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| Binding Eva Photo: Frightfest |
One of the big discoveries at this year’s Frightfest, Binding Eva is a small film which has made an impression in part thanks to a brave central performance by rising star Ryan Ralph Gerrard. It follows his character, petty criminal Felix, as he tries to cross the Forest of Dean with two hostages: a mother (Catherine Deevy) and a seven-year-old girl (Darcey Wood). It’s the big screen feature début of director Conscian Morgan, who also produced. When I met the two men just before the festival, Conscian explained that he was involved from the outset, developing the script with his brother and then with writer Will Clempner.
“I wanted to make a forest horror. I do like a good forest horror, and I had a couple of scenes in my head: natural, organic, but with a rural kind of feel to them. Where the guy's wrestling his own kind of immoralness, I suppose. So that's where it came from. And then off the back of that, it was kind of thinking about ‘Okay, so what's the main conundrum at the end that you have to deal with?’ That's where I start, really, and then I work backwards and go ‘Okay, so I know what he's doing, within reason.’ Then I start thinking ‘Okay, so what's the setting?’ And then the characters and stuff.”
It’s a film which is highly dependent on the central performances. Did he have the cast in mind when writing?
“No, actually, I didn't,” he says. “It was supposed to be in Sweden. The intention was to shoot in Sweden where there are some really nice old forests. It's a great location for that kind of stuff; it's definitely old in its feeling, its DNA. Then the budget moved it to the UK. There was a lot of forests here in England, but I was in London at the time, so the easiest one would be the Epping Forest. And then I was like, ‘No, instead we’ll film in Scotland.’ So it was moving around in the UK at this point.”
This led him to realise that he had a lot of options as far as the character of Felix was concerned.
“I did initially feel that it would be someone a little older. In my mind, when I was writing, it was someone that had been through a lot in life. You can see between his eyes, life's taken its toll. But when Ryan read for it, he just stole it. Felix wasn't even meant to be Scottish. I was like, ‘How am I going to make this?’ And Ryan was like, ‘Right, let me take this away.’ He became the character and I can't think of it being anyone else now. He is Felix.”
“I think the first script I got, it was set in Dumfries and Galloway, so I was quite excited by that,” says Ryan. “But I did read the character as an older man, so I had that existential crisis in acting, thinking ‘Can I actually do this? Can I pull this off? Will people believe I am this age and I have a son and stuff?’ I'm not a dad for myself. The closest thing I've got to that is a little nephew who was two at the time of this production, so I decided to spend a lot of time with him and treat him as a son and see what that relationship was like, and boy, did I get paternal. It's the first time I've really had that kind of reaction with a child.
“To bring that into the film, it became a lot easier for me, and I did start to believe, actually, I can do this. I'm turning 30 next month, and I played him as a 30-year-old and I just tried to bring as much of me to the role as possible.
“Interestingly enough, this film didn't do an expansive backstory on this guy. Normally I would. The stuff I've done before is quite a lot of period stuff, so I have the internet for the knowledge and all the research. But with this from the start, like the audition process, I took the quite bold decision to change bits of the script that I got and add my Scottish flair to it. We discovered Felix as we shot, so I didn't come to work with this plethora of information about who this character was. Obviously there's the basics and a bit of the backstory, but were able to use a lot of improvisation techniques, and we spent the nights before scenes workshopping them and finding new bits. So Felix sort of developed the whole time we were filming. That was fun.”
Felix feels like somebody who lives very much in the moment. So did that approach help with creating that aspect of him?
“I think so. Because again, I didn't really know what was coming. You know, we might improvise something the night before that was definitely not in the script, so it always felt fresh. There was a real sense of fresh energy there each time we walked on set, and none of us really knew what we were going to say or do. It felt quite spontaneous a lot of the time.”
One always has to be spontaneous to an extent when working with a child. How did he and Darcey develop the chemistry that they needed?
