In a special interview we caught up with director Johannes Roberts about his latest film called (yes you guessed it) The Other Side of the Door, which is at the cinemas NOW!!
HM: Firstly, Johannes, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
JR: Pleasure.
HM: For ‘The Other Side of the Door’, which warped part of your brain the idea come from?
JR: From the left warped part of my brain. It came from a
mixture of things. Discovering this real village in India called Bhangra. It’s
totally abandoned, nobody knows what happened to the inhabitants, and it’s
fenced off with signs on the outside of the village saying don’t enter this
place after sunset. I just thought that was a crazy story. So that sort of
started the ball rolling in my head. Then obviously it has a lot of Stephen
King influences, some influences of The Monkey’s Paw and old fashioned ghost
stories.
HM: Do you think India’s the new hotbed for horror?
HM: Do you think India’s the new hotbed for horror?
JR: I don’t know if it’s the new hotbed for horror, but I wanted
a fresh place to explore. I just thought that for an audience to see a story
that is, in a sense is a familiar ghost story, but in a fresh way, is a very
scary thing.
HM: Are there any
underlining horror films from India that you’ve discovered that you think need
to be promoted more?
JR: You know I haven’t seen any actually. There are some Indian
ghost stories but their sensibility of horror is very…it’s not like the J
horror thing where you’re like ‘oh wow there is a whole world of really scary
movies that has yet to be [seen]’. They’re quite camp and silly. Hopefully
[we’re at] the sort of forefront of it maybe.
HM: If you had to choose
one, writing or directing, which would you choose and why?
JR: Directing. It’s a funny thing, creating the stories is what
fires me. To say this sounds horrendously pretentious, but I would, in my mind,
think of myself as a story teller. So the two things are kind of intrinsically
linked together but I would never write for someone else. I couldn’t think of
anything worse, or more boring. I only write for myself. Directing is just a
lot of fun. Writing, coming up with the ideas is cool but then it’s a real
slog. Directing you are king of the hill and it’s kind of cool.
HM: Did you envisage
Sarah Wayne Callies as the role of Maria when you wrote the film?
JR: She was, oddly, physically exactly what I had seen, but I
hadn’t had a particular actress in mind. Except I tend to I always seem to
invasion Jenny Agutter in everything, but that’s just me. Sorry Jenny.
Fox or someone, I think the Casting director Michael
Hawthorne, mentioned [Sarah] and I was like, ‘yes of course I love the walking
dead’ and, it was a perfect fit, and then we chatted and we just got on. I’m
not very Hollywood and she is. She’s just down to earth, and just really rolled
up her sleeves and took that. It was a tricky role. She had to go very dark
with it, and it’s sort of really quite emotionally draining, heart breaking
kind of role. Then also you have to play the horror side, and then also [it’s]
in this strange crazy world. For English people India is one thing, but for
Americans it’s a real far far far away world. For us we obviously have quite
strong links. But yes, she was great.
HR: Storage 24 was a
great success; did you expect it? What has been keeping you busy since then?
JR: Hahaha said no one ever! Obviously writing, replying to fan
letters for the three people that watched Storage 24. It just takes time you know? It has been 4 years! Actually
what happened is, Fox saw Storage at a film festival, really liked it and said
‘what have you got going, what’s next?’ And they had just had an Indian ghost
story fall apart on them and so were looking for an Indian ghost story oddly,
and I was like, ‘oh I’ve got an Indian ghost story’. It was one of these really
crazy sort of coincidences. So they came on in 2012 and it just took a little
while to get the movie developed and off the ground. It was a complicated
movie, and then at the same time I was developing a movie which at the moment
is called ‘47 Meters Down’, it might be called something different when it
comes out. So the two things were going side by side and then we shot ‘The
Other Side’. It just took a while you know, but then I’ve just done two films
back to back so, I think the other movie comes out very close after this, so it
all kind of got done together. Sorry I’m trying to justify why I’ve not been
working for four years.
HR: You’ve got your foot
firmly planted in horror writing and directing. Can you tell us how you got
into horror what you love about it, and how different it is now to what you
were watching when you were younger?
