The Watch - Lukewarm on ‘Camping’ and Hot on ‘Haunting of Hill House,’ Plus a Conversation With ‘Apostle’ Director Gareth Evans | The Watch (Ep. 299)

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan is joined by Alison Herman to talk about Lena Dunham’s new show ‘Camping’ (1:44) and Netflix’s ‘Haunting of Hill House’ (12:45). Then Chris is joined by Gareth Evans to talk about his new horror film ‘Apostle’ and what it was like to create this movie (23:39). Read Miles Surrey on 'The Haunting of Hill House' here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly. One shiny podcast will be touring from Friday, November 2nd to Wednesday, November 7th, where Tate, Titus, and Nephew Kyle are traveling to Columbus, Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky, Bloomington, Indiana, and Chicago, Illinois to tip off the college basketball season. You can find links to tickets on the ringers, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Also, be sure to catch up on all of our NBA previews-pillooza content from Tuesday, where you can find Bill Simmons, Shea Serrano, Joe House, and more previewing the start of the NBA season. You can check it all out on YouTube. sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me today in the studio is Alison Herman. Let's go camping.

I'm so excited. Allison and I are going to talk a little bit about Lena Dunham and Jenny Connor's new show Camping. We are also going to talk about the haunting of Hillhouse, which is something we both feel very passionately about. In the positive, I think. Yes. Yes.

Okay. And then I'm joined later by Gareth Evans, who directed the really insane horror movie Apostle, which is currently on Netflix. And that was a really interesting conversation. Gareth is probably the best action director on the planet. Yet he has decided to make an early 20th century horror torture poem about Dan Stevens getting stretched out

by Michael Sheen on medieval torture devices. So fun stuff. You're making an incredibly compelling pitch for this movie. It's a very, very, very strange and awesome movie. so we'll talk a little bit about that later with the director. But Allison, I want to talk to you about these two shows right now. I guess they're both about family. That's a good synthetic way of framing them.

Let's talk a little bit about camping. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago when you and I were both sort of watching screeners. And I think that I had a very blasé attitude about this and I didn't expect it to be as divisive a show. I don't really know if it's even divisive. I think people are just rejecting it straight up. I think it's just startlingly negative, yes.

which I think I can confidently say neither of us is really in full alignment with that consensus. I think it's also, I don't think it works. I agree that, you know, I don't think it's necessarily a creative success. But I think there are more interesting and measured ways to evaluate that lack of success than this sucks. So this is automatically going to come along with the Lena Dunham price tag at this point. And I do have Lena Dunham takes. I think that they're excusable because they're about her art and not her person. Good. Okay.

You start wherever you want to start. You want to start with Lena or you want to start with a show or do you want to start with a combination of both? It's a combination of both because I think it's drawing the common lines between this and girls, which is, you know, I and others have complained frequently about film directors who go into TV who aren't necessarily fully preferred for the adjustment, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, what have you. I think Girls was a really underrated example of that phenomenon in that I think it was pretty clear that this was an independent film director, someone who got her start with Tiny Furniture,

which was a feature, someone who probably if you asked her when she was like 18 or 19 where she saw our career going, she would have said filmmaker. And she got a deal from HBO and she's not an idiot. So she took it up. And I think girls definitely had its moments. But I think a lot of its weaknesses were tied pretty closely to the fact that at least in my reading, this is someone who was clearly more comfortable with finite closed stories and had a little more trouble with building like a full six season convincing arc for.

all these characters. Like all the best episodes or all the most acclaimed episodes of girls were these bottles, like one man's trash and beach house. Sure. Just get everyone in a room and bounce them off each other. And girls kind of frayed apart when you zoomed out and were like, why is this person acting like this? Like Marnie Season 1 has nothing to do with Marnie Season 5. They don't like each other. Why should I like them?

Exactly. Or just like the dynamics of the group doesn't make any sense. So when I heard about camping, which is a limited series, it's just eight episodes. It's starring a movie star. It's very much like in that vein. I was like, oh, great, this is exactly where I would have thought that Lena Dunham and Jenny Connor should go next. They should tell a finite story because that's clearly like where their natural impulses and interests are. I think the problem with camping is that it does have that, but at least to me, they also,

it has a lot of the problems that girls have. They don't read as convincing the characters in this series do not read as fully realized people. No, and I think that camping has like a little problem with what aisle it's being placed Okay. So if camping was on, dare I say CBS, which I don't think it would be, I think it would be seen as quite amusing. I should say up front that I laugh multiple times per episode of camping. I've seen a couple of them now. I think we've seen about the same amount. I would also say safely that at least in the first half of the season, what you see in the first episode is pretty much what you're going to get for the next few episodes. Yeah, it's consistent.