“We lived in a house together right through production, so we did spend a lot of time together off set,” he explains. “That was really helpful just to get me and Darcey to know each other. Obviously Eva, in this film, doesn't really say much. There's reasons for that. So we had to find our dialogue, we had to find a language between us as Ryan and Darcey. You know, whether that be a look or how close were to each other, how to really get that across. And obviously with a child on set, the logistics of that are a nightmare.
“They have about five hours on set, so all the time she was there, the camera was focused on her and I'd have to remember what she did after she left. Then it would come back to me, so we'd face the camera on me. And I did find that quite challenging, acting with nobody a lot of the time, especially a lot of the emotional scenes she wasn't there for. Coming to terms with being as prepared as possible emotionally was very new for me.”
They weren't only working with a child. They were working with an animal as well. I ask Conscian about how the goat, Beautiful Bill, came into the film.
“When we were doing pre production, we knew we needed a goat,” he says. “We were saying ‘What can we compromise with? Is it going to be a sheep? How are we going to find a goat?’ But with all of the shoot, one of the really great things that we landed upon was a Facebook group called the Forest of Dean Noticeboard. There's like 50,000 people in there. It's a really strong community. They're all really engaged. We just struck up a relationship with the group and the admins, saying ‘Look, we're filming in the Forest of Dean. We need some things.’ And at one point it was we needed a goat. It was really surreal request.
“I didn't mention it was a horror film, but mentioned we needed a goat for a movie, and a lady called Poppy who has a vineyard nearby, she was like, ‘I've got one, and I'll be happy to have a talk with you about the film and understand what it's about.’ And he ended up being in it. It's unique. It's a unique goat. It wasn't the kind of normal goat I had in mind. In some ways it had its own spirit. It was really weird energy – hard to explain. But anyway, the point is that's how we stumbled upon the goat, and then we scheduled some shots, some on her land and some on the different locations. And he brings his own energy to it, his own personality, which is also very good. We gave him apples and stuff and made different types of food that we thought he would eat. It was great.”
So how did you manage the overall logistics? Were you sort of really close to the forest in the house where you were staying? Did you have to move through the forest much with your equipment?
“It was a bit of a mixed bag. In the Forest of Dean we got what's called the Corner House, and it really is just on the corner. So the majority of our shoot, maybe 40% or 50%, was out of the house, drive around the corner into the forest and then maybe a 15 or 20 minute trek and then we'd choose different locations so we were not seeing the same type of trees and stuff on the shoot. Haridas [Stewart, the cinematographer] has had a good eye for that. That was half of it and that made it easier having a location on set and for the nights and the days.
“The other half was harder. There were some locations that were in my heart so we would travel sometimes for 45 minutes to the location. Ryan was holding gear. All the actors and the crew were all holding stuff from that point. We had quite a long trek at the beginning which killed morale a little bit for an afternoon, and we ended up with pushing that to another day and coming back again. But it looked awesome. It was a great location. So it was a bit of a mixed bag. Some near the house, some having to journey deep within the forest. It was a bit of a David Attenborough documentary kind of feel, and trying to fight the weather and stuff.”
The other physically challenging thing in the film is its water scene. How did they go about setting those up?
“There's a pond that looks like a river next to the forest,” he says. “Initially we were going to shoot on the River Wye, but we had a location where we were shooting nearby, like a pond, river type thing. And I was like, ‘Ryan, I think we're going to be in here.’ It had all these willows with lily pads and stuff. And Ryan went for it. He jumped in, mud all on his face. It was crazy. So we stumbled upon that location, basically. It wasn't the original intention, and to be honest, it was a bit more safe.”
“I'm not great with water in general,” says Ryan, “but I just thought ‘I have to throw myself in the deep end here, literally, and just do this.’ It was cold. It wasn't a warm day and you're in this freezing cold water. But I think that really added to what the final product is. You know, we look freezing, we look distraught. Even just like carrying kit and stuff to set, it was a team effort. Everybody wore so many hats on this production.”
