Buzz speaks with actress and writer Alice Lowe about her bold directorial debut, Prevenge, a satirical slasher about a pregnant woman driven to a killing spree by her foetus.
Could you tell us what audiences can expect from Prevenge?
It’s a very dark comedy, it’s a rollercoaster ride, it’s a revenge thriller. It’s also about a pregnant woman who’s going through a hard time. So, it’s a mixture of lots of different tones and it completely takes the rug from under you. When you think you know what you’re watching it changes, so there’s lots of different things in there for lots of different types of audiences. It’s for people who like horror films, thrillers, comedies, and people who like weird dark sort of stuff.
You were seven to eight months pregnant when you filmed it. What was that like?
It was fine, actually. I was really lucky because I was very healthy during my pregnancy, had a lot of energy and was kind of like ‘Oh, I think I can do this’. I think if I felt ill or tired at any stage, I would have just stopped. It actually made me feel quite relaxed about making a film because if I hadn’t been pregnant and was doing my directorial debut, I would have been really stressed out – “it has to be amazing!” Whereas with this I said, “well, it’s only a film and the pregnancy is more important really.” So I felt really good about it and had a lot of fun.
The film has some really dark themes. What drew you to telling a story like this?
I wanted to show a different side of pregnancy, because it was what I was experiencing at the time and I felt like a lot of depictions of pregnancy on screen don’t really describe what it’s like from the interior of the person that’s pregnant. I felt it was very much always someone else’s perspective on pregnancy as either a comedy or a horror about them and childbirth. I felt frustrated at the way pregnant women were represented on screen and wanted to do something that shows that pregnant women can be angry, that they can have a life before they were pregnant, and that they have a personality and identity of their own.
I wanted to make the main character into a heroine really, even though she’s an anti-heroine; to give her a lot of drive that moves the narrative forward. It’s quite cool, in some ways, that she takes on lots of disguises – it’s almost like pregnancy is her superpower. So, I think all of those things together make it a fun project but also something that maybe people feel that they haven’t seen before. I think people often come out of Prevenge saying ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like that before’.
You’ve worked with some really great directors over the years. Has observing their work processes helped you in any way with this directorial debut?
Oh definitely, a million times. The great thing about being an actress is that you work in so many different ways with so many different people, and you can start to work out what your favourite methods of working are and how you enjoy working. You’re learning all the time because people have different techniques. I learned so much off the people that I worked with, and I found out how I like it to work as well. You can cherry-pick what bits really work. I don’t think I’d be able to do this without having worked with good people over the years.
What was it about Cardiff that made you want to film there?
Well, Prevenge was made by a Welsh production company for a start. The Director Of Photography [Ryan Eddleston] also lives in Cardiff. I’d been to Cardiff quite a lot so I felt like I knew it, but at the same time wanted the audience to feel unfamiliar with the place it’s set in because Ruth [Lowe’s character] is going on a journey to a new place and it’s new territory having a baby.
At the same time, it’s really important that it was in a city, because it had to have that anonymity to it, and have a lot of character. The city is a character, and grief is often taking to the streets just walking through the city at night. The city has a real strong identity to it and we shot some really beautiful scenes in Cardiff. I think it looks really beautiful.
How did you approach casting?
I actually wrote a lot of the parts for specific actors, because I knew what their skills were and they’re good at improvising and very warm, charismatic people. If you’re going to create a horrible character, you still want them to be very mesmerising and almost likeable on screen. I was interested in a spread of people who all had a similar skill set and very naturalistic performances, as well as people who could come in at the last minute and make the characters very three-dimensional, because there was very little time to develop them. When people came in I was blown away with what they did with the script – it was like they understood characters better than I did.
For them, it was quite interesting because most of them hadn’t seen the other scenes and were kept in the dark about it. When they went to the screenings for the first time, they understood what the project was by seeing the other people’s performances. I didn’t want people to be influenced by each other in terms of their tone – I wanted it to feel like individual little plays.
What was your approach to the colour palette?
I really, strongly didn’t want to use pastel colours and the old clichés of pregnancy. I wanted it to be vivid because I felt like something hormonal makes things seem quite vivid when you’re pregnant. Sometimes I had euphoria and everything seemed really bright and vivid, and I’d have very psychedelic dreams. I wanted all the imagery in the film to be vivid and powerful and strong.
There’s a noir feel to it, like you’re on the dark side of pregnancy, so there’s a lot of night scenes.
Along with that, I wanted a bright light in the dark, and for the underpass scene I really wanted bright colours to almost be like an assault. There’s a lot of dream-like psychedelic stuff in it as well, where we show you closeups of insects and reptiles, and I wanted to have this trippy feel of someone who’s going mad. Each character’s death has a colour as well, but we had no lighting whatsoever; all the lighting had to be preset, which meant choosing locations where the colour was already inherent in it.
We had some strokes of luck: I really wanted the first murder to be green, and luckily we found a green reptile shop and it was perfect. It shows what you can pull off on a low budget. Usually you hope for things like that and it doesn’t necessarily work out, and you have to let go. But that was the other good thing about filming in Cardiff: we found places I think other film makers might not have exploited yet.
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Prevenge is released on Fri 10 Feb. Info: www.facebook.com/prevengemovie