![]() I guess that the beauty of Netflix is that people out right up in the Highlands are likely to see the film in a way they probably wouldn’t if we were doing a theatrical release. We’re gonna do a screening, hopefully, out at Leadhills, but that’s only actually an hour from Edinburgh. In terms of the locations for the film, all of the locations, apart from when we went up and shot some landscape shots for a week, were within an hour of Edinburgh. Well, we haven’t, because we ended up… with the recce that I did, which was going back a long time now, about seven years, I went right up to the north of Scotland. Have you screened the film for any of the rural community locals you consulted? So they’re looking to differentiate the good stuff from the bad stuff, whereas I think there’s always been good genre movies and bad genre movies, in the same way that there’s good art movies and bad art movies. And I think that’s always happened, but elevated genre’s largely a term for people who don’t really think genre cinema should essentially be good – it should all be bad. But I think if you look at something like Deliverance, which I think is clearly a thriller, and a film like Wake in Fright or Straw Dogs or Southern Comfort, there’s always been genre movies made… the possible enormous strength of genre movies is you can hook an audience in through the genre and then lead them into territory that they’re not expecting often into serious territory. ![]() “There’s always been a sense that genre films are somehow not really real movies.”Īs someone who’s now directed a tense thriller and also programmed genre cinema events, what are your thoughts on the discussions surrounding ‘elevated genre’ cinema of late, particularly horror?Įlevated genre is a massively popular term at the moment and it’s popular within the industry because, and this is historical, I think there’s always been a sense that genre films are somehow anti-artistic or a little bit cheap or not really real movies. ‘Should I be rooting for them or not?’ But I was definitely looking to blur those lines. There’s no clear morality, really, I don’t think, in terms of any of the characters in the film, which hopefully leaves the audience in the middle to navigate that.įor me, perhaps one of the key bits is this kind of action sequence in the film about 50 minutes in, and if the audience is still rooting for the protagonists at that point – which, I think, from feedback so far, that they are, but in a slightly uneasy way. And I’ve always thought that dynamic’s a little unfair and I certainly wanted to do a bit of revisionism, so that I’ve balanced up the morality. It really helps.ĭeliverance was a huge influence on the film and I love that movie, but the one thing about Deliverance is that, in it, things are very heavily stacked in favour of the city folk who go out into the middle of nowhere. Having somebody like Jack definitely… in fact, I’ve shown clips to people when we were editing the film, I showed a short scene to a few people, like the bar scene, and people were immediately like, “I’m rooting for the blonde guy”, just because he’s got that kind of movie star charisma. And so I knew that the actor who played Vaughn, as well as being a really good actor to handle some of the more emotionally intense stuff, was also gonna have to be super charismatic. It was tricky ground because the worry with that is you have to be very careful that the audience are rooted in with your protagonists. ![]() ![]() Could you tell me about writing and directing the performances for that balance? Perhaps my favourite thing about the film is that everyone’s actions are understandable. We talk to about the influence of Deliverance and Wake in Fright, discussions of ‘elevated genre’, rising star Jack Lowden (Dunkirk), and the benefits of Netflix distributing the film. (You can read our review of the movie here.)Īhead of its global launch on Netflix this weekend, we spoke to Palmer at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where the movie premiered, before winning the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film – the first Netflix Original to win this prestigious prize. ![]() The debut feature from writer-director Matt Palmer, the Scottish Highlands-based thriller stars Jack Lowden and Martin McCann, and is one of the most scarily tense films – that’s not explicitly a horror movie – that we’ve seen for quite some time. If Calibre’s plot of two life-long friends fighting for their lives in an isolated country setting after a hunting trip gone wrong might seem a little familiar, the nuances to how the plot escalates are anything but. ![]()
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