The Disappeared is a ghost story with a difference. It's the story of Matthew, a young man struggling with mental health issues after the disappearance of his younger brother, and it's set on a tough London council estate. We asked director Johnny Kevorkian about the journey he took to make this film, starting from his early days doing technical work on film sets.
"I started out as a runner and then I worked as a grip," Johnny recalls. "That was my way of getting my foot in the door with feature film production. It led to me working in the editing suite on a bigger feature and it was cool, it taught me a lot. I spent a whole summer there working closely with the editor, assisting him. I did that while I was at college, when I was 16 or 17, and it started me off in the industry."
So is it helpful for him, as a director, to have that kind of experience?
"I think it is," he agrees. "It was good to have spent a lot of time on set, and when I was working as a grip I was very close to the camera person, so I got to see how they were setting up their shots. I got to see how the director was working - I was on the front line of the whole thing.
"I went to film school for a while then, and I made a short film which I thought was good but, in retrospect, it was terrible. When I came out I decided to make a better one. I scraped some cash together and got lots of favours and then made The Wake, and that taught me a lot. It was more a style piece than a character of acting piece. It set me up to go off and make another short film called Seizures, shot on 35mm. It had some really good actors in it and was more of a performance piece. It was a sci-fi thriller type of thing but very much performance led. I then set up Mind's Eye Films - now Lost Tribe Productions - and started moving into the world of features."
I ask how he went about finding funding for The Disappeared.
"I began with another sci-fi thriller, a Blade Runner type thing. I was very ambitious, thinking I would do that as my first film." He laughs. "At that time nobody was doing any sort of genre film in the UK. People were laughing about films that weren't comedies or period dramas, so clearly it wasn't a good start. Then a bit more of a hunger for horror started coming in. I'd always loved horror myself and I thought it would be a great way to get my first film made because, as everyone knows, you can do it cheaply. There were several projects we'd been working on but they were collapsing around us because a lot of tax breaks were being pulled from the UK at the time. That created problems and everything took longer than expected, so we thought we'd write our own script while we were waiting for the system to adjust itself. So Neil [Murphy] and I wrote the script, which at that time was titled The Calling, and it became The Disappeared.
"I got funding through the EU for a short film called Fractured, which was like a Memento-style thriller, so I shot that and when it was finished I presented it to some investors. They loved it and asked me what I was working on next, so I showed them the script for The Disappeared. They liked it and that led to it being funded. So it came out of nowhere really. I think it's one of those things where you just have to keep pushing and eventually it should happen."
It's a great success story. But how did Johnny go about getting his cast together and how did he get Harry Treadaway to deliver the powerful performance that really makes the film?
"With a horror film you can go one of two ways. You can either go for the slasher thing, throw horror at the audience and that's it, or - and I thought this would be more interesting because there aren't many films like this coming out of the UK - try to create an atmospheric, character-driven horror film. I thought, why not just cast theatre actors, or good TV or film actors? That's why I wanted to be really specific about getting people like Alex Jennings and Greg Wise - and Harry, who's the new guy, but who's going to be big soon. I thought this would be a great time to get him. It took a while to convince him because he's being really thoughtful about his career at the moment and the projects he takes on. He'd never done a horror film before and I think he was a bit dubious about that, so I assured him that it wasn't going to be in-you-face- horror, it wasn't going to be gory, it wasn't going to be a splatterfest. It was going to be character-driven and he would be the main character. I think what appealed to him was the fact that he's on screen about 99.9% of the time! As a performance piece, the whole thing rests on his shoulders and it's a make or break role. If it was cast wrong, the film wouldn't work.
"I think 90% of getting good performances comes down to the casting. Talking to Harry about the role, I discussed his character and what he'd been through - he was part of the reason why his brother went missing and he'd been in hospital - but mostly we focused on getting the balance right with the horror in the film. We didn't want to go for too many obvious frightened moments and expressions. He downplayed a lot of the role and I think that was really crucial to that character. Then when the time came for him to lift that, in the end sequence, he went for that. Up to that point it's important that we share the confusion of the character, not knowing whether he's really seeing things or it's all in his head. He's doubting his own sanity and people around him are starting to doubt him. I don't think many actors could have pulled that off."
I note that the film interested me because of its underlying social issues - there's the mental health angle and then there's the fact that it's set on that kind of housing estate. I a lot of horror movies everything happens to rich middle class people who have a lot more options.
"That's exactly it," Johnny agrees. "There's the cliché of the family that moves into a nice big Gothic house, and while films like that can still be good and atmospheric, I thought, why not go for a reality-based film of a sort we never see, set on a council estate in London? That's a home, people live there, people work around there. It's an interesting place because it's in a city but it's abandoned by a lot of society. You have all these kids that are going missing and they're not really creating a massive news sensation. Also, visually, it's fantastic, very creepy. The way my cinematographer Diego shot it, well, he's originally Argentinian and Chilean and he approached it in a fresh way. He lifted it so that it didn't look like a kitchen sink drama."
I ask if he thinks that will draw in a different audience, because people will see something with possible supernatural elements taking place in a setting they're familiar with.
"Yes," says Johnny. "Every day we pass council estates, they're everywhere, they're part of our everyday lives. Supernatural things could happen in this place - it doesn't have to be a haunted house that's 300 years old, it can be an estate that was built 20 or 30 years ago. I loved the idea of basing the film in a normal everyday scenario where people are coming and going and living their lives. And then there are also the social problems - the gangs, etc., there at the same time, bringing you back to reality. We're not in a fantasy world as such."
There haven't been many successful ghost stories in western cinema in recent years. What inspired Johnny to take on this kind of project, especially as his next film will have similar themes?
"I think the Spanish have been doing some interesting stuff recently, like The Others and The Orphanage, but I haven't seen many good classic ghost stories coming out of the US. I love ghost story films like people used to make. I love The Innocents. I also love the classic storytelling style, relying on atmosphere, basic scares and chills, following characters who should be really interesting, not just people who're screaming and running around the whole time. When people relate to these characters you can unleash the horrors later on and people will respond to them more. But I also love things like Don't Look Now - I'm a big fan of that film. We should be making more of those in this country because we have the history, we have the locations, we have the atmosphere, we have the grey skies for it.
"My next film is called Sleep Thief. It's very different from this - it has a bit more blood in it, but in the style of Cronenberg, not splattery stuff. It's scarier. But again it's character driven, this time with a main character in his 30s. The film centres around him, his trauma and the torment he's going through. He's breaking down in a different way from Matthew in The Disappeared, losing his grip on life.
"We're starting to put the finance together for that now, so we're hoping to start casting in the next few months and get into pre-production before Christmas, then start filming in the new year. So with a bit of luck it'll be ready to go out in May or June next year."
Finally, we can't really talk about these films without talking about Frightfest, which has given Johnny a lot of support. I ask him how The Disappeared went down when it was screened at the last Frightfest event.
"It was my favourite of all the festivals I've been to," says Johnny. "It was a bit of a surprise to me, because the film was shown on a bank holiday Monday last year in the Odeon Leicester Square - the biggest screen it's shown at so far - and I hadn't expected a huge number of people to come along on a bank holiday. But there were 820 seats and they were all full! It was fantastic, and it went down really well. I think a lot of the fans there didn't know what to expect and they were very surprised. I think they'd expected more extreme horror, but they loved it. I was really pleased. It's an excellent festival."
It's a great film, too, and you can catch it in cinemas nationwide from Friday this week.
