Interview with David Keating, director of Cherry Tree

This interview originally appeared on WOW247 (RIP).

Interview with David Keating for Cherry Tree

Where did the idea come from, first of all?

So, I made a film called Wake Wood, which is in similar emotional territory, with the writer-producer director Brendan McCarthy and Brendan then had the idea for Cherry Tree. So it came a few years ago and it was quite a lot of conceptual work about what are the emotions behind it before we ever really settled on whose story it was. So it went through quite a few iterations with Brendan as the screenwriter and producer.

What kind of preparation did you do, and did you watch any particular films beforehand?

The preparation that I did principally was getting down and dirty with the centipedes. We met first in a small suburban bathroom in Belfast where there's a centipede enthusiast who kept them in her bedroom. So me and two of the effects people were there and we were in a bathroom because putting them into a bath was the safest way to be able to photograph them. In fact, in the FrightFest program, the big image of the centipede, I took that day with it climbing down the front of my lens. You know, it's one of those funny things where when you start to relax a little bit, you start to get a little too close and the centipede handler will just go, 'No. Too close.' Because they can suddenly move very fast and their venom is very nasty.

So you did your own centipede wrangling?

No, we had a fantastic centipede expert with us. We met Dr Michel Dugon, who is one of the leading venomous animal specialists and a fabulous guy. And he worked very closely with the actors, actually. He was really key to the kind of trust that we built up, because there are very few effects shots with centipedes in the film – they are 95% all real.

So the centipedes that are effects shots, are they CGI? Animatronics? Plastic animals? Or something else?

They're a combination of things. Some of them are real but digitally enhanced. I think in two shots there's a 3D model.

So most of the shots where the actors have centipedes on them, they're all real?

Absolutely. In fact, I don't think there are any shots with the actors where the centipedes aren't real.

Including the sex scene?

Real.

How did the actors react to that?

They were fabulous, you know? It was very interesting, because I was like a broken record about safety in the very beginning, when I met the actors, even before they were cast. And once they'd read the script, I would give them a speech about how not to worry, they would never have to interact with a centipede, in fact it wasn't possible for them, they were too dangerous, so I gave them this whole speech, which after a certain number of weeks went completely out the window. I had to just completely eat my words. But that's kind of the process, where you're going, 'Okay, is this safe?' But you've got somebody there who's being very clear and level-headed, so we hit a point where Michel said, 'This centipede will not bite you' and the actors trusted Michel enough to go, 'Okay'.

Was it in their contracts, that they had to be okay with centipede handling?

No, absolutely not. In fact, Naomi Battrick is one of the physically bravest people I've ever worked with, but she's absolutely terrified of spiders. She is viscerally arachnophobic and we did work in some conditions where there were a lot of big spiders, not in front of the lens, but just in the locations and it was very, very hard for her. So I was quite worried that she was going to be fearful around centipedes, but actually she was fine, she was very brave.

So you wouldn't subscribe to the adage, 'Never work with animals or children?' Or centipedes?

You know, all I seem to do is work with kids and animals. In all the films I've made, I've wound up working with some combination of the two. We had big animal scenes in Wake Wood too.

With films such as It Follows and The Witch, there seems to be an explosion of low-budget psychological horror films. Do you see Wake Wood and Cherry Tree as fitting into that explosion?

[Long pause] Well, these are love stories. Their genre is horror and their sub-genre is reanimation or witches, depending on how you want to classify, but Cherry Tree is a story about how much a teenage girl loves her dad. That's what it's about. So in as much as these films fit into a wave of other films, the emotion that people feel, the love within families, that's a theme we've been exploring forever and I'm sure we'll keep exploring.

Do you see those elements as something that horror can exploit particularly well?

Well, love and fear are a very interesting pitchfork, love being one of the big motivators in life and fear being one of the big demotivators.So, for me, it's really interesting to pair them up. I don't know if I'd be able to make a film if I wasn't able to explore ideas that I felt I understood or I'm really curious about. So there's an element of that which is 'Okay, you've got a plan, stick to the plan, deliver the plan' and there's quite a bit of that in filmmaking, but there's another side which in some ways motivates me more, or at least as much, which is about, 'Here's an idea, let's explore it, where can we get to with this idea, on the back of this idea?' And that principle operates with the whole team, with the effects people and very much with the actors.

Did you learn anything during the making of Wake Wood that you applied to Cherry Tree?

[Very long pause – 23 seconds] I suppose that I learned that I have not gotten over my teenage obsession with cameras and actors. On Wake Wood, I sort of reconnected with, 'Oh yeah, what was it that I was nuts about when I was fifteen? Oh, right, this.' Actors and what happens when you put a camera in front of them. I noticed on Wake Wood that that was really what my particular passion was. So I indulged it on Cherry Tree, I suppose.

Are you keen to explore other genres or do you see yourself sticking with horror?

You know, the first film I made, The Last of the High Kings was about how much love there was within a family and the second film I made, Wake Wood, was about how much a married couple love their kid. Cherry Tree is about how much a teenage girl loves her dad. Obviously, we're opening FrightFest, so it's a horror, but that's the genre, it's not what it's about. For me, there's a difference between genre and thematic material and I will definitely make more horror films if I get to make more films, but not only, I would think. But the only continuity that I could sort of pledge to is I'll probably keep making love stories. And some of them, I hope, will be horror. That's a really messy way of answering your question, but I hope it makes sense.

What's the hardest thing to get right, overall?

