern tragedy, slowly but surely veering slap-bang into a violent end. LWLies speaks to the writer-director about his speedy three-week shoot and the realities of getting a genre film distributed in the UK.
LWLies: The likes of FantasticFest and Fantasia Festival in Canada have amazing sponsors and a real sense of ‘fanboy’ appreciation. Do we have the same appetite for genre films over here?
Rumley: All you have to do is look at FrightFest or Day of the Dead in Leeds to see that there’s a tremendous hunger for genre films in the UK. FrightFest now plays at Leicester Square’s Empire Cinema, which has a capacity of about 1200 and, as far as I’m aware, is one of the largest cinemas in the UK. The audience for each of these films is usually way bigger than those playing at the London Film Festival or in Edinburgh. I was on the jury at Leeds for Day of the Dead last year and although a smaller venue, it still had sizeable and constant crowds, which was nice to see. I think where American audiences are probably better at this kind of thing is vocalising their support, especially through websites. So whilst things like Aintitcool, Twitch, Bloody Disgusting, Fangoria and Cinematical are pretty established sites, it’s only in the last few years that the UK has started to have established websites which are in part at least dedicated to the genre.
Your previous film, The Living and the Dead is quintessentially British and in part, autobiographical. But Red White & Blue is all-American – set and filmed on-location in Austin, Texas. Do you think that it is being an outsider that allows you to capture Austin so vividly?
There’s something truly quintessential about Austin and Texas in terms of Americana; the sprawling landscapes, as well as the less visual aspects like the friendliness, the food, the music – even the cowboy hats. It’s a very genuine, heart-on-sleeve kind of place. By the time I came to film in Austin I’d been there three times – usually for between three days and a couple of weeks, so I felt I had a pretty good grasp of its visual strengths and overall character. I’d say it is very much defined by the bars and clubs and music venues that manage to be gritty but incredibly charming and full of character. The majority of places we filmed in, we did very little production design. We just shot what was already there. Tim League, our executive producer and local Austin long term resident, called the film ‘a love letter to Austin’, and although it’s a perverse love letter, I do like the sentiment behind this comment.
When we think of ‘slacker’ films, we think of them being made by the likes of Larry Clark, Harmony Korine and Richard Linklater. Do we have British slackers?
My first three features – Strong Language, The Truth Game and Club Le Monde – were very much inspired by Richard Linklater’s first three features Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise. When [my films] were reviewed, the comparisons to Linklater and actually Eric Rohmer were pretty rife. I made them because, at the time, in the early-to-late ‘90s, there weren’t any films about British youth culture. Even though our music, fashion and art industries were going through the roof, our film culture wasn’t. That said, I don’t think we have had the slacker culture that the Americans have, that was also detailed so well in Douglas Coupland’s books, especially Generation X. The concept of doing a slacker revenge movie in the UK is pretty much anathema and that the US is its spiritual home. It’s something to do with the UK having unemployment benefits and the vague social stigma that associated with signing on. Americans who captured the slacker sentiment tended to make it seem a romantic progression from leaving school or university before getting a job in the ‘real world’. The only people who tend to deal with these kinds of subjects [in the UK] are, or were, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach and they’re more from a social and political perspective than a youthful one.
How essential was your relationship with Tim League in helping you make the film?
Tim was absolutely essential. He owns what is generally considered to be the coolest, and most independent, cinema chain in the world – the Alamo Drafthouse that, apart from having waiters who come throughout the film to serve you food and alcohol, also has an incredibly eclectic programme. I’d stayed at Tim and his wife Karrie’s house when The Living and The Dead won a tonne of awards at their festival FantasticFest and we became friends pretty quickly. At some point, in Cannes I think it was, I asked if he’d be interested in helping out on the local scene if I came to Austin to shoot a film and he said yes immediately. As a kingpin of that scene he was, essentially, our facilitator. If we needed some bar locations, he’d get in touch with his friends who owned bars. If we needed some domestic locations, he’d put an announcement out on his Alamo Drafthouse website, if we needed extras he’d do the same.
Can you tell us a bit about the shoot?
