Interview: Marc Price – Director of Colin

Marc Price Interview

In the world of British Independent filmmaking, Marc Price’s debut feature Colin has become somewhat of a minor phenomenon. Famously made for £45, Price’s debut is a heartfelt zombie film which manages to flip the genre’s conventions on their head and reach for a deep, emotional core almost unseen in films of this type. Colin is as sensitive as it is brutal with a strong lead performance from Alastair Kirton as the eponymous zombie, and shot with a verite that makes it all the more intense. In short, it is an impressive debut, especially when you take into consideration the film’s budgetary constraints.

The film was the talk of the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, after which Price was catapulted into a media whirlwind which saw him play his little movie at major festivals all around the world. Marc spoke to me openly and honestly about the making and distribution of Colin, the dangers and pitfalls to watch out for when selling your film, and other hardships the lowly independent filmmaker encounters on his strange journey to get his film seen.

Since the release of Colin, Price has been prepping his follow-up – the tantalising Thunderchild – a WWII set, men-on-a-mission, monster flick which he considers to be his first ‘proper’ movie, as well as writing several other intriguing sounding projects.

The following interview was conducted in a dimly-lit pub in Clapham on a hot June afternoon in 2010. Since then however, this unassuming, self-deprecating, and wonderfully charming 31 year old has put his dream project, Thunderchild, aside for the time being, and begun shooting an altogether new project entitled Magpie. But at the time of this interview, Colin and Thunderchild were still very much on his mind.

So, over a pint (or two), Marc began by talking about his first film – No not Colin, but one that still remains in the vault….

LIVE FOR FILM: Tell us about your first filmmaking experience.

MARC PRICE: I actually tried making another film before Colin. I’d had this very complicated idea for a film when I was about 14. Funnily enough it was inspired by Deliverance, my Dad had said, ‘you’ve gotta watch this!’ It wasn’t like he wanted to show me anal rape or anything, he just wanted to show me the dueling banjos bit, which he loved. So I started watching this happy looking movie, and then… yeah it turned into… (Adopts a southern accent) ‘You got a pretty mouth’.

So it turned into that, and I was terrified. From watching Deliverance, the idea for this film came, about doing something that you cannot possibly take back came. I called it Boorman Lake, after, of course, John Boorman, and I wrote this when I was 14 and it was absolutely terrible. But I ended up building on that until I thought that it could be a descent first movie.

I was 24 by the time I shot it. It was the same camera I used to shoot Colin. My main actress was Canadian and her card was getting used up so she had to disappear back to Canada, so I couldn’t get her for any pick-ups, which I definitely needed because I realised I’d shot a really ugly, shit little movie with brilliant performances.

LFF: Did you shoot the entire film?

MP: Yes, in little over about a week. It was a great experience, everyone was really friendly, but there were things I really failed on. I really failed to capture key moments that I wanted to be very unsettling and very upsetting, but there wasn’t any atmosphere. It wasn’t great. So I was struggling to edit that for a while and Colin came during that. So I thought I’d liked to put this one behind me and come back to it after Colin, which is what I told everyone. I think I knew I had no intentions of coming back to it.

Boorman Lake was very difficult, because I’d had the idea since I was 14, and I thought ok, well that didn’t work, but with Colin, from the moment I’d had the idea, everything from it just worked for me in my head. I thought this was a great way to tell the story, I know where I want it to go, and I knew the emotional responses I wanted to get from the audience, which at that time I only thought would only be my friends, who would also be in it. So yeah, I started to write this film from a zombie’s perspective, I was really happy with how the story went. I just thought we could do something different with Colin – a film from a zombie’s point of view.

LFF: For me that is the hook, not how much it was made for, but because I felt you’d kind of book-ended the zombiedom we’d been through, and turned it on its head…

MP: That’s what I hoped, I didn’t think the fact that we’d done it without spending any real money would be such a big deal, had I known that I would have been shouting that from the start, but I thought a zombie film from a zombie’s point of view would have been the thing.

