The Seasoning House won a Screamfest award for Best Actress, Rosie Day. Day starred as a deaf mute girl in a military rape house in the Balkan War circa 1996. The film portrays her friendship with other prisoners, and intense chase through the house and beyond. It is the first film directed by Paul Hyett, a prosthetic makeup artist on nearly 100 films. Her journey was so gripping it prompted me to write a full review. After that screening, I was also able to speak with Hyett, who was visiting Los Angeles from the U.K. We discussed his directorial debut, which is making the festival rounds and expected on Blu-ray and DVD this December.
Crave Online: I found The Seasoning House a very thrilling, cathartic movie. Is it okay to describe it that way to my readers? Not that it’s a fun time but it’s rewarding in that way.
Paul Hyett: I’m fine with that. For something to be fun you expect those boo moments and lighthearted. What I was trying to do was dark. It was a thrill ride. I always saw it as a dark, thrilling, harrowing movie, a journey into claustrophobia and fear and what goes on in that world. So it is a thriller.
How did you do the knife in the face? That had to be CGI, right?
Everything in there was half prosthetic, half visual effects. Because of my background, I know so much about prosthetics and VFX. That particular effect was a half knife, an appliance inside the mouth and then visual effects of it slicing out. So a very complicated shot to do but it worked really well I think.
How long were you planning to move into directing?
Quite a few years. It must have been about five, six years that I really wanted to do a movie. I’d been writing while I was doing the prosthetic jobs. It was just a case of trying to find a script. I wrote another script before that. It was too high a budget to make for my first one, so we looked to do a low budget one, contained in one location and we thought it was The Seasoning House. We had the story and developed it to be as claustrophobic and thrilling as possible.
Were you ever daunted by tackling a subject like this for your first film?
Not really. I think everyone expected me to do a creature movie or something with loads of prosthetics in it and I kind of wanted to show that I could do other things. I kind of felt, for my first film, it would be a good, challenging thing to take a real life subject and make a film form it. I kind of went in understanding the responsibility of that subject matter, but I just thought if you’re going to go for it, you should go for it.
It is a Balkan story. Did you ever consider not doing the film in English?
As in Balkan language?
Yes, with subtitles.
We thought about it. I think it just would’ve been too difficult for the actors to learn. Or use Balkan actors?
Well, to have it in Balkan language you’d have to.
It was a very brief discussion, as well a discussion of do we go with Balkan accents? I felt a good medium was English actors with Balkan accents. I think for them to learn a Balkan language would’ve just been too difficult. I kind of knew who I wanted in the film, like Sean Pertwee, I’d always seen him as Goran. Kevin Howarth I’d always seen as Viktor. Anna Walton I’d seen as the mother, so I had all those in mind. We made a decision: English actors.
Why was it important that Angel be deaf and mute?
Because I didn’t want a lot of talk and exposition. I wanted also to have as much as possible a female perspective. I thought, you know something? One way to really show it was to make her deaf-mute so you’re really in her head so I could really play with a camera and a sound design, really so much from this one particular perspective, from a deaf person. It was really trying to get into her head and make it feel that we were with her, rather than just lots of talking. Sometimes I think films just have too much talking and too much exposition. I wanted it to have a slightly fairy tale feel and quite a sort of surreal feel, but it mostly came down to I just wanted people to really identify with her and see it from her point of view.
It’s not hard to sympathize with the girls in this situation, but there is also a very moving relationship between Angel and the girl on the bed. Was it important to have that emotion in the first half of the movie?
Yeah, I kind of felt without that feeling, without that warmth, it would’ve been too cold a film. It would’ve been too violent, too cold I think. The most important thing for me, and I always said to those girls, if we don’t feel emotion with you guys, then it just turns into a survival chase movie. One thing that I’ve always found was the spirit of women in those environments, women suffer horrendously in war but also you see a lot of strength from women. I felt for them to have this friendship in this nihilistic world, let their spirit survive, was really important for me to get that feeling, that connection between them and feel that even in this world there can still be hope.
Were the camera speeds adjusted in camera or in post-production effects?
They’re all in camera. I love Steadicam. We’d done a lot of 40 frames a second, 50 frames just to get that feeling of surreal feeling. I’m a big fan of Polanski and Hitchcock and early De Palma. I really wanted a classic feel to it, so everything was planned and Steadicammed.
What is your next film going to be?
We’ll be announcing that soon. I’ve got a couple movies that I’m attached to but we should be hopefully starting one very soon.
Is that first script that was too expensive still in play?
That’s still there, yeah. We’re currently trying to get that one financed as well. That’s actually the second part. I’ve got a planned war horror trilogy that is basically horror thrillers set in conflict zones, different stories, different time zones, different periods, different characters, completely different stories but based on that horror in a war zone. That one is the second part, probably won’t be my second film but it might be the third one. At some point I will be revisiting it.
Which other countries are the other two war films?
There’s one that’s based in Iraq and one in Chechnya.
Will you keep doing creature work gigs?
No, all my prosthetics, I’ve kind of given that up and moved on to full time director.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
