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| Jericho Ridge |
A dark, freezing night. A lonely sheriff’s station. Incidents elsewhere taking the other officers way, and just one woman (Tabby, played by Nikki Amuka-Bird), nursing a broken leg, left to hold the fort. Unfortunately for her, there’s something inside the station that some very bad people want to get their hands on, and she’s in the way. Survival thriller Jericho Ridge is opening in UK cinemas on Thursday, and it’s going to deliver some serious action.
In March, when it screened at the Glasgow Film Festival, I met up with director Will Gilbey and star Chris Reilly to discuss it, but we all knew from the start that it would be a challenging interview. There’s very little we could actually say about the story without giving things away. It was a few dramatic twists and turns, but there’s very little embellishment. It is, I suggest, a simple story, told well.
“The development of this was just trying to do a low budget film, which was controllable,” says Will. “The one location thing is always very attractive, but it can get quite played out and tired. It's quite hard to keep one location exciting for 80, 90 minutes. I really wanted to do an action thriller and I came up with the idea of a sheriff's deputy, maybe a dispatcher, alone for a night, and all sorts of mad stuff happening, but ultimately I just wanted the one location thing.
“You know, you don't get many days in a low budget film, and obviously action takes forever. It's a really slow process just gathering everything, keeping everyone safe, and resetting after takes. So I wanted to be able to stay in one place and really focus on making the film look and feel as good as it possibly can, rather than overstretching. I wanted it to be ambitious, but as an editor, I cut a lot of first time directors’ feature films, and I've seen the mistakes. I've been able to learn from the really good ones, and the ones just didn't quite get there. A lot of people us too many locations. They're jumping in a bus and they're going to five different locations in a day, and they make films that look like early Nineties TV coverage because that's all they got time for.”
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| Jericho Ridge |
I tell him that I think not enough people who make films watch bad films. There’s a lot to be learned from them. We go on to talk about the location.
“I think we're the first international production ever to shoot in Kosovo,” he says. “One of our producers, a guy called Harvey Ascott, has been going out there shooting. He shot an Oscar nominated short film [Shok], which is very good. He shot some music videos out there, commercials, stuff like that, and he's been sort of slowly cherry picking the best people, the best teams. And it's quite a cheap place to shoot. They now have a 30% tax credit.
“This initially was supposed to shoot in Canada in the beginning of 2020, but we were all sat on our hands for two years, and then we were trying to figure out where made the most sense for us, with the money that we had, to go and shoot. Kosovo just seemed right. A lot of the film takes place in one location, but there's that journey to work at the beginning. We're travelling through the countryside and it had to feel like it could be in America.”
Fortunately, Chris tells me, he didn’t have to wait two years for the project to get off the ground. He auditioned for it not long before the shoot.
“It seemed to me a great script, very tight. There was an opportunity to flex the muscle again after a long fallow period. I didn't know Will's style before, but I think you summed it up by saying ‘telling a simple story well,’ and I enjoyed working with someone who cast very well and trusted his cast to find those pieces of character while he concentrated on the technical side. I think that works really well for independent film, when time is of the essence.
“I knew Michael Socha. I worked with him before on a series called Homefront, by ITV, way back in 2013, and I thought his work was phenomenal. He's working by intuition. He's just alive as an actor. I love working with him.”
I mention that I love the opening credits for the film, which set it up like a seventies thriller. Was that the idea?
“Yeah, totally,” says Will. “I mean, that's possibly the greatest decade of cinema. It was one of those things when you sort of go a bit mad choosing fonts, it goes back and forth so many times, you're adjusting the color and, you know. But that was totally the vibe we were going for.”
And on casting, where did they find Nikki? She’s a really strong lead.
“I totally agree,” he says. “I think we got very lucky. Another one of our producers, Alex Tate, saw the casting director’s lists, and she was one of our lists and he was like, ‘Oh my God, I've seen her in a few things. She's absolutely incredible. I was aware of her but I hadn't seen a lot of her, and then I did my research and was kind of blown away. I think she's fantastic, and she has quite a lot to do. The whole film is told from her character’s point of view. She's in every scene, she's in every fight and, you know, we're throwing her around. It’s a very physical role.
“She was great fun to work with, really cool. And, you know, honestly, the whole cast, we had really good casting directors and we got some established talent and some really exciting up-and-coming as well. Solly McLeod and Zack Morris, I think you can see they're both going off to do really exciting stuff and they're both very good actors. And they’re just lovely people, which is so nice, especially when you’re doing your first film.”
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| Jericho Ridge |
It’s the richness and depth of character that really brings the film to life, Chris observes, and Will agrees.