I made no attempt to hide the fact it was shot on a camcorder, I wanted to lower everyone’s expectations, to the point where people think we’re not going to show outside, or that there’ll be no more zombies, and then we do, you don’t think there’ll be a house siege, and then oh there it is. They’ll never do a broad daylight street brawl sequence, and then oh there it is. But what I think what really blindsided people was the emotional elements of the film, and that was the most obvious way to go for me, having a character you really cared about, a character the audience could really connect with. At the end of the movie they understand what his motivations are, even if he doesn’t. The audience becomes linked to the character, following a zombie in different directions, that seemingly don’t have any connection, but the more you watch the film, the more you see that everything does actually have a connection.

Every movie is in its own little world, its own little microcosm, and that’s what we wanted to create for the audience, that those things were important to this particular zombie, even if the zombie doesn’t even get it. The shot at the end where we pull back from Alastair with the girl, and he’s not even looking at her, not interacting with her in anyway – he simply doesn’t understand. For me that shot represents the entire journey of making this film; it was one of those ideas, the shot you have in your head when you’re writing it – and there it is exactly how you saw it, and for it to come at the end, it was really exciting to see that moment. I love that everything works out there.

LFF: Did you shoot it over a length of time, or did you just go for it in one block?

MP: We just shot it when we could, I knew we’d edit it at the same time, with the first film we shot in about a week, I was like ‘no, we’re not going to do that again and risk fucking everything up’. So with Colin, we thought we’d take our time, if something wasn’t right we’d go back and do it again – we were able to because we didn’t have a budget or schedule. But it’s surprising we shot everything in the days allocated, because we said this is a day that we’ll shoot this sequence, I’d like to get this finished, so we don’t have to come back and we would. We shot the bulk of it in six months; this is part-time filmmaking you know, two week days and Sundays for pick ups which generally didn’t involve Alastair. Over all it took eighteen months, with continuous editing – apart from the main six months it was Sundays and the odd day here and there.

LFF: So you used the editing process to shape the on-going shooting of the film?

MP: Yeah, after the first screening I got a shot of a couple of actors to cut in, just to make it look nicer looking, and after that it was ok you know. The first experience I had of watching it from beginning to end happened when I screened it. I hadn’t seen it, I was looking at the time and it was running just five minutes shy of two hours. I was being very efficient with the scenes, as I was cutting sequences together rather than scenes.

LFF: What did you cut on?

MP: Adobe premiere 6, which even at the time was ancient! I had it hooked up to my television and it looked fine on there. I’m cutting now on Final Cut Pro. I used to be with Premiere all the way, because it hadn’t got the things I didn’t like about Final Cut, but then I got to play with the upgrade, and it’s now got those things I didn’t like, so I thought fuck it, I might as well use Final Cut Pro. I know my way around it. I think it’s the same with any editing software, they are very similar; it’s just the buttons are in a different place.

LFF: Was it important for you to do the editing yourself?

MP: I just didn’t know anyone else. This wasn’t just with Colin, but even when I was back in Swansea, making short films with my mates, I didn’t know anyone who could shoot, or edit, or do effects, so I was limited by what I could do. So that’s the way I approached Colin. It’s nice not to be at the mercy of someone else, but with the next film, I’ll obviously start delegating roles.

Through making Colin I’ve found those people who are perfect to do things like the visual effects, guys who are great at things like music, which I don’t have an interest in achieving myself but I know what I want to see and hear. Leigh Crocombe, who plays the first Zombie in Colin, he’s actually been doing a lot visual effects, in fact he did visual effects on a short film I’ve done recently.

LFF: Is that The End?

MP: Yeah. We shot it so quick – we shot it in an afternoon, and then he sort of went ok, we need to do this, this and this. So in just two days Leigh had worked out, not only how to do it, but how to make it look that good. There were gun shots, and blood splatter, and he figured it out pretty quickly, and it’s good to have someone to trust as much as I trust Leigh to have on the case in an area I have very little understanding of. I know how to achieve certain effects, but I don’t know what buttons to push. I’m fucking useless at After Effects and all those sort of programmes.

LFF: What was the reason behind making the short, was it to experiment, or just to keep your hand in?

