Arrow Video Frightfest returns for its twentieth year of frightful delights later this month. Running from Thursday 22nd August to Monday 26th August, the film festival showcases the best and brightest in films that embrace the darker side of cinema. In the run-up to the festival, we at THN are bringing you a series of interviews with some of the filmmakers presenting the fruits of their labour to the Frightfest audiences.
Stairs Film
Writer and director Tom Paton is no stranger to Frightfest. In both 2017 and 2018 he screened his features Redwood and Black Site, now in 2019 he brings Stairs for the Frightfest audience to devour. The film fits firmly into the science-fiction horror category and tells the terrifying tale of a group of mercenaries whom, after killing the wrong people, find themselves trapped on a set of stairs. How does one get stuck on a staircase I hear you ask, well these stairs are no ordinary set of steps, they’re actually a time-loop trap. Every time they try to escape them, the mercenaries find themselves re-living the events that brought them there. They must pull together to change the actions of their past selves, or die trying.
It’s a very interesting premise for a film, and one that must have taken a lot of hard work to pull off. With that in mind, we sat down with Paton to get the full lowdown on production, his slightly off kilter journey to making films, and working with Casper Van Dien on film number five.
What made you want to get into film-making?
It’s one of those age old questions, but I think for me it was just that I always wanted to tell stories. That has always been my driver for most of my life. I decided I was going to be a film director around fifteen so it was a pretty early decision for me. The usual things got me into it, watching Jurassic Park when I was eight and thinking I wanted to be an archaeologist when actually it was more film making I was into. Then I discovered eighties movies like Evil Dead, The Lost Boys, things like that which just gave me this real love for cinema. Particularly the more commercial side of cinema as opposed to the artsy side.
So was it the directing that came first?
It was a bit of a weird thing really, I tried my hand at writing and doing comics when I was younger, I was just not a strong enough artist in terms of sketching ability. I had a really weird journey to being where I am. I never went to university, I ended up working abroad for a while, and while I was there I came up with this idea that I was going to film tourist events and sell them back to their customers. That became this crash course of film making where I learned how to use cameras, edit, do VFX, and the writing part came back in later. I ended-up doing hundreds of music videos before I made the leap to feature film so it was a bit of a weird left field journey to where I am.
Stairs Film
Stairs fits into the time-loop sci-fi genre, was that always the intention?
I would say for me the point was to make this existential horror. I always found the idea of Groundhog Day to be not far from a horror movie. It was trying to go in that direction or at least do it in a different way.
It’s a time-loop film, but it goes at it from a completely different angle. Was it intentional that when people were watching it that they weren’t thinking, ‘oh it’s another Groundhog Day‘?
I think that’s it. When you get a film as iconic as Groundhog Day, which I don’t believe was the first film to do the time loop, but it certainly did it the best. Then we’ve had stuff like Happy Death Day recently, it felt like there had to be a different angle to this. The idea of making it this ‘versus movie’ where even though we’re in a time-loop there would be repercussions for every loop. If you died in the loop then that was it, you weren’t going to make it through to the next one. It was about trying to redesign the rules of that really and come up with this way of packaging it correctly, and that’s where the concept of the stairs came from in the first place.
Stairs Film
How hard is it to get your head around all of this time loop stuff when you’re writing?
Honestly, from a writing perspective, this one was a real challenge. In terms of just trying to map out events. We try to lay the groundwork early where in the first fifteen minutes you start to realise later on that everything you’re seeing happened within those moments. It was really difficult mapping that out from a storytelling perspective. I write everything on cards anyway, it’s always been my style, here it was mapping everything out on the cards in terms of what was going to be in each scene. Then you start to try to line stuff up, there was a lot of card swapping. The real headache was the on-set stuff. Traditionally when you’re film-making you’ll be, ‘we’re shooting scene 22 now’, whereas on Stairs we would be like, ‘ok so we’re shooting scenes 4,5,6,18,54,85, and you would have to know which version and which camera angles you needed the repeats with the variations in.
