Period piece found footage horror is few and far between, with examples like The Devil’s Doorway appearing occasionally to illustrate the creativity possible with the format. Now, director Andrew Legge is tackling such a challenge with his feature film debut Lola, a pseudo-documentary about two sisters who have a machine that can look into the future.
The year is 1941, and brilliant UK sisters Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Martha (Stefanie Martini) have created a device that intercepts broadcasts from the future. Besides revealing the coming glories of rock & roll, the invention—which they call ‘Lola’—also allows them to alter the course of World War II. But will their unmaking of history provoke a lifetime of shocking consequences?
Dread Central spoke with Legge about filming found footage on 16mm, building a time machine, and the magic of Cloverfield.
Andrew Legge: Well, actually we did shoot it on film. We shot it on a Bolex. Do you know the Bolex camera?
AL: It’s like a really old-fashioned 16 mm camera that you wind up. It’s got a clockwork motor. We used that for a lot of Martha’s footage and then we used a reflex 16 mm camera as well, like a more modern 16 mil camera, but with all lenses. For the newsreel stuff, we used a 35 mm camera, a thing called the Newman-Sinclair for some of the stuff, which is a really, really old newsreel camera, but it’s all film. Everything was film.
AL: Well, I’ve always used film. My short films were all shot on film, so I’ve never really shot on digital. I don’t really like shooting on digital.
AL: Yeah. I like the surprise you get with film because you shoot it and you don’t really know what it’s going to look like. Then it comes back from the lab and there’s always this kind of magic feeling when you get your rushes back.
AL: No, we would’ve done probably an average of six takes, I’d say, for each scene. I mean, the problem we had was that you have with found footage is coverage, we couldn’t do it. And that’s a pain in the ass. You can’t do your multiple angles. So that was tricky. I mean, I wouldn’t do found footage again.
AL: Well, for Lola, I felt like you. I liked the idea of doing period found footage. We haven’t really seen them, and I liked the idea of shooting on film and all that, but for me, the problem with the found footage was motivating the camera. I tried to motivate the camera constantly. And I think this with Lola, we push it a little bit. We have a little bit of a get-of-jail card in that we’ve got the newsreel footage as well that Martha’s able to cut into her film, and that was quite a good thing for us to be able to do. But it is still really hard. There are still scenes that I’d like to have written that I couldn’t write because of the camera, but that’s the classic problem.
AL: So we did both, but how did that work? So we kind of retro-engineered stuff. I would go looking in the archive for material for a scene that I was doing. So for example, when the sisters get arrested and they get taken to court, I needed to get footage of a mob, an angry mob outside of prison. I couldn’t find any angry mobs outside of prison. But I found the protesters with the balloon. So I wrote the scene around the balloon. That footage comes from London, but we shot the film in Dublin. We found a building in Dublin, which had a kind of archway and entrance very similar to [what’s in the archival footage]. And so we were able to make a shot list around the shots of the found footage of the archival footage, if that makes sense.
AL: A little bit. But in a way it kind of makes it easier because once you found the archival footage of the balloon, for example, you were dictated by the footage of how you shot it. You’d have to be shot on similar lenses, and it all had to be street gravel. You wouldn’t have people on the street with the cameras, and it had to be a rainy day because it’s rainy in the footage. The road is wet. So we had to do a wet down. The lighting was dictated. It was kind of flat lighting, an overcast state. So that was kind of cool.
And then we had the kind of wide shots in the archival. So then we had to go, okay, we’ve got our three kinds of establishing wide shots in the archival. Now we have to go slightly tighter with the balloon footage, and we had the balloon moon in the same kind of direction. So that kind of made it much easier. Then in the day, it was just like, “OK, this is what we have to do. Boom, boom, boom, boom.” That’s cool. It was a bit like that. So we made our own balloon, and then the only VFX was just getting the Nazi Whores written onto it. That was written on our own prop balloon, but [VFX was used] getting that written onto the balloon in the archival footage.
AL: Well, I do have a soft spot for found footage films. I like them. And also with Lola, there wasn’t any other way of telling the story because the whole movie is meant to be footage assembled by Martha. So in a way, the film is meant to be an artifact that’s found on Lola that they’ve picked up in the past. So how can you tell that story without doing it just found footage? It’s impossible. It was the only way we could do it to do it. It wouldn’t have worked in any other form. Would you agree with that?
AL: Gosh, I guess organically in a way. I wrote Thomasina first and then I liked the idea of this mad scientist having a sister. So then Martha got written. There was kind of a script, I guess, and there was a lot of discussion with the actresses as well about it. And I liked the idea of them being feral. I liked the idea of these two women who were bored up in this house by themselves who were outside the norms and who got all their cultural references from what they saw in Lola. I liked that idea. And I liked them as being not women that you see normally in period films. So-called well-behaved.
AL: Yeah, I wanted Lola to look real. I wanted it to feel real as well, like it came from the 1940s. So all our references for Lola were really like the 1930s and 1940s televisions. It was like those old radio systems. We actually found a very similar kind of tower structure, which had your circuit boards. I wanted the materials to feel like stuff that the women would’ve had access to. So I liked the idea of them going up to London and buying loads of valve radios and then butchering them and butchering a TV and stuff. So that was very much the inspiration. Then it was using organic materials like wood, metal, glass, the materials that they would, again, have had access to.
AL: Yeah. I mean, we have all the bits. There’s footage, there’s actually, there’s a shot there you can see of Stefanie [Martini, who played Martha] with the Bolex and Emma [Appleton, who plays Thomasina]. She filmed that, and really, she shot a lot of the material herself.
AL: Totally, yeah. I would say she probably shot a third of the film.
AL: It was kind letting her do it, she was very good. Okay. So it was just kind of giving her the camera and going “Off you going there”, which we like.
AL: No monitor. Which is wonderful. I mean, I hate monitors.
AL: I totally agree. Everyone is just looking at the monitor then. I mean, it’s, I think it’s brilliant if you’re doing a big kind of scene with stunts and stuff. But if it’s just a little scene, it’s great. It’s just not up on the monitor. I think there was a monitor on one of the 16 mm cameras. I think we actually did for the stunt scenes and stuff, just because we had to make sure that we got the stuff.
AL: It must be David Bowie, isn’t it?
AL: I think it has to be David Bowie. Yeah, it was funny because in an early draft of the script, I didn’t have David Bowie in it. The machine was more just like a weapon almost. So it was actually when we got all way into it that it really felt like something more fun as a script.
AL: No, we wrote him in. I was just thinking it’d be hilarious if they put tuned into Bowie and she’s a Bowie fan in the 1940s. So I just like that idea. It was always David Bowie before we had the right to anything. So that was just lucky that we then got the rights to the music
AL: Gosh, what’s my favorite found footage movie? I love Cloverfield. And I love the way they’ve got the footage underneath the footage because I think that’s smart. Would that be one of my favorites?
AL: But in your eyes, is Lola a found footage film? I’m not sure if it is because it’s being constructed. It’s not unedited.
AL: Oh, I love it.
AL: Yeah, yeah, I get you. Lake Mungo, I found it actually really creepy, quite scary.
Lola is available for pre-order on Blu-ray from Severine Films now.