In 2016, South African director, Alastair Orr, debuted his robbery-gone-wrong demonic possession film, From a House on Willow Street, at Arrow Video FrightFest. Now four years later, his latest project, Triggered, will be screening on Friday 28th August as part of this year’s digital edition of the festival. The film sees a group of friends turn on one another after they become the victims of a brutal game in which they awaken to find explosive vests with timers strapped to them. The rules of the game are simple: whoever has the most time wins. If they want to survive and ensure they have the most time, they’ll have to take it from someone else, and the only way to do that is if their opponent is no longer breathing.
It might sound very much like something out of a Jigsaw trap, but Triggered has a lighter, more fun, approach that will be sure to get your Friday night started with a bang. Ahead of the screening, we caught up with Alastair to find out a little more about the project.
What made you want to be a filmmaker?
It was just that unshakeable feeling. That stupid passion that doesn’t go away. You watch movies when you’re young and you don’t know where they come from. In South Africa we’re very isolated I guess, from international content back then, so you don’t know where these movies come from, you just fall in love with them. Then for some people that feeling just changes into, ‘well maybe I can make these things’. Some people outgrow that feeling, but I didn’t, so I started just getting into videoing weddings and all that kind of stuff and got to the point where I was tired of making other people’s stuff… let me make my own. Nobody really wanted to invest in me so I paid for it myself, and it just slowly started building up, making bigger films each time. It was just a passion and a love for film that didn’t go away.
How did the idea for Triggered come together?
Triggered… we looked at our resources. With House on Willow Street, we had other investors and stuff and we constantly had to work in their notes, their comments. Just because people are paying for a film doesn’t mean that they know how to make films. A lot of the time we felt like we were compromising because of where the money was coming from. We didn’t want to do that again so we basically saved up our own money until we got to a point where we were like, ‘what can we afford?’ We tried to go and find more funding, but it’s difficult in South Africa at the moment. So we just cut our loses and said, ‘well this is what we can afford.We know a place where there’s some woods and we can probably afford about nine actors at a time’, and we tried to make a contained thriller just in a forest. We thought we’d flip it around a little bit instead of just putting it in four walls, we’d make the forest the contained location.
The film is set entirely at night, what challenges did this pose for filming?
Look, the night comes with a lot of issues, you don’t understand how tired you get. But you do get into this haze of one day starts blurring into the other. That’s just with any night shoots. Our problem was the rain. We shot at the end of summer. We thought we were clear for the rain and on day one it just started bucketing down. We had a seventeen day shoot, but I think out of those seventeen days, we probably shot for about twelve. We were just completely and utterly rained out.
The lighting plays a huge part of the film. We might not be able to see much, but the vests go different colours depending on the time they have left. Can you talk a little bit through the thinking behind this?
We knew we weren’t going to be able to keep track of everybody’s time. There’s too many characters, and constantly bouncing around, there’s no way to actually keep track of, ‘oh Bobby’s got this amount of time. He’s got three minutes more than that person’. That was just going to be a complicated situation so it was the writer, David [D. Jones], who came up with the solution of, ‘you’re safe, you’re winning, or you’re losing’.It was a great visual key to know exactly where that player stands. It’s not important that, ‘you’ve got two minutes more than me’. It’s just important if, ‘I’m red and I’m the next person to go’.
The premise sounds like something out of a Saw film, but I found the tone to be a little lighter and more akin to films like Cabin in the Woods. Was it always the intention to make it a bit more lighthearted?
That all came down to the writer, David. He’s actually a comedy writer. We were working a comedy thing before this, and it was Ariye [Mahdeb], the producer, and I who decided to give David a shot at this just to do something a little bit different. We knew we didn’t have the money to compete with the big boys so we thought, ‘let’s just try and do something different, and give it a little bit of a lighter edge.’ It was just a way to differentiate it a little bit.
Are you a fan of The Terminator films?
Oh yeah, big time! I’ve got Terminator busts right here in my office at home. It’s definitely one of my top five movies. I’m obsessed with it.
I only ask because there’s a shot with CiCi hiding behind a tree….
It’s very Sarah Connor there.
It’s almost identical to the bit….
I know which one, where she’s in the Steel Mill. That was just blind luck. The actress kinda looks like her as well so it was just blind luck, but I’ll take the credit for it.
Also, something about how she moves away from the tree reminded me of Sarah trapped in Cyberdyne’s clean room. As a fellow Terminator nerd that’s immediately where my brain went.
So that actress, she’s a stunt performer first, so she’s got the physicality. I would say she is like a real life Sarah Connor. She can actually do those things. Shes’ trained in all that kind of stuff, so maybe that’s where it’s coming from. I’d love to take the credit for that, but it was completely unintentional. That day we were so pressed for time, nothing was story-boarded, we just shot as quickly as we possibly could. So it definitely wasn’t planned unfortunately.
You’ve made a few movies now and they’ve all skewed towards the horror genre, what is it about the genre that keeps bringing you back?
We definitely see it as the easiest to make money on. I’d love to sit and say it’s all just passion, passion, but at the end of the day these things do need to make some money so that we can make the next one. I think it’s that. It’s also easy to hide stuff in darkness. So if you shoot it all at night, you don’t need all the big fancy sets and all that. You basically only need to cover what your eye can see, and if you’re seeing too much, you can just turn the lights down a little bit and hide your budget restrictions. Our films keep making money and this is our comedy version of it, we’re always going to come back to some kind of genre background. We’re always going to throw in some horror, action, or sci-fi into whatever film we do. That’s just the kind of film we’re drawn to here.
The film is screening as part of FrightFest’s first ever digital festival, how are you feeling about the screening?
I’m feeling pretty good. Obviously I was nervous about, it’s just completely out of your control, and I was a little bit worried about the piracy aspect of it. But everyone has been super convinced that it’s going to be safe. It’s geo-tagged or whatever, so only people in the UK can see it, so I’m feeling pretty good. I’d rather people see it like this than not at all. I’d rather this happen than FrightFest get cancelled. We just love FrightFest, it’s our favourite festival that we’ve been to by far. It was big deal for us to get back into FrightFest, so I’m glad it happened. We would have loved to have been there, but the world changed badly.
People are currently selecting their line-up’s, why should they opt for Triggered?
You’ll get to see something that a lot of people put a lot of hard work into. It was something that we just loved doing. It was a bunch of friends that made it and you’ll just see a project that was made with a lot of passion and not a lot of money, but a lot of guts and a lot of balls, and a lot of hard work. Hopefully it shows on screen. We tried really hard and we’re proud of the product, and we’re just glad it exists in this world. I think people will get a little kick out of it.
Are you working on the next project?
We have been approached to do a bigger action film. But with a bigger budget comes bigger complications, and it’s harder to get the wheels turning on that. We were getting a lot of momentum, and then in March the lockdown happened and that’s put a big, big dampener on things because we don’t know when we can get the international cast in here or anything like that. There’s nothing on the horizon that’s like, ‘in October or November things are going to go back to normal,’ so we’re just trying to develop that as best we can. Work on the script as best we can in this time, and as soon as we get any indication of what the future holds then I think we can try and resume that. But also we don’t know…the world has changed so much during lockdown with the theatrical stuff in the States changing, and now there’s premium VOD, so we also just need to figure out what the next game-plan is. The future is very different to what is was six months ago.
Triggered screens at Arrow Video FrightFest 2020 on Friday 28th August. You can buy tickets for the screening here. Triggered is released on Altitude.film and other digital platforms from 13 September.
