SXSW 2011 Interview: Simon Rumley and Sean Hogan Talk Sex, Horror, and ‘Little Deaths’
Interview with Simon Rumley and Sean Hogan, Directors of Little Deaths
Interview conducted by Britt Hayes – SXSW, March 2011
During SXSW we had a chance to sit down with filmmakers Simon Rumley and Sean Hogan. With director Andrew Parkinson (Mutant Tool, the middle segment) they’ve crafted a new British horror anthology titled Little Deaths. Check out our review from this year’s SXSW and read on for a chat with Rumley and Hogan about marrying sex and horror in their latest film.
Brutal as Hell (Britt): How are you guys?
Simon Rumley: Good, good. Happy to be back in Austin.
BAH: And you brought your beard! How appropriate!
SR: That’s what I tell people, I’ve come with the Austin look. But I think when I get back I’m getting rid of it.
(laughs)
BAH: So how did each of you conceive your pieces of Little Deaths? Did they start as ideas for features, or were you approached to create pieces to contribute to the anthology?
Sean Hogan: I approached the guys originally with no real concept other than to do the anthology, just because I thought that we in theory mesh well together. I thought that are respective approaches and styles, although different, were kind of complimentary in a way. But that was really all I had, like “Guys! Let’s do something together!” and “Okay! Yeah, let’s do it!” They asked “What are we gonna do?” It happened very naturally in terms of the way that the stories fit together; we actually came back and pitched each other ideas, and yeah, bingo, they’d work. We clearly have similar issues but it’s going to work as a movie.
Personally speaking, my story arose out of a desire to write something about sex and power games for a while, and also out of that my first feature had been a subtle, atmospheric ghost story and I wanted to go to the other end of the spectrum and do something more confrontational, so it was just a desire to push the envelope a little bit and play around with that kind of material. And I know Simon’s idea arose out of something that he’d been playing with for a while.
SR: It came from when I was at university many years ago and I was in bed with my girlfriend at the time, and a spider dropped on her and she completely freaked out. She was naked and she was like (mimics screaming), and I thought hey, this is an interesting idea for something. At that time I was writing, I was thinking more about becoming a novelist than a filmmaker, so I was writing a few short stories and I tried writing that as a short story. It was about a younger goth couple and the guy was in an abusive relationship with the girl, who kind of pushed him around and it was a he wouldn’t take it anymore type of thing. So that was an idea I had quite a while ago. Probably over 20 years, actually, and I guess it just stayed with me. When this opportunity arose I remembered it and thought, “Man, let’s chuck in some dogs instead of some spiders,” and there you have a story.
BAH: I feel that your segment, Simon, is the perfect punctuation for the anthology, and I’m glad that the films are presented in this order. It feels like, although the films are separate and all have separate climaxes, they are steadily building to the ultimate climax with Bitch. Even more impressive is that you chose not to show too much. You exercise some careful restraint in the end of your film that makes it that much more intense for the viewer.
SR: Good, good.
BAH: Both of your films have this animal subtext; in Sean’s film, House and Home, there’s a metaphor for the homeless being akin to strays, and in Little Deaths there’s the dogs, of course. How did subtext play into your films?
SH: Obviously the movie’s partly about class, and there’s the various metaphors running through it about food and hunger and sex and appetite and all those kind of things. So it all just seemed to play well together in the sense that you’ve got these people who are basically driven by their sexual appetite and they don’t care who they’re gonna step on in order to please their desires. Then they run into people with a different set of appetites and end up being consumed by the people they were feeding upon. The UK seems to have a real tradition with these sort of class-based themes and all these kind of things, so that certainly played into it. I like the idea of making a film where the monsters are the heroes in a way. The real monster being the human being – that was something that attracted me to play around with it.
SR: With mine, in the end I think people’s phobias are in trusting at the best times, especially with animals. The dogs are kind of weird because I’ve never really liked dogs. Some people are shocked, I know. I had cats growing up but I think when I got chased home when I was about four with some sausages by the butcher’s dog, I’ve been scarred for life. I think dogs are scary. And this sounds strange, but I’ve been in a couple of riot situations where there’s been police on their horses and police on the ground with dogs. It’s just the idea of barking dogs running wild – I think it’s really scary. And obviously there’s this kind of feral power to dogs. I just think having a girl who has a phobia of dogs – people do have these things, not maybe that many but they exist. What do you do? If you’re scared of tigers you just don’t go wherever tigers hang out, but if you don’t like dogs then you’re a bit stuck.