[Pause] The contract you have with the audience. The promises that you make at the beginning and then delivering them. And I often think about my mentor, John Boorman, who had a big influence on lots of my thinking about film. And he talked about setting objectives for himself and always failing to achieve them. I think lots of filmmakers feel that way and we set our objectives and then we try and jack them up even higher and then we maybe get some of them, maybe not all. But I think one of the difficult things to manage is that film audience relationship, and what you promise at the beginning and how much you deliver and maybe how much they'll let you get away with by the end.

What steps do you take to ensure that you achieve those objectives? Because you don't know for sure until the film screens to an audience, so what sort of sense do you have of it as you're shooting?

Questioning, 'Have we connected this character to the audience?' At one point, I was very concerned that with the character of Sissy, we hadn't seen her by herself, so that was something that we were able to correct. We see her by herself later in the film than I would have liked, but I wanted the audience to feel that this character has an inner life, and that's not so easy to do if there's always story to be advanced, or other characters to interact with. It's probably easier to do with somebody by themselves and I was just conscious of that, so it's things like that.

And also you have to be careful, in that sense, if your film is predominantly from [lead character] Faith's point of view, then it's difficult to go outside that point of view and set up whatever else you need to set up, so it's a tricky balance...

You know, you're absolutely right and the point of view was something that we all discussed quite a lot. There was a version of the script of Cherry Tree that was really from Faith's dad's point of view,  Sean, it was about a dad who's very sick and he's really worried about his daughter and then he discovers that his daughter is pregnant and then he discovers that his daughter has made this terrible deal, so it's his journey. And I felt that that rendered Faith passive, and I pressed very hard that we flipped it and made this all about Faith, make it her story.

How do you see the future of horror cinema in the UK?

[Pause] I think it's going to get weirder. I hope it is. Probably, maybe more like the '60s, you know, wilder. I love the idea that horror has the kind of muscle to be a broad church, to gather in all sorts of strangeness and viscera, in not just the physical sense, but that the things that make you feel viscerally. Maybe I'm just saying what I hope for.

Do you have a next project lined up in which you could contribute to making it weirder?

Yes, I do. It's very, very different. It's a horror film, but it's very, very different to the last two that I've made. It does involve kids and a family and it's quite wild. I can't really say any more than that. I was sort of desperate to talk about it, because I'm actually at that stage where I'm like a burst pipe about it but I got warned off, I got told to keep my mouth shut about it. The reason that was actually given to me was that all this takes much longer, which I know perfectly well from experience, but of course, if you talk about it now, people sort of expect it to be out next year.

How important is Video On Demand to the future of independent filmmaking and distribution?

I think it's really important, Video On Demand can take us back to theatrical on demand where if you want to watch a film by yourself on your laptop or on your tablet or however you want – effectively, we've got Video On Demand on aircraft now, that's great, that's fine. If you want to gather together and watch stuff, it can be your family or your friends or your classmates or fellow enthusiasts who you gather together and share, or you can just vote for it to be on at your local cinema and in a couple of weeks it very possibly will be. So I think what we've been doing for too long it is pouring content at the audience, where they're 'If you want to see this, go there', whereas now, the audience really has a say in where they see something, how they see it, what version they see.

I was thinking in terms of horror films in particular being able to find an audience that perhaps they wouldn't otherwise find, outside of dedicated film festivals like FrightFest, for example. It's quite hard to get horror films a decent distribution deal, most of the time...

It's hard to get any film distribution. In a way, in some regards, I think genre films are having a better time than – let's say fantasy films, for argument's sake, fantasy films in that broad category are having a much easier time than drama.

Who are your main horror influences?

I loved how Stanley Kubrick made The Shining. I thought that was inspired. We don't tend to think of him as a horror director, but it's one of the great horror films. I love the way Spielberg made Jaws, again, what a magnificent horror film, and brilliantly made. So I think the spirit that Robin Hardy conveyed in The Wicker Man, I watch the film and go, 'How did he do that?' You kind of think you know and go, 'Oh, that's because of that and so-and-so's so creepy', but that's a film that operates on so many different levels at once.

Can you remember what made you interested in that particular genre in the first place? What made you want to direct films with horror elements in them?

[Pause] You get to chase your wildest imagination and as a team we're trying to up each other, go, 'Great, that's a good idea, can you go further?' You get to play with centipedes and chuck blood around, so it's very fun. As well as it being fun, there is a dark side to life and we are,  I think most of us tend to try and walk in the sun, but we know it's there and I think I've always been really interested in exploring ideas that say, 'Look, there's more going on than what you see'.

And finally, do you have a particularly amusing centipede anecdote?

Two very quick ones. We got the biggest ass lens to do a particular shot, a piece of kit called a Barstow, I think that's what it's called. I mean, on the front of the camera, it looks like a fucking machine gun. It's this ridiculous thing, we've got the camera up here and this thing down here [gestures] and it's massive and we had a monitor and we were right in on the centipede's head, like right there, and you're going, 'Awesome, awesome, awesome...' and the centipede had been eating pig skin and in giant size on the monitor, it threw up, and that, I believe is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in my life. Check the DVD extras – I assume it'll be there. But actually losing one on the set too. They're absolutely fine as long as you know where they are and you know where you are and that's completely fine, but as soon as you don't know where one is, it could be absolutely anywhere, as in crawling up the inside of your leg. We just couldn't work – we had to clear the set until we found the centipede.

Where was it?

It was curled up under a chair, basically. We were all [frantically checking ourselves to see if it was on us] and being completely ineffectual about finding it. Going, 'Where do you look?' 'Well, we've looked there', 'Well, look again, look again' ...

Nobody freaking out, or everybody freaking out?

Some people walking away, some people going, 'I'm not scared of that centipede'. In fact, it was the chief electrician said, 'Just leave this to me', and I think it was the centipede wrangler and the electrician just searched the place and found it.


END