Will Gilbey Interview (Director 'Jericho Ridge')

Our series (!) of interviews with (British) (up and coming) action movie directors continues with this delightful and insighful chat with Will Gilbey. He's written and edited loads of stuff but his directorial debut JERICHO RIDGE knocks it out of the park.

We got into the pros and cons of filming a movie in sub-zero temperatures, why using green screen sucks, how Gavin Rossdale features on the soundtrack and so much more...

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Well, I'm back with the pre-intro and you know what that means. It's gotta be a special episode. And you're damn right it is. We are back with another in our series, yes, it's a series now, of interviews with, brackets British, brackets up and coming, action movie directors. We scored an absolute doozy this time. I got to speak with Will Gilby. He is a guy who has written a whole bunch of movies. He's edited. a whole bunch of movies. He's won a BAFTA for editing that mad BROS documentary from a few years back. But this is his directorial debut of a movie he also wrote, but interestingly didn't edit. And as we'll get into later, a movie called Jericho Ridge, a super tense, dramatic, single location, siege action thriller. A British cast, a British director shot in in a small town American sheriff's department. Search this movie out wherever it may be on the big or small screen near you and definitely watch it before the interview. I mean, I would say that goes without saying. Also check out the previous episode where me and Joe Roberts got into depth about Jericho Ridge, the movie. So you will got to watch the movie. You got to listen to the pod. That's probably three hours. Then I'll meet you back here and we'll do an interview with Will Gilby. I'd say let's start that about now. Enjoy. I got you, man. I'm calling Theon of fighting without fighting. Stick around. Some motherfuckers are always trying to pass Skadoville. Dodge this. Will Gilby, director of Jericho Ridge, which as we listen to this is available to watch on screens large and small across the UK. Thank you so much for joining us. Simon, thanks so much for having me. This is very exciting. I'm going to get right into it. Watch Jericho Ridge just recently. Loved it. Thinks a smashing debut, if you will. Fantastic. takes a year or two to write, but your first takes your entire life up to that point. Is that how it feels to finally have a directorial debut feature? I mean, it does take a horrifyingly long time. I was just looking at the first draft of the script I think I wrote in 2017. Wow. We're now 2024. Obviously we got completely... killed by COVID and lockdown. But then I was, I've been trying to get a film made before this, another script, which I'm still trying to get made called No Great Beauty, which is like a really fun crime thriller, I guess. But it just, it sort of, it just went and went and went, didn't quite go anywhere. And then it was, I wrote Jericho Ridge and suddenly people with not very much money started responding to it very well. And so, but then it was obviously the process of, you know, trying to take it, hold onto it and, you know, marshal this whole thing through lockdown. We were supposed to go and shoot it in Canada. So we location scouted Winnipeg in Manitoba in, um, yeah, sort of November 2019, and then you start looking at the news going, is this, is this really going to happen? Is this, and then, you know, and then, yeah, I guess it happened to everyone though, so it's not like I can sort of, you know, claim that we were especially unjustly sort of served by this. It was a, you know, it was a added pressure, I guess, to everyone. So does that mean all the behind the scenes photos has everyone in a mask? Yes, exactly. I had to do the whole film in a mask. I mean, we were in, we were, we shot in, um, so we were sort of trying to explore where to shoot the film, where was going to open up first. We looked around the houses. We looked, we looked at everywhere. Um, literally that you could, you could film and we ended up settling in Kosovo. As you do. Well, I think we're one of them. I think we are the first international feature to shoot in Kosovo. And basically one of our producers. There's sort of three main producers on the project. One of them, Harvey Ascot, he's been going to Kosovo for the last 10, 12 years. Just building up sort of, I guess, contacts and meeting all the people who are good out there and figuring out how the whole place works. He's taken short films, commercials, music videos. He did it like an Oscar nominated short out there called Shock in 2016. Wow. But so he sort of knows everyone there. He knows all the good people to get. And it's obviously very budget friendly. I think now they actually have the tax break. They didn't when we shot out there. So I think film production is going to ramp up there sort of massively over the next five, 10 years, which is very cool. But yeah, so that's how we ended up doing it really. But yeah, like I said, it's a marathon. It feels like a marathon rather than a sprint. I mean, it really is. Yeah. People sort of assume that like, well, I've just, you know, I've just been waiting and waiting and then I thought now I'll direct my first feature. Yeah. But it's actually like this massive sort of contraption of things that need to slot into place. No one wants to give you a chance. No one seems to want to give you any money and everyone wants to, as soon as you've got the money, everyone wants to sort of somehow get in the way of it. There's all sorts of problems that go throughout. So yeah, it is a horrendously hard experience getting your first film over the line. I'm really hoping the second one comes a bit easier. Yeah, right. The difficult second album, so to speak. Yeah. Well, I've got a couple of things written and I'm hoping to get cracking. Well, I mean, fingers crossed off the back of this. I mean, you sort of, I often hear people who talk about screenwriting and stuff, saying write to a budget or write to your budget. And it feels like this film sort of really ticks a lot of boxes. I feel like you've very sort of shrewdly approached it in that way. Can you talk a bit about the writing process with regards to that? How do you make it affordable, sort of logistically manageable, but also come up with something? enjoyable gripping, exciting. Yeah, I guess, so I guess, you know, this is, I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying this is a mostly one location action thriller. It's set in and around a sheriff's office, a rural sheriff's office in America. And I guess the idea was to, you know, I've obviously edited a lot of first time film directors films. I must've done 10, 12, something like that. Some of them worked out great and some of them didn't. And like ambition is super important when you're trying to come up with a low budget film. But if you have too much you don't get to spend time creating stuff to the level that you need it to be to actually affect people. I've seen loads of people shoot low budget films with an 18 day shoot and have upwards of 50, 60 locations. The day might be you're hitting four locations, you're jumping into