Director Paul Williams (a.k.a. P.W.)

The furred mask...

_AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW BY THAN NILES FOR WONDERLANCE

THAN NILES: With 'The Furred Man', which I had the privilege to be on set for, and your most recent Sci-Fi short 'Red Light', you delve into the Monster and Science Fiction worlds (two genres that have not had a soul for a very long time). I suppose my starting question would be, at what distance can a werewolf smell his, or her, chosen prey, effectively?

PAUL WILLIAMS: Start with the vital werewolf survival tips first. It really depends on what aftershave or perfume you’re wearing – each has there own smell radius. I hear Britney Spears’ ‘Fantasy’ has a particularly strong whiff that lycans can pick up from a mile away, so that brand is probably best avoided if you’re planning a moonlit stroll.

THAN NILES: Evil Hypnotist was started in 1999 by yourself and producer/composer Paul Terry (the brain behind SkyBaby Records and Cellarscape, as well as the co-author of the Lost Encyclopedia). On set, you two (the two Pauls) are the fearless leaders and your respective talents play off of each other well (him filling the producer role while you direct). Tell us a little about how you two met and how you came to be so Evil. Where does the dastardly Hypnotist come from?

PAUL WILLIAMS: We shared make-up. Paul Terry (PT ) and I studied English and Creative Studies at Portsmouth University,  and one of our first projects for the Creative Studies part of the course was to come up with a monologue on the theme of ‘conflict’. As usual, and something that would form our working relationship from that point, I came up with something comic (Death growing a conscious) and PT wrote something dark and foreboding (a man tied to a chair working through the demons in his head). We had to perform our monologues on stage and both our characters required ashen faces – so in the dressing room PT and I shared white face paint. We got to talking and a friendship quickly formed.

Over the next three years at University we worked together on various projects for the course and when it came to our very final piece we collaborated on a the short film ‘Sold’, which became Evil Hypnotist Productions’ very first film. The name for the company comes from a great ‘Big Train’ sketch – a show starring the now famous Simon Pegg.  A woman is trying to give up smoking and sees a hypnotist to try and put her off lighting up when his revolving bowtie and his colleagues laser eyes don’t work they call in Kevin Eldon but warn her “he is an evil hypnotist.” A Victorian looking gent creeps passed the doorway in the classic EHP pose. He cures the woman and gives out a long evil laugh. Writing it out doesn’t make it sound that funny but check it out on YouTube. The sketch stuck in my head and when it came to coming up with a name for the company the Evil Hypnotist seemed like a natural fit – and hopeful sticks in people minds. Though it has backfired on us as – once, a delivery driver dropping off some lights did think we were a magician act.

THAN NILES: In the early days, you mention on your website the way short film, by its very nature is constricting and limits a story. After making seven short films and a full-length feature, how did you go about the writing for 'The Furred Man'? Did you run into the same restricting pitfalls that you had in the past to keep it fifteen minutes long?

PAUL WILLIAMS: I think that was the early days talking. That was very much my view back then and it has evolved over the years of making shorts. Shorts are hard – it’s not the compression of a story into a short time span, it’s finding the right story to tell. ‘The Furred Man’ was written as a short and has a beginning, middle and an end – a simple structure some shorts fail to tackle. I didn’t want the film to be all set-up and no pay off – I knew my restrictions going in but never wanted that to limit the story I wanted to tell. Yes, it’s mainly three people talking in a room, but how do I make that interesting through dialogue and shot choice? How do I take the story out of the room? How do I ramp up the tension? Bring in special effects? A lot to fit into fifteen minutes, but that was part of the challenge and the excitement.

‘The Furred Man’ is a cautionary tale – a campfire horror story – which lends itself to a tight structure. I think I’ve learnt a lot more about pacing and structure through shorts than features. Features are great as you have a large canvas on which to spread your story, but the mistake here is then to amble around and litter your film with exposition and pointless scenes. Shorts make you trim off all the fat and even some of the meat, until you are left with the bones of your story. I was surprised with our latest short ‘Red Light’ that you could fit a beginning middle and end into three minutes. I’ve taken these lessons and applied them to my feature work and hopeful this will make for tighter more concise scripts.