MP: It was just a test, to test the camera we want to use to shoot Thunderchild, which is the Canon 7D. I wanted to see what the camera could do. We did everything I was advised you shouldn’t do with the camera. We shot on an exceptionally high ISO setting, we recorded the sound on the camera, which turned out, probably, to be not so great, and we were shaking it around doing hand held stuff. I just thought fuck it, let’s try everything, let’s treat it like a real camera, do what we can. Obviously there were a few problems, and we’re not going to shoot Thunderchild that way, we learnt what we could and couldn’t do, but every problem we came up against, is fixable in post. I know for a lot of film makers that’s scary, but we have the software now to take care of things like the rolling shutter you get with the Canon.

I’d read a lot, and had decided that this was the camera to go for, so much so I bought the fucking thing, so if it didn’t work I don’t know what the fuck I would have done. Try explaining that to Helen (Grace – Producer), ‘Hmmm, well I screwed up, and the £1500 we spent getting the camera was probably a waste of money – never mind, I know a guy with a RED Cam!’

I like to operate… it’s like I need to operate myself. I’m happy to have a DOP but I defiantly need to have a hold of the camera to get the shot. Because I like the idea that I can be filming this actor here, but I like what this actor is doing here and I can just turn the camera and get it. I like the atmosphere that creates, where the actors are like ‘wow I could have a close up at any second’. No one knows what I’m going to do with the camera, and I’m happy to keep everyone on their toes in that sense. It’s difficult to communicate if I’m not operating at least at this stage because I don’t know a camera crew, haven’t got one. So I’m beating my way through it. I like to capture moments, moments of emotional intensity, that’s what I’m trying to get.

LFF: If we can just go back to Colin for a moment. What happened in between finishing the film and showing it at Cannes?

MP: It was about a year, initially we sent it off to a bunch of festivals, any festival that had a paid entry form, we didn’t get into….

LFF: Did you pay? Because I’ve heard many people say, don’t bother.

MP: We did for a couple, but I don’t think you should do. With one festival, a major one, we submitted the film, paid our money and one of our crew was working on their pre-screening bumper and the festival producer asked her what they had worked on, and she said ‘Colin, it’s just been submitted here’ and he said ‘is that the one that opens with the guy with the Hammer?’ and she said ‘ Yes, what did you think to the ending’ and he said ‘oh it’s not my job to look at that, there’s other people who get those films through the rounds and give them to us’ and she thought, oh ok you didn’t watch till the end but remember the film, so maybe that’s a good sign’ – we didn’t get in.

After all the press, we were invited to show the film there, not only that but we won an award! Now that’s something you can look back on and be a little bitter about, or you can think this is how it works and we were lucky enough to be in that position.

Frightfest was another interesting one – we showed the film there before we had had any of press and that was quite an interesting and remarkable thing, considering though, we are not really the kind of film you’d expect there. Even though we’re a Zombie movie we’re not Frightfest, which I think has more of a fun vibe, and Colin can be quite heavy in parts. I hope its fun, but I think the emotional heart of story is quite a sad story, quite a tragic story. Frightfest were really good to us, they gave us two screenings, both of which I think were first to sell out, and I was really excited and proud of what they did for us, and it wasn’t for the press, it was just off their own backs which I thought was incredible.

LFF: When did you meet your Sale Agent, and now your producer, Helen Grace?

MP: It was after we sent it to Abattoir, which is a welsh horror film festival, we got treated really well there as well because Gaz Bailey who runs the festival was wicked, and really liked the film and gave us a great slot and I was really happy about that. Helen phoned Gaz and said sorry she couldn’t make it and then asked him if there was anything they should go for, and he said Colin.

LFF: What was she then?

MP: She had just started her own company and was working as a sales agent. She got in touch, saying she got my details from Gaz and could she get a copy of the film, and I said ok cool, so I sent her a copy of the film. Then I get an email from Gaz saying is it ok if I give your details out to this strange woman? (Laughs) It was cool though, she watched the film in the same way Gaz did – where he’d come home, had a couple of drinks and thought I’ll watch half an hour and then go to bed, but he said he couldn’t switch it off, which was really touching. Helen had a similar thing where she was supposed to be going to a meeting, started to watch and went ‘ohhh’ and had to watch the whole thing, and I thought wow that’s amazing. I really liked her, I really liked where she was coming from. I had been speaking to another sales agent who had been suggesting changing things, which of course I’ll listen too, but I’ll make up my own mind up about what to change.

