 |
| Holiday cool: Aisling Bea and Nick Frost as Susan and Richard in Steffen Haars’ Get Away Photo: courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder. An IFC Films and Shudder Release |
Steffen Haars’ lively horror comedy Get Away, a festival hit now making its way into cinemas, is the latest film written by Nick Frost, who also stars in it as Richard, the father of a family which goes on holiday to a remote Swedish island with a bloody history. Aisling Bea plays his wife, Susan, and after I'd spoken with Steffen and their young co-stars Maisie Ayres and Sebastian Croft, the two of them joined me for a chat about the creative process and their experiences on set.
“ I became conscious that I wrote a horror film after watching it,” says Nick, but adds “There were days on set when someone got murdered and there were 50 liters of blood on the floor. And then there were a few times I actually went back to my wife at night and said ‘Fucking hell, this film's really violent!’ You know, I didn't really imagine it as violent, because it's a cute comedy about a family having their last holiday and the fact that a serial killer is involved seems to be an aside. I didn't imagine what we were doing until I saw what we did and I was like, ‘Wow, that's kind of gruesome.’”
“ We were covered with a jam-like substance quite a lot,” says Aisling, not without enthusiasm. “It tasted like blackberries. But we were also filming up in a forest where there was quite a lot of flies and bugs. They thought their Christmas had come early. We all had little flies stuck in the jam on our pretend bloody faces by the end of the day. But it gave me great skin by the end.”
“The twist that we can't write or talk about was the first thing I thought of,” says Nick, “and then it became about ‘Let's hide it amongst theatrically big antagonists.’ That really helped me. And then let's make the family as normal and as loving and as fragile as families we know or that we came from.”
 |
| A family vacation: Maisie Ayres, Sebastian Croft, Aisling Bea and Nick Frost in Get Away. Photo: courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder. An IFC Films and Shudder Release |
A lot depended on getting the right chemistry between the actors, and Aisling stresses that that’s not something one can rely on.
“I think chemistry can be sort of acted sometimes onscreen when people hate each other offscreen, but it makes a job seven times longer when that's what you have to do, because you're working off set, you're working on camera. Whereas there were days when we had a ball filming this and we did feel like a little family. It's probably down to Nick nitpicking the cast.” She turns to him. “You should work as some kind of dating show host because you were just really good at putting people together.
“ It was down to him putting us together as a group. We've all been quite excited about doing press together and stuff, which is rare, and it’s because we really all fell in love with each other as a little family. Maisie and Sebastian are both very funny as well, so most of our time was just laughing.”
It was Maisie’s first film, so I ask Nick what it was that he saw in her that made her seem like the right person for that part.
“We'd seen quite a few really good people,” he says. “There were people on the top of my list. Then it was Friday afternoon and we had one casting to go and she came on screen and it was like, I don't know, everyone else had been great and they were at a six and she just did nothing and she was an eight. She just smashed it. Everyone fell in love with her.”
“She was the least experienced out of everyone,” says Aisling. “Sebastian has been acting since he was eight or nine. I remember watching one of her takes back, and I don't tend to watch takes back when we're filming or anything like that, but I kind of stumbled across some of the stuff and I just...” She trails off. “Maisie as a person is always laughing. She's a really gorgeous, cute bundle of joy and then she's so serious and she can turn it on. That's such pure talent, to go from that sort of bumbling goofball to what she plays in this. She's just incredible. I remember watching, going, ‘Oh my God.’ Because when you're in a scene with people, you don't actually see what the rest are doing.”
We talk about the residents of the film’s fictional island (shot in Finland but posing as Sweden) and how their storyline and rituals developed.
“I guess it just came around being around a lot of Swedes,” says Nick, laughing. “I love the fact that spending quite a lot of time with them made me question what it was to be English. You know, I wasn't sure what it meant, I wasn't sure what culture I had. A lot of my family are Welsh, so I now identify as a welcome Welshman because I figure we’ve got a lot more culture. I think it's about leaving my kids something more than just roast dinners and pantomime, and a love of football. Yes, these things are all English, but when you look at the Swedes, it's like they do something here in February and something else in May, and then they have Midsommar and then they have this, and I think it's so rich, it's such a rich culture that it's easy to get amongst it and to fall in love with it, you know? I think essentially I was so jealous of them, I just wanted to kill everyone.”
“It’s a testament to Nick's script is that he's managed to write a culture that doesn't actually exist,” says Aisling. “So it can nod to it and we know it, but no one's going to be offended by it. It's a made up thing, but it's so real. And the family's reaction is almost every sort of Brit abroad.”