“I had a couple days rehearsing with Nikki, but the schedule was so chopped up with actors available at different times, so trying to get everyone in the room to do it was nigh on impossible. Everyone had to just parachute in and do their best, and I think they really brought it.”
We talk about the challenges of Nikki having to move around all the time as if she's injured, with extra stress going through her body all the time, and fitting all the action scenes around that.
“I had the exact same leg break,” says Will, “which is why I put it in. I remember what it was like. It was just trying to put her on the back foot, trying to give her so many disadvantages that she's got to work through to survive the night, and that was one of them.”
I mention that I recently spoke with Renny Harlin about The Bricklayer, and he was talking about how when he watches action sequences, he's often frustrated by how easy it is to lose track of what's happening to who because there's so much running around. There’s a really clean through line with the action in this film.
“I think geography and spatial awareness in action is completely essential,” he agrees. “A lot of times I've had to cut action sequences where often they don't have what you need because they didn't know how to get it or they didn't get it, or there's bad luck or whatever, and you're having to create that chaos in the edit because you've got nothing else. These days, everyone's pretty much fed up with that, aren't they? I really wanted clarity and geography, to understand the layout of the location.
“The film is written so that when you come into the sheriff's office, we do a tour of the whole thing, so you're like, ‘Okay, here's where the doors are, here's where the cell is” - I wanted everyone to know where we are, how it's going to work, and to try and film it as cleanly and simply as possible in some respects.”
How much was it possible to design that at the scripting stage, and how much depended on the location?
“The first thing I did as I started writing was I literally just got a pen out and I drew a floor plan. Initially, when were looking at Canada or other locations, we were trying to find an existing structure and adapt it to our needs. So in Canada, we found a petrol station that we were going to use and we were going to have a set for the rear half, but then in Kosovo they were like, ‘No, we'll build it.’ They built the set in a ridiculously short time. We only had three weeks to prep, but they built the set in about two weeks, based on my crappy drawing. They just made it a lot better.
“It was really good doing it that way, because obviously, you know, you go into location and you think ‘Yeah, this is the perfect size.’ Then you get a film crew in there, you get the lights and you get the actors, and you're like, ‘Okay, we can't move. This is ridiculous.’ So just being able to build everything a bit bigger than it might need to be was really helpful in terms of being able to manage filming it.”
Then there are the outdoor scenes, with which filmmakers are always at the mercy of the light and the weather.
“It was hellishly cold. It was sort of. Yeah, -12°, out on the night shoots. We did the second unit shoot at -16°, when they're going to the cabin. And that was Harvey was telling me ‘Simon Dennis was just saying he's got to hold the gun. He's like, “I can't.”’ And then we had an actor, Aidan Kelly, he was out in bare feet because he gets routed out of his house in his dressing gown and, you know, it's freezing. They pulled the door off the sheriff's office and it kept freezing over. And obviously, for continuity, we had to go in there and chip the ice off it every two or three hours. So, yeah, it was challenging, but it was fun.”
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| Jericho Ridge |
“The most fun for me was when I landed there and I realised that I was working with collaborators who were really passionate about telling a story, and who really trusted us as actors to bring our own thing to the job and push in the direction of the film,” says Chris. “Everyone being open to that process just makes the job fun. There's nothing better to do than an independent film, for fun. I love it.”
Will nods. “Yeah. There are definitely stressful times when your generator explodes in the middle of the night or when you're on location and the camera hire company have managed to snap the key off in the lock and we can't get the camera out so we have to break the door down. Things like that mount up, but when it's going right, it’s just such an enjoyable process. It was really fun. I loved it. Working with great people, collaborators, artists, it was awesome.”
They were both excited to be at the Glasgow Film Festival.
“It’s very exciting,” says Will. “It's my first time here. It's definitely not going to be my last. I'm hoping to see a couple of films. And I thought I never would enjoy watching my film with an audience, but I started to really like that process. I think actually, as a filmmaker, you can learn so much from the collective gasps or how they react to things. I really feel like I've learned and can build that into the next one.”
So what's the next one?
“There's a few different ones. I want to make an action film. There's a crime thriller I'm working on. I've written a TV pilot, which may or may not go, and then I'm starting to write a horror film as well, so I have a few balls in the air and. But really, I'd love to do another action film next. A little bit bigger, a little bit more money, slightly bigger stunts, you know, that sort of vibe.”
For Chris, Jericho Ridge remains the most important thing.
“Just how happy I am to have done it and how happy I am that it's in Glasgow and I get to be among my own people. In Glasgow, they’re traditionally a very dry audience and can be quite critical, so I'd love to hear what they think of it, because I know that when I saw it the first time, I was very pleased.”
