Branney, Sean & Leman, Andrew (Call of Cthulhu Movie) Part 1 of 2
H.P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” remains one of the most famous (and infamous) horror tales ever written, almost 100 years after it was put to paper. While many of Lovecraft’s stories have been adapted to film, with varying degrees of quality and faithfulness to the source, no one has yet to attempt to adapt “Call of Cthulhu”, despite it’s standing as arguably the best known of his tales.
This has now changed. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, in the form of Sean Branney and Andrew Leman, have done what no one else has attempted. They have captured the Lovecraft masterpiece on film for the very first time. Even more amazing is the fact that they have achieved this feat using cinematic techniques and styles from the era of the author: 1920’s silent film.
A couple of months ago, I sat down with Sean and Andrew in their makeshift workshop and studio for a lengthy chat about the film, their experience with the HPLHS, and the world of Lovecraft as a whole. In this first part of our two-part interview, I discuss their history with Lovecraft and their work with the live-action role playing game, Cthulhu Lives, as well as the foundation of the film.
Mr. Dark: I want to start by going back a bit. You started Cthulhu Lives back in 1984, correct?
Sean Branney: That’s when we started with the live Lovecraftian role playing and Cthulhu Lives, just over 20 years ago now.
MD: Give me the basic breakdown of how you went from Cthulhu Lives to the live musical Shoggoth On The Roof, and now to the movie version of Call of Cthulhu.
SB: Fundamentally, Andrew and I are both producers, by nature; we make stuff, and we do things. That’s been our way for years. We started putting on the games, and one of the reasons we don’t do those much anymore is that they became so labor and time intensive. It was like, I could spend six months and put on a pretty good Cthulhu Lives game that a dozen or fifteen people would participate in, or we could produce a full-length stage play that hundreds of people would come see, or an audio CD of Shoggoth on the Roof that thousands of people can enjoy. As we’ve gotten older, from a standpoint of personal satisfaction and business sense, it’s been our impulse to make stuff that more people can participate in.
MD: Basically increasing the scale, then.
SB: A little bit, but still doing the kind of projects and telling the kind of stories that we think would be fun. That’s what led to us doing Shoggoth on the Roof. Shoggoth On The Roof was a humorous project that started as a movie and became a stage musical. It was made enjoying the satire of the whole crazy concept of a Lovecraftian musical. Once we got through that, we decided it was time to make a real, serious Lovecraft film the way a Lovecraft film should be made. There are lots of adaptations of Lovecraft stories, but the most classic, famous, biggest sprawling epic Lovecraft story that’s never been filmed before seemed to be the right choice for us to try to take on.
Andrew Leman: When we hit upon the idea of doing it in the style of the 1920’s silent film, the way we imagined it might have been done if it had been made at the time that he wrote the story, we realized that would be a way we could produce this film the way we wanted, within the resources that we had. Trying to do a modern day version, you’d need a Jerry Bruckheimer-type budget to pull it off using modern technology.
SB: Like the way Peter Jackson is doing King Kong.
AL: Making it in the style of the 20’s opened up some simply practical doors of ways we could actually produce it, in addition to the very satisfying artistic aspects of the style. That’s not to say it’s necessarily easier, but it’s a different set of challenges, and one we felt we could more readily wrap our head around.
MD: So tell me a little bit about your backgrounds. Do you have film experience, or is this kind of a launching pad for that? I know you made a short film a long time ago.
SB: We’re both theater guys. Andrew and I actually met doing a play back in 1982 together. We just wrapped a civil war production with our theater group. Neither of us are trained as film guys, but there’s a certain parity there between film and theater.
AL: We made a short film back in college days, based on another Lovecraft story, “The Statement Of Randolph Carter.” We learned a lot doing that, but that was, what, twenty years ago? So we did that, and learned a bit. Although we both have master’s degrees in theater, we have at least tangential connections to the film industry, me in Chicago and Sean in L.A. We’ve been around enough to know a few things about how it works. Neither of us is trained in film, but we’ve learned a lot by just diving into things and learning how to do them as we go. That’s how we both operate, I think.
SB: For this, we’ve also had the huge benefit of bringing in our cinematographer, a fellow named David Robertson who is a trained film guy. We both know the language of story and how to visually communicate a story, but David’s the guy who knows that if you move that light instrument four feet back and tilt that door in, the image is going to look better.
AL: Sean and I know the material, David knows the techniques.
SB: He’s been a very important part of it. So many people see the trailer and see the look of the picture, and go WOW, that looks great.
MD: That was my response, it just has a great look.
SB: David’s a really important part of that, because he knows the techniques to visually represent what we’re aesthetically trying to capture. We’re very grateful for him.
AL: We all did a lot of visual research as we started. We watched a lot of the classic black and white horror films and non-horror films from the time period. I picked out specific scenes from specific films and said that’s the look I want, this part is the flavor we’re trying to capture.
MD: So there’s a certain amount of visual screenwriting here, then, not so much mimicking the period as learning from it and trying to find things that captured the look you wanted?