He turns to Conscian. “It's funny – you were talking about walking 45 minutes to a location. I didn't realise this until you were saying that, but we did need to think about the logistics of preserving energy for us as actors, because sometimes we would have to walk for an hour and then give this one big emotional scene and then walk all the way back before we had a 40 minute journey home. So there was a lot of prep and mental and physical exertion went into that, but I think it was worth it.”
Yeah. I mean, the other big challenge for you, I think, as an actor in this, is that right at the start, you know, you're sort of coming into this situation where you could be seen as a threat to a child and you're demanding control of the car and so on, but you have to make the audience care about your character right from the start. So what was your take on that and how to do that when you first started with that?
He nods. “I think as well, because we were adding this Scottish element, it's very natural to me to be quite mean. We bring this very sort of aggressive flair, don't we? Even the sound of our voices, we give that connotation. There were some times that improvised little bits that, you know, maybe came out a bit misogynistic, and Conscian was like, ‘No, we can't have the audience hate you straight off the bat.’ But with the child and stuff, it was interesting because obviously at the start of the film, without giving too many spoilers, I'm trying to do something for my own sake. Eva almost becomes an object to him at the start. He wants to ignore that she exists, really. Otherwise he is going to be quite paternal and take on that responsibility and he doesn't want to do it.”
Conscian remarks that he was really grateful for the range Ryan gave him across different takes, which made things easier in the edit. Ryan responds that he was pleased to be given enough time to do that.
“Everyone was so open to change,” he says, happily. “It could totally flip on his head, and we’d find these really brilliant new bits of energy. It was a special way to work. Definitely different.
“My core in this production was never to play horror. Even like right back at start with the audition. I didn't know that it was a horror film. I just took it at face value as being this drama. I was watching Happy Valley the night before. I love Sally Wainwright's writing. It's very conversational and natural, so I tried to give off that essence throughout the whole film. And because we got the improvisational aspect to this, it's made me want to apply that to every bit of work that I do going forward, even if I don't get the rehearsal time. I want to try and just make it feel that way.”
I mention that it seems particularly valuable because he’s playing a conflicted character.
“Yeah, absolutely. The heart of this film is quite ambiguous. There’s this moral ambiguity that people are going to leave thinking ‘Actually, this is a villain.’ Some people think he's a hero. I don't think he's either of those things. I think we have left it quite open. We're not spoon feeding the audience what happens and how he feels. This is really an ordinary guy you could pass on the street that just so happens to be in exceptional circumstances, and he has to make these big, bold decisions that if it was you or I, we might do the same thing. You know, you don't really know until you're in it.
“Obviously it's exaggerated because it's a supernatural horror, but I do think the bigger question stands. I could totally empathise with his choices and not once did I judge what he did. I think that is really important because if I judge it then I think the audience would see that I'm judging it and they’d judge it as well.”
Conscian is already busy with another project.
”I love a horror, but also I love sci fi and I'm a big fan of British sci fi,” he says. “I’m working on a new project which is basically a sci fi horror, a very contained Event Horizon kind of space where a group of people go into a location, and where the location becomes the antagonist. This is maybe a bigger canvas. We're working on that now and it's exciting stuff. So while I wait with nerves for Frightfest feedback, I will be punching away on my keyboard.”
Ryan doesn’t have anything else immediately lined up, but he’s excited by emerging opportunities.
“With this, I've reached out to a few casting directors that maybe haven't seen me before. I've made some brilliant connections with the fact that this has been platformed at Frightfest, so I'm doing some general meetings with them, having conversations and finally, for the first time in ten years, I'm being seen for some Scottish stuff. The last ten years has been just me being English people in different productions and I think this has really given me that leap pad to access my voice again and let people see me as Ryan, as a Scotsman. So I'm looking forward to more Scottish things.”