The shooting process was pretty straightforward – we shot on a handheld Red camera for three weeks. For the first two thirds of the film, the camera hardly moves at all and then in the final third, when the Noah Taylor character comes into his own, the camera moves a lot. We had 27 different locations and a first cut of the film that lasted about two hours so, in terms of the actual scheduling and filming, we were moving ridiculously quickly. Myself and Milton Kam, the DP, had worked with each other a couple of times before so we were confident we could do this all in a limited time frame – although I don’t think everyone else was so sure! Initially the crew was a little shocked at how quickly we were shooting but, in fairness to them, they all stepped up to the challenge with flying colours.
How did you fund Red White & Blue?
The funding came from a guy called Doug Abbot who I’ve worked with now four times – he’s an independent producer and is good at getting low budget films off the ground without having to resort to any of the usual financing routes. I started writing the script in September 2008 and was in Austin in March 2009 doing an initial recce, returning in May to prep, and film in July. It was certainly the quickest that I’ve ever got a film off the ground.
What do you think contemporary fans want from horror films?
That’s a tough question because I think it very much depends on the age of the fan you’re talking about. It seems the slightly less discerning teen audience is pretty happy watching the Michael Bay or Roy Lee school of remakes but I think the older, smarter, more cine-literate audience is the absolute opposite. From what I can gather, the more discerning horror fan is pretty much happy to watch anything that remotely falls into the horror canon – it doesn’t matter if this is a black and white film from the ‘50s or a Japanese or Korean film from whenever. Certainly Red White & Blue and The Living and the Dead played many genre festivals and have both won awards at the largest of these so I think, more than anything, there is a core audience of cine-literate horror fans who want to be challenged. They want to see films that aren’t coming straight out of the studio system in Hollywood. Sadly, more often than not, it’s the distributors who aren’t able to comprehend this and won’t pick up films that don’t fall into formulae that they understand from a tried and tested formula.
Following from this, much of Red White & Blue is not typical horror. It is a ‘genre-bender’ and, indeed, you have referred to it as a ‘slacker revenge thriller’. Are you fearful that horror fans won’t have the patience to wait for the gory reward in the film’s second half? Or that arthouse fans will switch off when the gore kicks in?
Most people who love cinema, and are interested in seeing unusual films with good performances that challenge and emotionally affect them, seem to respond to Red White & Blue. We’ve played at both genre festivals and non-genre festivals and most audiences seem to appreciate it for what it is. But of course, there’ll be some who don’t and actually, it seems like it’s more likely the arthouse crowd who can’t stomach the violence towards the end more than the horror crowd who can’t stand the character development at the beginning!
How important is it for indie films to have a cinematic release these days? Is it something you insist on in distribution deals?
It’s important to get the films theatrically seen so that they receive more exposure because without these it’s very easy for films to fall between the cracks when so many films are released on a weekly basis. Nowadays, unless a film has a massive marketing and advertising budget, it’s hard, if not impossible, to compete with your average studio film. That said it’s great that there are so many websites which are fan driven and will write about any film, whether it’s coming out on DVD, just been screened at a festival or even if a trailer or poster has been released. I’d love to be able to insist on a distribution deal for my film but the reality is that there’s next to no communication from distributors to filmmakers so getting them to buy the film is about as much as you can hope for these days. It’s is a sad state of affairs.
Busy directors frequently say they have no time to watch contemporary films. Now that things are really kicking off for you, do you watch fewer films? If not, tell us some films or directors/writers that you’ve noticed lately?
I do try to watch as many films as possible since, irrespective of what anyone says, it is important to see what other people are doing and how they’re doing it. My favourite day at FantasiaFest was when I watched four films back to back and I was pleasantly surprised by how great they all were: Bodyguards and Assassins, High School, Black Death and The Violent Kind. I also watched a Korean film from the ‘60s called The Housemaid, which is widely considered to be a classic and was restored in its print version by Martin Scorsese’s print restoration fund. I’m looking forward to seeing [Darren] Aronofsky’s Black Swan and in terms of new writers – there’s a couple of guys I’m collaborating with in LA – there’s a guy called Adam Alleca who wrote the remake of The Last House on the Left and this other guy called TS Faull who wrote Grimm Love. Both are in their late twenties and have a great talent for writing excellent characters and putting them in incredibly interesting, dramatic and emotional situations. I’m trying to direct films written by both of them and if they happen, I’m pretty sure they’ll blow people away. And at the Sarajevo Film Festival I was just at, I saw Lebanon, The Myth of The American Sleepover and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – all more arthouse than genre but interesting and passionate films in their own right.
Simon Rumley (text) by Georgie Hobbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
