Franklyn is a pretty ambitious first feature…
Yes.
How difficult was it to get off the ground?
It sort of was and it wasn’t. When I went to Jeremy Thomas (Hanway Films) with it, it was with an understanding. When I did the short film Thespian X it was through a lot of favours, basically people I had worked with in the industry, and we’d managed to get something fairly impressive together. When you write something like that you write unfiltered, so to speak, so you don’t let the costs and the money get in the way. You just write a first draft. When it looked like it was in some sort of shape to get up and running after we’d developed it, half the job was finding clever ways of pulling it off really. On paper it looked like it could have cost the world. What we did was very smartly used 2D where we could have used 3D CGI. We made sure the balance of Meanwhile City to normal London felt like it was pretty prevalent, but if you actually look at it there’s not that much of it. So there was a fair bit of smoke and mirrors going on really.
So it was good old-fashioned British ingenuity, harking back to the early days of Terry Gilliam’s film work?
Sure. It was good old-fashioned matte paintings. I was only allowed to tilt the camera up on a fixed head, because if you suddenly throw the camera off to the left-hand side on a shot and it’s costing you another £120,000 on the shot. I just really had to keep an eye on it all. I had some very good heads-of-department. We all made sure there wasn’t a bit of wastage in any department in anything we did. There was this risk that it could have ended up looking like this rather crap fancy dress party. The collaboration of all the departments put together something quite unique.
A lot of filmmakers do waste a hell of a lot of money.
Yes. Exactly. We did all this work at Double Negative and they had a number of other projects in there – the stuff that gets done, rendered then chucked away is phenomenal really. I think this has been very good training for the future, to be very careful cutting your cloth.
You also attracted a really good cast. Did you get Sam Riley straight off the back of CONTROL?
When Sam came in I hadn’t actually seen CONTROL, but when he came in to read, he came in to read for Preest, but he was so obviously Milo and so obviously the perfect dark other half of Emelia, Eva’s character. Eva had worked with Jeremy before, with Bernardo Bertolucci on THE DREAMERS, and she was immediately correct. I don’t think there was anyone else who could have done what she did. And she’s easy on the eye. She’s close to her character Emelia and I thought she pulled off a rather mesmerising performance. Ryan was just this great curve ball. We found out he was very interested in the script, and when I went over to meet him you’ve got this added bonus that if you’ve got someone running around imagining he’s something that he’s not, and if you are going to imagine someone that you’re not you’re probably going to imagine you’re being him. It was just an added bonus having the American accent, which makes the revelation all the more interesting when it happens.
The film actually straddles two camps. On the one hand it’s a sci-fi/fantasy film and on the other it’s a romantic drama. Is there a risk you will alienate both audiences, rather than draw them in?
It’s funny because there is more of a risk with the sci-fi and fantasy community going; “But I thought I was going to see THE MATRIX, or something”. The thing is, at the end of the day you are at the mercy of the marketing department. FRANKLYN was always going to be a difficult film to categorise. By the very nature of the story and what it was doing, it is simply what it is. If you start writing a project with the marketing in mind and worrying about that, you end up doing something that isn’t very interesting.
As we see coming out of Hollywood every week.
Yes. Exactly. My hope would be that you will get some guys in there expecting god-knows-what, but might walk out having seen something different to what they thought they see and still be interested, and questioning about it, and thoughtful about it and hopefully entertained in the same way as sitting through an onslaught of guns and bullets. I certainly think it’s possible. Hopefully the story will tell itself and take people off in a different direction anyway.
It certainly seems to have been sold to the sci-fi/fantasy fans than the romantic drama fans.
Yeah, and I’m not surprised, let’s put it that way. At the same time, I think, as a whole it’s a rather strange film anyway. For me, part of the London instalments, it is an otherworldly London and there is something quite odd about it. It certainly backs itself up in terms of being a broader fantasy for all of them. It feels like a parallel line of a pocket of London that’s gone a little bit wrong somewhere, which goes back on track towards the end.
A bit like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.
It’s that sort of another place…
Which, unfortunately, did end up looking like people walking around in fancy dress costumes.
Exactly. Which was something we really, really wanted to avoid. I would class it as a fantasy drama, so hopefully it won’t be too misleading.
The thing with the sci-fi/fantasy crowd is they are actually a lot more intelligent than most people give them credit for. They are much more open to other genres than someone who goes to see a romantic drama and goes, “What the hell’s all this sci-fi/fantasy nonsense in it?”
Absolutely. That’s absolutely correct. In a way science fiction and fantasy are very easy words to cover swathes and swathes of fantastic fiction and cinema, and everything else. I’m a big Ray Bradbury fan, and the level of literature gets looked down on by people when you stick that label on it. It almost cheapens it slightly. The levels of imagination and how much you are asked to take on and entertain as a fan of this genre is a lot more than just sitting in front of WEDDING CRASHERS or something.
FRANKLYN is out on February 27
Gerald McMorrow will be one of the jury members for this year’s SCI-FI-LONDON 48 Hour Film Challenge.