Deeper into the characters, but for the most part, it feels like they had the concept for the show. It's a remake of a British show. Right? British. Yeah, British called Camping by Julia Davis. I actually interviewed Jenny Connor, and she told me, it sort of came into their crosshairs when Zadie Smith sent Lena Dunham the show just to be like, oh, this is a good show. You should watch it.

And then they decided to make it work and adapt it. But, yeah, I mean, the premise is in the title. It's literally just a bunch of people who don't really like each other. They're good or middle class. People from L.A. who are up, like, I take it's supposed to be like an hour and a half north of, like, not Ohi, but... Yeah, I think they shot in, like, Santa Clarita area, but, yeah, like, you drive a couple hours, so you're removed, but not too far removed.

Yeah, and it feels like a lot of the jokes are derived from keywords from blog posts. Rakey. Yeah, Rakey healing and chronic pain and a certain kind of, like, there's a B-plot about the midlife crisis is that various husbands are going through at various points. And it's all of these people who are now that they're out in the wilderness, they're kind of of letting their guard down and sort of saying who they actually are and who they see themselves as at this point. And I think that like

if it was just like this kind of well-funded sitcom that was taking place in this limited amount of episodes and put in this very specific setting, I think people would probably come to it with a little bit of a different expectation. But when you attach HBO to it and you put Jennifer Garner

in it and you say it's from Lena Dunham and then it's the most significant thing she's done since girls, there's going to be all sorts of expectations around it. Oh, I totally agree. And I will say, like, I think she's a great joke writer. I think Lena Dunham and Jenny Connor both have an amazing voice. They have a very particular rhythm to their dialogue. I think it's cool that they have an outlet for that. And there are a lot of thematic consistencies. You know, we're still having unlikable female protagonist think pieces written in 2018.

But Jennifer Garner's character is very unappealing and strident and hard to wrap your head around, which I actually enjoy. I like that they're trying to. trying to make it work. And I don't think the problem really lies with that character. It's just that the emotional underpinning, I basically think, like, the jokes are good, the show itself cannot be great because even comedy is driven by people and characters. And these feel like delivery devices for jokes and not fully realized, like I said before, fully realized people. That's the buzzword that I'm looping back to over and over again. Yeah, it's just, I remember there's this one joke where one of the side characters played by Arturo de Porto, you know, offhandedly mentions he's on a rebound recently divorced and he brings along this woman, Jandis, which again, like, that's a weird Lena Dunham thing is you give all your characters bizarre names like Jandis that no one actually has that kind of prevents you from having that connection. Somewhere there's a watch listener named Marnie being like, how dare you?

Marnie is like on the low end of that spectrum, but you can definitely like get a little bit of it. But yeah, he just offhandedly mentions that he's a human rights lawyer. And I remember hearing that and being like, nothing. thing about this character really reads that way to me. It's just a funny joke that he's offhandedly mentioning. It's men. Yeah. And it's just like they didn't really consider the full context of these people's lives or relationships. And I feel like when you're having the, they're all trapped together and it's all going to come out, you need to recognize what's coming out, you know? Yeah. Also, this show feels very much under the influence of Sharon Horgan, who has nothing to do with this show whatsoever. But over the last few years, it was done this thing where she's in catastrophe. she made Motherland.

She did this show. I don't even know if they ever went beyond a pilot episode that was aired, but it was called The Circuit, which is this dinner party show that she made where, like, her and this character she plays and her husband go to this, like, awful dinner party, and I think the idea is that they would keep going to these different dinner parties,

and that's where to be told. But it's almost like television as a short story collection where you're not overly committed to any one thing. And obviously catastrophe has become somewhat of a success, both here and obviously in England, and it's on Amazon. But it almost feels like Sharon Horgan is allowed to do these kind of just like experiments. You know what I mean?

Try this thing out and a couple of episodes come out of it. And people are, oh, it's delightful. And then with Lena, it's just too much. It's just there's too much of her out there and there's too much stuff that's attached baggage. Now, I think that there are different people and they are making different jokes. But do you see what I'm saying where there's just like an expectation that comes along with Lena Dunham's stuff? I do.

