Every director deserves a crack at a comeback, but few take that chance eight years after their first feature. Matthew Parkhill released the contentious DOT THE I, staring Gael Garcia Bernal in 2003. It left critics baffled following its Sundance release, but little has been heard on the Parkhill front since. Now he returns with THE CALLER, a psychological thriller that has been backed into ‘genre film’ naughty corner.
A mucky phone in a creaky house joins our main characters, Mary (Rachelle Lefevre) and Rose (Lorna Raver of DRAG ME TO HELL shit-scary old lady fame). Naturally, Mary is a troubled divorcee, and Rose is the lonely stranger on the other line WHO WILL NOT BE IGNORED. The non-stop calls chip away at Mary’s sanity, and it all goes a bit Donnie Darko as Rose reveals she’s calling from the past.
THE CALLER’S leading man is True Blood’s Stephen Moyer (John), and when the late Brittany Murphy was recast with TWILIGHT actress Rachelle, it raised many vamp-weary suspicions. However, Parkhill is adamant this was a coincidence, not a poor attempt to pull in a tweeny audience.
The ‘stranger calling’ cliché is one that has plagued genre films since Drew Barrymore met her sticky 90s end. But in an interview Matthew he urged us to curb the snobbishness and embrace good storytelling. Our hearts fell when he described his next project as ‘a modern Oliver Twist which is like OCEANS 11 crossed with SKINS’, but hell, we’ll still watch it. And in 3D too.
THN: In terms of the phone call element, that’s very much a horror cliché now, were you worried about that?
Matthew: Hmm, not really to be honest, before we started making the film, the movies that inspired the look and feel and sound that I was going for – none of them were films like the ones you describe. The focus I had was on films like LET THE RIGHT ONE IN and ROSEMARY’S BABY. We never really talked about the phonecall as a horror device, we never wanted to have the reveal of the person on the other side of the line. And in that sense, we wanted to let the imagination run wild. When I read the first line of the script I thought ‘well we’re going to have flashbacks etc we’re going to meet this mystery woman’ but the fact that we never went that direction gives it something different. So no, it wasn’t something I was particularly worried about, I think as long as you tell a good story, it doesn’t have to be a cliché.
THN: DOT THE I was your last film, and it couldn’t be any more different, was there a reason for such a departure?
Matthew: Well for me DOT was many years ago now, and I’ve been involved in a lot of movies in between which have collapsed at various stages. I’m always attracted to something in the material, I personally like to jump around I don’t just want to do one kind of movie. But there has to be something I can bring with it, I’ve got to be honest with myself about that. There has to be something to force me to give up five years of my life to fight the good fight and get this movie made. I don’t always think in genres. It’s just dependent on whether I find something in the material, and with The Caller, I just loved the way Sergio told his story.
THN: I’ll just get this out of the way, on your cast you have a male lead from True Blood, and a female lead from Twilight, was this a conscious decision?
Matthew: No it honestly wasn’t, it looks like a brilliant marketing ploy but it’s just the way it happened. Our original actress had to be replaced (the late Brittany Murphy) and it turned out that Lefevre was available. But I wasn’t really worried about the association.
Matthew: I have to be honest, that was a real concern for me, I did wonder how I was going to get anything, was it just going to be 2 hours of people on the phone to each other? I think there was a number of things that helped to create the atmosphere. One is sound, there are all sorts of things happening sound wise that people won’t be aware of. We recorded the sound of a fly buzzing in a jar, babies crying, or the sound of a phone and nursery rhyme played backwards. All these kind of things help reach into your subconscious. And it’s partially visuals too, it’s about creating atmosphere, using shadow.
THN: And in terms of the actual phone calls, how did you manage to create that tension?
Matthew: I was very insistent that Mary and Rose should be speaking on the phone in real time. We installed a phoneline, and allowed that to happen. And in real life, these to women never met each other, not because they didn’t want to, but because it heightened that mystery between them. Rachelle (who plays character Mary) never knew what Rose was going to throw at her on the other end of the line. She’s such a sweet lady, Rose, but she plays such scary characters, including the old woman from DRAG ME TO HELL. I think that separation between them helped to create this sense of tension on screen.
THN: When you received Sergio’s script, because it is a genre film as such were you at all worried about being attached to it?
Matthew: Well I was getting sent a lot of weird scripts around that time, a lot of horror, and I am really not a torture porn type of guy. This film is very much genre, but it has a great psychological element to it. But when I received Sergio’s script I was really impressed at the subtlety of the horror and the scares. I am a big fan of movies like Rosemary’s Baby, and in that film you don’t even see that much, it’s all surrounded by music and shadow. Like Roman Polanski said it’s as much about what you see, as what you don’t see.
THN: Rachelle is really put through the mill in this film, and is constantly screaming, did it take a toll on her?
Matthew: It took a hell of a toll on her, and she’s in every single scene. She was adamant about doing her own stunts, she gets thrown across the table, hit by a refrigerator. It might not look much because it’s only a couple of seconds on screen, but you wouldn’t normally get your actors to do that. By the end of that sequence, she was bruised, battered, she’d lost her voice. Thank god it was a dialogue free scene. But to a director, it was like gold dust. I think it’s really important for people to see what a great actress she is in her own right.
THN: What can you tell us about TWIST?
Matthew: It’s a modern retelling of Oliver set in contemporary London. The kids are free running, using parkour to commit heists, a bit like Spiderman without webs. My take on it is going to be a young Oceans 11 crossed with Skins. And hopefully it will all come together. It is based on the original story, but it’s a starting point. We start shooting next spring.
THE CALLER is released on DVD and Blu Ray from 24 October 2011
