On Monday Concrete Plans arrived on Digital HD after its premiere at October’s digital Arrow Video FrightFest. The film tells the story of a group of builders who find themselves in rather dire straits after their aristocratic boss reveals his true colours. The film offers an example of one of the best British thrillers in years as, in addition to a great story hook, it mirrors our own society. In doing so it throws up issues of class, xenophobia, and much more, making for a complex and compelling watch.
The man behind the project is Will Jewell who both wrote and directed the film. Concrete Plans marks the first-time feature film from Jewell after his stand-out short, Man in Fear, and demonstrates a keen eye for detail and a talent for squeezing every ounce of tension from a scene. With such a wealth of material to dig into, we were thrilled to sit down with Will to discuss the production in more detail.
How did you get into filmmaking?
I went a fairly roundabout way of getting in. I worked as a town planner for the council for quite a few years… I wonder if that’s why there’s a building theme to the film. I always played in bands and was in music. I always knew I wasn’t going to be working at the council forever. I was playing in a lot of bands, but I think I realised that I wasn’t the world’s greatest musician. Then I started getting more into writing the lyrics. The lyrics then started turning into short stories. I just did an evening class in creative writing and kind of got spotted by a guy who ran a film company. He said, “you should write a film”, so I did, this was quite a few years ago, and it got optioned. I wrote a few more and started writing for TV and then realised…I’d written for Doctors and things, and they tell you, “okay your script’s signed-off and it’s going to air on this date”, and you watch it and think, “what have they done with it?” So then you realise, “okay, I’m going to have to start directing as well”. Music to writing to directing in the fairly long-winded roundabout way. Wasn’t the ‘go to film school and start making films’ route.
Concrete Plans did itself take quite a number of years to get made, what were the biggest challenges that you encountered?
I guess the main one, like most low-budget films, was pulling the budget together. I’m based down here in Brighton and we were just sharing an office with Rob [Alexander] who’s the producer. He’s a documentary producer, and I think we worked out that on the day of the wrap of the shoot, I think he’d gone through his emails and it was pretty much five years to the day since I’d kinda pinged him a little five-six page idea for a feature.
We were looking to do something low-budget. Film Wales put some development money in, the script turned from a five page idea into the script. Then we got a few cast members attached and got a little bit more money. It’s just stitching together the money, then you get cast, then that cast drops out because you’ve had to move back the shoot dates. It was really that.
I guess the good thing is, all that time I was just writing and rewriting the script and making it tighter and tighter. Which was probably really valuable in the long-term because we shot the film in fifteen days, which was insanity. Every day we’d be dropping scenes, so every night I was sitting there on three hours sleep or so having to have this script apart that I’d spent five years honing. At least I knew it so well I could think, “if we drop that scene, the story beat from that is this, I can roll that into the scene we’re going to shoot tomorrow”. It was a lot of hasty rewrites. I’d come in each morning at breakfast to the cast and crew with the yellow pages and the green pages and the blue pages…I wasn’t particularly popular, but that was the only way to get the thing written. It was a long process of development.
Your previous film, the short, Man in Fear, is set within the hustle and bustle of the city. Concrete Plans is set in an isolated rural location. Was it always your intention to do something very different locationally?
It was more a practical function really. Man in Fear was a sort of taster for a feature. I want to go back now and make that feature because it got a lot of interest from quite a few studios in making the feature version. But because of the accidents, the budget was a certain level and they all said, “we’ve run the numbers, go make a low-budget feature and then come back”. When you talk about a low-budget feature that inevitably means not too many characters, not too many location moves, so that made me think of setting it somewhere remote.
I’d had this idea a few years earlier, which was basically the portacabin scene. I thought five characters in a portacabin, we could shoot anywhere and cheap. It was the game of cards, something bad had happened, there was blood on the floor, you weren’t quite sure what, but it was the hook concept of why screw up five lives, let’s play cards and the loser takes the blame. The rest fill their boots and leave. That felt suitably low-budget and the fact that it was remote just means, for dramatic reasons, they can’t go and knock on the neighbour’s door and say, “it’s all kicking off, can I call the police?” We only really had about eight cast really and a couple of extras in the end scene, so it was very contained and very doable.
You say it has just a few characters, but all of those characters do get a lot of screen time. When I was watching it back the second time, it’s hard to pick one or two that you would class as your protagonist. When you are writing something like that, how hard is it to juggle all of those characters?
It’s a very democratic film, in terms of we open and the first character we see is Viktor. So I was kind of thinking he’s the outsider coming in, is it his story? But Bob’s the glue that holds it all together…I ended up doing twenty-odd drafts of the script over those five years and that, the formula, I always wanted to make sure every character felt well-rounded. But then how much screen-time do you give them? That was the thing that took a lot of drafts, because some drafts would feel like they were leaning too much towards one character.
