With seventeen-year old French feature filmmaker Nathan Ambrosioni’s horror thriller Therapy set for its Los Angeles premiere Sunday, October 23, 2016 at 10:00pm at Screamfest LA, read on for our exclusive chat with the director, as well as the film’s producer Fabrice Ambrosioni, and then have a look at the trailer and some stills!
Produced by Ambrosioni from a script by his son Nathan, Therapy stars Nathalie Couturier, Luna Miti, Remy Jobert and Vanessa Azzopardi and revolves around two young police officers leading a routine investigation following the discovery of hidden video equipment in an abandoned house, and the descent into terror which follows.
The young Ambrosioni, who cut his filmic teeth writing and directing his first horror feature Hostile in 2013, said of his inspiration for Therapy, which came primarily from the location he’d selected, an abandoned building in the south of France, “I was asking myself, “What could I do to escape if I were locked up in this house?” I love the slasher films with masked killers like Halloween and The Strangers, and I imagined a killer’s story set in this kind of location.”
Of his son’s cinematic passion and his own historic producing of such, the senior Ambrosioni told us,
“Nathan was thirteen when he made his first experimental feature with two school friends, Julie Ventureli and (future Therapy actress) Luna Miti, and a Sony VG10 camera. After viewing his first home-made film, I was very impressed with the result, so when he told me that he had written another script, Hostile, I didn’t hesitate to help him and offered to be his producer. I learned a lot on the job just like Nathan, especially as we had no budget at all. After shooting Hostile, he told me about another project, Therapy, and I immediately said, “Let’s go for it!””
Shot over the course of twenty-five days, director Ambrosioni employed a variety of cameras during the production of Therapy, with each one intended to represent a different character’s unique POV.
“All the scenes were natural settings – the huge abandoned building, the forest – except for the commissariat, which was a studio lent (to us) by a French TV production,” said the filmmaker. “There are four different points of view in Therapy: Sebastien’s camera, Olivia’s GoPro, the killer’s Super 8, and the objective point of view for the police investigators, so we used different cameras on set.”
Given Screamfest’s historic programming of “New French Extremism” cinema (Inside in 2007, Martyrs in 2008), we asked the filmmaker if Therapy is intended to add a chapter to that sub-genre (note: at the time of writing we had yet to see the film), to which he replied, “The movie doesn’t fall into that sub-genre. It’s not an extreme film. My inspiration comes more from movies like Sinister or The Strangers than it does Martyrs, even though I do like that film.”
He laughed, “There’s (just) not too much blood or dismembered people in Therapy!”
As for the Screamfest selection of his sophomore feature effort, Nathan effused,
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