LFF: So Cannes 2009 totally exploded for you, interviews with the world’s media, and all these people waiting to talk you.

MP: That was really strange for me, I was just trying to keep my feet on the ground a little bit, but I was really excited. The thing about Cannes was that every day seemed to get better and better and better, and I thought man I’m going to fall off a cliff here and crash into the rocks below. I did an interview with ITN, who were sent back to re-shoot the interview, because I’d mentioned the £45 thing, and they came back purely on that. That all came about when I was just sitting with Helen the day after we’d got there, and was just having a drink with her and her friend and her friend sort of turned around and said ‘oh a publication has really messed up and said the film cost $800,000’, which is pretty fucking hilarious. So I laughed, and the woman with Helen said, ‘well how much did it cost?’ Helen said she didn’t know and mentioned about £500? And I said ‘£500!! I haven’t got £500, I haven’t got an over-draught, I can’t even afford to be here! It didn’t really cost us anything, maybe £40-£50 something like that.’ Then Helen’s friend said, that’s an achievement you should mention that, and I said ‘Maybe so’, because I felt that would help lower peoples expectations, put them in the right place, because when they sit to watch it and see it was clearly shot on a camcorder they’d never expect it to go where it goes, hopefully. Helen being a shrewd sales agent was like ‘well we’re not going to be able to get much of an MD on that if we tell people it cost £50!’

LFF: What’s MD?

MP: I asked her that was, she kept throwing those two letters around; I think it’s the advance money you get for distribution.

LFF: I suppose they’d be like, it cost £50 so we’ll give you £100?

MP: Yeah. But I assume if they’re selling it to different territories they actually offer less than the budget. Then again I could be wrong. So I said, ‘it could get people to watch the movie’, and I must have sounded like I knew what I was talking about, because Helen went for it. So I mentioned it ITN and they really wrote home about it, and it was fantastic, and from then on there was more press who got a hold of the story, I guess because of the global economic crisis which was probably well under way when we started shooting the film, but I was probably more concerned with Marc’s economic crisis. That really was me talking in the third person! (Laughs)

LFF: So what interest from Cannes did you get?

MP: Well, that amazing press didn’t necessarily mean we had distributors bashing down our doors, far from it. We only had a few serious contenders for the UK. One of them was offering things I would never have gone for. Another beauty about the way we made the film is that we didn’t have to mortgage our house to make it we weren’t in a rush to make our £45 back! So we could turn around to these distributors and say, ‘actually that’s the exact opposite of what we are looking for’.

LFF: What did they want to change?

MP: They wanted to change the name, and marketing, the only reason they wanted to take it was because of the press. They just wanted to ignore everything and were quite dismissive of the whole process.

LFF: Did they throw any of their title ideas at you?

MP: No, but I did come up with one, which I felt, well in terms of a compromise how’s this, but that was me just trying to reasonable, knowing Helen had worked really hard getting us that meeting. They offered us some really amazing things, ‘if you want to make another film we’ll pay for it’, but we felt, well if you’re going to screw up the marketing on this one, I don’t really have the confidence you’ll get it right on the next one. I was much aware of how important the marketing was. So when we went with Kaleidoscope, because I think the press had given the impression we were being sought after by everyone, we were able to say we want this, this, this and this…. They were really cool about that actually.

LFF: What kind of things did you want to retain?

MP: I wanted to make sure we still had the main actors face dominating the poster, namely Al, as I didn’t want the poster to lie. I mean I like The Zombies Diaries, but that cover for the DVD is not the movie you get.

LFF: Yeah, it makes it look like I Am Legend or something…

MP: Yes, and there was a backlash on the internet because of that! I thought it would be unfair, considering what we had achieved. We got control in a lot of areas, and in others they felt they knew what they were doing, so they did that, it was an interesting compromise. I think we had an awful lot of PR, which was great, and I’m happy with the way the film was marketed.

LFF: How has the success of Colin affected your next film?

MP: There’s a lot of personal issues, I don’t want to not pay anyone this time, because I couldn’t have asked for more success from a first zero budget film than I had with Colin, to make the next one the same way would be exploitation, and I don’t really want to exploit the people that worked so hard on Colin. I want them to be paid, even if it’s a small amount; I want it to be paid work. That’s the big part of the budget for the next film, making sure people are getting paid, but I do think we can make it very, very cheaply. We’ve started a visual effects company, which we’ve started testing one or things with, as I think there’s a lot we can do for ourselves, which brings down a lot of the overheads, studio costs and the cost of getting another visual effects company to do it for us.