a van with all your kit with everyone. Inevitably the film crew gets fucking lost on the way there. You lose 20 minutes, you jump out of the van, you put the camera on your shoulder and you're shooting early 90s TV coverage. that's the best you can do. And then it's back. Whereas trying to be in one space, you know, you, you can, you can take the time to really, to live in it, to, to shoot it properly, to light it properly and actually hopefully try and turn that space into something that works. If you turn it into a pressure cooker and use the sort of use, yeah, use, use it almost like a, it's just a, a melt, a boiling pot, I guess. Yeah. I mean, that's the sort of perfect definition of this movie, isn't it? It's the pressure cooker. sort of analogy. That was the idea. Yeah. And I guess, yes, you are, I'm, you, I am writing to, I'm also trying to write stuff as a first time film director that I'm going to be able to do, or I think is in, within my wheelhouse, you know, I don't want to write, you know, a scene with five kids having a conversation because I don't have the confidence to necessarily direct five non-actors. You know, I want good actors. I don't, you know, I don't want to write animals into this or massive, well, we've got, we've got one small explosion. But you know that some things are beyond your grasp. Right, right. The scene with the donkey wranglers didn't make it in. Yeah, it made it to the sixth draft and then we cut it at the last minute. Next time. Absolutely. But I think it's interesting that you speak to sort of knowing your limitations or knowing the challenges that you want to face. You have written a lot of stuff in the past and a movie like A Lonely Place to Die is not the sort of movie that... Perhaps you would write as a first feature. You know, that seems like an incredibly challenging movie to film. Cliffs, weather, climbing. My brother loves it. Not for me. You know, a much more controlled environment. I prefer, like I said, especially first time out of the game. Where do you put the lights on a mountain? Exactly. Yeah. That's sort of scary stuff. Yeah. Well, it's sort of intriguing. I love to sort of... find out, you know, the kernels that start these ideas. And that one was so interesting that in the credits, you and your brother are credited as climbing doubles for a couple of the actors. Right, yes. Which sort of join the dots of like, why, what would inspire you to write a movie about Cl... Oh, oh, okay. No, we sort of wrote it and then my brother got obsessed with it and he sort of bullied me into going with him and doing all this stuff. I wouldn't say I have a terrible fear of heights, but I have a sort of... human sensible fear of heights. So I found a lot of that stuff pretty scary. But then after we shot the film, we just found that we didn't have a lot of glue to stitch together scenes. So we went up there. Do you remember the back in the days of the Canon 5D Mark 2? We have one of those and we went up there with a climbing guide. We put on the actors costumes and obviously actors are quite small and svelte. They're pretty skin tight on us. And then we sort of filmed ourselves sort of abseiling down the cliff. like lying backwards, all this sort of stuff, just to try and stitch together what we could do. That's extraordinary. Wow. Well, I mean, who, you know, I didn't, there wasn't a bit where I was like, that is, that's not Melissa George's legs. That's probably Will's legs. So I think, I think it's fair to say we didn't, um, we didn't double Melissa, but we, you know, everyone else, I think pretty much got doubled. Incredible. And so I suppose, um, to, to spiral off that, you know, the yours or your brother's interests in mountains and climbing. You'd be like, oh, why don't we write something around that? How do you get from that and a kind of list of very British movies to thinking, I'm going to set this movie in the Pacific Northwest in a sheriff's office? Something I probably, maybe you do, probably don't have a lot of first-hand experience of. No. I think, so the first thing is I never said where this was set and then someone seized on it early. I sort of basically agreed on the Pacific Northwest just because the landscape kind of matched where we were going to shoot in Kosovo and there was like a unity of accents. So all our actors could come in and essentially be approximating the same kind of accent and sort of Northwest, it's quite in England, what you call that general American. It's not like a super strong accent. So like, especially if you've got a British cast who are mostly uniformly excellent at playing Americans. But I sort of think if you, if you go Southern, everyone goes a bit too hard. If you go East coast, Boston, you're fucked basically. Like no one can do Boston except people from Boston, seemingly. New York, everybody's doing the surprise. So I wanted to find something that people could do effectively. And I wanted to find really, it's just space in America. Um, and I, and sort of doing research about sheriffs, deputies and stuff in those sort of far flung parts of America and how far you are away from backup and how, you know, I read a story about a guy getting in a gunfight, hiding behind a car. having to call up his other deputy for backup who was in bed half an hour away, who then has to get out of bed, get dressed, get in the car, drive there. And it's just this whole, in England we'd have someone there within five minutes just because we're more compact and much more sort of overpopulated. It's extraordinary. I spoke to another British director recently, James Nunn, and I was trying to sort of get this. I know James, he's great. Yeah, great lad. And he also made a movie with a British cast. in Malta that was set in the US on like spring break. And it just kind of, I can't quite sort of get by what my thought or point across is, but it's such a unique thing that as a British director, cast, like all these things can come together and we can, we're sort of allowed to do America in that way. I think the reverse would be an unmitigated disaster. Okay. You know, if you got, if you get 12 Americans doing English. I think you'll get one or two, you can probably do it. Like the only, I was trying to think of like the best Americans doing English accent film ever. And it's to my mind, it's spinal tap. Oh, nice. Yes. Very solid. They're all flawless and they're all, but they're also, they're all improvising, which means they're not, you know, they're not able to learn everything like phonetically through an accent coach. But I mean, that was, when was that? Eighties? Eighties. Yeah. I'm going to just, early eighties. Before both of us were born, almost certainly well. Oh yeah. Right. No, sadly, that's not quite true. But you're right. It does sort of, that door kind of swings one way. I guess there's more demand for British actors to do American. But you know, there's, there's much more work, you know, there's a lot more work in America. So, you know, as an English actor, if you want to work regularly, there's obviously loads of great stuff over here. But if you don't have an American accent, you're going to be massively hamstrung by that. Yeah. I, you know, the, the