There's also something kind of Phoebe Waller Bridge in it to me where it's like you make your name with this autobiographical series that you are starring in and then you're like, well, actually, I'm mostly a writer so I'm going to step behind the scenes and do killing Eva, in this case. I think camping is kind of the trial balloon. I agree that there's just a lot of baggage attached to this, both

in terms of like specifically Lena Dunham and also this being like the follow-up to her breakout project. And it's also difficult. Wasn't she going to do some like 1950s period piece? Wasn't that like in the works for a minute? I think it's like one of those HBO things where they're like, we're developing this and then it just never happens. It's

also very difficult to, I would love to look at this and be like, this is what it says about her career going forward, but there's this additional wrinkle of she and Jenny Connor have been partners through girls and this. And they announced a few months ago that they're bringing their creative partnership to a close, which I have no insight information on the story there, nor will I speculate about it. But it's just, you know, the nature of their work going forward seems to, seems likely to change. Camping was probably a product of that flux and that change. You know what I mean? Given the timing of it, I would imagine that this was coming at the end. end of the cycle for their working relationship.

I mean, they literally announced it. I think the show might still have been in production. It was like at TCA's this summer when they were explaining what the show is and they were like, and by the way, this will be our last thing together. So it's just hard to look at it and be like, okay, so this is what this says about the future of this writing duo because the writing duo no longer exists. And now we're going to, I guess, learn a little bit more about who Lena Dunham is is as a solo artist and who Jenny Connor is when she either partners with someone else or solo

produces. So to go back to what you were saying before, do you look at camping as being an effort on her part to make like sustainable television and to just kind of live within that world? Or do you think it still suffers from some of the same like cinematic pressures that you think maybe were on top of girls? Well, one of the things I actually liked about it is maybe the natural comparison would be a really big ticket movie star anchor miniseries like big little lies or sharp objects. And I kind of like that this felt smaller. When I talked to Jenny, she also told me that this had been greenlit before Jennifer Garner signed on, which means it wasn't this like big little lies. Obviously, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman made that happen. So this still, at least me...

Same thing for like maniac, where Jonah and Emma Stoney up involved. It's not the sort of like reverse or cartleading the horse situation that you give with a lot of movie star TV. It still feels very much like TV, which to me feels very in line with your observation that it's basically a sitcom. And it's okay for things to just be kind of funny. not really work, especially when the whole thing is only four hours. Yeah. I guess I'm sort of okay with being like, yeah, this is an experiment, and it didn't really work out, and that's it.

And I feel like there's just the Lena Dunham of it all gets the knives out really quickly. Yeah, I don't think that the characters on the show are particularly likable. And that's a, even for 26 minutes, it's tough to ask people to hang out with that. Yeah, I just, again, I'm so surprised. I'm so surprised we're still having those conversations. About likability or about just talking. about camping. Yeah, about likability. It's just like, yeah, of course. Like, a lot of comedies

are about horrible people. That's totally fine with me. And if anything, in this case, it's a little easier for me to swallow them with girls, because with girls, it's like, okay, you don't like this person now? Just wait four years. And she's still terrible. Yes. Yeah, she's worse. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about something we do like. Let's talk about Hillhouse. Speaking of fully realized characters, that's what I like about this show. So, that's a really good way of putting it. Because I think that Hillhouse is, is an acquired taste, especially I think it takes a little bit of while to recognize the tempo and understand the mechanics of the dramatic world that it takes place in.

But one thing that you can't say is that it's not fully realized. That visually, in terms of the tone of the performance of each of the characters, so in case you don't know anything about this show, it's called The Haunting of Hillhouse. It's based on a Shirley Jackson novel. It's directed and largely written by this guy, Mike Flanagan, who's, to me, one of the most exciting horror directors out there. He directed Hush and Gerald's Game. And he's basically like a Netflix native son.

Like Hush and Gerald's Game are both Netflix things. He started out a little bit more in the Blumhouse school where he had done this movie. He'd done Hush. I don't know in the order of one he shot it, but I think Hush was released before Ouigi 2. And Ouija 2 was, Blumhouse is just like, we have this IP.

Like, Paramount's gonna let us make another one. What could you do? What would you want to do with this budget? And he made this movie with Elizabeth Reiser that is like kind of like a 70s Polanski movie De Palma movie that has like some Ouija stuff attached to it. And if you look at the IMDB, it's very clear that actors like working with him. Like Elizabeth Reiser is in Hill House. So is Kate Siegel, who I believe was. Carla Gagino who is on on Monday show has been in Gerald's great game and now she's in Hill House.