“ Hello,” Nick announces, pressing his face up close and talking far too loud.
 |
| Dining out: Nick Frost and Aisling Bea in Get Away Photo: courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder. An IFC Films and Shudder Release. |
Aisling laughs. “Yeah, very good. I think that's a really good running joke is because when you go to countries that you don't know very well, there's always like, ‘Well, of course on the Wednesday we have this thing,’ and you're like, ‘Oh, of course, yes.’ But there's loads of those ‘No, it's förbjuden,’ or whatever it is.” She stumbles over the word. “It's quite a nice little running joke throughout.”
“It’s förbjuden,” says Nick in a heavy but authentic accent. Aisling copies him, practising.
Humour is important on films that use a lot of in-camera special effects, because shooting can move very slowly, but Aisling assures me that she enjoyed herself throughout, despite some tough experiences.
“The bloody jam was sticky and yucky but our make-up designer Tytti [Vaaleri], who is Finnish, was great. It was our favorite thing. We would get these hot face cloths at the end of the day. And I think there was something about us all being in it together that was quite lovely. I didn’t know that my arm was slowly falling off. I had to have a shoulder surgery when I finished the job, so I was struggling with basic lifting of knives. I was like, ‘I'm really out of shape here. I've got to get back in the gym.’ But because we all got on so well, the in between bit, sitting around, even though we'd be covered in jam, made those days a lot shorter.
“I'd never been to a Nordic country and the area was stunning. Sometimes we'd be in places that just took my breath away, so there was an element of feeling incredibly lucky that we got to be in it now. I don't think we ever felt incredibly lucky with the catering. I think we all felt incredibly, incredibly unlucky in Finland. There isn't a lot of stuff grown there other than mushrooms, so everything's imported, so the catering was not a great friend. But the stunning views, it was just breathtaking some of the days where we were filming.”
“Also, it was being a family,” says Nick. “Ashley's boyfriend was there, my wife was there and my children. We all hung out in each other's houses and we went for pizza. There were days when we wrapped and if we were at a lake, we'd just have a swim in the lake. My house was near a lake, and we'd go and eat some lunch and then go to swim for a bit.”
“ You don't get those experiences often where you can actually enjoy where you're staying because it's so beautiful,” says Aisling. “A lot of the time you're in a hotel or something . I really do feel like I lived in Finland for a bit.”
“It was all fully worked out before we got there,” Nick says of the shooting script. “What did change – and this is something that I'm kind of proud of in terms of Aisling and Bash [Sebastian] and Maisie doing their homework when they're not filming, is they would come in and say ‘Can we try this?’ Or ‘I was thinking, my character would like to do this.’ or. That for me is like, ‘Yeah!’ God, if you've read something that I've written and it's sparked this and now you want to try this as a result, then one hundred percent we're doing that, you know? Also, I was very lucky that I got to shoot a film with Steffen and our DoP, Joris Kerbosch, earlier in the year. So I knew how that would work.
“When you have only X amount of dollars to make a film, and then you get someone like Joris and you know that he would turn X into three times that, make it look like this, then that it makes it easier for me to sit back and say, ‘Okay, you know what?’ It may not be a hundred percent how I would have done it, but it's your turn, and I trust you.”
 |
| Nick Frost and Aisling Bea investigating things that go bump in the night in Get Away Photo: courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder. An IFC Films and Shudder Release. |
“The balance on set when filming comedy is all about mess and freshness and making sure you feel funny enough to do it, especially with a lower budget,” says Aisling. “I think they made it look so amazing, knowing what we had. It was intricately planned to also sell a lot of the moments, sell that someone’s getting stabbed and they’re not. Spoiler alert: no one really gets stabbed in the film. I did lose my arm, but other than that. And Nick hurt his knee, but other than that, you know, to sell all those things require a lot of pre-thought camera angles and set-ups to make sure we could handle lighting.
“Lighting is so important. And you'd be amazed how on most jobs, lighting takes a lot of time, but especially in something spooky where you have to shoot it and make sure the lighting sells it. Like there's a bit where myself and Nick are looking out the window and we only have time to do three takes of that from behind our heads. That lighting is everything in that. That's 15 minutes to get a huge moment of the film. And so in those moments, you have to be so prepared. But with the comedy stuff, you have to leave room for mush and stuff like that, which Nick did so brilliantly with us. That was the joy. And then the other bit was the physically harder bit because you have to be so specific to make sure we can sell it. I actually learned a lot watching the film like that.
“I don't think I've ever done a genre film like this before. So I almost had to see in the edit, what we were talking about when we were talking about doing silly things.” She smiles, and makes it clear that she’d be happy to do it again.
Get Away opens in the US on Friday 6 December 2024 and in the UK on 10 January 2025.
