Film Interview: RED WHITE AND BLUE director Simon Rumley

Saturday, 02 October 2010 21:49

Film Interview: RED WHITE AND BLUE director Simon Rumley

Director Simon Rumley discusses his approach to crafting his latest feature, the disturbing revenge thriller Red White And Blue, which premiered at this year’s Fantastic Fest and IFC On Demand.

Premiering both at this year’s Fantastic Fest and VOD simultaneously via IFC Films, director Simon Rumley’s latest film, Red White And Blue, is a harrowing thriller and intimate character study that inspires simultaneous fear and empathy. A tale of three people’s lives interconnected by sex and death, the film follows an episodic structure following the lives of Nate (Noah Taylor), Erica (Amanda Fuller) and Frankie (Marc Senter) who end up engaged in a downward spiral of revenge and killing due to one night’s indiscretion. I luckily was able to have a few words with the film’s director before the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere and here is the conversation that followed.

Vegas Outsider: To provide a bit of context, how did you come upon the idea that would eventually develop into Red White And Blue?

Simon Rumley: Well, it came directly out of the experience with my previous film, The Living and The Dead. It had played at a lot of festivals and the general consensus on it was that it was more horrific than any other horror film people had seen but wasn’t necessarily a horror film. I liked that kind of contradiction in terms of how it made them feel and caused them to think and wanted to try and do that again with my next film. I then sat down over a period of time and thought about things like what is a horror film? What are the obvious things or tropes in a horror film? What makes a horror film a “horror film” really?

I thought about images like someone running through a field or landscape chasing someone else with an axe or knife, and that second person trying not to get killed. I then thought well how can I make something similar to that but have it not be so obvious since it has been done a million times before. That’s when I came up with the whole subplot of Erica; quite a while ago I came upon a few articles on the Internet including one about a woman in Tokyo who had been infected with HIV by a Japanese man and in turn, had sex with all these young men; infecting them in order to exact some sort of revenge. When I read that, I found it be a very scary but interesting and topical idea.

VO: One technical aspect of the film I found interesting is the overall editing strategy, i.e. in Erica’s section virtually no camera movement occurs with all transitions coming through straight montage cutting whereas with Nate at the end, it is virtually all POV camera shots and fluid tracking. How did you come upon that particular plan of attack?

SR: Sure, that’s a good question; I guess as a director obviously I wrote the script first and went through about six drafts. At some point, the director takes over from the writer and I then think “how can I shoot this? how can I make it work?” How can I film this in such a way so as to make it as dramatic and have as much tension as possible, to get as much bang for the buck sort of thing. And I thought it would be really interesting to have a lot of energy in the film but without utilizing a more traditional moving camera and communicate it mainly through the editing instead. With more traditional camera work, it moves when the character moves and stays still when the character is still. So that’s where it basically came from and I think the first scene where the camera actually does move is the one where Nate discovers that Erica has been kidnapped. Up to that point, the film has certainly been more character and emotion driven but by that point, when Nate suddenly starts getting angry and kicks into his more sociopathic self, it sort of commands the camera to move.

VO: Besides the editing scheme, I was also struck by the film’s writing in how well-balanced each character is in terms of motivation and portrayal so that, despite the horrible things they do to one another, the audience understands and empathizes with them without much judgment.

SR: Yes, I think in many respects much of the film, whether you see it as drama, tragedy, or subversion of a horror film, is really a character study of these three people; none of whom are really bad people but they do bad things. It is I suppose trying to portray real life because in real life there are very few people who are one hundred percent good all the time and by the same token so-called evil people don’t do evil things all the time. So it was really about how to get a balance between the two in order to create a realistic portrait of these people. And I think in modern-day cinema, more often than not, you have the goodies and baddies and that’s it with no grey whatsoever. While you have films like Star Wars with an obvious hero and villain, I don’t think that’s true for most films. So that was why I wanted to explore what people are really like as much as you can within the artificial medium of filmmaking.

If you think about the Nate character, who in most films is portrayed as such an evil character simply coming in and threatening and harming everyone like a Halloween, Friday the 13th, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which are all similar really. I always think it’s fascinating to instead sit down and think “how did these characters become so depraved?” They must have had something in their history that made them that way, some tragedy. If you look at Friday the 13th, which is one of my favorite films, all the killings are rationalized by this tragic story of a mother taking revenge on a group of teenagers for killing her son. I found it really interesting then to explore the flip side of why these people become killers and what it was that actually damaged them. So within Red White And Blue, we see how and why Nate can be evil, we can see why he does what he does, and what happens when he goes too far.

VO: Well, when it comes to the violence itself you often choose to deny much of the actual bloodshed by cutting away or inferring action, which only draws the viewer further into the scene and forces them to impose his or her own image instead. For example, the sequence in which Nate captures and tortures one kidnapper’s family in order to extract information is particularly harrowing because as much violence occurs just out of frame as within and we are left wondering what their fate is.

SR: No that’s quite right and certainly when I was writing the script, I was very aware of that. I guess with the escalation of violence in the film, each encounter does become a little more graphic where we see more and more what is happening to them. But I think with the family there is inevitability to what is happening to them. Again though I wanted to shoot it so that as the film progressed we see more as we understand more of what is going on so then with the Frankie character, his experience becomes the most graphic encounter we see at the very end even though we could have shown even more. Actually one of the scripts that inspired me in that approach was Audition, the Takashi Miike film, which is a great slow-burning film which is essentially a drama until the last fifteen minutes when everything goes haywire and I liked that, I found that to be an interesting way to make a film. Again with the script itself, it was a lot more graphic but when we came to shooting, it didn’t turn out that way and certainly when we edited it, we threw away stuff too.

I think the other thing is when you write something you have these great ideas about what you’re doing and then the more you write and develop the characters, you understand what it is you’re actually trying to do. So as I was going along it became clearer to me that seeing violence, or at least graphic violence, was something that I was not interested in. I mean you can watch a million films where someone getting their head or hands chopped off it becomes sort of so what? But what I think we don’t see as often in films is the power of the threat of violence towards people and that to me really is the family scene. It’s ten minutes of a family screaming and petrified because they don’t know what’s going to happen and to me that was something I haven’t seen investigated as much in contemporary cinema. I thought that would be an interesting route to go down and explore the terror on these people’s faces as they think about how they may be killed or injured. I think the family scene may be my favorite one in the film; it’s very visceral and the young girl who plays the daughter deserves a lot of credit for pulling off that performance at such a young age.

To learn more and fine out where you can see this film, go to www.ifcfilms.com