It was a real headache. A lot of people burned out on this set. By the end of it I had to really keep my cool and know exactly what I was gong for, how this film was going to fit together because I think a lot of people were just, ‘you know Tom we just trust that you’e got a handle on this’.
It must have also been an interesting challenge for the actors?
I think for them it was a real challenge. We shot all of the stairs stuff first in one bulk before we moved onto the war zone stuff. The war zone stuff in itself was a big technical challenge. We decided to purposely go for this graphic novel day for night look on it. Even that from a technical perspective I think was freaking everybody out. But from the actors, we knew that that final block of shooting on the war zone was going to be really challenging for them. It was really just about reassuring them, and reminding them where they were in the story. Hat’s off to all of them for being able to keep track of it. Sometimes it was them keeping me on track too. It was a real collaborative effort. It was hard work for them for sure.
Stairs Film
You’re last couple of films have focused in on military type characters, what is it about those types of characters that draws you into telling their stories?
It’s a little bit of a two-fold thing with me. I’ve kinda always been obsessed with siege films and survival movies. I think those movies have always played well when you mix in military type characters. I also love world building, which also comes naturally to that kind of environment, you can put a lot of world building around those characters. On the other side of the coin, it’s because I’ve been, until the fifth film that we’ve just got in the bag, I’ve been playing with these really small budgets and I’ve got this idea that I always want to do what I’m not supposed to do. The biggest critique in every one and two star review I get is basically saying it’s too ambitious. But that’s what drives me. I don’t want to make [something safe], I like to take a small amount of money and do something you’re not supposed to do with it. I think that fits when you use the military backdrop quite well because it tends to be that you need millions and millions of pounds to pull that off. I always feel there’s a way to do this that sets my films apart from some of the other indie films I’m competing against. I’m a sadist really though, I think that’s what it is.
Well is worked for Rodriguez and Cameron, they both started with micro-budgets…
Yeah, but I think it’s very different times at the moment. There’s so much being made now, anybody can make a movie these days. I think the real key now… where it used to be – could you surpass what your budget was, was the marker of if you were going to get into Hollywood or not. Now I think it seems to be, can you do that consistently long enough for you to get into Hollywood. Of course there’s the examples where people are breaking through off of a single hit, but I just feel at the moment that the whole scene is based around there’s so much stuff being made, can you consistently raise budgets and put content out and prove your worth. It’s strange times to be a filmmaker.
Stairs Film
Colour also seems to play an important part of your visual aesthetic, why do you like telling stories this way?
I think again part of the low budget parameters that I think a lot of filmmakers fall down on is that they don’t tap into that cinematic language that’s evolved over the last hundred years. Colour has always been a really important part in getting across why things look a certain way. Trying to engage the audience in a certain emotion, colour has always been a really important part of that, never more so then when you’re playing with a small budget. Stairs very intentionally has this RGB pallet to it. We took it to the absolute extreme of what you’re supposed to do really. It’s either very red, very blue or very green. It’s all intentionally done because it’s saying a lot about what is reality? What are these people perceiving? We present cinema in RGB so it was an intention for two reasons. I think one to help the story progress and two to try to help bolster that underlying theme we were going for. I think colour is crazy important. If you don’t have progression in colour within your film it tends to get quite boring after a while.
Of course it’s always a massive risk when you go this extreme. We did it to Black Site, there was a lot of colour progression to some extent, but on Stairs we really took it as far as you should probably push that kind of thing. There’s obviously a worry for us as filmmakers because we don’t know what anyone’s TV is calibrated to. If it’s kept quite neutral then you can sort of get away with it, but when you go as extreme as we have there’s always that fear for me that I’m going to go sit at a mates and watch it in two years and be ‘oh God!’ just because of their TV settings.
Stairs is your latest film to screen at Frightfest, the team having supported your work thus far. How important would you say a festival like Frightfest is to filmmakers.