It’s interesting because it does feel very democratic. I saw your interview with Steve and he talks about it being a true ensemble. So many ensemble scripts aren’t really, they’re a main character and a few supporting friends. All the actors were on the same rate and the same everything. It was very democratic and egalitarian because really I never used the word ‘lead’ at all during the shoot. I couldn’t say anyone was the lead. It’s tricky. It’s truly an ensemble in that regard. That was the thing that I struggled with the most with in terms of one draft would feel overbalanced, the other characters weren’t getting enough screen-time to come to life. That was trial and error, and that’s why it took a lot of drafts to get there, to make sure each character had enough backstory and enough grit to them that they really came to life.
Concrete Plans tackles xenophobia, toxic masculinity, the class divide; as much as it has been in production for years, it is very much a film of now. Why do you think that it’s so important that art reflects the world in this way?
I think those two points are linked really, the fact that it has been in production for five-six years, and it does feel very now because obviously if you look at what’s happened during the last five or six years in terms of in this country, with the referendum and the fact that politics and society has just felt very, very polarised, there’s not that, “oh well, we can thrash out our differences”. I think particularly around the referendum, and with Farage and Johnson who are almost famed for their casual racist remarks, made people emboldened to use that kind of language. The fear of the outsider was very much something that seemed to come to the fore during the referendum. I think it’s really soaked up a lot…it’s a state of the nation snapshot.
When this was still being written a year and a half ago, pre-Covid, which has changed a lot of things, but has also probably heightened some of that division and polarisation, it felt…I can’t remember the country feeling as polarised and tense and on edge as it had since mid 2015/16 when I started writing this. It was strange though because I think it was already in the script, I think when the referendum result happened, I think I was on draft three or something at that point, and I looked at it and thought, “one of our key characters is an East-European migrant worker”, which at that time around the referendum was the Daily Mail bogeyman figure. It was about tax evasion, the have and have not’s, in my mind this rocky outcrop with the manor house and the portacabins was essentially a microcosm of Britain.
It was interesting because I’ve always been very interested in politics. I’ve written bits of political satire for The Huffington Post, but I didn’t want to make something that felt really preachy. I wanted it to be a thriller, it had a lot of spaghetti Western influences originally in there because I think the tropes of these hard-bitten blue-collar guys out in the middle of nowhere who suffer an injustice and it’s about them trying to find some repair for that. I always wanted it to grip and entertain, all the social undercurrents I wasn’t quite sure how much they would come through and that’s really been picked up in the reviews, the class elements, the polarisation.
There’s a lot of little details I put in there. Even the slogan on the side of the van was about restoring your past / renovating our future, basically a Brexit nod. There’s even, in the opening and closing drone shot, there’s quite an overt red, white, and blue colour scheme in there, which was quite a nod because I wanted to bookend the film with the fact that this was almost a snapshot of Britain. It’s conscious, but I was walking this tightrope between wanting you to be able to let all of those elements go over your head, but you could just experience a film that would grip you and be engaging, but you’d come out feeling it resonates with me, even if you can’t put your finger on why. It would hopefully be because it holds up a mirror tonally of where the country is at. We’re not at the stage of nail-gunning each other yet, but I think there was a sense of that bleakness.
The weird thing with it was, as it worked out, the shoot dates in March 2019 when we shot were exactly the last day of the wrap of the shoot was supposed to be the day we were originally going to leave Europe. It was all on TV and the radio that they were going to ask for an extension. It was very much swirling around, between each take we’d be out there shivering talking about what was happening and politics with all of the cast and crew. It was very much front and centre, the mood of the nation was feeling, it almost played into the title with Concrete Plans, everything just felt very uncertain where the country was going. Concrete Plans was almost a nod to that as well as things that happen in the film. I think the fact that it developed over that period soaked into the pores of the film and informed it. I think that is why it feels very now and very topical because of that.
The situation that the men find themselves in offers up one of those great film moments where the audience is encouraged to think through what they would do when placed into that situation. It opens up discussion and debate with whomever they’re watching the film – would you just call the police or would you risk something more extreme?
It’s interesting because that key moral dilemma, would you [do that] if this thing had happened and you were implicated because you were in the middle of nowhere, and you’re offered a four in five chance of walking away scott free, would you take it? We’ve actually created this interactive trailer where basically the Jim character takes elements of the film and then basically says do you want to play cards, loser takes the drop. It’s like an online poker thing that we made, we got some funding from Film Wales so we can actually play online cards for your innocence or guilt with Jim. That’s coming out this week I think.
It does lend itself to become some kind of Buzzfeed quiz – What Concrete Plans character are you? In the writing, that must have been a lot to switch between characters.
Sometimes I might, but my Steve head on or my Dave head on. Dave is actually a bit of a repository for my rants. I think the cricket rant was verbatim one I had. I caught up with some friends I hadn’t seen for ages on the Isle of Wight. I hate cricket, I think it’s pointless and they made us all play cricket outside the house in the garden. I was just moaning about it, I was hungover, and I went off on this rant about cricket and thought, “I like that” and that became Dave. William [Thomas] has got such a beautiful lilting accent I’d kinda written the character with his voice in my head, and he was the first one to come aboard. Some drafts I’d lean more into some characters just to make sure following through their lines, they felt well-rounded.
