MC: Having watched it, I decided that I needed to know about the reality behind it and so I reached out to Felix Dembinski for an interview. I started by asking him how the film had come about and, if it had been made during the pandemic, how did restrictions effect the production day to day.
FD: The script was written quite a while ago when I was a student, in 2016 and about half the film, mostly interiors, was filmed then. Things then slowed down with appropriate props and locations becoming harder to find. Then the lead actor vanished and I was left with half a film’s worth of footage and unsure what to do with it
MC: So the film has actually been some six years in the making then?
FD: It was filmed on a scene-by-scene basis when I could find people, locations and props to buy or borrow that were right and try to get things filmed on the few rare hours at a time when there was an overlap of them all being available. This is obviously a ridiculous way to make a film but I could see no other way to make it with the resources I had available. The rest was filmed after graduation with friends when they were free and again when locations and props could be found between 2018 and 2019. A finished rough cut was done by late 2019 and, during the pandemic and after, the sound design and further work with visual effects and grading was done, as well as dubbing characters over zoom with people who had their own microphones, or me going to people who I knew with a microphone that I had borrowed to record some more characters’ lines and narration.
So no in answer to part of your first question, the pandemic didn’t greatly effect it. If anything it gave me some paid furloughed time so that I could work on it as a main focus with some income and have none of the inescapable and halting business ontology guilt over spending a huge amount of time making an unmarketable and unmonetisable piece of work
MC: You mention friends there, is that what made up your cast and crew, or is the truth more complicated? How did you come to assemble them?
FD: When I was a student I answered a Facebook ad that I had seen looking for someone with a DSLR to help film a supernatural thriller. The post was made by a local guy (to where I was at university) called Elyas Ahmad who I think worked at a company involved with solar panels and enjoyed writing, producing and acting in films he made at weekends and evenings. From 2015 to 2017, I filmed many scenes on several films he was making, they each had a revolving cast and crew of students and interested locals. I emailed him the script for Letters to the Postman in 2016 and asked if he was interested in helping out, he said he was and put out ads for cast and was able to send far more convincing emails and messages to people to interest them in giving up time to work on the film than I was able to. Some people in scenes at that time were people who responded to ads he’d posted, some were people I saw on his Facebook friends list whose faces looked right and he managed to convince to be in it, some were cast who’d filmed scenes in his films that I thought looked right. One person was a director of another horror film I’d filmed scenes for with my DSLR and I asked if they were interested in acting in a scene. I met the lead for the film, who was interested in films and I think was a graphic design student at the time, when they were helping out on a scene for Elyas that I was filming with my DSLR. I remember thinking he had a face and haircut like someone you’d see in a Lindsay Anderson film and I had not managed to find anyone to cast for that role who didn’t have very modern-looking face or hair. I asked him if he’d be interested in being in it and he said “yeah why not”.
Other than some scenes when Elyas was free and available as an extra helping hand doing a bit of everything, I was the only crew during the 2016 filming. Elyas was the only person I knew at the time with a car which was incredibly useful too. For scenes filmed in 2018-2019 the cast were friends (some who’d been in previous amateur films I’d made) and relatives of friends who I thought fitted the roles and occasional extra crew were friends who were interested in hanging out for a bit and helping out.
For casting the dubbing I wanted a completely new cast, so every role is played by two people, other than the lead who’s played by three. I’d met a friend called Andrea Ratti who was working as an assistant director on a film I was working as a 2nd AC on, also on this film was Lee Viesnik as a sound recordist who lent me a microphone and recorder to work on some dubbing and narration recording, sound effects and field recording. Andrea was a lot better than I was at putting out ads able to convince people to be interested in giving up their time to work on it. I couldn’t find a suitable voice for the lead, every sample recording of dialogue I was sent didn’t quite fit and felt too emotive for the tone, so in the end, after months of waiting the lead was eventually dubbed by Andrea himself. The old postman was dubbed by my grandad. The narration was dubbed by my dad. Again, I’d spent months looking for someone right but none of the voices fitted what I was looking for, they sounded too close to an audiobook or were too emotive for what I was going for.
MC: What were some of the challenges of making a low-budget film, and what, if any, were some of the benefits?
FD: The biggest challenge is not having money to pay people or to be able to throw money at something to get a problem sorted. There are plenty of people who are happy to work for free on things sometimes and I’ve worked for free myself on a number of things. But when you’re one person trying to force a film into existence for no money it’s different than a small team doing so, you appear more like a weird crank.