So people show up. Henry Thomas was in Ouija 2. He's in Hill House. So yeah, like repeat performances from people. And, you know, he makes, this show is essentially a family drama. It's about trauma, and trauma is reflected or represented through horror. But the horror aspect of it, I think, it's not secondary or separate from the family drama, but it is deeply intertwined with pretty recognizable problems that all families have.

Yeah, and it's interesting to me because horror is not a genre that is given rise to a lot of serialized multi-season television. Like, obviously, Twilight Zone. There's been horror TV. It's just a difficult thing to turn into a multi-season thing. And it's weird because on the one hand, all the best horror is rooted in character. And serialized TV is such a great opportunity to just give you tons and tons and tons of backstory. And that's part of what Hillhouse does so well.

But on the other hand, it's really hard to ask people to be terrified for 10 hours. Yeah, I mean, like, intensity is the sort of core of that genre. It's like building up to the... moments and to ask people to go through that every week or every hour, depending on when you're watching these episodes. And one of the things I actually really liked about how Hillhouse handles that is you know right away that at least in terms of like the very base, like who gets out of this alive question, you get the answer to that really quickly.

Yeah, because there's there's flash. It's told it basically on two timelines. It's told there's this, there's this family, the crane family. And they're told basically from their childhood, these siblings who are living in this house in New England that their parents are trying to restore and flip. I don't know if flipping was around. I think it's supposed to be taking place in, like, the early 80s or something. They specifically mentioned 92 at some point.

But yeah, it sounds like, you know, with every haunted house story, you need a like, why are they sticking around? Yeah, right. It's like, they spent all their money on this giant mansion. Yeah, they're underwater on this house, essentially, and they have to fix it up. But while they're there, obviously, things go boom in the night. So there's the childhood aspect, and then there's these kids when they become adults, and it's played by Michael Weisman and Elizabeth Reiser and a couple of other folks. And it's four siblings, Nell and Luke who are twins and Shirley and Stephen, who are...

Well, it's five. And then, should we spoil the... I guess it's like in the first episode, but one of the siblings and the present timeline passes away. And then the other four have to kind of come together. And they're all estranged because of this horrible thing that happened in their childhoods. So it's, as you mentioned, a family drama. But, yeah, I have sort of an uneven history with horror.

I was definitely one of those people who could not go near it all. through the kind of hostile Otts era of torture porn. It was gross or because you just don't like being scared. I was just like, I don't have the stomach for this. And then, you know, the kind of artisanal wave started with it follows. And it was like, well, to be on top of the culture, I have to. And then at that point I was like, okay, I'm. But when you see something like it follows and you see the jump scares that are in it,

does that still freak you out? No, that was sort of like, okay, I stayed away because I was scared. Now I know I can handle it. And now I'll watch things like even don't breathe. Like I'll go to see regular horror like it. I don't have to, it doesn't have to be get out for me to get interested, but there's still like a slight hesitation. So I, this was not on my radar prior to its release this weekend. Obviously, October is a great time to release Horror Story.

It was literally all I saw anyone talking about over the weekend. So I had some initial difficulties getting into the pilot, but then I started it and I was just so impressed. There are little things like the writer in me is just so in awe at this structure where, you know, the flashbacks aren't necessarily in chronological order. There's a little patchwork, but you are totally clear. on what's happening all the time, and they're really good at, like, balancing information. So you kind of feel like you know it's happening, but they have to withhold some stuff, but it doesn't feel nonsenseical. It doesn't feel like mystery boxy. It's like they'll get to it, and you know they are going to get to get to it. But it's not like you're not going to get tricked about it.

Yeah, and you're not like, wait, what? Like, you're never spun around and it's a really hard balancing act that they're doing. And, you know, it's a Netflix. You know, something happened to the mom. You know, something is going to happen to these. Yeah. And it's a Netflix drama, so we probably have to mention the runtime at some point. But one thing I really appreciated, and it's something weirdly in common with Orange is the New Black, where Orange is the New Black is one of very few shows on Netflix that I feel like earned its runtime because it has like 472 characters and it fits them all in. And this show is basically like you're dealing with both the present and past versions of the family who are essentially

like two separate characters, which means like at minimum you have like 10 to 12 core characters whose stories you have to serve. And yeah, like because that's a lot of of people, it doesn't feel overstuffed, even though most episodes are at kind of the 50-60 mark, 170. Like, it feels like a full and rich show. And yet, weirdly, I started to notice, like, basically the first four episodes involve getting every single character to the same place. To one room.

