How do you feel about the state of British filmmaking, particularly when it comes to genre films?
I think it’s difficult, which is why genre films generally aren’t getting made. We kind of make “British films” and I’ve kind of been mocking it recently, but I think that we’re starting to expand our repertoire.
I’m a genre fan, and it’s not that I want to see mindless genre movies that take away from the artistic integrity of some of the great British films that we have done and consistently do, but I feel like it’s a business and you need to have things in the cinema that people want to go and watch. And there are genre fans and horror fans and sci-fi fans that don’t get enough stuff for them.
So hopefully this is something that horror fans, sci-fi fans, and people that generally want to see cooler films can all come together and watch.
You’ve done so many different things – you write, and you direct, and you act – what’s your main interest, would you say?
All of it, I can’t separate it! I love directing – I’ve done two films, obviously Adulthood and 4.3.2.1 – and I want to do more, but I want to do the right thing. I want it to be something completely different.
At one stage I was gonna do this, and then I thought, as a production company – you know, I have a production company, there’s only three of us, but – as a company, actually, if I give this to someone else and give [The Knot] to someone else, we could actually get two films done a year instead of me directing something where we do one film.
So that was a conscious decision that we made, that I would step back and do that. In the wedding film, I’m not even the lead: there’s Matthew McNulty and Talulah Riley, and then Mena Suvari and myself playing smaller parts. The idea is to hopefully have a company that is self-sustaining and has a bit of longevity. And sometimes I’ll direct, and sometimes I’ll play the lead, and sometimes we’ll do films that I’m not in at all and that I haven’t even written.
What do you think about the state of British genre cinema?