I’d assume from what I’ve seen (working as a driver and runner on television programs, films and adverts) and heard, never having myself the experience of heading even a so-called ‘no budget’ film that costs as much as a new car, that you’d have more people breathing down your neck, less time to consider things and would have to tread on eggshells around every decision. So one benefit of making something for very little money (I spent about £500 on this film) is that you can be in solo control of everything. A big downside to that though is that if things start going wrong or you lose faith in what you’re working on you aren’t under any professional obligation to finish the film, which is I think the main reason so many films made like this don’t get finished and released.
The potential downsides of being part of a project with any notable money do not make me prefer making a film the way I’ve done with this one. It’s clearly a very enviable position to be in and there are clearly still a lot [of] people with a lot of control over what they’re making with other people’s money on a budget the same as a thousand new cars.
One of the benefits I see in films made for very little money as a viewer of them is that the specific resources and types of life the individuals making them have are so different to each film that each film feels like an entirely separate universe. The decisions made on how to attempt to do something ambitious for the money they have and how they solve problems that occur all feel unique to each film and filmmaker and create a separate style for each person.
MC: Why did you adapt this particular story from Robert Aickman, one of his later ones in his career, and what is it that appeals to you about Aickman in general?
FD: I was reading as much Aickman as I could at the time but a great deal of his short stories were out of print then. I found a page listing where each of his stories had been republished in horror compilations, which I was able to find much much cheaper than the second-hand copies of original publications or even the reprints of still out-of-print versions of some of his original anthologies. Letters to the Postman was at that time out of print, so it was one of the last ones I read. I’d liked the title for a while before that, something about it felt inexplicably very wrong. It was one of his stories I felt would make a good film, there are maybe a dozen that I think would be great to make film adaptions of. Of those, it was the one that seemed most possible to make with the resources and abilities I had. I like the density of Aickman’s stories. Many have the impact of great full novels in only a couple of dozen pages. I like how sometimes it seems like he’s setting up a very simple metaphor which then seems to transform into a metaphor for several completely separate and even conflicting ideas, but there’s an emotional cohesion to it all in a horrifying way. I also like how most of his stories are slow slides into horror/fantasy, where there’s rarely a specific point at which it becomes that, instead being a very slow fade to the point where the mundane starts to feel horrifying and the horrifying feel matter of fact
MC: When watching Letters from the Postman I was reminded of Jonathan Miller’s production of M. R. James’ Whistle and I’ll Come to You, the 1968 Omnibus film that arguably kickstarted a renewed interest in James’ work, leading to the celebrated Ghost Story for Christmas films that began in 1971. Was Miller’s film a particular influence on you?
FD: I’ve seen Whistle and I’ll Come to You but it wasn’t a conscious influence. Another BBC M. R. James adaption, The Ash Tree (Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1975) was though. I think that’s the most beautiful of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. It has a lot of wide shots filmed on a long lens, which makes the landscape look unlike anything the eye would see and more like a perspectiveless illustration in a children’s book which is something I tried to copy. Both the overall tone and the acting in the Lawrence Gordon Clark films are closer to what I was going for than in Jonathan Miller’s, which is more a psychological portrait with a lot of riffing and documentary-style scenes. I like it just as much but the Lawrence Gordon Clark ones feel more mysterious and otherworldly.
MC: What are some of the other influences, film or otherwise, on Letters to the Postman?
FD: 1930s, 40s and 50s horror was an influence. The overall general atmosphere of poverty-row horror being much more of an influence than any one specific film. Ones that I did take from specifically were the soft visuals and stark whiteness of Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer,1932) and The Amazing Mr X (Bernard Vorhaus, 1948) the rigidity and odd geometries of White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), the dream logic of the spaces, collage, costumes, sounds, tone mixing, rhythms and film grammar of Night of the Ghouls (Ed Wood, 1959)and the claustrophobia and comedy of The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932).
The early video colour manipulation of The Mystery of Oberwald (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1980) as well as the lo-fi CGI of Twin Peaks The Return (David Lynch, 2017) and the strange video game look of Argento’s Dracula 3D (2012) were inspirations of creating a style out of expressive non-photorealistic grading and visual effects. Some of the detached comedy of Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) and Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick, 1999) is in there with the occasional moment of very diluted Jerry Lewis, who I wish I’d leaned into more.
I like the matter-of-fact surrealism of Bunuel, using surrealism to say something in a more direct way than realism could. The double casting in That Obscure Object of Desire was a useful escape route influence too.
There are many different films that inspired [me of] how to show and create the tone of a past with little or no money. Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch (1974), Bresson’s Lancelot of the Lake (1974), Borowczyk’s Goto, Island of Love, (1968) Fassbinder’s Effi Briest (1974) and Duras’ India Song (1975) were ones I thought about the most. Bresson overall feels like an inescapable influence.