pond is bigger. The pool is bigger. I know. The pool. Across the pond. Yeah, absolutely. Will, while I flounder, I think it's time that I bring in a guest. On the previous episode of the podcast, we spoke about your movie Jericho Ridge in depth. And when I say we, myself and each episode, I have a different guest. This time it was my friend and fellow British filmmaker, Joe Roberts, Peacock season two, BBC three this summer. He, uh, he had some questions also, and I recorded them out of his mouth as he said them. And if I may, I'm going to play in the first of them for you now. Fantastic. Hello, Will. Uh, it's Joe Roberts here. Um, I hope you're well. Um, how, how's, what have you been up to? What are you doing? I know what you've been up to. Just watched it and it was fantastic. I have a question regarding it, that it being the film, Jericho Ridge, with your background as an editor and having worked. a lot with other people's footage, how do you think your editing knowledge changed or modified how you worked as a director and as a writer during the scripting and pre-production stages? Did that sound like I read it? Because it felt quite red when I was reading it. That's also another question for you. Do you think that sounded red? Anyway, all the best. Congratulations again. Fantastic film. Thank you. Joe Roberts there. Keeping it brief. Hi Joe. Thanks Joe. No, I think that felt very off the cuff, very spontaneous. You know, so I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Yes. I think it massively plays a part. So in terms of editing, it comes into the script writing. It's a 90 page script. Anytime in draft it started to swell above that. I started to panic and started trimming fat. I don't want, didn't want it to go. I knew we'd have a limited amount of days to shoot this. So I wanted to focus on I didn't want to spend a week shooting stuff we're not going to use, which I've definitely done that before in the past. I worked on films where you just shoot loads of stuff and get cut. I think it's time to kill your babies at the outset. And that comes from editing and having been in the edit suite when you write a two page scene, dialogue scene with actors, it's five minutes suddenly. And then you stack all those things together and your film is so long, you want to cry. So that definitely comes in. And you know, sort of transitions between scenes and stuff like that. I'm always thinking of the cut. there. Whereas a lot of times when you're working with first time directors, there's nothing that it's just interior, interior. And there's no thought really between. So you sort of have, you have to build that out in the edit and you have to find stuff and you have to start using shots to bridge scenes. So I worked with an editor on this, which I never thought I'd do a Sarah Pesciak who was brilliant. I never thought I'd want to edit my own. I thought I'd want to edit my own. Of course. Yeah. So I thought she came out to Kosovo for a bit and she was assembly editing. And I thought I'd come back to London. I'll let her finish her assembly and I'll take over. But sort of as soon as I started working with her, I was like, no, she's, you know, she's great. Like on paper, I probably got more editing credits in her. I've definitely done sort of more action, but she comes at it with a totally different mindset. She's really creative. She's incredibly fast, very technical. Just came up with just, you know, when someone starts coming up with ideas, you're like, I never would have thought that in a million years and I know I wouldn't. Yeah. I'm like, this is brilliant. And also a first time filmmaker. You're either of the, you're either one of those people who everything is amazing. Or if you're like me, you're like, Jesus, everything's terrible. This is horrific. So you need another pair of eyes. So you're either, it's either 12 hours long or it's two seconds long. Mine would have been too. So having another, you know, you're kind of going crazy as well. And I didn't want to be on my own in a room for 12 weeks, going a little bit mad. So it was genuinely awesome. She's a great collaborator, but the other thing, also, I'm going back to the question We shot maybe five or six setups maximum that aren't in the film. Oh, wow. So I'm quite conscious of what I need to make a scene work. I'm very conscious of what I don't need and what I don't need to waste time filming because, you know, in a film such as this time is, you know, the most valuable thing you have really. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so thanks Joe. Great question. Great off the cuff question. I'll let him know Peacock BBC U3 this summer. I'll look out for it. It's interesting. The role of the editor can be sort of, I mean, it's obviously plays a huge part in any movie, but sometimes it's like you're there from the beginning and sometimes you're kind of the hired gun at the end, right? Who's kind of dumped all the footage and you've edited a lot of movies of varying quality, shall we say? I mean, absolutely. Yeah. That you haven't necessarily written or been so creatively involved with. But. But sort of, are there lessons to be learned from those, for want of a better phrase, turd polishing exercises? Well, I always like to think of it as lacquering, you know, or just pouring glitter on. Right. Because, you know, when you get the polish out, it tends to come apart. But you know, I did, I did used to specifically get, there's a couple of production companies or distribution companies that used to bring me in just to recut films that were sort of in trouble. And yeah, you do. And it is a really useful learning experience because you can also think about editing. When someone does something really good, you can be like, Oh Christ, you know, okay. That it's a, it's a great opportunity to see what works and what doesn't, you know, right up close. Um, and yeah, I've absolutely held onto as many of those lessons, you know, talking to you, you know, it's transitions, it's keeping things focused. It's trying to keep your script as, uh, as short and as essential as possible so that you're not wasting. valuable, valuable time that because as soon as you start deleting scenes and having to pull lines and stuff like that, then you're sort of unpicking a thread and depending on the intricacy of your script, like things can start falling apart and then you don't have to do reshoots. You can't afford to do reshoots. So we're going to have to do some shitty ADR lines on someone's back. Yeah. You know, to stitch together plot issues, which no one enjoys. No. And there are, you know, and there are numerous sort of setups and payoffs that work very neatly in this movie. And it's a very lean. sub 90 minutes. And so, you know, anything you say that comes out of there, the house of cards starts sort of wobbling a little bit. Yeah, totally. It's quite intricate and there's nothing in there that isn't doing one or two things. You know, everything's setting something else up. It's paying off a little character. It's teaching us something about this. It's something that's going to come in later. And that's just the sort of nature, I think, of such a contained story. Yeah. Well, let's