MC: We’ve touched upon the casting a couple of times now and your description of the double casting being an ‘escape route’ and the Lindsay Anderson-style lead ‘disappearing’ over the six years since work on the film commenced, so the quirk of casting more than one actor for each character was born of necessity yes?
FD: The dual role for the lead was a necessity after the disappearance, yes. I was left with half a films worth of footage and spent a while both thinking and investigating. I thought potentially of using the footage in a completely different way but then liked the idea of just continuing as if nothing had changed. It played into ideas I was working with anyway and several people said they got a lot out of it, some entirely new and unexpected things that I thought fitted perfectly with what I’d originally planned on making. It works too I think as this central wrongness throughout the entire film [which] is so barefaced but never commented on. I think it can be an easy last resort of a scoundrel when something goes terribly wrong on a film to say, “it’s meant to be Brechtian” or “it’s meant to be surreal” but there were both surreal and Brechtian elements in the original plan and as filming continued the dual casting was something I was constantly thinking about and reshaped the film a great deal.
When filming the second half of the film’s scenes, with a friend from school who’d been in films I’d made as a teenager, I didn’t try to get them to mimic the previous performance at all, I gave them the short story and script to read and gave them similar instructions as I had before. I liked then when I cut from scene to scene seeing two different ideas on the same character. That gave me the idea to then dub everyone with entirely new cast. The film was always intended to be dubbed anyway. There was no on-location audio being recorded other than the DSLRs internal mic. There are a lot of films where I think this type of dubbing works really well in the film’s favour. A lot of 70s and 80s European horror films that feel like dreams because of it.
MC: Given that Anderson’s If… jumped about from black and white to colour because of budgetary restrictions but sparked earnest discussions regarding what it all meant, I guess it makes the mystery of your Anderson lead and subsequent interchangeability all the more resonant. Personally, I love how several of the performances feel suitably unnatural, lending greatly to the peculiar, eerie aura that the film and the story has. You’ve said that you ensured no one in the cast was mimicking the previous performance, which leads me to my next question – what kind of direction did you give to your cast?
FD: I didn’t usually give a huge amount of direction. I’d give a quick rundown of the scene and if necessary how I thought the characters were feeling or what they were thinking. Because I was working with a complete mix of both level of training and interest in acting (maybe about half the people involved in the film didn’t have an interest in acting, they were people who I already knew and were helping me out or thought it be an interesting or amusing challenge) I was just doing what I thought would work each moment at a time. Sometimes I’d give people what I thought was a suitably generic reference point that they wouldn’t feel like they were being asked to mimic something, like “treat this like it’s Dracula’s castle” or “this is like that scenario from Family Guy or The Simpsons”. The majority of the focus of my on-location direction of the cast was to get the movements to feel right. Most lines read were done in about three takes but shots with an important focus on movement could go over a dozen. The camera never moves or pans at all in the film and the focus never pulls, so movements had to be planned out. The most takes done were of the handling of letters with myself as a stand-in and opening the letterbox. There are a lot of points where I wish there’d been time for more takes because some of the blocking is very clunky in a bad way.
There was a lot less time pressure with directing the dubbing. I was able to get more takes and it was relaxed enough to spend time exploring some different ideas. I was also able to then make a collage of different line readings from different takes with different tones and different meanings for the final sound mix.
This is where some of the intended offness and unnaturalness come from. You could have a someone with an interest or training in acting dubbing someone with no experience or interest or someone with no experience or interest dubbing someone who had an interest or training. It makes some of the performances unreadable in parts. You’d have someone performing on location with one idea and performed when dubbed with another idea. It creates a bit of a feeling of being unsure how to read the character on screen or the situations.
Recording and editing the narration took a great deal of time. It’s read by my dad whose accent is slightly unspecific I think because he grew up in a mostly Polish-speaking house. He has no interest in acting and, like most people me included, reads very stiltedly when reading text aloud. I wanted each section of narration to feel like a solid block of sound of BBC or public information style “objectivity”. I’d have to do maybe a couple of dozen takes of each line of narration and then build up a collage of different sentences, words and even occasionally syllables. This sounds a bit megalomaniacal but I tried with a few different people to get the narration right until I was happy with it. It’s one of the most important parts of the film. When my mum watched the film she didn’t realise it was my dad reading the narration, even though she knew I’d recorded his voice for the film and they’ve lived together for almost 30 years, that’s how different the finished narration is to the way he naturally speaks.
MC: It’s really effectively done, I wish more low-budget horror filmmakers would lean into it. Whilst we are on the subject of sound, let’s tackle the score. I noticed you use several pieces from Fellini’s Casanova. Given that this film is about a doomed romantic infatuation and that movie is a melancholic look at the great lover, was that intentional? The use of Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity at the close was also really effective too. How important was the music for you to create a mood for your film?