Scene from 'The Furred Man'

From left to right: Asst. Director Henrick Kolind, Than Niles & P.W.

THAN NILES: There has been a generalization about short film, that there is no real audience for it and that the only people who watch them are “film festival people.” Do you think that with companies like Shorts International selling films on iTunes and websites like YouTube that we may begin seeing more demand for shorter content to accommodate shorter attention spans?  

PAUL WILLIAMS:  It’s a tough circuit. The digital age as made it easier to make films so there is a lot of content out there and it’s hard to get noticed. Festivals are great – showing your film in different counties, seeing how people react to it, building an audience base – but you’re right, festival audiences are film fans. So how do you expand on that great base? YouTube is a funny beast – it caters for the audience with little time on their hands, watching stuff over lunch or sending links around to friends. But will people watch a short film over a sneezing panda? I don’t think so. Films – no matter how short they are – will be viewed as something you have to invest time in, sit down a properly watch, and the sneezing panda will win every time. I don’t think YouTube is the right outlet for shorts – there are better video streaming sites, such as Vimeo, which has more film content, but it’s still so easy to get buried under other content and in the UK mainstream TV channels are now using YouTube for their On Demand services. Selling through iTunes or Amazon, or streaming through pay-per-view sites like indieflicks is another fantastic resource, but the hardest thing to achieve is telling the general public that your film is their and that it’s worth watching.

I feel, after touring ‘The Furred Man’ on the festival circuit for nearly a year is that a cultural shift has to happen, and that should be lead by the film press. The public need to be told that great shorts are out there and where to see them. PT has worked tirelessly to promote the short and get some great internet sites to cover it, but it has been hard – especially with bigger websites and film publications that you have no chance of being featured in. Now, I’m not asking for a full page spread in print, but a lot of theses publication have great websites that are updated daily and need content. We don’t need a hundred film sites telling us the latest casting for ‘Dark Knight Rises’ – I’m sure that little film will do okay without their help. We need someone championing the great work coming out of the independent film community. And there is a strong, amazing community out their supported by film clubs and nights in London like Brain Wash and Sunday Screenings and every town has them – people going out and seeking new and exciting shorts from around the world.

Our biggest coup was being picked up by Channel 4 in the UK and shown on television – sandwiched between ‘Alien Vs Predator’ and ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’. This enabled us to reach a quarter of a million people and hopefully channels like Channel 4 will carry on screening shorts and build it into their schedule more.

THAN NILES: In 2004, you wrote 'The Wake' which spawned, seemingly, exclusively from circumstances in your life at the time. You mention in your write up of the film that the passing of your mother and your friend, and Evil Hypno colleague, Phil Thomas were the main inspirations for the project. Do you feel that the people and circumstances in your life at the time of developing a script dictate where the story and characters will go?

PAUL WILLIAMS:  You can’t help it. The story you're writing is inside your head and everything you're going through at that time and in the past is in their too and the two gel and meld in wild and interesting ways. ‘The Wake’ is definitely my most personal film to date – a reaction to a very hard time in my life – but even then I didn’t want to make a depressing film about death, I wanted to celebrate the life of these two amazing people. How they had inspired me and others, how a person’s life affects everyone around them.

I’ve just started a family of my own and this has influenced the current project I’m working on – but it strengthens the story, makes it more real and grounded when you write from your own experience, especially when you throw in a couple of monsters, because the audience need to relate to someone or a situation in the story. Fantastical elements only really work when they are grounded in some kind of reality.

On Set ('The Furred Man' crew)

Director Paul Williams on set ('The Furred Man')

THAN NILES: There is a very distinct brand of comedy and horror that is apparent in 'The Furred Man'. What spawned your fascination with monster Sci-Fi and what pushed you to say, this is a story I want to tell?

PAUL WILLIAMS:  I’ve always loved genre films. I grew up surrounded by ‘Star Wars’, ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Back To The Future’, ‘Evil Dead’ – these are the films I loved as a kid and no matter what I do they will always influence my work. Sci-Fi and monster movies, especially of the ’50s and ’60s, are great because they always ground the fantastical with reality – the alien in human form trying to find good in the world in ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’, the small town man trying to tell the world alien were invading in ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, giant atomic ants in ‘Them’. And who doesn’t love monsters? From classical Greek myth to Godzilla - sci-fi broadens the canvas on which you can tell your story.