get into my nerdy questions about the movie making process. In my head, the sort of pre-production of this movie involved like a tiny cardboard model of the sheriff's office, like a Cluedo board with you moving Lego pieces around to block everything. Is that reflective of the actual process in some way? Well, I did the first thing I did, I guess because again, this is this one location thing. The first thing I did when I wrote the script is I drew a floor plan because you can't, there's only like, you know, there's the front office, there's the corridor, there's the cell and there's the vault, there's the side door and there's the exterior. So you need to understand, I needed to understand how it worked so that I could plot people through it. And that changed a little bit, but yeah, like roughly that's, you know, that's how I did it. And then the great thing, another great thing about going to shoot in Kosovo is although we had less money to spend shooting there than we might have done going somewhere else, we had more days and we got to build our sheriff's office. So looking at other countries, we were looking to adapt an existing structure. It was a gas station in Canada, which would look really cool and would have been lovely, but looking at it now, it was an hour out of town and we would have gotten there. Everything feels small. You build this, you were inside some issues, you get a film crew, you get lights, you get people, you get actors in everything. So you get the dolly in there. Everything just seems tiny. So we built the Sheriff's office bigger than we thought it would need it to be. But we only had in the end, just because of life and low budget filmmaking joy, we only had three weeks of prep. So, I mean, it was incredibly accelerated. I mean, this thing was, this set was going up. know, literally almost around us as we were filming it. And am I right in thinking that the front part of the sheriff's office is attached to the exterior in that you can go through the front door and you're in the office and then the cells are in a stage? You say a stage, it was a warehouse. But yeah, so that, the front room was there. I always wanted to be able to see out the windows. There were people, certain. no people who actually were involved in the making of the film. But when we went out to other people beforehand trying to source finance, there were people who were like, Oh, can we have green screens on the window? Or can you rewrite the script so that no one ever looks out? I just thought, no, that would be, I mean, you know, you can watch $250 million thumbs in the green screen and look shite. Or you can go back and watch lonely place to die, which is some of the best green screen work out. Where is the green screen in that? All when she's falling down, when you're looking down the mountains, it's all, it's all. There's a, there's a really cool little bit on the making of, probably on the blue of the DVD. Um, I might post that on Twitter. It's a really, it's really good. The people that did that think it was Molinere back in the day, but they just didn't. Amazing. And you can watch, you know, a Marvel film and someone's just stood by a window and you're like, that doesn't work. Yeah. Obviously there's loads of great Marvel TG. I'm not snagging them or picking them out individually, but anyway, I just didn't want, I wanted to be able to look out the windows and see danger. I wanted that. You know, and it, you know, it was painful because it was incredibly cold. Yeah. Um, it started snowing and then the snow melted and so we had to, I guess, paint a lot of shots snow into, and then the first day we got out there, there's a lot of wild dogs in Kosovo in a cool way. Right. Well, I live in, I live in Mumbai now, so wild dogs are suddenly part of my life. In no other country I've ever been to. Um, they're like community dogs. They, they're well cared for. They seem well fed. There's no dog shit anywhere. Wow. So if you go out for a night out in Pristina, as you're walking home to your hotel, you and your buddies will pick up like a crew of five dogs. Dog friends. Yeah, and they'll, exactly, they'll be your buddies, they'll walk home with you. Love that. But they also, we're filming the main part in this little national park called Germia. As soon as we get there, you start filming and you hear woof, woof. And there's obviously stray wild dogs that live around there and just spend the whole night running around barking. And after sort of one night, I was like, we're, we're fucked. This isn't going to work. And eventually we had to send out a production assistance into the woods with head torches on to track down the dogs, make friends with them, and then essentially bring them back into a warm tent and feed them and to stop driving us completely crazy. Because obviously, you know, the set's been built. It's got no insulation. We keep blowing out the windows and smashing it to pieces. So you sort of had a dog pied piper team, basically. Yeah, we did totally. And they were really sweet dogs, but once they start barking, you know, you it's, you know, time is time is money. Those are things you just don't think about. God, no, you really don't. And then suddenly you're losing, you're losing an hour because of dog barking. And it's crazy that we've got that sorted out. And then obviously like, again, it's very cold. So there's a couple of scenes where Nikki, who plays the Nikki Mukabird, who plays the lead character, Tabby Temple, you can see. You can actually see her breath when she's inside and it's supposed to be the windows are closed at this point, the doors, but it was just, it was really cold. Oof. It's interesting you mentioned that it snowed and you know, that is something that you can't really control. I want to sort of talk briefly about like the VFX in this movie, because it doesn't feel like a VFX heavy movie or a movie that you would think, you know, has quote unquote any VFX in it. But, and I think it's a huge compliment to the department. that handled all of those. But am I right in thinking there's around 200 VFX shots in this movie? More, like 330, 340. So really what it is, is it's snow painting. So there's loads of shots we had to put snow into, which is done brilliantly. Like, um, if we'd had more money, I would have gone in and put more snow, like, you know, more snow on all sorts of stuff. But, um, and the other is like screen replacement. So when they're looking at the security cameras and that's all has to be done afterwards. because trying to organize that live on set in a way that's going to work would have just been totally impossible. So it's, it is kind of invisible. You know, we don't have any dragons or CGI animals or like three, but so there's nothing, there's a couple of muzzle flashes and a few fixes obviously. But that's pretty much. But it sounds like you didn't have to do the thing where you put in the fake cold breath for people at any point. If anything, you would have had to remove that. No, no, God, no, we really didn't. It was, I mean, we had a, you know, we had one of our actors out. It was minus 12 we were shooting. It was the one night we had second unit and they were shooting down