And then there's a sixth episode with, we're not going to give anything really plotty away right now, but I will say that six episode is the one that I think people are going to be talking about a lot because it's this tour to force of direction that essentially takes place in a funeral home with all the major characters in the room together and it's shot basically like Rope, the Hitchcock movie, where it's a series of long, long, one-take shots

that cut sort of invisibly as they pan to different parts of the room, and it's essentially shot like a play. Yeah, it's like a mid-season bottle episode, which a lot of Netflix shows tend to have, but usually it's like, oh, the whole rest of the season is basically like one movie, but we're going to have this one episode.

And this I also appreciated because the preceding four episodes are all totally character-based. Like every sibling gets their own side of the story told until they are all put in a room together. So now you understand the baggage that everyone is bringing to the table. And you mentioned the two separate sort of families that they are. And essentially it's one family, but the childhood and the adulthood. One of the things I really like that the show is doing is, you know, when you watch It, for instance, there are some situations where you see like, oh, this kid. is cool or funny in the way that this adult is cool or funny.

Like, they're just basically smaller versions of the adult character. But you can actually see in some of the Crane family how what happens in their childhood breaks them. I think it takes away in an essential sweetness or, like, innocence of these characters. I think some people, their adult versions, were cast better than others. For example, the adult version of Luke is supposed to be.

So as a kid, he's like this spectacle, Coke bottle glasses, like, nasally. stuffed up. And then he turns into Chris Evans on heroin. Right. But he's supposed to be a junkie. And that dude looks like he could run a marathon tomorrow. It looks like he plays tight end for the chiefs. It's like get your C-list Aaron Paul. Like get someone who looks like a tweaky, skinny

white guy. And don't get someone who looks like you just painted a scab on him in makeup. And otherwise he works out at Equinox every day. But it actually, because of the Coke bottle glasses and everything, you actually are just left to wonder like what happened to this kid. Because it's clearly a choice that he made to make this.

little kid so dorky and sweet and have this this adult version be so broken and and kind of brooding you know so I thought that that was really fascinating I'm I'm still trying to unpack the Henry Thomas plays the younger version of Timothy Hutton yeah that's a little weird but you know the the entire show is really really fascinating and you know I we often talk about horror and a lot of these genre things especially on this podcast as like Trojan horses where you advertise the genre stuff, but really there's like this core drama at the heart of it. I wouldn't even necessarily say that this movie, this show is ashamed of its genre trappings. I think the genre trappings are sewn into the story of tragedy. Yeah, not at all. And I don't think it's like

it's really a family drama is necessarily the right way to sell it in the sense that like all horror, like horror isn't a pure genre. There's like all different kinds of it. They're psychological, there's slasher, there's whatever. So like this is just the flavor of horror that it, it goes with is, you know, the ties that bond us all together. Yes, exactly. Which is the scariest horror of all. Yeah, family is the real boogeyman. Okay, so we're very in on the hunting of Hillhouse.

You can go back and listen to my interview with Carla Gugino from Monday if you'd like to hear a little bit more about the making of that show. It was really interesting hearing her talk about it. We are a little bit more mixed on camping, but feel free, you know, stick with it. There's LOLs every episode. It's just you probably won't want to go camping anytime soon after watching it. Add me with your thoughts. I'm here for them. Coming up next, my interview with Gareth Evans,

Director of Apostle, thanks for listening. Andy, we'll be back on Monday. It's our 300th episode. Oh my God, congratulations. Thank you. So we're doing a mailbag. Send your questions to the watch pod on Twitter, and we'll get those all together and answer those on Monday. Until then, have a good weekend. Today's episode of the watch

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work takes you. I just wanted to have a conversation about this movie Apostle, which kind of blew my mind at when I saw it. If I can start with it, like, so you finish the raid two and you're thinking yourself, you're one of the best action movie directors in the world, and you're thinking about what you're going to do next, what is it that leads you to British folk horror? I was going to do a different film first. I had finished the rate two, and I was sort of developing a film that I was going to make. It was going to be my first sort of American movie.

We were going to shoot in Europe. It was more of a sort of contemporary action film. It was a step away from martial arts. But it was, you know, a lot of gunplay, a lot of car work. And that fell through. We had like scheduling conflicts and various different bits of pieces that kind of like got in the way of that getting made. And at the time we wanted to get it made.