‘The Furred Man’ came out of horror’s inability to handle consequence. I’ll always remember the scene in ‘Fright Night’ when the werewolf is staked by a banister and turns back into human form. He even says ‘thank you’ as he croaks his last croak. All is good – the werewolf is dead. But wait – you have a dead, naked teenager in your house now. What are the police going to say? Will they believe your ‘he was a werewolf a minute ago’ story. This idea of consequence was the starting point for ‘The Furred Man’.

THAN NILES: You have always populated your films with actors who are primarily known for their stage work. Actors like Daniel Carter-Hope, who plays Max, the furred man, himself and Chris Courtenay, who is the soft tempered inspector Chaney in Furred, bring a just outside of reality, comedic charm to your movies. Is this a conscious decision? Do you write your scripts with this type of acting in mind?

PAUL WILLIAMS: A film lives and dies by its actors – these are the people who will make the audience believe the story. My writing is slightly stylised, full of monologues and impossible lines – actors like Dan, Chris, Martin Durrant and Bronya Deutsch bring out that comic charm and breath life into the script. I don’t think I write the script with this type of acting in mind – my style of writing is just what comes out and I have been extremely lucky in finding brilliant actors to translate it onto screen.

THAN NILES: I will be honest, the shooting of Furred was one of the most enjoyable on-set experiences I have had to this point. There was a clear sense of family during the entire shoot. It seems that this kind of camaraderie doesn’t only make for a better filming experience but a better film as well. The audience can tell when a movie was really fun to make. In my opinion, this is supremely important, how did you do it? How did you put together such a congenial crew? 

PAUL WILLIAMS: The short answer is making films for twelve years. While making seven shorts and a feature you work with a lot of people and you find the ones that are not only great at their job, but are great people. The story I’ll always tell, as I think it reflects on how we have formed relationships with everyone, is how I came to work with my director of photography Eugen Gritschneder. We had a very small crew for my first feature ‘The Wake’, only five people, but together mostly by my friend Johanna from people she had gone to European Film College with. She brought over Eugen and we meet the day before we started shooting for three weeks. If we didn’t get on – if he didn’t understand what type of film I wanted to make – we had failed before we even started. The first day was a nightmare. True to form the English weather turned against us and it rained just as we started filming in a graveyard. We overran. We had sound problems. Actors were stranded… I thought we had bitten off more than we could chew.  But we got through the first day – and the next – and the next and we hit a rhythm truly down to the fact that Eugen and I understood each other. We knew what we were trying to make and we helped each other. Now I simply can’t imagine making a film without him and he has become a good friend.

You used the right word in your question – ‘family’. Filmmaking is tough and stressful enough as it is without me being a complete arsehole. I don’t think shouting at people and storming around set is the way of getting the best out of people. We keep the set fun, open and professional. People can feel like they can contribute ideas, share thoughts as we all have the same goal – making the best film we can.

As with the actors we have been lucky enough to find amazing crew members – people we will work with again and again because we all meet up between projects and have a laugh and dissect films and share a meal – as friends. It sounds cheesy as hell, but this is my life. I have been making films since I was fifteen with me, some gullible friends and an Hi8 camera and it still amazes me that all these years later I am still doing the same thing only the stories have gotten bigger, the equipment more expensive and the friends more gullible and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

THAN NILES: What’s next for the Evil Hypnotists now that you have established yourselves in the indie world?  

PAUL WILLIAMS: We are working hard to capitalise on the success ‘The Furred Man’. I’m hard at work finishing off the first draft on a new horror/comedy feature. We are sticking with the monsters but switching beasts – throwing in some old folk, a mysterious device and mobility scooters into the mix and coming out with something very British, very scary, very Evil Hypnotist Productions.

OFFICIAL SITES: www.evilhypnotist.co.uk www.paulterryprojects.co.uk THE FURRED MAN - OFFICIAL FACEBOOK FANPAGE: www.facebook.com/TheFurredMan

Share the content of this page: