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Alex Chandon (Part 2) Go back to Part 1 of this very long interview
"They are Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Paul Verhoeven, Martin Scorsese, early John Carpenter. I haven’t seen John Carpenter do anything good for a long time. Maybe They Live was the last thing that I thought was half-decent. But his early stuff was masterful so I don’t know what happened. Maybe he just stopped taking drugs or got married or something. Same with George Romero. Early Romero, early Argento, early Cronenberg. Starship Troopers was my favourite film of recent times, and before that Jacob’s Ladder. But there’s been nothing in the horror scene from America that I’ve liked for so long. Oriental films turn me on at the moment. I’ve been two years in the wilderness, editing Cradle of Fear, so I’m playing catch-up. Not so much The Ring and Audition, which are spooky, but extreme stuff that they’re getting away with like Evil Dead Trap, which I think is just whacked: Fulci meets Argento meets John Woo." What about the influence of British horror, such as Amicus? "Those are the directors that influenced me. What they were doing was low-budget stuff. But as far as films go, what I grew up with was the Hammer double-bills on BBC2, then Appointment with Fear on ITV which usually showed Amicus ones: Tales from the Crypt, Asylum, Vault of Horror and all those films. They were always my favourites. I do think they went into my subconscious. So the stories weren’t that difficult to write. I watched those films and realised that you don’t have to state the obvious. Like: why should there be zombies? You just have zombies - and it’s cool. Also filming it in England with English accents, it’s always going to have that English thing. “It was brilliant that people like Alan Jones and yourself mentioned films like Asylum and Tales from the Crypt. Dani Filth absolutely adores all the Hammer films. He would die for Christopher Lee’s signature. He just loves that old retro stuff and I think that’s where we want to go. Obviously we want a bit of a budget and we want castles, something really gothic and atmospheric. I love the hectic gore and it was fun doing it on this, but I’d like to tone things down a little; still be quite heavy but maybe a bit more serious instead of comical. But having said that, if you can fuse the two - like Bad Taste and Evil Dead - and it works, then I think that makes it quite a fun film to watch. “I’m always concerned about what my audience think rather than what I think, and I’m quite keen on giving people a good time. So I wouldn’t make something like David Lynch’s Eraserhead now. I’d make that if I was successful. I always get pissed off with a film like Funny Games which has got the most ridiculous plot thing at the end which just fucks up the whole film. I just think that’s a cop-out in film-making. Blair Witch again - I think that’s brilliantly experimental idea on film, but it made me feel seasick. I hated it and its whiny accents. But I just thought the idea was brilliant. If I’d seen that film on video I’d have thought it was amazing, but I think it just put out the wrong idea about horror films at that particular time. “I’m finding people like Cradle of Fear because they like the old school: stab, slash ‘em up, bit of sex, no redeeming characters, everyone dies, it’s great. I didn’t know about Rob Zombie’s film, House of 1,000 Corpses, until we were making ours. Rob Zombie is a metal icon in America, a bit like Dani Filth is in the UK, and he was saying that he was doing this film which was a throwback to the ‘80s horror films - loads of violence and heavy metal. We were both going to finish at the same time, which we did. But he can’t get his released because he went with Universal. That’s obviously a benefit of doing something independently like we did. But I wish him luck on getting it released. I hear rumours that it’s coming out on DVD but no-one’s saying who’s releasing it, which makes me think of Jim Van Bebber’s experience with Charlie’s Family, when someone else gets hold of it and releases it because people want to see it. It’s a funny old world. “I think there will be a backlash against CGI as well - that’s getting a bit boring. I think we used computer graphics quite well in a couple of shots, with some of the violence, like the stabbing through the cheek. I like to do that - use computer graphics with real make-up and really try and fool the audience - rather than having a computer graphic creature. When you see it, you know it’s a computer graphic creature. It’s not like seeing Michael Myers as The Shape in the bedroom, which is something that s till gives me the fear. I think The Others is doing it for the psychological horror. I think the gory, violent, in-your-face horror is going to come back with attitude, and if it does I’d quite like to be at the helm of that."