FD: Music is one of the most important parts of almost every film’s atmosphere. I try to be careful not to put a piece that’s doing exactly what the dialogue or images are doing at each point. There’s some quote I think from Raul Ruiz about music doing its own separate story over the film. I find that a very exciting and inspiring idea. I think that it particularly applies to the Kraftwerk song. The Nino Rota soundtrack to Fellini’s Casanova wasn’t chosen for any potential story connection between the two films. The tracks from it I used I chose because they sound like a mystery over water. There’s a track by Luboš Fišer from Juraj Herz’s Morgiana that was chosen for similar reasons. It sounds like a mystery at night. I chose these tracks before filming and put them in a Spotify playlist of music that felt right. There wasn’t that much in there, most tracks in there were used in the film.
MC: One of the striking thing about the inclusion of Kraftwerk is, I think, that it breaks away from the period setting the film has, up until that point, established. At least I think so; I got a sense from the set dressing and wardrobe choices – as well as the b/w cinematography – that the film is set somewhere around the late 50s and mid-60s, am I correct? How important was it to you to evoke such an era?
FD: There wasn’t as specific a time period as that, in terms of locations, costumes and props I was going for mid-20th century, theme and idea wise between the end of WWII and the early 60s specifically, so your guess is within that. But I wasn’t going for an attempt at recreation, even on the tiny scale I was working on. There are only a few things that to me are distractingly too new, a radiator is in shot that looks too new, a pair of shoes and some stuff that’s heavily in shadow and out of focus and so may not be noticed by anyone anyway. But most things were fairly easy to remove or change with photoshop and after effects: modern signage, tv dishes, wires, too modern looking road signs, changing light switches etc, but this was just going off the feeling the things in the image gave to me rather than based on any research. The only slight research was for post office back rooms for inspiration rather than recreation. The back room in the film looks like something from an Ed Wood Jr film.
I wasn’t going for an exact past – not just because of not wanting to spend money – but to create a dream past, an unspecific past, the past as a parable setting or fantasy rather than the reality and a noticeable one that’s in a slight way about a fantasy of the past rather than some of the more unnoticeable and concerning fantasies of the past we see on screen. I liked using a lot of things unchanged, going for found objects in use today but the right object, even people’s haircuts and costumes. Everyone was wearing stuff they own and wore currently. I gave people an idea of what I wanted and asked to see pics of all their clothes they had that fitted the description and then chose from those.
Would I have used an actual postman’s uniform if possible? Possibly, but the idea of him looking like a mix between a sixth-form student and a generic suited guy works better for what I what I was going for than making it a film specifically about postmen. I don’t know how many people are getting anything out of the presences and absences in this film, not just period setting-wise but in general, but there’s a lot of reasoning behind some decisions that might just come off as a ‘no money’ decision. Sometimes they are that but there’s a million ‘no money’ solutions to a ‘no money’ problem and you can only decide to do one and each decision and the amalgamation of all these decisions can create a lot of meaning and a style as well as indicate an approach and a way of viewing the film.
The Kraftwerk song is meant to noticeably stand out era-wise as from somewhere else, incompatible with the rest of the film. Almost as if it’s being beamed in from somewhere else or another time, from another realm. The rest of the music isn’t exactly period specific though, it’s an instrumental score, just no synths. There’s no cultural signposts for a time, there’s no Vera Lynn on a radio or Quatermass on a TV.
I think the original Aickman story is intended to be set when it was written, 1980, but seemed more timeless than most of his other stories which are often very specifically about the immediate present. The writing style is more florid than most of his work and suggested to me a soft visual style. I shot with diffusion filters and 8-point star filters as well as some grading and VFX to get this, which is a look I associate most with ’30s Hollywood.
MC: You’ve certainly made a remarkable film on a small budget. How has it been received since the close of last year?
FD: The film’s been received very well so far, with positive star ratings on review websites and positive reviews with only a couple of small complaints. I wasn’t expecting many people to watch it beyond the people in it, friends and family but I’ve seen a bunch of reviews from complete strangers. I’ve been self-promoting it in different ways online after hearing more positive a reaction that I was anticipating.
MC: It is certainly deserving of all the positivity. What plans, if any, do you have for the future? As someone who despairs of Gatiss’ stewardship of A Ghost Story for Christmas, I suppose it’s too much to hope that someone who truly gets it like you will take over?
FD: Current creative plans mostly involve cheaper projects of DIY and music. I have two other Aickman scripts written and, as mentioned before, I think about a dozen of his stories would make great short feature films. Given the far more positive than expected reaction to the film I’m thinking about possibly trying to get rights to them, depending on cost, so they can go on the film festival route and VOD, it might be worth looking into. I also know far more people now than I did when making Letters to the Postman, so it could go quite a bit quicker and smoother. My friend Andrea Ratti who helped with casting for the dubbing and works mostly as an assistant director worked on a horror film recently where everyone got paid well and had good meals on set (always the biggest sign of how tight or not the budget is) where the business model was to churn out horror films for VOD on Amazon, Tubi, Plex etc and it seemed to him that it was going very well for them. We’ve got several original ideas that we’re excited about trying out to see if we could replicate their success. I’d kill for the opportunity to ever make something like A Ghost Story for Christmas.
