I=Interviewer
HG=Harry Gale
I: Hello and welcome back to radio porter, and we are back with a very exciting special guest, the famous film maker Harry Gale is here with us today to discuss his new film ‘fresh fallen snow’.
Harry Gale, pleasure to have you here
HG: Pleasure to be here, Dave.
I: well Harry, there has been a lot of talk about your opening scene, with Times calling it ‘the most memorable start to any film ever’ what is it that is so incredible about the scene?
HG: Well, Dave. The scene’s location is very cool, it is onto of a carpark and there is a sense of vertigo while watching it, which creates tension anyway, which is good for a thriller. The scene itself had a low budget, in fact all we need to provide was the guns and police vests, this appeals to audiences as many people want to work in film and think that if they have a low budget they can never make anything good, this tries to get rid of that idea.
I: What about your choice to use an unknown actors instead of Hollywood stars?
HG: We worked with lesser known actors as they worked best in the role, I mean, as brilliant it would have been to have Leonardo DiCaprio as the detective, we think that the actor we hired, does a perfect job of it and embodies the character perfectly, same for the other characters. Also we didn’t want to work with an incredibly high budget, as there is something about low budget independent film which is so unique and it forces you to make more compromises and find creative ways around your problems which really worked in this film, we think the audience will enjoy that feeling of knowing that this film was made with well under $1 million which for a summer blockbuster is very inexpensive, however if we hired someone like Leonardo DiCaprio, that price would have rocketed up to $26 million which doesn’t guarantee a good profit margin.
I: What genre would you label you film as?
HG: Well I believe it is a thriller, yet a drama at the same time, as in the present you have the very thrilling action between Molly (our protagonist) and Detective Nyland (our antagonist) this is shown in the opening scene and the atrocities in the mental institution, yet at the same time there is the flashbacks to times of Molly as a child and her relationship between her and her parents also the moments of the detective and his life outside the force and the effect that this case had on him, which is the drama aspect of it.
I: I would argue that this is of the subgenre ‘psychological thriller though, wouldn’t you?
HG: Yes, absolutely, we didn’t want the thriller to be action based except for the opening scene, which even though there is guns and a stand off, it is the dialogue in that scene which really emphasises the tension instead of the guns.
I: Who and what inspired this film?
HG: Well ever since I saw ‘Shutter Island’ (2010) I knew I wanted to make a film centred around mental illness, it is such an interesting topic to delve into, especially in film as you can represent two completely binary-opposite perspectives of the world, the one of the mentally ill character and the mentally stable police detective, and using different editing, camera and sound techniques to show the difference between the characters was a really enjoyable experience to do.
I: Where is the film meant to be set? Is it England?
HG: Well we wanted the film to be grounded, so, there was no way better to do that than set it in your own country. Foe example the opening scene was filmed in Guilford, however, it isn’t set there, but it is set inside a kind of… recreated England in which we can design the terrain through the editing, as there is no mental institutions in Guilford, so through editing we had to convey three locations that are fairly similar to each other, so it is the hospital, a forest and a city, and we couldn’t find a location with all three so we had to edit our way around it and film in different locations and make them look as if they are close enough together for the girl to be able to run to each of them consecutively.
I: For listeners today and don’t know what the film is about, would you be able to give a brief outline of the plot?
HG: Well, the film is about a young girl who is mentally ill, she is in a mental hospital and her and her friend plot to escape, they manage to do so and run away and a majority of the film is how their relationship develops over the course of their escape. Eventually the film ends up in the city and finishes with the opening scene where she makes a shocking revelation about how she can never escape from the institution that keeps them prisoner.
I: the characters are quite ambiguous, would you say so?
HG: yes, they do have many things that go on in their mind, from the protagonist to the antagonist, where I as a director wanted to make the audience feel sympathy for an unlikeable character and dislike a likeable character, so for the detective who is the antagonist you start to dislike him for the scenes of his personal life and you begin to sympathise with the protagonist due to the flashbacks of her life and how hard her life has been.
I: There is a quite shocking plot twist in the opening scene when you see what she has done, why did you choose to do this?
HG: There is, however, we saw this as necessary as we needed to show the extent of her mental illness and what it has driven her to, so we just wanted to show how far gone she really is.
I: Who is this film aimed at, a young audience, an old audience or another that I haven’t thought of?
HG: Well we wanted the film to be unflinching as it represents a young woman spiral into madness, so we couldn’t exactly make it a PG, however we wanted to make it a 12, which we eventually realised we couldn’t do as it would mean that we couldn’t show many of the things we wanted to, however, the film ended up being a 15. We chose the film to be a 15 as we wanted a large audience to be able to see it and we really wanted a target audience of 19-21 year olds as they are able to take the themes represented in the thriller seriously as they are relatively mentally mature, however, it can appeal to anyone as we have suspense and an interesting narrative, however, they shouldn’t be looking for an easy watch as the film is rather hard hitting.
I: I remember when Universal showed the first trailer for the film, about a week later it became the most anticipated film of 2017, how did you create this much… ‘hype’ around the release.
HG: Well it was my idea to do a lot of digital marketing for the film as it almost guarantees that a lot of people will see it and people also respond we'll to it being interactive as it is more memorable, so we advertised through social media platforms such as Facebook where it would be a view through binoculars at a snowy forrest and the user would have to find the two patients in the wood and when they clicked on them the poster would be shown that had the tagline and the release date.
I: It was a strange choice not to have any soundtrack on the opening scene wasn’t it?
HG: Well we didn’t want to detract from the dialogue in the scene as it was a fairly interesting conversation between the protagonist and the antagonist, and a lot of the themes that are bought up in the dialogue, are revisited later, and we wanted them to stick more which would have been less easy to remember if there was a soundtrack.
I: Now… the studio credits for films, I don’t get why they have them as they should be in the credits at the end right?
HG: Well, not many people sit through the credits up until the point where the studio gets credit, therefore we put them in the beginning so people know who made the film.
I: what about the title for your film, did that have any meaning behind it?
HG: Yes it did, the words were hollowed out to show that the character was void of emotion and feeling, and the snow was put in through a particle emitter in the software motion, this was to mimic the tagline of the film and the line that is revisited most, in the film.
I: Is it true you edited the film yourself?
HG: It is true, we used the software adobe premier pro cc as it is a good editing software that allowed us free range of other adobe softwares such as after effects, this is all due to the adobe cloud which is a very clever things that allows seamless movement of projects to other softwares in the adobe universe. The cuts had to be quick as it is a thriller, therefore if something exciting was happening, there would be a lot of cuts that fasten the pace of the thriller, but we did keep the shots longer on the protagonist as she is our main character and we needed to establish the relationship between the protagonist and the audience to allow the audience to like her more.
I: Have you stuck to the conventions of a basic thriller?
HG: No, Usually a thriller centres around a strong male protagonist and has a lot of action, however, we wanted the film to centre round an unstable characters, even those who are in a position of power. We wanted it to still be obvious that it was a thriller though, so we used a lot of the editing, camera work, editing and mise-en-scene that you would see in a thriller however, the story contradicts this.
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