And Dave gets the best line in the film…
Is it the Macarena one? It was when the film premiered at FrightFest there were about three or four tweets about that line, which I was quite pleased with. It was a weird line, it was divisive. Some people absolutely spat their coffee out over the script and others were going, “I’m not sure about that line, is it too much”. I said, “let’s put it in and we can cut it if we need to.”
As serious as the situation is that the men find themselves in, there are these little moments of humour and comedy. I think a lot of films get too bogged down in the seriousness and in doing so lose the audience a little. This film is a situation that on many levels I could see tangibly happening, and the fact that they are all having a laugh and a joke and are blokes being blokes definitely reinforces that.
Builders are notorious for banter and piss-take. I don’t think you could write a film about builders taking themselves too seriously. It’s a very British thing I think, gallows humour, the bleaker the situation, the more we poke fun at it. It’s the Blitz spirit and all that. I did a small amount of building work in summers when I was a student, and they are very pisstake – I was a long-haired student at the time – so I had a lot of piss ripped out of me so I always knew that I had to bring that sense of humour to it.
Concrete Plans screened at digital FrightFest, how did you find the experience?
It was strange because I wasn’t sure about a digital premiere because I guess I’m old-school. I love sitting in a cinema and feeling the mood of the room. We had one cinema screening in Brighton before lockdown, we had about three hundred people in and God it was tense the second half. I was looking around and I don’t think these people breathed for ten minutes. I was gutted we were going to lose that, but actually I think the digital premiere worked really well. All day I was getting texts from mates up North who I hadn’t seen in years going, “we’ve got our tickets for tonight, we’re all ready to sit down in front of the TV”. It was weirdly a shared communal experience because all around the country I could picture certain people and friends and family were all sitting down getting ready to watch it. It was weird, the first half I was getting quite a few texts and then the second half, when it gets really tense, there was nothing, just radio-silence, then at the end I got quite a lot. I really enjoyed it. Then seeing the response on Twitter after and seeing reviews come in..that was quite a long drunk night of celebrating. It was almost like being at a proper film premiere in that way.
The film is now out in the world do you know how it’s performing yet?
I’ve seen quite a lot of posts on social media of people watching it. I teach at a film school so I think they’ve heard me banging on about it for a bit so a lot of my students watched it last night so I went in today and they were all buzzing and talking about it. It’s been nice. I think quite a lot of people have bought it for their Friday night film, it’s probably not a Monday night film. The distributors seem to be quite pleased, there’s been quite a lot of activity and buzz around it.
I think one of the few positives to the pandemic is that people have started to look a little further afield for their content, and indie films have had a better shot at finding a wider audience. With cinemas shut I think people are happier to spend their money online to watch something new.
You’re right, In the peak of lockdown you were hearing people say, “I think I’ve nearly completed Netflix”. It is that; people are stuck at home and there is that appetite for the new. I think 2020 has not gone how any of us would have planned or envisaged it, but I can see.. you have to look for an upside and I think you’re right, I think people are looking for something new and this film has come out. I think digital releases, you look at what’s happened with cinemas and how much they’re going to bounce back. I think this might be to some extent the new normal in terms of I think even some of the big studio pictures. Look at Trolls World Tour, that went straight to digital and made more money in a few days than they did in months in the cinema. I love love cinema, but I think for films of this scale, you’ve got to be on social media, you’ve got to put in that leg work. Hopefully we’ll find an audience, signs are looking good.
With Concrete Plans in the world, have you starting working on your next projects? You mentioned earlier a desire to flesh out Man in Fear, have you been working on that?
I’ve got a few things. I’ve written a TV, eight-part thing that I’ve written the pilot for. It’s set on a criminal drugs trial that’s not what it seems, called Ten Blind Mice. That’s a bit more thriller. I guess weirdly it’s about a group of people being cut-off on this remote drugs trail and things going a bit wrong, so I guess it probably shares some of the DNA of this. Going back and doing the Man in Fear feature version, because it did get quite a lot of interest. The Guardian said it was a ‘feature in waiting’ and it did get quite a bit of attention at the time, but it was of a certain budget level so that certainly going back and knocking on those doors now. I’ve got more of a Black Mirror type idea that’s a bit dark, futuristic, about doping and how much you can enhance a human and still retain that humanity. So a bit of a spread of projects.
I’ve got one about a group of pensioners that turn to a life of crime when they get done for their pension. Weirdly in there, one of the characters in my mind is Dave’s sister. There was a line in an early draft where Dave went on about, “I know what you rich guys are like’.’ He then had this little thing about his sister working forty years in a tile factory and the boss declared bankruptcy and then reopened it the next week in his wife’s name and wiped all of the pension fund. It was basically that story, so in the story universe, that’s Dave’s sister. That’s written and is out with TV companies at the moment, so I’ve got a few things out.
Concrete Plans is available now.