And so I was kind of at a place where I had moved back to the UK anyway. And I really wanted to sort of like make something. It had been a while since I'd been on production, in production on anything. And so I started trolling through these old ideas that I had in my draw. and one of them was from an old short film that I had, it was incomplete, it was an incomplete short film that I was making back in like the early 2000s and I kind of shot it in my dad's house. It was prior to doing anything professional. The central concept of that was about a sibling searcher for a missing sibling. When they turned up at the house, all that's there is an envelope with a rose petal inside it and some like earth, some soil.

And so that initial concept was something that kind of still intrigued me. And so I started taking that as a leaping off point. And I said to the guys at XYZ specifically Aaron to take it about developing this thing and creating something that would be totally different from what everyone is expecting me to do next. I'd done three martial arts films back to back with Marantau, The Raid and the Ray 2. So that was not really something I was interested in doing next. I didn't really want to go back into that genre. So I thought, you know what?

I had such fun doing Safe Haven with Timor for the VHS2 segment. I thought, why not delve back into that? Why not flex that muscle again and try something different and try horror? And so around that time, I was sat there in the house watching movies and trying to do the, you know, like the whole shameless films that you really should have seen by now, but you just happen for whatever reason. Yeah, you're going back through the canon, right? Exactly.

And one of the films that I had never seen, but heard so much about was Ken Russell's the Devils. And so I watched that, and I was just absolutely blown away by it, like from a technical level, the design of it, but also that it had something to say. And so that was the initial impetus that was like, you know what, I want to do something within that genre. I want to go back and rewatch those films. I rewatch films like The Wickerman or Witchfine in general, Ben Wheatley's films like Kill List and A Field in England, and just start to analyze the aesthetics of them. And even things like Sam Peckinpah's Strawdogs, like that's still. fit sort of within that sort of folk horror tradition of, you know, the unusual community, the sort of the behavioral traits that are ever so slightly askew that you just find so unsettling

when you're in their company. And so I looked at those films. I started studying them and pulling them apart and starting to figure out what could I bring to that genre that would be, you know, different, but also have some of the DNA of the films that I've made in the past. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, you were mentioning the Devils and that's a movie that was recently added to Filmstruck, but I actually remember my dad, who was British, had a book about Ken Russell's movies. And I remember as a kid flipping through it and seeing stills from the devils and just thinking, what the fuck is this? And was this actually allowed to be in theaters? And of course, it's one of the most controversial movies ever made. When you were

watching it as an adult, where you just sort of like, they let him get away with this? Well, that's the thing. That was so, what was so awe-inspired about that movie was that a truth I guess in a way we've had a similar sort of introduction to that film because all of my knowledge of that film prior to this came from

sensationalist anti-censorship documentaries where it only ever show you the sort of the titillating shots of the nuns getting up to no good as extreme

and as sort of like visceral as that footage was it's not what the whole film is about you know what I mean there's a much stronger sort of message in that movie and I

wasn't prepared for that to be there as front and center as it was. That movie really, really did catch me by surprise. It was an adult watching it. It was, yes, there were elements there where I was like, holy crap. Like, what what would be like to be on set?

You know what I mean? Because we had moments on a parcel. I mean, like, the day I turned up to set to see what had only ever been my sketched drawing of the sort of heathen stand table, suddenly brought to life and put on set and it to be real and made of wood and metal.

And not only that, but also to see about 50 to 60 villagers all dressed in black occult robes and gowns. That was a surreal moment for me to kind of be on set and be like, okay, we're filming that. Yeah, yeah. How much would you pay to hear the carpenters like banter when they were putting together some of the torture devices for you? Yeah. I probably said about a thousand times to shoot to various different HODs on the set.

My mantra was basically, I'm a nice guy, really. Yeah. Everyone asked me, like, how the hell did you come up with this stuff? And I was like, cheese tends to be my favorite answer for that. It's just like lots of cheese late at night. Yeah. Well, okay, so I did want to ask you in terms of inspiration. Was there a particular piece, was it a historical document,

any kind of a history text or anything like that? rooted in this early 20th century rural environment, but also Dan Stevens' character obviously has been part of the Boxer Rebellion, I gather from the movie. And then there's this tension going on between the Michael Sheen Malcolm character and this sort of perceived antagonism from the crown. What kind of historical things are going on in Apostle that you were drawing from? With the Peking Boxer Rebellion,

what that did was it centered us in terms of what period of time we were going to actually tell us. story in. I knew I wanted it to feel turn of the century between Victorian and Edwardian England. I knew I wanted that period. I just loved the tone and the texture of it. I loved the feel of it and everything else. And so that was intriguing to me. I knew I didn't want it to be modern. I didn't want it to be