It just kind of went from there. I always love the title because I think it’s kind of a duality of meanings.
BAH: Were there any cuts or maybe different versions that you guys played around with? Were there any different or alternate endings?
SH: I think you go through many changes between script and first cut. I went back and shifted a few things. I had a scene that I dropped, but it never even made it to the first cut. Essentially the stories were very tight. Speaking for myself, we shot pretty much what we needed and only dropped one scene, but there wasn’t that much room to play around with. We each had six days to shoot our episodes which doesn’t leave you much time to shoot much more than you need. The film is essentially what it’s meant to be and what it always set out to be. It’s pretty close to the original script in terms of the actual nature of material. There’s a softer cut in existence that’s not really approved by us and was only ever done as a back-up for certain territories where sexual material might be an issue. There are issues about which version is going to get screened where and released, and that’s a battle we’re having to fight at the moment that’s kind of ongoing. The version of the film you’ve seen is the one that’s meant to exist and is our original vision and the script that we put into production.
SR: Yep.
BAH: Same?
SR: Yeah, same. It’s funny with thirty minute films because it’s not quite a short and it’s not quite a feature. My script was pretty tight. I don’t think we really even changed the order of the scenes or anything, to be quite honest. It took us about two weeks to edit it and another week to kind of fine tune it. In that respect it wasn’t bad to do. It was all there. As a director, something that I always try to do, and I guess something all directors try to do is try to get the script as close as possible to an editing script rather than a shooting script so that when you come to the edit suite – in an ideal word it would be exactly like the script and you’d be like, “Yeah, this is really easy,” but of course it’s never really like that. Some things work better than others. In my mind that’s what I strive to do, to get a script that doesn’t really change from the shoot to the edit.
BAH: Can you talk about the marriage of sex and horror in these stories and how you represent sexuality in a way that is sort of horrifying?
SR: Again, I think they all came together sort of spontaneously. I think that was sort of interesting in itself, all these sex/horror ideas. I guess, to me, it’s not a million miles away from my other films in as much as that it’s a relationship movie, really, and any relationship is going to be at least something to do with sex. A large or a small part of a relationship happens to be that it’s about sex. A big part of the relationship is about the sex, which is in part inspired by the girl’s phobia of dogs, so I think without that phobia they wouldn’t have this kind of game playing that they have. It’s about the guy being emasculated I supposed by her constant demands to do whatever. In the end it’s a character piece, really. The relationship exploration just happens to go a different way. You always get to a crossroads. Every scene is a crossroads in the script, and you can go down different roads, but this one is exploring sex and violence.
SH: For me, in a more general sense, is horror movies should be confrontational, should be transgressive, and should make people uncomfortable. They shouldn’t be safe. They shouldn’t be necessarily things that thirteen year olds see on a Friday night and go, “Ooh! That’s scary!” You really want to push the envelope sometimes and it’s just a question of how you keep doing that. Horror keeps evolving and once upon a time people thought rubber monsters were scary, but now you have to push different buttons. One of the buttons you can push with everyone to some extent, depending on what their personal issues and hang-ups are, is sex. It’s something that everyone does, or pretty much everyone does, and it can make people very uncomfortable. That’s something you can go after if you wanna get people a bit uptight and make them freak out a bit, that’s one of the areas. Not too many horror movies do that. It just seemed natural to me. That’s something you can go after and maybe push a few buttons.
SR: In horror movies it’s usually the naked teenage girl in the shower or having sex with her boyfriend in the forest or whatever, and I guess maybe that was a couple of decades ago. Nowadays, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of representation of this kind of thing at the cinema. It’s funny, I had a film called Exquisite Corpse, based on a novel by Poppy Z. Brite, about two gay serial killers. That was incredibly sexually explicit as well as violent, and people thought, “You’re crazy, you’ll never make this film.” We had the distributor of Cannibal Holocaust in France say, “If I make this film I think I’ll go to jail.” Sex is not as taboo as it used to be, but sex and violence, for whatever reason, still seems to be one of the fewer taboos around.
BAH: Well thank you both so much for talking with us. Little Deaths is a great film, and I can’t wait for more people to see it.
SR: Thank you!
SH: It was nice meeting you, thanks!
Little Deaths does not currently have distribution here or abroad, but we’ll keep you posted on the latest news. In the meantime, check out Simon Rumley’s Red White and Blue when it hits DVD, Blu-ray and Netflix Instant on May 17th. Sean Hogan is the writer and director of Lie Still and is currently at work finishing his latest effort, The Devil’s Business.
