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| The Piper |
A young adult horror film based around the story of the Pied Piper but also exploring the difficult relationship between a mother and daughter, with a ghost story and a dash of romance thrown in, Piper had its première at last year’s Frightfest. It’s now about to get a digital release in the UK. In between, I spoke with Anthony Waller, who not only directs but appears in the film – something he’s pleased to have done, he said, because it means that he can now brag to people that he was married to Elizabeth Hurley, even if it was only onscreen. She plays the troubled mother of the film’s main character, Amy (Mia Jenkins), who struggles to deal with her growing up and getting involved with young traveller Luca (Jack Stewart) after they relocate to the town of Hamelin.
“I was offered it from some Australian producers and I read the script and I thought it was very dark,” Anthony says. “I thought it would be an idea to have a romantic interest in there as well, and I wanted to make it fit the original Piper premise that the parent gets punished by having their children hypnotised into committing suicide, which is scary because many parents would think that losing a child and surviving it is a bigger punishment than their own death.
“If somebody feels that they have to pay the price for somebody else's misdeeds, then it creates a lot of interesting dynamics and tension between the characters. Also important for me was the question of does he actually exist physically or is it just the spirit of the piper invading the consciousness of the characters, and guilt that brings that to the forefront? And the religious associations with that. This whole idea that if you feel you're being watched and judged, then you behave yourself. It ties into many things which fascinate me in human psychology.”
We don't see that many mother daughter relationships in horror these days, I suggest. With films themed around moving house, often there’s a resentful child, but here the two are quite close and it’s interesting to see how that relationship disintegrates under pressure.
“Yes. And there's a scene where you notice that they're lying to each other and you notice that's new. They have this trustworthy relationship earlier on, but the mistrust between the mother and Luca also breaks that down. And then the daughter knows that the mother is hiding something. You can understand the mother would not want to unduly worry or scare the child, but the Piper makes that not possible.”
We talk about the different ways that events in the film can be interpreted, and the importance of not forcing a supernatural explanation. Anthony says that he always wanted it to be ambiguous, hence his decision to include a post-credits scene which offers yet another way of looking at events. We then go on to discuss the way that travelling people are represented in the film, and his desire to break away from the negative stereotypes sadly still common in film.
“It was important to me to not do cultural misappropriation and not to say ‘this is the Roma or the Gypsies’ or anything. So I created my own ethnic group, so to say. That's why I created this term, the Weser, because Weser was named after the river. I imagined it was people who travelled, but they would be base around the Weser and they would always come back to Hamelin.”
The allowed him to create that tension between outsiders and the people of Hamelin which is always there in the original story.
“There’s also the idea of a puritanical kind of discipline system,” he says. “The fear that everybody else fears, that if they do something wrong, then everybody will get punished. That's why there's no crime in the area. People justify often that kind of discipline because of that, but it's disciplined through an iron fist or some kind of religious extremism. So it does touch on themes or ideas that are relevant to everyday life.”
We talk about the film’s locations.
“It looks more like Hamelin than the actual Hamelin,” he says. “We shot two days in the actual Hamlin, and that was without any actors. It was just plates for views out of windows, views out of cars, establishing shots. Because, for example, the street view outside Amy's bedroom window, that was a green screen that was shot in Latvia. Most of the film was shot in Latvia. And so that street outside her window is Hamelin. When they drive through the streets of Hamelin they’re in a car that was in a studio with green screen. All of the street scenes with actors there are in Riga. I love the architecture and the look of Riga. It looked to me, without having ever been to Hamelin, like the Hamelin in my mind – the fantasy Hamelin, in a sense.”
It has lots of great fantasy tropes – there’s even a cave.
“Yeah, that was in the east part of the country. We shot in four different areas of Latvia. And the school, that incredible looking building, was actually built by a German, and it's turned into a museum and tourists go around it. There was a music school there in between so actually we had all the desks and the blackboard there.
“The location for their apartment was actually a boutique hotel in the east side of Latvia. The views out the windows were Hamelin, but it was a boutique hotel that we took over and used as their apartment. And all the streets scenes otherwise were in Riga.
“There’s a very small window of time where you get the leaves, like the small window for spring when the flowers come out. For autumn, you want the leaves to change colour and be half on the trees and half on the ground. So that's a narrow window of two weeks that we were aiming to capture. I wanted it to be extraordinarily colourful because in Amy’s mind, sunlight and coloured leaves and everything would give it that romantic quality. We pushed a little on the colours there so that it would be almost cartoonish, because it's her fantasy way of looking at things.”
Mia Jenkins is very good in the role. Where did he find her?
“That was a suggestion from Jeremy Zimmerman, who was our casting director. He already worked casting my first movie, Mute Witness, back in the early Nineties. And so he said, you know, we just need one known name and then we can find the stars or relatively well known names. I mean, Tara Fitzgerald, she's well known, and Bob Dawes. But we allowed ourselves to have lesser known names for the kids, for the two leads.”
Mia was 20 when they shot, he says. To me, she looks a lot younger.
“She had been in a number of Disney TV series, so she did have some acting chops,” he says, “but I didn't realise how good an actress she was until she actually came to the reading and we did some reading together. She's got a northern accent normally, and she has an amazing American accent, which sounds effortless. In the entire shooting process, she did not once fluff a line. We did do other takes to try a different reading or to try a different emphasis, but there was not one mistake. I mean, I just never experienced that. I was immensely impressed with her.”
How did he feel about it getting into Frightfest?
“I'm really excited about that,” he says. “I mean, IMAX, the main theatre, Leicester Square! I guess I've been spoiled already because my first movie, Mute Witness, was shown worldwide with Columbia TriStar and I flew all over the world first class, paid for by Columbia TriStar, to attend over 13 festivals and everything. So it's hard to follow that up. But I hope we get a good audience and a good reaction.”
Since then, he’s been working on a few different projects.
“I've been developing a project which is about life extension, longevity, cheating death. It's science fiction fact, so it's projecting into the near future, but still things which are conceptually possible. That's a been written as a movie and as a TV series. At the same time I’ve been working on a script which is a World War II story based on the true offense surrounding the raid on Saint-Nazaire, which was a dry dock on the Atlantic seaboard of France which the English commandos attacked because it was the only place that their largest ship would be able to be repaired – otherwise they would have had to limp back home and then they could be targeted.
“If I do action, blowing things up and all that, then it's important for me that it's based on a true story. I don't like blowing things up just for the sake of action. I like to feel that people can imagine what it's like to be in the shoes of the people doing it.”