contemporary set because I didn't want it. I didn't want to fall into the trap-ins of the typical shit, which would have been having to explain why you can't use a cell phone or something. You know what I mean? So I knew I wanted to kind of strip away all of the modern technology from the talent of this story. And so that Peking Boxer Rebellion

served a function not only to tell us what year we were in, what sort of period of time we were set in a story, but also informed just how far this man will have fallen in terms of his belief, what absolute monstrosity could have happened to him to shake his core beliefs to such a degree that he would throw them away and abandon them. And that was a key sort of component

in terms of giving us an idea of who Thomas was. But what it also gave us was a sense. of what he is able to endure, what he is able to survive. And then that kind of would tell us, oh, he's going to be willing to put himself through hell and back. That state of mind that he must be in and what he goes through in this film,

once you see that flashback, you understand that this isn't an aberration from his normal life. This is his life. There is no post trauma. There's only trauma, really. Exactly. We want to do it feels like,

obviously you want to talk about like the sort of thing, the subtext of it being the idea of how dangerous it is when people of a political leaning will use and abuse other people's faith in order to further their political gains and how corruptible it can be. And so that was something we really wanted to play with. And so with Malcolm, we looked at those things. What could have put him on the outs? What could have made him be seen as someone who was treasonous in terms of his own country?

And so we started playing with this idea of some of the... the tenets of what Malcolm talks about when he's in the church and the sermon, there's sort of early, early, early, early forms of communism. Malcolm doesn't actually live by those rules. He doesn't live by what he preaches. He says it's all about equality. He says that money has no value. But his house is bigger than anyone else is.

He is the leader of this community. And he says it repeatedly. He says I'm the leader in this community. So it's a weird sort of like it's hypocritical nature of him that he exposes the sense of equality and freedom of movement of life. But there's a curfew. There are things you must do. There are rules you have to abide by.

So it's very far from the truth in a way. One of the things I found fascinating was when the way in which we're introduced to this island and essentially this cult is in a lot of other movies that deal with groups like this, the initial first act introduction is that this, our audience avatar

comes across this group and it's like this utopia. You know, everybody seems happy, everybody seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid sometimes to, you know, the Jones Town way. But, you know, you present this world and it's so grimy and dirty and these people are essentially dirt farmers. And, you know, where do you establish that sort of level of production design and also that granular almost feeling of like unwashed people out in this like rural environment? I mean, that was one thing that really like immediately grabbed me. Well, I mean, I got to give huge props and credit to Tom Pierce, my production designer,

because him and his team did an incredible job on this. Like in interviews, I've always kind of been saying like, oh, yeah, we built this village. I had nothing to do that. I turned up week after week in a very clean, brightly colored high-vis jacket to see the progress as they worked in the mud and the grime in the worst months of winter for two months straight building. that village. And they built it from the ground up. Every stick of that, that village was just constructed and assembled and scenic painted to make it feel like it was a real community that

had been lived in, that had been explored, that had been worn down with time. And that that extended that design would extend into the wardrobe that they would wear as well. So I remember in early, early discussions, I spoke to Jane Spicer, who was this amazing, talented wardrobe designer, costume designer. In my more simplistic approach at the start of it, I said, you know, they should have a uniform. They should be like, almost like Quakers.

They should have a set clothing. And she was like, you know, I disagree. She said, let me give every single person their own different costume, their own wardrobe. Everyone will feel slightly different. There'll be certain touchstones which stay the same, but like let them

have their own individuality to them. And then she took all those costumes. And she, you know, she gave everyone little tiny pops of color here and there to make the background interested, to make the,

you know, even, you know, not just the main players, but everyone who was part of that community had their own look, their own feel. And then, like,

her team stress tested that wardrobe. Would wash and wash and wash again, damage them, rip them, fray the edges, you know, pick out the stitching on things, really make it feel like everyone who was in there had,

you know, nothing felt bought off the rack, so to speak. So that level of, you know, grime and texture and grit was something that, you know, I know myself and Matt Flannery, my DP have always loved in films. And we had a great team that was sort of like fully in support of that vision then. Yeah, that was so palpable when watching it. So I wanted to ask you a question about you and your relationship with Matt Flannery

and specifically your approach to directing set pieces, which, you know, Apostle has a different kind of set pieces than maybe people are used to from you. there are some quote-unquote action scenes, but they're very much more, they're products of the narrative itself. So there's not a lot of martial arts or anything. How do you take something? You see it on the page, it says,

there's a straight razor fight between this boy and this man Quinn. What's the first step you and Matt take when you're plotting out and blocking and thinking about camera movements? Because it's obviously just such a distinctive partnership that people know you by. I've never ever shot any action sequence

in terms of getting coverage. And even though this film was not the raid or the raid two, and it was never going to be that, those little sort of detours into, let's say, set pieces for the sake of it, those little detours into those set pieces, they still had to feel like, you know, the shots were the best way of capturing, the movements and the rhythms of the people who were involved.