by a lake, which was minus 16. We had one actor out in bare feet. He's rousted out of his home in the dark. Story reasons, you'll find out when you watch it. And he, I mean, he did not complain once and was an absolute trooper about it. But you know, it is, I mean, it was uniquely breezy. You know, you're wearing two pairs of tights, trousers, three pairs of socks, you know, and obviously the cast are out there in between takes. shirts. Yeah. You know, it's they who probably suffer the most. It's nothing but glamour moviemaking. That's if I've learned anything. I know. Yeah. And it was obviously, it was mostly night shoots as well. Yeah. You know, which, yeah. Well, another unique challenge to the body and mind after a couple of days. Yes, it is. I quite like them in the end, but yeah, it is, it is, it is tough. Yeah. One of the, one of the VFX things that stood out to me and it felt like a real maybe you are, maybe you're not, but a real action movie fan thing was that all of the bullets are sort of those tracer fire. Tracer fire. I sort of built that into the script because the whole point was a lot of this film, you're with Tabby, Nikki Mukabur's character. She's the only point of view character in the film. So you can never bounce out. I don't know, I set this sort of challenge for myself at the beginning. I'm going to be with her in every scene and you never really see anything she can't see. So we're always going to be with her. We're never going to sort of jump outside and have the baddies going, well, hang on a second. If I sneak around the back, I can do. So how it was sort of trying to show where that's coming from and give a little bit of geography and orientation as to where they were. And also it looks cool. It does just look cool, doesn't it? It just looks cool. Who does it? So going, I mean, going on, I can, if you've got to, if you're bored, go onto YouTube and just watch Americans firing tracer ammunition into the darkness. It's great. I think it's like, when I see things like that, I'm put in mind of sort of Michael Mann's. odd sort of borderline pornographic sort of gun fixation, attention to detail, but stuff in his movies where you're like, geez, guns are, they're like, so they're cool to look at, but they're also pretty terrifying, right? Like it's such a thin line, you know? Totally. Yeah. Well, I'm not, yeah. I mean, I've done enough sort of action films to be, I mean, the stuff you Google as well for this, like I'm always looking up things like bank government watch list across the globe. 100%. This call is definitely being monitored. They're listening to this 100% NSAL all over this shit. Extraordinary. I think you did, I think, you know, I hate to keep saying for a first time director because as we know, you have pointed cameras at things and been in charge of other stuff and been a second unit dog's body, The Guardian. Yes, very much so. It's on my business card now. That's so perfect. You did a great job with the action set pieces in this. And I think, you know, editing experience must play into that enormously in terms of sort of geography and rhythm when it comes to the action. But like, who else did you work with putting that together, the action design and how hands-on were you with that? Very, we had a very cool stunt coordinator from Bulgaria called TC. Um, he, it was supposed to be someone else. He was his boss, I think he was supposed to stunt coordinator, but he got COVID. So TC came over and did a lot of work with Nikki on like sort of gun drills, stuff like that. We've got all our actors to go to the, there's a shooting range in Kosovo. So we went there. Um, there's one range we went to him to look at guns. And as we walked in, they have like a bar with like a beer tap and stuff. And I, what, what better mixture can you possibly have than lager and fire? What could possibly go wrong? But, um, But you couldn't get like, they were very stringent actually in Kosovo about a lot of things to do with guns. They've got, you can go and shoot guns in a range, but you can't own people. Yeah. Anything apart from that, they're actually, they're not very cool with. But, you know, so I was obviously very designed in that. I'm really a big fan of geography in action as much as possible. You know, you want to get to the emotion of it. You want to connect it to character and you just, you want to see what's happening and understand where everyone is. I think a lot, you know, you know, action definitely took a... I died for a few years when it came to over cutting and you know, as people would call shaky cam or whatever isn't usually shaky cam. I guarantee you, if you gave me the footage that was shot on that, I could pull a much more cleaner, possibly better edit out of it, but I guess it was just a style for a time and I don't really think the born years. I don't think anyone enjoyed it. I'm looking back. But I think, you know, for me, it's geography character and stuff like that. It's super important. Yeah. Speaking of geography and that kind of thing, were the dash cams and the security cams, was that all written from the start or did that kind of get built in later as a way to expand the world? No, it was quite early. I think at doing the first draft, I was like, uh, Emma, I'm going to, she's going to be calling people a lot. And it was sort of first, that first major scene where, uh, the two, the sheriff and the chief deputy go to Arnie Boo's cabin and that scene. I was like, this is going to be about eight or nine pages. I just doing it over the phone, you know, it's worked really well in the guilty, uh, which is like a Danish film, which Antoine Fuqua remade. Oh, it's fantastic. It's all set in like a sort of essentially a nine one one, someone responding to an emergency call. Oh, that's right. Yes. And it's really good. Jillon Hall. So yeah, yeah. He was in the American remake. Yeah. But I just thought this is a lot of, a lot of dialogue over the phone. And I just thought seeing that would be so important. And as soon as you start writing, oh, dash cam, oh, but everyone can have a dash cam. Right. Why the fuck not? You know? So, but so that came in, that was came in pretty early. That was right there in the first draft. It's also a nice kind of low budget way to have more locations to, you know, expand the world while still ostensibly not spending a day driving. And it was all to do with the POV thing of her character as well. That was the only way she can see. outside the sheriff's office. So I needed to have something like that for her to be able to see what the hell was going on. My other tiny question about a small part of the cog in the movie is, was she always going to be injured? Was that a sort of product of having a small place for her to move around or did you want the odds even more stacked against her? Yes. That was one of the, I think one of the first things. It was a broken leg, but became a broken ankle. Um, some people were totally into that and got it. Yeah. It's about putting her on the back foot as much as possible. And then the sort of the reason for her broken leg paying off a bit later, but, uh, some people tried to, some people were really on board with it. A couple of people