"We had some difficulties on the story with the Porsche. Just the visual effects. I ended up having to do a lot of them myself which is why a couple of them have got that Wacky Races quality to them. But that was difficult because the guy whose Porsche it was, basically he just lost the Porsche and we hadn’t really filmed it. It’s a long story. We’d filmed a little bit of it but we’d never filmed it with its hood up or anything like that. So I had to somehow recreate the Porsche, which had its inherent problems. “But as far as the make-up goes, the most tricky one was the scene with Emily Booth, when she has a one-night-stand with Dani. You know what happens with her. Just because it was such a small room and that puppet was a fucking nightmare to operate. About eight people, with two girls in a state of undress - which was fine! - and about four cameras. We’ve got a photograph of the room, with twenty people in such a small space. So that was a bit of a nightmare. But having done effects before, I made sure that we spent a whole day on the effects. It’s not something we try and rush at the end of an evening. We have fun when we do it. The ‘making of’ film for this film, which we’re sticking on the DVD, is going to be an all-time classic. We had cameras rolling on everything and obviously everything went wrong. Syringes full of blood would explode backwards into the cameraman’s face. Things would fall off walls and hit people on the head. It was all going wrong, just because of what we were doing, but luckily no-one got hurt. And it’s all on film. “Plus I think it will be educational for people who might be thinking about embarking on this about what it does take. I don’t think a lot of people realise how difficult it is to get something that looks, as you said, quite slick. The other nightmare effects scene was the whole climactic bit. Now I’ve got even more respect for Chinese films, when they do a fight scene. i know it takes ages to do it, but I thought we could do that fight scene in two days. I think it went to four and a half days, and we had to get everyone back to the location. It was just a nightmare." Where did you find your locations? "We got a locations manager that found us the little enchanted cottage which was brilliant. A lot of places I’ve used in the past, like the attic of my flats for The Man’s lair and we used the cellars underneath the flats for the bit with the guy with the axe, walking down the corridor. Lots of people’s houses: my granny’s house, my mum’s house, my brother’s girlfriend’s house. we used 25 locations. “We did the club scene in a gothic-themed pub and we had to be in there at five in the morning because we had to finish at eleven o’clock when they opened the doors for the customers. We asked people to arrive in full make-up because we had no time to put make-up on all those freaks. We went round to gothic clubs and dropped fliers and told people to get to this gothic pub in the middle of the West End at five in the morning, not knowing how many people would turn up, and got seventy freaks from all over England. Stuff like that was mad. Then Oxford Street, where we just went out and filmed without permission - which I highly recommend to everyone. You can get some really nice shots of places that other people can’t, with a little video camera and a small crew. Locations were good, I was very pleased with them. We shot it all in North London so we didn’t cross the river. I’m always a bit biased towards North London so that suits me fine." How did you pick your cast? "I wanted to use proper actors and steer away from using my mates, so again this was a progression. Having been making this stuff for ten years, I did know loads of actors. So it was a bit of everything really. Some were proper, full-time actors, like Stuart Laing in the internet story - he’s one of the leads in South West Nine, that new film that’s come out. He’s a friend. Emily and Eileen, obviously I know them. Melissa Forti is an actress in Italy, a friend of the Italian cameraman. Some people we found off ShootingPeople on the internet, which is a database for film-makers. “We did a casting session, which I’ve never done before, with people coming in off the street for the odd role. I filled a few like that. And then a couple of the dwarfs and amputees that I know - just freaks from the past! The guy that got his leg cut off, he played one of the rednecks in Bad Karma, the one that gets shot in the head. The guy that got his cock cut off in Bad Karma, Marcus Raven, he’s the art director on Cradle of Fear. I met people at the premiere who want to be in stuff. There’s this guy called Killjoy who fronts a band called Necrophagia - he’s really big in America, and he wants to be in a film, as does Casey Chaos from Amen, another big band."
"It’s actually pretty close. It’s one of the rare times when it’s pretty close. I was about 95 per cent happy with it, so I’d say it’s 95 per cent of what I thought it was going to be, so it’s pretty close to my initial vision. I was flabbergasted at some of the effects that we got going. Like the CGI shot at the end - stuff like that I just didn’t realise it would be that good. I was blown away by it - it just took my head off, man! I learned a lot doing the film. “Doing the sound effects too, which was another thing that I did. I know people who run drum’n’bass record companies, and along with the Cradle of Filth music I had access to tons of music that I could mix to superglue the film. I just learnt so much on that film, creating my vision. Now, for the next film, it’s just going to go to another level and I can employ all the stuff I learnt on this. If I’d known what I know now, Cradle of Fear would have been a quite different film, just because I know you can do things quite easily that a big studio would tell you would cost billions. You can do things quite cheap and blow people away. I think we’ve done pretty well with this but I’m just desperate to get my hands on a bit more cash - so any investors out there, get in contact." Are the band happy with the film? "They absolutely adore it, yes. As far as they’re concerned, it’s another outlet for them and a change of image. I think they’re the first heavy metal band to have done a film, or appeared in a film, to this extent. They love it. They’ve just signed to Epic/Sony and they’re quite happy for their image not to be rubber fangs and to take it a stage further. So if this can get them taken a bit more seriously, which I think it can, then it’s good for everyone. So yes, they really like it. They’re actively helping in designing T-shirts and selling T-shirts and getting involved in publicity for it, so that’s been good. I’m on paper to direct their next promo, but I think I’ll have to wait till Easter for that. “At the moment I’m itching to do something else, I want to get creative again, but I think I have to wait a bit and choose the right project, not sell myself short any more. Even if it takes a little more time, just do that film that will really, really make us stand out from the crowd. Cradle of Fear’s still underground at the moment. It will go much more mainstream when we get distribution, but at the moment the people who know about it, know about it and like it. We’ve been doing a lot of work spreading word of mouth and the response we’re getting is really, really positive. So we’re doing something right. We’re not burning our bridges. Also it feels like an underground film, which is what I like about it. Someone mentioned blowing it up to 35mm and putting it out at the cinema; we never even went there when we were making the film, but that would be a dream come true. Just keeping my fingers crossed. Something new happens every day at the moment: I get a new e-mail from someone who’s seen it.” Go back to Part 1 of this long interview where Alex Chandon discusses working with Cradle of Filth, making Pervirella and avoiding the BBFC. | ||
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Who are your horror influences?
What was the most difficult effects shot in the film?
How close is the finished film to what you originally envisioned?