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| Haley Lu Richardson in The Last Survivors |
Just released on DVD, The Last Survivors – previously known as The Well – is a post-Apocalyptic survival story with a difference. It centres on a teenage girl, Kendal, who rather than fighting for her own survival is determined to protect the well that her ragged community depends on. Naturally this leads her into conflict with others who want the water in the region for themselves. The girl is played by Haley Lu Richardson in her first major film role. I asked her how she came to get the part.
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| "She's been stripped down to the core." |
“It’s kind of a funny story,” she laughs. “I was with an agent for acting and they were sending me out to try for all sorts of things, mostly commercials. I hadn’t done much work because I had only just moved to Los Angeles, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and submit myself to something I had seen on an online website. I went in thinking ‘Uh-oh, I hope this isn’t like a sketchy thing,” and the guys who were hiring had only seen me on a website too, so they were thinking ‘Uh-oh, we hope this girl is a legitimate actress!’ I was really excited about the role because how could you not be in love with a role like that? I was intrigued by it not being movie of dialogue but more being a movie of action, it spoke to my heart in a way. It’s kind of a horror film but I read it more as a story based around the description of the land and what the characters are feeling.
“I definitely identified with it,” she adds. “”I’m not really anything like Kendal but if, say, five or ten years from now there were to be a drought and that happened the way it did in the movie then I would probably be a lot like that. She’s been stripped down to the core. At that point in my life [when going for the role] I had no confidence. I was pretty hopeless but since I identified so much with the character and I really liked the people who were making it, well, with some roles you think yes, this part is mine.”
Developing the character was a joint effort, she explains, between her and director Tom Hammock. It was her first big film and his first film as a director so they had long conversations about his vision and how to realise it, and she got the opportunity to contribute her own ideas. She’s full of praise for his technique, which was clearly helpful for her in developing her acting skills.
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| Kendal gets her bearings |
One less fortunate consequence of working on a small project was that some of Kendal’s work ended up being cut from the final film because special effects couldn’t be realised as Hammock had hoped. I express my sympathy in regard to a scene where she lies in a hole covering herself – including her face – with sand, all in vain. It turns out she didn’t know it had even been included as a DVD extra.
“I’m so glad they at least put it someplace!” she exclaims. “Because I was so new to it all I had no clue that there was a chance that we could spend three whole days filming a scene and they could just cut that out. It was a long time and a lot of effort.”
The film looks like hard work in general because the intense physicality of Haley Lu’s role. We see her run, jump, wrestle, kick and swing weapons for perhaps 40 minutes in total, onscreen, but of course each of those scenes represents days of rehearsals and retakes. I ask if her background as a dancer helped.
“I do think that dancing helps because I’m in good shape,” she says. “Well, not goodshape, but I have muscle in there somewhere. We worked with a stunt choreographer who was really good. His name was Casey [Adams]. We went through the choreography for a month before we started shooting. Of course the bad guys I was fighting were mostly in masks so they were actual stuntmen and I was just this teenage girl with no experience. We were fighting with actual weapons so it takes a lot of preparation because you have to be really safe.
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| Kendal on her rounds |
“The whole movie was a challenge for all of us, everyone was out in these actual conditions. What you see in the film, those were really the conditions we were working in for 12 hours a day, physically running around and working every day and it makes real demands on your body before having to go through all these emotional ranges and stuff that I’d never experienced before.”
Nevertheless, she’s still thrilled she got the role, and it’s only now that she’s really beginning to appreciate how rare such opportunities are for women.
“I feel like I took it for granted a little bit then,” she says. “Since then I’ve been struggling to get auditions and to find roles for female characters that are that awesome and that badass. Sometimes roles look good but then I read a little bit and it turns out that all the girl’s there for is to fall in love with the guy or to be a pretty cheerleader.”
Partly as a consequence of this, she’s stuck with the production team that made The Last Survivors and made two more films with them. She’s current shooting a film called Follow. “It’s a horror film,” she says. “So I get blood splattered all over me again. After I did The Last Survivors I vowed I would never go through that again, but here I am!”