AL: Yeah, because although the idea of the project is to make it the way it would have been made in 1927, at the same time it isn’t 1927 anymore. A modern audience doesn’t watch films the same way we watched them in 1927. We don’t have the same kind of attention span, we’re not used to that style of acting. A 1927 film plays pretty slow and corny to a modern audience. An attempt to be slavishly faithful to that period would probably make for a slow and dopey looking movie. The idea is, how do we capture that flavor while playing to a contemporary audience? So, we’re letting ourselves do some modern types of editing that wouldn’t have been done in 1927. Some of the action sequences are very choppy. Apart from some avant-garde Russian cinema, no movie was made using that. We’re using what I hope is an effective blend of the look of the 1920’s, but an awareness of how a modern audience watches a movie.
SB: I think part of that is having an adaptation and a screenplay, with the piece of literature that has been transformed into something more dramatic, a bit more linear, and a lot more visual than the story is. It is an extremely literary story, it’s all about words and not about action. We had to make it about action, otherwise it’s be a movie that’s boring as hell which is a big crime in Lovecraftian cinema.
AL: A huge pitfall.
SB: The ones that are really truthful to the material are really boring, and the ones that aren’t really boring have nothing to do with the material. We didn’t find either of those options an acceptable thing. Once we reprocessed the story to make it visual and active, then it was the kind of thing where you can go back and say here’s the challenge, here’s the setup in this scene, now let’s look at period movies where they had to address similar visual challenges. They used models, or they used a fabric ocean, they used different kinds of things. So when we started to move out of concept and into production, we realized okay, we’ll have to build R’lyeh in eight different sizes in order to use these techniques in order to tell the story.
MD: How much of this production is just you guys? I know this is about as independent a production as you could have, but how much are you doing between yourselves? You have set building, some model building, props, makeup, I know you have some actors and a cinematographer, but how much is just done by you?
AL: We have a cast of almost fifty people, and a core crew of about six or seven.
SB: Really, the preponderance of the work is this guy (Andrew) getting things done. Andrew happens to be one of these multi-disciplinary people who can work in fabric, work in foamcore, work on a miniature boat, and get it done. We bring in outside help when we can, but it’s mostly him. The preparation, the production, its all Andrew.
AL: I’m basically the art department. I have help from a few other talented friends when they can provide it but for the most part whatever needs to get built for this movie, I’m building it. Especially the models and the miniatures, I’m building all of those. We do have, I’m very glad to say, a real stop-motion armature guy who who’s building our stop-motion Cthulhu. I’ll put the flesh on it when the time comes, but the skeleton is being built by a pro that knows what he’s doing.
SB: Through the theater connection, we also have someone doing the costumes. Laura Brody costumed the show, and with 50 actors, multiple time periods, and with very little money she did a tremendous job. So some of it has been jobbed out, but the core of what’s happening, the schedule and the budget, and of course the actual act of making the movie has been done by Andrew and I.
MD: As far as the script goes, Call of Cthulhu isn’t a huge story, it’s actually fairly short. Did you have to flesh it out at all? How close, basically, were you able to stick to the source material?
SB: Honestly, I don’t think you could do a film adaptation of this story that’s closer to the original. We fought really hard. There are some things we cut out, but there’s nothing we added in. There are no shower scenes, there are no funny bits with a dog, there are no car chases. It really sticks to Lovecraft’s story. What we mostly tried to do is streamline it, kind of connect a few of the dots that aren’t really connected in terms of storytelling. They’re implicit in the story and they’re a little more explicit here. We’ve given it a little more shape in terms of a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ve also given it a whisper more of a protagonist than the story really has. The story’s not really about a single guy, and ours isn’t either, but ours is a little more so than the original story. I think it’s in a good way that will help a film audience understand and digest and sympathize with this revelation of cosmic horror. In the story he just throws all these pieces together and make you go ugh, it all fits together, yuck! All we’ve really done is bracket it in with a character that shares the same experience as us. He’s a character that’s already in the story, but he’s more prominent in the film than he is in the story. Generally speaking, though, if it were any truer to the story it’d become really boring on screen.
AL: Sean did the adaptation, and the more I’ve worked with it trying to put it on screen, the more I’ve come to appreciate how well put together it is. One of the big things that Sean’s adaptation gives it is a structure that is something an audience can follow. The more I work with that structure the more I appreciate how multi-layered it is. The structure works on various levels simultaneously, which I really like. The story itself comes in three parts, The Horror In The Clay, The Narrative of Inspector Legrasse, and The Madness At Sea. Sean kept those same three basic divisions, but now each one builds on the one that came before, in every way that you can build. In length, in intensity, in action. Each part of the movie is an order of magnitude bigger than the one that came before it, but in the end it all ties up where it started, and puts the whole thing together.
That’s it for Part 1. Click here to read the conclusion of the interview with Sean and Andrew, where we talk about the release schedule for the film and their take on the state of Lovecraftian film as a whole, as well as what’s coming up next from the HPLHS. Be sure to get more info on the film right here!
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