Interview: Simon Rumley, Red White & Blue

“The whole remake thing will probably carry on until there are no more films to be remade.” Angela Burton interviews director Simon Rumley on Red White & Blue, the state of horror movie business today and the joys of filming in Austin, Texas.

I met Simon Rumley on a chill but bright October morning in Waterloo. Clad in a long brown coat and sunglasses Simon led me into a nearby café, ordering a sparkling water as we sat down to talk about his latest film, Red White & Blue.

The Texas-set horror, which screened at this year’s FrightFest to excellent reviews, follows Erica, cool and emotionless as she dives into bed with any man she meets. Her compulsive one-night-stands represent her only form of human contact until she meets Nate, the only man who wants her for more than just sex. The pair begins to form a hesitant bond until Franki, a young wannabe rock star who was one of Erica’s previous sexual partners, returns with a troubling turn of events.

IndieMoviesOnline: You directed from your own screenplay once again. Where did the idea for Red White & Blue come from?

Simon Rumley: Yeah, it came from a few different places. For my last film I travelled around a lot of festivals doing interviews and talking to people about it and everyone – well, pretty much everyone – said, this is one of the most horrific films we’ve ever seen, but it’s not a horror film. I like that, I like the contradiction. It confuses people but also disturbs them. I thought it’d be great to do that again, to make it a really disturbing film that isn’t necessarily a horror but is if you think about it.

The most obvious things in horror films is people running around trying not to be killed by a crazed axe murderer or whatever so, I took that premise, of having a lead character who is trying to kill people but with a slightly different kind of sensibility: that’s when I came up with the Erica character. At the same time I’d read on the internet about a woman in Japan who’d been infected by a Tokyo policeman and she decided to deliberately go out and sleep with a bunch of policemen to try and infect them. I thought it was a pretty disturbing idea. It came from there really, those two things together.

IMO: And how did you find filming in Texas?

SR: That was amazing. It’s a place I’ve been to a couple of times before, initially for Fantastic Fest with The Living and the Dead. I was there for a week and had a great time. Then I became friends with the guys who run that festival, Tim and Karrie League. Travelling around the world with a film you tend to bump into the same people, at the same festivals. So we became friends. At one point I asked, if I made a film would they be able to help out, and they said yes.

[Austin] is just a really friendly place, nothing’s too much trouble, everyone’s very laid-back, it’s pretty much a very anti-materialistic place, I think. People aren’t so worried about making tons of money. It seems like they’re just happy hanging out being a bit creative, making films, being in a band. It’s a really unusual place. It has a great bar scene, a great gig scene, a great cultural energy, it was a really great experience. I was there for twelve weeks in the summer, I went out at the beginning of May and came back at the beginning of August. It was just a completely fantastic time.

IMO: How did you choose your cast?

SR: Noah Taylor, we went to straight away. There were a bunch of people I wrote down who I thought could be great for the character. I thought he’d be a long shot because he lived in Australia. But it turns out he actually lives in Brighton, on the south coast, so we spoke to his agent and we said, can he read it quickly? If he reads it quickly we can meet in the next couple of days, because I was going to Austin at the time. So he read it, he liked it, he met up with me. He wanted to make sure it wasn’t going to degenerate into something like Hostel. I assured him that it wouldn’t, so he came on board pretty much straight away.

The guy who plays the Franki character, Marc Senter, he’s someone I’d seen in the film called The Lost, which is a cult horror type film. He plays a serial killer called Ray Pye. It was a fantastic performance, he had one foot in reality and one foot in this kind of demented buzz, so I thought that he would have the right sensibility to understand the part and be able to convincingly go for that point. He’s a normal guy and then he kills someone – it’s not an easy thing to pull off. Senter was someone who was always at the back of my mind but the producers hadn’t heard of him, so I told them to watch The Lost. They watched it and really liked it so we made him an offer and he came on board straight away.

And then Amanda Fuller: getting Erica was really tough, we spoke to a few better-known actresses on the phone. None of them, for whatever reason, decided to do it. One thought it was too violent, one thought there was too much sex. We tried casting in Austin and the Texas area and that was just completely not happening. In the end, I think there were just a couple of weeks to go and one of our executive producers suggested we get a casting director in LA. That’s what we did, we had open auditions. I think we had about 50 girls come, me and the producer were in Austin at this time so we would watch all the rushes online in Austin, then I flew out on the Friday to audition the top five girls. When we were going there we felt Amanda Fuller was going to be the one. We met her and she had an absolutely instinctive understanding of the role and of the writing so we went with her and she did a great job.

IMO: The Living and the Dead sees a character having a hard time dealing with their terminally ill mother, something which I understand was autobiographical. Red White & Blue also touches on this. Is this an important theme for you?

SR: Certainly with The Living and the Dead. Both my parents died within the space of six months, my dad had a heart attack and then three months later my mum was diagnosed with cancer. She died three months after that. I wasn’t looking after her but I was there the majority of the time, for support. I watched her go from being a completely healthy 65-year-old to literally a skeleton. At some point after that happened I started writing, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to write, I just wrote and from that The Living and the Dead came out. I was very careful not to exploit the situation and if I found myself writing something that had happened between myself and my mum I would take it out. The film was very much suggested by that experience.

But with Red White & Blue I think it just crept in. I wanted to have some aspect of the Franki character that was kind and sympathetic. Apart from that he’s this young, pretty much failed wannabe rock star who’s a bit abusive to his friends, gets drunk all the time, his girlfriend’s left him and he ends up shouting at her when she comes back, and underneath it all there’s a nice guy there. There wasn’t anything that said: hey, this guy’s actually not entirely bad. It’s funny, I didn’t even really think about it until some point after I’d written the script.

