Virus of fearGareth Tunley’s The Ghoul first appeared on our screens during last year’s chilling FilmFear season. As it approaches its official release, our Artistic Director of Film Jason Wood speaks to its director to learn more about its inspirations and themes…
Jason Wood: ‘People who suffer from depression often believe they’ve always felt this way. Like they’re trapped in a circle’. These words from psychotherapist Helen Fisher strike me as being central to the film. Was this one of the starting points both in terms of some of the themes that you wanted to unpick and also in terms of the film’s narrative – without giving too much away to readers – of a man pretending to be one thing when in reality he is something else entirely?
Gareth Tunley: We knew we wanted to make a film about depression but, I’m told, there’s limited demand in the multiplexes for a film about a man sitting in a room staring at his shoes crying. So we worked to wrap these concerns in some nifty genre clothing. Once you make that decision you find any given genre, in this case the detective story with a soupcon of horror, offers all kinds of fantastic structures and metaphors because other storytellers have been doing the creative heavy lifting for decades (which is nice of them). So the idea of being trapped in a loop that crops up in horror films and strange tales turns out to be a great way of expressing the feeling of depression. Films like Ealing’s Dead of Night or Polanski’s The Tenant and even comic strips like Alan Moore’s Ring Road mine that circularity for dread and we found it was equally potent for expressing the feeling of being trapped in mental illness.
Likewise the pulp staple of the cop who goes ‘deep cover’ to the extent of losing grip on his identity is familiar to us all through a gazillion novels and films. I thought of Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly particularly. And we found it was a great way to explore the tragedy that people with mental ill health have to pretend to be healthy. People who are depressed have to pretend to be happy and so on. More controversially: even some aspects of mental ill health may be a kind of act. People who are genuinely ill may still have to telegraph and even ‘act out’ some aspects of their illness in order to make it comprehensible to others (and even themselves). The detective story turned out to be a great way to explore these thorny and rather unpleasant themes, which is probably why it’s survived for a hundred years or more.
JW: As both writer and director you have crafted a work that could be seen as incredibly complex in both a narrative sense and in terms of a film that functions on both a conscious and sub-conscious level and yet The Ghoul entirely avoids artifice and pretension and is incredibly taut and watchable. This is quite a feat. Was it difficult to pull off? Did you have to work assiduously to keep the balance between intellect and creating something that also functioned as a kind of metaphysical thriller?
GT: At one point I had scenes and ideas written on cards on a wall in my flat. But I thought: if something happens to me and the police find me here with lots of cards blu-tacked to the wall with things like “Psychiatrists brainwashing patients” written on them and lots of books on the occult… well, that’s just not a good look is it? So I stuck to the word-processor from there on. So yes, it’s a complex plot I guess. We worked hard at script stage and in the edit to make sure the story was always moving forwards and we had lots of input from writer friends, mostly on what to cut. I love Geoff McGivern’s scenes and he brings a lightness to them but they could easily have become turgid lectures – I cut a load more stuff on loops, cycles and infinite recursion. So the audience dodged a bullet there!
JW: The dullest of questions but you work within a limited budget. How did this affect both the visual aesthetic of the film – it captures a grey and claustrophobic London metropolis – and how you attempted to portray the central protagonist’s descent into a kind of mental fugue?
GT: Without giving too much away the film has at least two realities in it. If we’d had a bigger budget I might have been tempted to push one of those realities into some kind of stylised space. Luckily we had no money! So the whole film is cut from more or less the same micro-budget cloth. So this means that our main character Chris’s fantasies appear to have been constructed from the more or less mundane materials of his every day life. So the budget told us what kind of film we were making and having no money does rather focus the mind!
JW: A lot of the success of the film also hinges on the incredible central performance of Tom Meeten. Can you talk a little about how you came to cast him and the performance he gives? Along with the accomplished writing it could be argued that he is the axis on which the film spins.
GT: Tom carries this film on his considerable shoulders! I should say he also co-produced the film so it’s a heroic effort on all fronts. I first met Tom almost 20 years ago in a basement comedy club when he was wrapped in bin-liner and gaffer tape and being yelled at by Steve Oram. This was part of a comedy sketch not some distressing mental collapse by the way. So, in a way, I was as pleasantly surprised as anyone. I’d love to take more credit for somehow knowing he’d be great but it’d be a blatant lie! I knew he’d be good because I’ve worked with him before but even I was stunned when we got further into the edit and saw how much nuance and depth he brings to every scene. Tom’s known for big physical wild comedy, and if you take that energy and bottle it up you sometimes get something very special and implosive and in the case of Tom he just delivered in spades.
JW: Did you allow yourself to draw on any other film references? Sight and Sound mention Shock Corridor but I see something of Antonioni’s The Passenger in the film and also Welles’s The Trial.
GT: To be honest a lot of the time we’re trying to avoid being influenced too much by things. Also the main influence is the budget and the schedule! DOP Ben Pritchard and me spoke about Jean Pierre Melville early doors but that all went out of the window once we got going and realised we didn’t have time to do elegant moving master shots! Film-making always reminds me of what Mike Tyson said: “Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth”. I’m sure there are influences there from all over and it’s interesting to hear others say what they think they might be. For instance I’ve only seen one of the three films you mention there – I’ll leave you to guess which one. I have some catching up to do!
JW: For all the intellect on display in the film you also allow yourself to have some fun with paradoxical concepts such as the Klein Bottle, the Ouroboros and the central, perhaps, motif of The Möbian strip. Did you want to ensure that audiences would be entertained as well as intellectually stimulated? I think you are also well served in this regard by the casting of Geoff McGivern as Alexander Morland.
GT: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: ‘thank God for Geoff McGivern’. Geoff brings a lightness to a character that could have been portentous and grim but without losing a wonderfully creepy quality. He makes all those concepts you mention sing and convinces us that our main character would be almost hypnotically drawn in by his various peregrinations through arcane ideas. He refers at one point to ‘wooly ideas’ and that’s an understatement: much of this stuff about consciousness, magick and fringe mathematics might not impress a truly rigorous thinker but Geoff makes it compelling enough to impress our vulnerable main character and that’s what matters for our story.
JW: As a cinema operator I would ask this but I can think of few other films that so demand repeated viewers. Did you conceive of The Ghoul in this manner? It reveals something more with each viewing. A rare feat in contemporary British cinema.
GT: That’s great and I’d love people to watch more than once, as long as it doesn’t put people off coming the first time. Trust me folks: it’s a blast first time around then just gets better and better!
JW: Finally, Ben Wheatley served as an Executive Producer. You have worked with Ben on previous projects as an actor. How important was it to have Ben on board and what advice did he give along the way?
GT: Ben’s a major inspiration. I was in his first film Down Terrace (so long as you pay attention) and that was a kind of production model for us to do something on a similar scale. Ben wasn’t involved in the production of The Ghoul but gave notes on the edit. His notes were mostly on what to cut. Ben has an eye for narrative efficiency and spotted opportunities to cut ruthlessly that no-one else had picked up on even towards the very end of the edit. And when Ben Wheatley says you should cut something from your movie it’s best to take notice. Then Ben came on as Executive Producer and that was massive as it helped get the film noticed and ultimately is one of the factors it’s being seen at all and has a proper release rather than my plan to project it on a sheet in pubs and pass round the hat after.
The Ghoul opens on Friday August 4. Book tickets here.
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