LFF: Have you got a name for your visual effects company yet?

MP: We’re working on it! We’ve got people working for it, but we’ve not got a name for it yet.

LFF: So you want to pool together a group of filmmakers; a little family who make up a creative work force and just go out and make films?

MP: Well yeah, we’ve got a lot of options of getting the finance in that way, one way we’re trying is to find the money without necessarily giving away the rights, so we can represent the sales for the Countries. If we own it we can really push it in every single territory. Plus it’s going to be a much nicer looking film than Colin, it’s not going to a little camcorder movie, that if people don’t watch they won’t go ‘hmm there’s nothing here’. With Thunderchild we should be able to just show a clip and people will be like ‘whoa’, that’s how it should work, unless I’ve fucked up and made it really badly.

LFF: Tell us more about Thunderchild.

MP: Thunderchild takes place entirely aboard a Halifax Bomber, on a mission over an undisclosed area of Europe, during World War 2. Essentially the movie is about the bomber, and on the way back a creepy creature gets on and starts attacking one of the gunners. The ideal is to really play on the drama as these two different genres collide. It’s very different in pace and style to Colin, and that’s not me being derogatory to the way we made Colin, it’s not like we didn’t take more narrative risks with Colin, it’s just that I want to make something more streamlined. Colin is a slow-burn movie and I want this to be more boom, boom, boom, sort of race you through it. I want the audience at the end to be like ‘WHAT?! That was a 100minutes, my god!’

I’d love to start shooting this year. We’re in an interesting position, because we’re shooting the visual effects first, because we’re using rear projection. We don’t have the money really, or really have the level of skill as yet, although one of our guys is fucking brilliant. But it’s going to take a lot of work to do the hand held stuff, and then get it tracked on scratched cracked Perspex, and then the Green screen stuff. I want to do use rear projection, and then just really use grading to blend the projection stuff in to what is actually there. By using modern technology and old cinema techniques we can get it to work, so we’ll use models rather than CG planes and then enhance them with CG – much like how it was done in Moon, and everything in Moon looks fantastic.

LFF: Sounds very intriguing…

MP: We have a fun moment in the script meetings, where there’s always someone new there, and it’s great when we go through the script there’s a point in the script, where everyone goes (draws in breath) and it’s the point where I call ‘break’ and we go have a cup of tea and then come back in. It’s always a really good moment.

LFF: Is it a major Plot Point?

MP: I think it’s the third major plot point, it’s not a twist, it’s just something I hope the audience have forgotten all about it, and then it comes in, and they’re like ‘ohh I knew this was there’. I kind of like having that, the first week everyone was like that, and the second week everyone was watching for all the new people’s reactions – it’s really not a twist, it’s just that point where you can feel that shift. You feel that shift that in every possible path of the story, not in a bad way but in a very interesting way. You know you’re conditioned to watch one movie and then it goes ‘GAH’ and turns into another, and it’s not a bad thing you know. It should feel like From Dusk till Dawn, but not be as jarring. We will have established that movie, like with any human characters we’ve established the movie and the direction it’s going to go in, and you get to that point and then it shifts. It’s like, we really enjoyed that last movie and we get to enjoy this movie, which should be really cool, which is how it’s been it’s been in the script meetings.

LFF: You talked before about how you hope to pay everyone on Thunderchild, did you yourself make any money from Colin?

MP: A little, but you know with Net Profit, there’s always a reason why you can’t get your money. But I could be wrong; this is just our experience, and every experience is unique. So all we’re trying to do with our next film is hang onto that stuff. We don’t need people telling us how to do it. We already know how to do it, and that works for us.

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For more information on Marc Price’s work, and his upcoming film Magpie please visit www.nowherefast.tv/ or follow him on Twitter – www.twitter.com/Marc_V_Price

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For more information on Marc Price’s work, and his upcoming film Magpie please visit www.nowherefast.tv/ or follow him on Twitter – www.twitter.com/Marc_V_Price