And so I've always, always, always done previs for everything that I've made. And so this was no exception to that. So when a cane sequence is like the Razor Blade fight, we treated it in the same way that we would have treated a fight scene in the raid. We got together with the stunt choreography team, you're led by Jupaya. And we designed it. We talked about the philosophy behind it. We talked about the tone of it.

We talked about how Jeremy should be so filled with rage that it's almost like a rag doll being yagged around the room. But he's trying to stash in him in every. moment. So it was the psychology of those people of who they are, where they're at. And so, you know, from Quinn, it was almost like, you know, being a bear or a rhino with this little raccoon that's jumping on him and trying to claw out him and trying to cut on it. And so he ends of having to use brute force in order to control him. But he's going to keep coming at him. And so that was sort of the initial sort of leaping off point for those sequence, that sequence in particular. And then once we had designed it, we knew exactly where we wanted those characters to

move and how that action was going to play out, you know, where to put the camera and how to edit, that's kind of almost hardwired into us now. Yeah. It's just a case of always making sure that wherever we put that camera, it's telling you the audience what's happening in that choreography and also giving you a clear definition, a clear idea of the geography of the space that they're in. And so that's been the case for everything. But then obviously, you know, each set piece.

carries with it a different tonal shift. So something like that sequence has to be quite frenetic. That camera moves around a lot. Something like the heathen stand sequence with the table with the drill bit, that's a different story completely. Yeah. That had to hurt emotionally. That had to really, really feel painful to look at.

And even though, again, we do have like aftermath shots that show a level of detail that will kind of like push audiences in a certain way, the setup of it was more clinical, it was more methodical. So we shot it in a more classical way. And so we kind of picked shots that would give the audience a clear and detailed understanding

of the mechanisms of that device. So you would know how things would work and you would know exactly the kind of damage that thing would do. But the moment it gets used, we cut away to people's reactions. Yeah. And even people who would probably have seen that before

and you can see how horrified there. Yeah, exactly. And the reason why is because this scene had to be about, like I've seen set pieces in like folk horror films where you know, it's just a complete stranger of a character

that's being brutalized and then you've got no emotional investment with that character at all. But what I wanted to do with this was to have it be someone that we cared about. Someone who's fate we gave a shit about. Yeah. When that happens, we understand why that community is upset. And what it gave me an opportunity was to show that members of that community were upset about what was happening, but they were afraid of this new militaristic dictatorship that was about to emerge in Quinn.

Spoke volumes about the community then. It spoke volumes about the people who are following what they believe is their faith, but not aware of the monstrosity that's at the core of it that's at the bottom of it that's been fueling it in terms of that political movement. But, Gareth, I just wanted to ask a little bit about Gangs of London, if you don't mind me asking, just because I know that's something that a lot of people who were listening to the show are probably really excited about. How's that going so far? Yeah, it's going great. I mean, this is, in a way, it's sort of a return to action. And I'm working with Jude Pyer again and his amazing stunt team who worked with us on Apostle. And we've basically been, we've been designed in 10 hours worth of television, which has. some pretty ambitious action beats throughout it. It's a completely different take for me. It's a completely different approach to me, being able to tell a story in long form.

It's something that I've been co-created with Matt Flanley by DP. And it's something we're going to start shooting in in about just over a month and a half from now. So we're not far away from starting it. And it's really excited. It's going to be a different, a different, different sort of what's called challenge for me after everything I've done so far.

So yeah, we're not holding back. We're being pretty ambitious in terms of the set pieces, but also I feel like what we've got is something that speaks a lot about London as a city right now, the global politics overall, but also tells a really sort of like rich layered text and sort of story about the people that inhabit the city as well. So, yeah, you know, all things well, it'll turn out something special. So yeah, we're really excited.

I can't wait to get started on it. All right, good luck with that. I hope we could speak again when that comes out. Thank you so much for your time, Gareth. Thank you so much, cheers. Take care, guys.