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N0 1 / 18-20 FEB
20 Feb, Grosvenor, 8.30pm | 21 Feb, GFT, 11.15pm
Love and Death David Robert Mitchell tells us how he turned his childhood dream into indelible cinematic nightmare It Follows
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t’s a dark and stormy night, and I’m heading into the cinematic equivalent of a haunted house – Islington’s Vue – to speak to indie filmmaker David Robert Mitchell, the mind behind It Follows, the most beautiful and ingenious American horror movie in recent memory. As I pass the pick’n’mix and popcorn stands, leaving puddles of rainwater in my wake, I catch sight of the filmmaker as he’s leaving the auditorium after introducing his film to the London
INTERVIEW: Film Festival audience – its chilling synth score fills the corridor, then fades as the cinema door slowly closes. “It’s a little quiet,” he says to the LFF liaison. “Can they turn it up a notch?” It seems like a reasonable request until minutes later he’s describing the concept for the score by composer Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace). “We wanted to create a balance between a very beautiful and haunting, melodic piece of music,” he tells me, “and then at times it’s like a controlled noise – it’s assaulting the audience.” If you’re one of the few people to have caught Mitchell’s debut film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, a delicate and swoony comingof-age film, you might be surprised to find him
Jamie Dunn
delivering a brutal slasher flick as his follow-up. But take away the film’s central monster and we could be watching the same movie. “When I was writing It Follows I kept thinking about the idea of taking characters similar to the characters that I had written in Myth, and then imagining if they were placed in a nightmare and how they might react.” The nightmare in question is Mitchell’s own recurring one. Perched on a bench in the multiplex lobby, he recounts it: “In the dream I sort of knew it was a monster coming to kill me but it looked like different people.” In the film, too, the eponymous ‘It’ takes many forms, sometimes seemingly-benevolent (a girl in pigtails, a lost-looking old woman) continues…