IMO: As well as the symbolism implied in the title, the film contains an Iraq war vet. It seems as though you’re commenting on politics in the US. Can you talk a little about that?

SR: I call the film a political with a small ‘p’. If you notice it, then great and if you don’t notice it then I don’t think it necessarily affects your enjoyment of the film. There seems to be a very gung-ho aspect to American culture, if you do something bad then immediately you should be punished. Or if someone does something bad to you, you don’t sit and think about it or work out why or if it’s something that you’ve done wrong, you just go and kill the other person or invade the other country. So it is a little bit about that and that knee-jerk trigger reaction to acts of violence, an eye for an eye kind of mentality. One of the things that I find is, ultimately, the whole violence of the film is just really futile. It’s a very sad, tragic film: all these people don’t really stop, they all do bad things and they get punished way beyond how they should have really been punished. If any of them had really stopped to really think of what they were doing or considered the consequences of what they were doing, then they may still be alive. In that respect it’s also about futility and all those kind of actions. In a very small sense it’s about Western culture, specifically America, by extension the UK and certainly the western part of Europe.

IMO: What kind of films and directors inspire your work?

SR: For this film we didn’t really watch that many films. Sometimes I’ll sit down with my DP or editor or composer or whoever, just to watch and talk about stuff. We didn’t really do that much for this film. We watched Amores Perros, that was really the one film we felt the visual style was fairly similar to what we wanted. There were a couple of films in terms of editing, specifically there was The Limey, the Steven Soderbergh film; there was a Sam Peckinpah film called The Getaway which I think was early ‘70s; and then there were the earlier Nicolas Roeg films.

Generally, there’re obvious people like Martin Scorsese, I like Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Richard Linklater, who inspired more my first three films. There are some Korean directors: Park Chan Wook; Kim Ki-duk who’s done a lot of films but generally you don’t see him that much in this country; Kim Ji-woon, who did A Tale of Two Sisters. There’s a Mexican director called Alejandro Jodorowsky, he was pretty crazy, pretty amazing. And there’s Darren Aronofsky, he’s a really great filmmaker, David Fincher is always pretty interesting. I generally go for darker drama directors rather than out-and-out horror people.

IMO: Are there any directors whose careers you aspire to?

SR: Steven Soderbergh, he’s someone who is prolific. He’ll do a bigger, more commercial film and then he’ll do a smaller, less commercial film, which sometimes he writes or which challenges filmmaking conventions or is more experimental. I haven’t really got to the point where I do commercial films yet. But I like the idea of being able to do larger, more commercial films and then, using the success of that to go back and do something like Red White & Blue or The Living and the Dead or something a bit more left-field or a little bit harsher. I think that’s pretty ideal. I guess a few people do that. Steven Frears does it; not so much now but he would often go back and forth between England and America make a bigger film over there and then one over here. And I guess Guillermo del Toro does it as well. That one for them, one for us mentality, makes sense to me

IMO: What do you think about the current state of horror films?

SR: It’s interesting because over the last few years there has been some pretty unusual films come out: Antichrist, A Serbian Movie, Human Centipede. They all generally capture the public’s imagination, they’re not easy films. They’re single isolated films, none of them have had much backing behind them in terms of budget or advertising. I think there’s a side of the whole horror scene that’s actually very healthy and imaginative and there’s the other side which is LA studios doing remakes of Asian films and remakes of American films and remakes of anything that they can remake, which generally seems to be for 12- to 15-year-old audience. The Last Exorcism was a PG or something [note: it was indeed a PG-13]. They tend to be fairly unimaginative, very by the numbers and really not very challenging because it’s a horror film and you’re making it for a 12-year-old, 13-year-old. A lot of the subject matter that you would want to tackle as an adult, you’re not going to be allowed to. It may well be because of that whole culture that you start getting these other films again like Red White & Blue which may be a little bit beyond the pale as such. It’s interesting to see where things will go.

The whole remake thing will probably carry on until there are no more films to be remade. It’s interesting, if you look at the films that started to be remade, they were pretty obscure, usually Japanese films and occasionally European films and then it was American films that everyone knew from the ‘70s and it now seems to have changed to if a film is successful in another language then its going to be remade, whether it’s Let the Right One In or Old Boy, I think the three Park Chan Wook films are all in remake territory at the moment. Everyone has jumped forward in terms of, if the film’s released yesterday – Rec being another example – let’s remake it. It’s a business but it’s still a creative business, one hopes. That’s annoying really.

IMO: What’s next for you?

SR: After this I’ve got to go meet my composer, who did the music for Red White & Blue and The Living and the Dead. I shot an anthology, a thirty-minute short film called Bitch as a segment in a feature-length film called Little Deaths. That is, me and a number of other directors: it’s a psycho-sexual horror anthology. There are no linking factors but they’re thematically tied together. Although we shot that in February we’re finishing it now, in terms of post-production. I think we’re planning for middle of November, I guess that’ll start coming out on the festival circuit sometime early next year.

In terms of next films, there are a couple of scripts I need to rewrite. One’s set in China, that’s a high concept chase movie. It’s a thriller. We’ve got half the money for that so once I’ve rewritten it, which hopefully will be the end of October, beginning of November then we’ll be back out on the road with that. Hopefully that’ll be next.

I’ve also got a film set in New Orleans, which is a hard-core horror and then I’m looking to write something new, probably toward the end of the year. I’m not sure what yet. And I’m also trying to get a couple of jobs in America, for scripts that I haven’t written, just me directing. I’ve got a few different things in the pipeline.

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