Four years ago director Adam Egypt Mortimer came to Arrow Video Frightfest with his debut feature film Some Kind of Hate. This year he made a triumphant return with his follow-up film Daniel Isn’t Real. The film is a visual and cerebral feast that lands somewhere between American Psycho, Donnie Darko, and Fight Club. Given that calibre of inspirations, it should come as no surprise that this is a very special film. Based on the novel In This Way I Was Saved, the film tells the story of Luke (Miles Robbins), a disturbed young man whose childhood imaginary friend Daniel (Patrick Schwarzenegger) makes a dramatic reappearance in his life.
Just after the film had finished screening, we raced over to the media wall to grab a couple of minutes with Mortimer where we discussed, amongst other things, returning to Frightfest and ignoring Patrick Schwarzenegger.
Image Courtesy of Clout Communications
How’s it feel being back at Frightfest?
I love being back here. Alan and Paul are such, special, special people and having them respond positively to my work and allowing me to show it is such an honour. The people at this festival that come out to watch the movies are mad. It’s totally insane. We just had two screenings and the reactions from the people were huge. So positive, so willing to understand why somebody would make a movie like this, why somebody would make a horror movie that is trying to say something, and trying to be emotionally true. It’s so fun to connect with a huge group of people who all want that experience. I think that’s something that this festival really excels at, bringing those people together.
You were saying in the Q&A that the book is actually told from Daniel’s perspective. What was it about Luke that you thought, no this is the better angle?
Well, it’s because Luke is the character that we’re all going to identify with. Daniel is the character that at first we want to be, and then we want to get away from. To tell it from Luke’s point of view is the real direct way for the audience to wear the shoes of the character. I think the more we stuck closely to Luke, the scarier it became, and the more that it became sadder and exciting. Whereas the book, because it’s telling the story through language, it was more of an exercise of capturing that voice and being creeped-out for being so close to Daniel, like American Psycho was.
In a way, the film is almost like if Brett Easton Ellis did Drop Dead Fred.
Absolutely. Drop Dead Fred comes up sometimes because it’s a movie that we all relate to and all saw when we were younger. It is sort of like what would it be like if that movie took itself really seriously and really went into how disturbed would you have to be to be an adult with an imaginary friend and what does that mean. I think it’s really fun to think about it that way. Sometimes I think of it like Cronenberg’s Drop Dead Fred.
The film is beautiful and needs to be seen on the biggest screen you can…
And they had the biggest screen! It was so cool!
What was it like getting to play with all those colours and techniques given that your first film was a much smaller budget?
Well, I worked really hard at preparing for the visual aspects of this, so I made a forty-page document that I called the Style Guide. That was made well in advance of starting to shoot so that everyone would really understand what we were going for. That broke down what colours we were going to use, and why. What colours reflect what kind of mood? I think a big challenge here is we’re going from a very intimate personally psychological story to a crazy cosmic horror. So I had to be very careful how I structured that so it doesn’t feel like a lurch into a different movie.
I had sections about every scene, about how the camera was going to move, what kind of colours, what materials, what textures, and that part of the preparation is the most fun. That’s what I love about film-making. You don’t have the pressure yet of shooting and spending all this money, and you can just think through how could it look and feel and why would it look that way? What could motivate it? I’m like, ‘I wanna make a movie with cool colours and have a lot of pink in it’! But then you got to go, ‘okay that’s cool, but why?’ Working backward to motivate the things you think will be cool, and as you do that you realise what the themes of the movies are, and when you feel that come together it’s very exciting.
Related: Daniel Isn’t Real review
I imagine it would have been quite a strange film for the cast to shoot, I mean certain people can’t see Daniel. Did they have long to work together to get used to ignoring Patrick?
We spent a week in rehearsal with the key cast. A lot of that was primarily for Miles and Patrick to get to know one another and work through the script together, and learn how to act like they’d known each other a lot longer. Sometimes when we were shooting we would shoot a scene and then we would shoot it again without Patrick being in it. He would just walk out of the room. Not because we were doing some trick of him appearing or not appearing, but so that we could feel maybe in the characters eyes or reactions that they’re talking only to Luke. Sometimes we were able to do that, most of the time they just had to act like it. I think especially Hannah Marks who plays Sophie, whose in these very close quarters situations with Miles, has to ignore that this character is right in her face. That was the challenge in the movie and that’s why you hire great actors who can pull it off.