tried to talk me out of it, but I think it was really cool. I think it works having a, just, you know, a bit, a bit more impaired, a bit harder, a bit more on the back foot, so to speak. Um, so that, yeah, that was baked right into the original draft. The car, we haven't talked about the costs. I mean, there's an action movie podcast. So, you know, much more attuned to going, oh, the tracer fire looked so good. They should have the tracer fire category. The stunt Oscar feels so close, right? It does. It's essential. It's got to happen. Surely. In the next year or two, for sure. It's mad if it doesn't. It's ridiculous. We hope so. Then finally we can do an Oscar's edition and we don't just have to be like, the explosion in Oppenheimer was quite good. I'm there for it, geez. The cast are great and sort of having been out of the UK for a while, I kind of, I was like, oh, there's a lot of, where do I know them from? It's that beautiful bit of like IMDb-ing during the movie. Was there ever in the sort of production or the sort of fundraising stages, were there people? who wanted, you know, quote unquote names or somebody with more sales appeal. Can we put Steven Seagal in it? Yes. So, okay, no Seagal, he was sadly never actually quite half of it. He was probably available. He would have loved to sit in a chair for that 90 minutes. He wasn't on our list, but at one point for a time we did explore doing this film at a higher budget level with a lead actor who could, you know, you could pre-sale, you could sell against and all that sort of stuff. And that as we sort of came out of lockdown and everyone in the world tried to go into production, money is getting thrown around, schedules are getting busy, you know, so, and it just, it was like, this is just, it's not going to happen. So we took the money we had already had been raised for the film and we committed to doing it in Kosovo with the best actors we could humanly afford. And Nikki was absolutely the top of that list and sort of, yeah, I was incredibly lucky to have got her. And having said that, she was better than, you know, as good as I could have hoped, better than I could have hoped. Really, really anchors this and leads it from the front and elevates this film massively with her performance. 100%. And like another reason I'm going to, you know, give her another compliment is that no one thought, or maybe we couldn't afford to, because obviously a lot of cameras, there's a lot of dialogue off camera. She's on the radio, she's on the phone, she's chatting to people outdoors. There's a, what we really probably needed there was an actor. could have read off with her, which we didn't have. So there's me doing like eight page passes with her. I'm playing three characters, all with differing American accents, some female. So she's managing to respond to me, ignore how fucking terrible I am. Sorry, can I swear? Yes, of course. Please. When it comes to my acting, I feel like I kind of have to. When she's able to do all this opposite me, so all this stuff when she's responding to run off screen, that's her doing it to me, That's impressive. Wow. Release the onset recordings is what the fans are going to say. We want to hear the Gilby cut. Yeah. It's not great, but that's another. So, so she was honestly way better than I could have, could have hoped for. And I think, you know, the whole cast were really cool. Yeah. I think she's. extraordinary in this. Some of it was quite last minute, but she, but she really anchors it and I don't know, it was great to get Michael Soccer in there, you know, Chris Riley, Simon Solly, I guess it's some up and comers like Zach Morris and Solie McLeod who are going to, I think going to go absolutely, I think they'll go, you know, they'll have great careers, lovely, lovely people. And it was just one of those nice ones as well, especially if you're doing a first time, if you're a first time director to work with a cast and you've been working in the industry for a while, you've absolutely worked with your share of difficult people and people who just, they're kind of like, they ruin it and I didn't get any of those people. Everyone was uniformly really, really cool. Fun to work with into the project. They got the project. It wasn't about, Oh Christ, my Winnebago's not because there were no Winnebago's in the Vulcans. They were like, one of my toes has snapped off Will. Yeah. I think Simon who plays Sheriff Fetty, I think he was on set with one of the producers shooting was, I can't feel my hands. He's holding a gun. And he's just like, we've got, you know, but it was pretty savage. We've got to go to the bar at the shooting range. I couldn't have been happier with them. Um, I think they were great. Yeah. I think it's a, it's a really great ensemble. And it is, it's such a great sort of collection of, again, not in a sort of detrimental way, but great character actors just do everybody. No matter how big the part just commits and delivers exactly what's needed. And, uh, yeah. And Nikki Mukabird, you know, really it's, it's her, it's her movie and she. elevates the, what is a great genre movie with a great performance. Absolutely. Yeah. Cause a lot of these phones, I guess, are anchored by actors who are more sort of action orientated. They might be ex-marshall, whatever. And a lot of them are fantastic and really good, but it's not quite up there with us. A proper RSC trained, a hundred percent. Yeah. Absolute professional who's going to bring such, you know, so I don't know. I think that's, I think you did pretty well. Snagging her. Yeah. I think we got super lucky. It feels like in terms of the set, the two, I suppose the two sets, the physical sheriff's set that was in the forest and the other one that was around the corner in the dirty warehouse or wherever you built that, you sort of rang every, everything you could out of those three, four rooms. You know, you shot in every corner from every angle, the lighting sort of changed. jail corridor went from that kind of stark fluorescence to the lights got shot down and then it becomes almost like a horror kind of vibe. That was my DOP Rory's idea. It's a great one. But also the thing is, you know, we're trying to do, if you're in one space for 87 minutes, as this turns out, you, which we're consciously trying to vary as much as possible. So you see it in daylights with the lights on, you see it sunset, you see it evening with the lights on, then the lights are off and you've got practicals going on. you start smashing the place to pieces. And so we're, you know, we don't want people to get bored and we want to keep the look as varied as possible. So we're always trying to find interesting ways. Yeah. I mean, there's the scene where Tabby is sort of having the heart to heart with her son and he's on the floor between a desk and she's in just a chair, but you know, the lights kind of half across his face and it just, it, again, I just think it's that sort of DOP gaffering that what one might expect from a genre piece. Totally. Well, I think we got really lucky. Rory O'Brien was the DOP in this. He's a very talented Irish director of photography. He's, he's done a couple of features, but he's done a lot