JR: That’s a good one. Yes, I love horror. I love any kind of
stories but particularly supernatural fantasy stuff. You know I’m not into the
torture porn horror side of things. That doesn’t really do it for me, but I
love ghosts. It sort of all comes from ‘Lord of the Rings’. I think that really
just, as a kid, blew my mind. The world, the imagination that was there. It’s
all about imagination I think. And then discovering Stephen King, and John Carpenter,
it’s just who I wanted to be. So that’s kind of really where it comes from. How
horror has changed is interesting. I mean ‘The Other Side of the Door’ owes a
big debt to ‘Pet Cemetery’ and the movies I was watching when I grew up. ‘Woman
In Black’, the TV movie not so much the Daniel Radcliffe one. But then it draws
on more recent horror. The J horror thing, which has filtered into it a little
bit. And the Blumhouse actually, what James Wan has been doing who is
phenomenally talented. That has also sort of come together. It’s quite an
interesting question. I like that. Seeing ‘The Other Side of the Door’, you can
see the different stages of horror in it. You can see it’s written by someone
that grew up with horror in the 80s and has carried on watching movies all the
way through.
HR: You mentioned Stephen
King and John Carpenter. Would you consider them your horror idols? Did you
have any other horror idols growing up?
JR: They’re really, yes, that’s…
HM: Can’t get better than
that?
JR: Yes, exactly, I’m just totally, I just loved, I’m obsessed
with, I read my Stephen King still now. I read everything he does, and John
Carpenter I just absolutely love. I just think he’s a phenomenal director. I
love Alex’s work, so I was very lucky to have the chance to work with him. He’s
very much more, brutal is not necessarily the word, but his style of horror is
much more shocking than mine I think. If you watch ‘The Hills Have Eyes’,
‘Maniac’, and ‘Switchblade Romance’. But yes, I think the King thing is very
present in all my work.
HM: You directed one of
the world’s first short series for mobile phones.
JR: I did yes, Wow this guy’s done his [homework], he’s dragged
them out.
HM:
Do you think the
advancement in technology, things like social media, can help talented people
get their stuff out there and noticed more than perhaps 10, 20 years ago?
JR: Yes, that didn’t help me at all with that. That’s funny to
think that. It was called ‘When Evil Calls’, and you downloaded episodes,
little two minute episodes, but it was before smart phones so it was [on] the
Nokia things.
HR: So like webisodes
almost?
JR: Yes, webisodes. They were called ‘mobisodes’, they thought
that it was going to take off. I think we were the first people to do it and we
were the last people to do it. In the end it would cost you about like £15, and
people were like ‘what’s going on here?’ and it was just a disastrous idea.
HM: But a learning curve
perhaps?
JR: Yes. I mean I enjoyed it. It was fun to invent, because
nobody had done this before. We had to invent a visual language for a screen of
that size. What kind of shots you use, and editing style, and all that kind of
stuff. The world has changed now with YouTube and all that kind of stuff. You
look at the guys that did that great short film called ‘Lights Out’, which is
terrifying. I don’t know if you’ve seen, you click on the light and off, and
the ghost comes closer, it’s really really scary, and when I first watched it I
was like ‘that’s amazing’.
HM: A bit like virtual
reality?
JR: No, it’s such a simple thing it’s a woman just standing in a
corridor, and when the lights’ on there’s nothing and then she turns the lights
off and there’s a shape, and then she turns it on and there’s nothing, and then
she turns it off and then the shapes slightly closer, and but it’s really
simple but it’s really really well done. I tried to do a variation of it in
this movie and, it’s odd it was such a simple concept, but I couldn’t get it to
work the way they had done it. And they then got a movie off the back of that.
I think they’re actually doing the ‘Lights Out’ movie. So that kind of thing
does help. You can pick up a camera, and you can come up with a very simple
idea, and you can scare the living crap out of someone, and then you have a
real opportunity to get that to a wide audience. So yes, it is. It will be
interesting to [see] constantly how this develops.
HM: And finally, what’s
on the horizon for you for this year and the years beyond?
JR: Hopefully work. I have just finished a movie called ‘47
Meters Down’, which I think will be called something different when it actually
comes out because Americans don’t get meters. That’s a shark movie with Mandy
Moore and Claire Holt, which Dimension are releasing in America I think that’s
going to be a big movie. I hope. I hope it’s going to be a big movie. It’s the
first movie in the world ever to be entirely filmed under water so it’s just;
it was a crazy crazy movie to do.
It was half filmed in a tank in Basildon, of all places. I
wrote this because I wanted to have like exotic diving. And then half of it was
filmed in the Dominican Republic. It was a very tough crazy shoot. And the
movie looks unlike anything you’ve ever seen because it’s just floating like
crazy. So that comes out, I don’t know when it comes out but I think probably
sometime this year, and then we’ll just see. More projects beyond that!
HM: Thanks for that Johannes
JR: Pleasure, great questions,
The Other Side of the Door is in cinemas NOW, it's spooky, it's scary and it's pretty good.
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