Frightfest has been really integral to my career. I’ve just finished my fifth film and it was a 3 million budget. I don’t think I would have got to this level without Frightfest bringing attention to what I was doing. The guys have really taken a risk on me. When they picked Redwood… Redwood is a very safe movie to a lot of degrees. It’s a safe, easy pick just for a general audience whereas my previous two films, particularly Stairs, are real Marmite movies. You either really like them, or really don’t. It’s been great that Frightfest have still taken that punt on me and believed what I’m making is there. It’s been super important to me career wise. Those guys are just awesome at just picking out a great line-up that caters to all tastes. Hopefully Stairs fits nicely with the event. This is a big one for them as well, it’s a real honour to be in the twentieth year.
Stairs Film
Had you been to Frightfest before you started screening your films there?
I’d been to a couple of single screenings, but Frightfest is synonymous with genre film festivals. I think if you’re even remotely invested in genre as scene then you know what Frightfest is. When we first got picked for Redwood, that film was written in two days, shot in fourteen with only three weeks prep, so it was really mental that it got into the festival. Then they made us an opening night film which was just insane! It brought all of this crazy attention and I’ll always be eternally grateful to Paul, Alan, Ian and Greg because they’ve kept that up. I’ve always been very good at the business side, I’m good at raising funds, I’m good at getting my stuff made, and getting it out there, but that was the first time in my career that someone validated me as a filmmaker and I’ll always be grateful for that.
You’ve mentioned that you already have film five in the can, what can you share about that project?
It’s called G-Loc, it’s a total step away from horror, there’s not even a hint of horror in this one. We’ve got Stephen Moyer from True Blood in the lead, and Casper Van Dien’s in the movie as well. It’s a big space adventure, basically all about this ships speeding up, going faster and faster and these two people that shouldn’t be getting along trying to fix it and having to get over their issues while they do it. The movie itself has got this huge world building in and it’s a real step up in budget for me. Suddenly to have all the toys and all the VFX I could dream for. It was a fun experience, you should be seeing that sometime next summer I would imagine.
At Frightfest maybe?
I don’t know. I think I’ve finally gone ahead and made a film that I don’t know if it’s Frightfest appropriate, but we’ll see. It’s been picked-up by a big studio who I can’t reveal at the moment, but I’ve got high hopes for what G-Loc‘s going to do. It’s already had a big spill on for my career. I’ve signed a two picture deal, I’m working on the sixth film as we speak, so it’s in a good place.
Busy, busy, busy.
Trying to be. I’m also rebooting Black Site as a Transylvanian anime. We’re ignoring what went down in the movie and doing a ground up reboot. Those two things are keeping me pretty preoccupied at the moment.
I was quite jealous when I spied Casper van Dien on the G-Loc cast list.
He’s honestly the coolest guy. I went to Cannes Film Festival in May and met up with him there again and had dinner and stuff. He’s just a cool guy. I think one of the first films I sneaked into was Starship Troopers so to have Rico in my movie, and it’s also a space film, it was a really big day for me that one.
One of the things I love about Starship Troopers is that it got, critically speaking, the interpretation at the time was that it was this pro-fascist movie. Now with a bit of hindsight, it’s clearly the exact opposite. G-Loc has got that sort of tone to it. There’s quite a hefty immigration metaphor built into the film and when we were casting the movie I wanted, I actually wrote something like Casper Van Dien like next to the character. When the casting agent phoned me back and said ‘Casper says he’ll do it’, it was a great moment for me because I was definitely using Starship Troopers as a jumping off point for what I was doing. It was really cool that he came on board.
It’s horrifying now to be in the world we live in and stuff that’s played for comedy in Starship Troopers is now just our news.
That’s what I love about genre films in general, horror and sci-fi. You can take these real world warnings or parables and you can build them into entertainment. They’ll always be takes away from it and says, ‘actually we should do something about this’, unfortunately a lot of these sci-fi films and horror films end up being right. We’re pretty close to 1984 now, all the military propaganda stuff in Starship Troopers is pretty prevalent as well. I try and do that with all my films. Even though I like to think I’m a very commercial director, I never go out of my way to be overly artistic, for me I like the idea that someone can sit down on a Friday after a hard day at work and just have a good time. But I do try to draw from real world stuff and there’s a lot of that poured into Stairs and even more of it has gone into G-Loc.
Stairs debuts at Arrow Video Frightfest on Monday 26th August.