of big budget telly. He did like the fall, he did line of duty, he did vigil. So he's coming from, you know, he's got incredible pedigree and he immediately got what this was. It's not like, oh, you've got eight lighting trucks, you know, and this sort of stuff is basically the, here's what you've got, can you make it work? And he was just. He's a great collaborator and a great guy to have on set. Just a really good personality and very, very talented. And it's like his handheld operating is, he must be in the top 20 people in the world at it. He's just very, very intuitive and very, very good at it. So very, very good pair of hands. Yeah. But yeah, again, massively elevates it. Having, having, it's like a an artist and a craftsman of that calibre attached. It just helps so much. Yeah. I mean, I think the sort of Venn diagram overlap of fixed set that you can have the time to light and shoot nicely and, you know, a great DOP just, you know, it makes it look like X plus $10 million. Yeah, which it ain't. All right, well, I've taken up so much of your time. I would love to, if you've got a few minutes left, go for a quick fire round. Okay, I'm terrible off the... Yeah, okay. I'll see how my brain copes. Let's go. Okay, I'm going to play in some music that will distract and annoy you as I bark these questions if you don't mind. Here we go. Love it. Let's go. Will, how good is your American accent? Uh, it's... actually he's knocked that out of the park straight away. Here we go. Question number two. What's your favorite action movie in recent memory? I was going to say Hardboiled but then you say recent memory. I love that Hardboiled got in there early. I'll take anything from after 2000. Okay I'll give you The Raid and it's an obvious one but it's just so much fun. I just bought it on 4k so we finally got back to it and just cleaned it up with a new color grade. Yeah it looks fantastic and you just sort of I hadn't watched it in five six years I'm like Yeah, this is just super, super impressive. Love that. Um, what am I trying to think of anything smaller that I've seen recently, but, uh, yeah, I'm going to go with that for now. I'm sure I could think of something cooler. Two absolutely fully acceptable answers. Two classic movies there. And the wild bunch of, we're going to go back far enough. Oh yeah, love that. Love a bit of Peck and Pyron there. We didn't mention Rio Bravo. That's sort of feels like a touch point that we should have come across. This is my, like, everyone obviously brings up Assault on Precinct 13 when you do this discussion. It's a siege thriller. My argument is... Okay. That was 1976. We can have another film of people besieging a police station. They can be the only one. And also, like, it's probably closer to, you know, it's a loose reimagining of Rio Bravo. So much so to the point where John Carpenter does the commentary on the Rio Bravo Blu-ray. Wow! But I reckon that's closer to Rio Bravo time-wise than we are to Assault and Precinct 13. So I figure, you know... So Carpenter should get a bit more flat, is what you're saying. No, no, I'm actually a fan. I don't want to get on that radio. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Carpenter, you got a lot to answer for, old man. Right, so it's meant to be a quickfire round. I'm so sorry. That wasn't quick enough. As a man of a certain age, I immediately recognised the voice of Gavin Rosedale from Bush on the soundtrack of this movie, singing over the credits. How did that come about? I really just want your answer to be, I'm a huge fan of Bush and I was like, get Rosedale. Well, you know, he is super cool, obviously, but he wouldn't have done a song for us in a million years because, you know, he's a huge... One of our producers, Alex Tate, is lifelong friends with Gavin. They've been buddies, I think, since they were teenagers. And they've sort of seen it all together, done it all together. And he was like, early on, there was a scene that got deleted where I needed an original song for someone to play and sing. And he was like, Gavin, can you do this for us? And Gavin was like, yeah, of course. He was like, yeah. And we spoke to him on Zoom and he was like, wow, I said, thanks so much for doing it for us. He says, I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it for Alex. So he did that for us, which is just super cool. If you think that John Wick 3. ends with a Bush, Gavin Rustale track. I think we're in good hands to also be finishing up with him. So that was Alex Tate's personal relationship with him. But what an absolute trooper. Super kind of him to do it. Amazing. And it's a great piece of music. It's a really cool piece, really cool track to go out on. Love the... Mr. Trigger Finger. It's cool. The baggy, trousered, studded belt teenager in me was over the moon. Over the moon to hear that. Nice. Only two questions left in the quick fire round, Will. How many different names did the town have before you landed on Jericho Ridge? Oh, that was quite early on. I think I had a couple of ones which had gun in it. I looked up, I actually looked up a town. It's literally almost as shit as like Gunchester or something. And I said to my wife, what do you think of this? And she said, that's the worst I've ever heard in my life. And I was like, you know what? You're not wrong. Oof. And I don't know, Jericho Ridge should have came out of somewhere and then someone's like, oh wow, is that because of the walls of Jericho coming down? I was like, no, but I'll take it, absolutely. And we've since found out there's a religious community called Jericho Ridge that's also on Twitter. So, you know, if you search Jericho Ridge, half your hits will be for the film, another half will be for a small... Yeah, well, do you know, what can you do? Or publicity. Unless there's some kind of standoff with the FBI, you're probably fine. Even then that'll float it to the top of the search results. I think they seem pretty chilled. I don't know, so don't quote me. There's two more questions. The final one circles back around slightly to something we touched on earlier, which is how do you know so much about guns, Will? Just because they're great. No, because just shooting films, you just start picking stuff up. You know, when we were kids running around as teenagers. In the woods, it was like, how do we get guns? How do we make it like guns are firing? How do we make it like our friends get shot? And so you start to pick up weird tips and clues and bits of information. And then remember the call is being recorded. That's that'll do that. We've got it. We've got everything we need. I met someone who was a gun designer, like why he's as a hobby. He builds his own guns and he machines his own guns. And I was like, you know, I started asking him questions like, so what's your daily carry? And he was like, blah, blah. And then I'd be like, and where do you wear it? And he stops just because. You asked the best question. Wow. I was like, hell yeah. He's a good person to be friends with. It's just, yeah, it's a load of weird information I've picked up along the way. And it does come in handy for filmmaking. Right, right, right. Not personal issues. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to be very clear about that. Very clear. Okay, the final quickfire question comes from our good friend Joe Roberts. He had a very wordy question earlier on. This one, we hope, is slightly shorter. What's your favourite C's movie? Favorite Siege movie? It's probably got to be Assault on Precinct 13, hasn't it? Unless I can think of anything else off the top of my head. What are some Siege films? Well, he brought up From Dusk Till Dawn. That was one I hadn't thought of. Very good. Interesting thought. Very cool. I guess it's quite like half because the Siege starts halfway in there, doesn't it? And we're literally right at the center at the beginning as well. So like in terms of, I mean, we don't have, we don't sort of, you know, switch from crazy vampire action film. Maybe we should have. But I'm trying to think, off the top of my head, what are some of the movies? Cork Shop. That was another recent one, wasn't it? That was a film I watched, I enjoyed it, but as we were developing this, there's always what it does matter what you're doing. Someone seems to be doing the exact same thing or something that sounds similar and it gives you sleepless nights for weeks, months, whatever, and then it comes out and it's completely different. But there is a thing, it doesn't matter what you're doing. someone seems to be out there creating something that looks worryingly similar. It's really scary and genuinely, genuinely frightening. But then it turns out to be totally different. And I think 90% of the time, 90% of people haven't seen the other thing that you're worried about. So they only see your thing. Or haven't connected it. Exactly. Yeah. So I'm going to go with Assault and Prison 13. Just if I gave it a good thing, I don't know. But that is a great movie. No, we'll take it. And we managed not to bring it up for the entire interview. So. If anyone should please have it be in your hands. Well, that brings us to the end of the incredibly tense quick fire round. That was not... You were saying it was so tense. Yeah. It was so not quick. Really, there are two things left to ask is now that this one's sort of done and dusted in the can on the screens, watchable by most people. What are your takeaways? What are the lessons that you learned from this one that you will take to the next one? Um, again, it's working with great actors. Uh, just really, um, I just, I would like a little bit more time and money next time, if we can arrange that. That would be lovely just cause I'd like to expand out, um, as much as possible. So I've got, there's a couple of scripts, um, I finished which I'm really keen to go with. Um, but yeah, so many, so many lessons. Uh, I guess it's just working with the right people, um, as much as possible. And cast, you know, a cast. seem to do so much of the work for, I think it's about 80% casting this. Um, it really does feel like that when you're on set, it just makes life so much easier when, cause I've been in the edit so many times on other films where you're trying to often create or correct performances in the edit and it can be done. And I've done it many, many times with the old glitter. Um, but it's, it's not where you want to be really ideally. So to have a really good cast, I think is just, it does so much of the work for you. It makes you a dialogue. sound a hundred times better than it is. And it just, things like that, you know, having a really good DOP, obviously it seems obvious, but if you have someone who's really, really good at it, you know, it just, it makes all the difference. Yeah. Ostensibly collaborating and working with great people from top to bottom. It helps. It helps. You can't do all this on your own. It's impossible. And you sort of, you mentioned a couple of things, but is there anything currently that's sort of floating to the top of the pile? Something that... we can expect next. Yeah, I've got a really cool action film set in Mexico. I'm really happy with the script finally. And I think I'm ready to start taking it out into the world and exploring options for how to get that made. But I think that'll be really fun. It's kind of outrageous. It's funny. It's action-packed. It's got some, again, like the budget's bigger, but it's not crazy. So I'm trying to come up with set pieces that are original, different, fun, but don't break the bank. So you're just trying to come up, you're trying to outthink rather than outspend. You know? Yes. So that, I think I've got some good ideas there for that one. I think it's gonna be really cool. I'm excited to see it. I hope it's on our screens in the next couple of years? Fingers crossed! In the meantime, Jericho Ridge is out now. I advise everybody to seek it out on the big screen or at home, whichever is easiest. Is it getting a rest of the world release? Is that sort of, you know, bit by bit? Yes, it's coming out sort of Australia, France, Germany, Latin America. It's out on one streamer in America. It should come out on a few more. So it's starting to go around the world now. Love that. Yes, which is great. Slow creep. So hopefully it'll find its audience and find its way. Yeah. And it also gives it a little bit of time for the sort of word of mouth to build as it crops up in each region. But we've been lucky because I think it came on. BET plus in America a while back. We just had a few people on Twitter who are real action film fanatics. The really knowledgeable, passionate, and they've been real, really championing this. That's how I heard about it last year. Which has been lovely. Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. So that's awesome. But I couldn't be more grateful to those, to those brave few who have recommended this so generously and So much. It's been great. We're grateful for you for spending four weeks in the sub Arctic tundra. Of course, I've put it together. Yeah. I really, really enjoyed it. I think it's an absolutely solid piece of work and I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you, Simon. Thank you so much. And this is really fun. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. Well what an absolute treat that was. Thanks so much Will again for giving up your time and being so open, candid and honest and answering all of our nerdy little questions about ManuShay. If you want to get in touch with the podcast please do on Twitter at dodge this pod or you can hit me up directly via SimonFielder.com there's all the links to all the socials you can see all my creations and noodlings you can subscribe to my sub stack newsletter if that's something you think you might be into just me. going on about stuff I've enjoyed, stuff I've made, things about India. I live in India, there's a lot of things that are very new and exciting. I like to write about them there. If you'd love to do us an absolute solid, you could rate and review us on iTunes or Spotify. Those are the main ones. I don't know where you listen to this. I mean, I don't really use either of those to be fair. It's, you know, your podcast player of choice, but that probably doesn't have the rating and reviewing that has quite so much weight. to it as those two. 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