By: debbie lynn elias
With a script by Oren Moverman, Craig Robinson and veteran screenwriter John Pogue, the latter of whom also directs, THE QUIET ONES is inspired by a true story and true events that happened during the 70’s when great social science experiments became “the thing”, so much so as to result in Departments of Parapsychology being created at colleges like Princeton and UVA and all over the United States. For John Pogue, the excitement of bringing THE QUIET ONES to life stemmed from the fact that it is based on something that was real, most notably, the “Philips Experiment” of 1972 in which a group of Toronto based researchers attempted to prove that ghosts, demons and evil are all manufactured within the human mind. For moviegoers, Pogue’s excitement translates into an intriguing, all consuming, psychological thriller that pits science against the paranormal, evoking discussion and thought, some real jump out of your skin frights, as well as giving Hammer and cinema as a whole, the 21st Century Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in Jared Harris.
As I sat down with writer/director John Pogue for this exclusive not so quiet 1:1 interview, I was immediately struck not only by how proud he is of the film, but his genuineness, humility and graciousness, giving credit to every member of the production team in front of and behind the camera. His passion and excitement over THE QUIET ONES is palpable, articulated with a disarming charm and joy.
John, THE QUIET ONES is beyond intriguing to me. The fact that it’s inspired by a true story and true events that happened in the 70’s fuels the concept and intrigue. I remember when all those initial paranormal investigations were starting throughout the country. Colleges were actually adding classes in the subject. What you’ve done to bring this to life cinematically is wonderful. You steep us in the 70’s thanks to that gorgeous 16mm verite styling blended with a present day 35mm, and then texture the film with a period grain, all while presenting uniquely terrifying events and emotion. If I didn’t know this a film under the Hammer banner, one look and I would know this is a Hammer.
Really? Thank you.
How did this story come to you? For most of the average horror filmmakers and fans now – this type of story with the basis of inherent evil, inherent energy and capturing and manipulating it – it’s not something that people explore on film. So, I find this really interesting as to what led you to this and the idea that you could bring it to visual life?
It’s a great question and thank you. What led me it, honestly, was that I had developed a relationship with Hammer and Exclusive prior to getting this script. They had seen a movie that I had done for Sony; I’ve been a writer for many years. So, it’s very simple. I read a lot of scripts. This one came across my desk. Oren Moverman, whose such an accomplished writer, had done the prior draft and I read this and I was like, ‘Wow! This is really interesting to me.’ So, it was really just reading the script. That was really it. Then when I started to do research prior to talking to them about the script and realized there were connections to all these great social science experiments and to this movement to create departments of parapsychology at Princeton and UVA and all over the United States, I became more and more excited because it was based on something that was real. What I brought to the project was trying to elevate the genre elements as much as possible so that it didn’t feel like we had this great premise and these interesting characters and then sort of standard spook horror scares. I tried to make the scary elements as psychological and minimalistic as possible to kind of reflect what the story was about.
How did you go about approaching this film with your cinematographer Matyas Erdely to give this visual life and then decide on this tonal bandwidth, incorporating your 16mm verite found footage and the rest of it being steeped in the 70’s film grain so that “we are there”?
I’m glad you feel that way. We worked very hard on that. My biggest fear as a filmmaker was how we were going to do that because this is a strange movie in that it’s a found footage omniscient camera hybrid but the found footage is real time. So you’re watching a movie but you’re also watching real time found footage. How can you make a movie with that core mechanism that doesn’t throw the audience out and have them go, ‘Oh. I’m in found footage mode.’? I didn’t want that to happen. I wanted it to be all sort of subconscious and psychological.
Matyas and I and our team spent all of our time in pre-production trying to create a visual grammar for the audience so that they would identify with Sam Claflin’s character’s point of view, so that the audience is ‘making this film’. That’s what I wanted. I wanted the audience to feel like they were making it so that every time we were behind the camera with Sam it was the audience. What we did was, we created moments where we were in 16mm and then we would go back to Olivia, for example, in omniscient footage – 35mm – for which we put lots of layers of grain on, as you said. Then we go back to the 16mm just so they would have a comfortability with this back and forth so that it would become unconscious and it wouldn’t become something [the audience] would start to think about. I didn’t want [the audience] to think about it. I was working with a cinematographer who I think is amazing so every step of the way we created these moments so that the audience by the end of Act One would be fully immersed and thus scared, so when that camera is knocked over we’re feeling the same fear that you hear in Sam Claflin’s voice. Then as the movie progresses you start to feel that even more and more until you get into the attic sequence so that you’re one of the experimenters in the attic as opposed to objectively watching. I was trying to create a sort of subjective feeling.
One of the elements that stands out to me is that you have all the horror tropes in THE QUIET ONES that are mandated by the genre, but what is most engrossing, at least for myself, was that I felt like a student watching a lecture series with the vintage footage and I was part of the experiment.
Good. I’m glad you felt that way. I wasn’t even feeling this as a horror film but more scientifically analytical which I found a quite interesting emotion and reaction to have with the film.
So much of that goes to your editing. Glenn Garland did an amazing job. How did you collaborate with him? Did you guys storyboard to establish pacing so you knew where to cut or did you get all your footage and then worry about it afterwards? How cohesive was this?
I completely agree. Glenn is amazing. I try to work with the editor as much as possible in pre-production. Not only so they can catch anything that you’ve missed, but so that you can start to figure out your editing aesthetic as far in advance as possible. Things evolved. We originally thought that the 16mm sequences would be much more continuous than they actually are. What happened was, even though we did a good job of making them continuous, we were a little bit slow and it wasn’t quite as exciting. So Glenn, who has worked on movies like “Halloween”, he’s just got so much experience, helped us figure out that, ‘Look John. Intellectually it’s great that they’re continuous. But from a pure enjoyment, from a horror perspective, it’s not gonna work like that.’ Once we made the decision that we would be cutting up this footage, and we did this in advance, that lent to certain aesthetic as to how we ended up editing the entire movie. It actually made it much more of a roller coaster as opposed to a slow burn, up and down. I felt the story dictated more of a roller coaster feel to it. We had a very honest relationship getting to the process of it where I didn’t have to mince words like, ‘I don’t like this’ and he can say ‘Well, I don’t like your idea’ and we can go back and forth and have a real dialogue. Every frame of this movie we fought with each other over, to try to make it as lean, economical but also as scary as possible. Glenn is an amazing person to work with.
Hand in hand with that goes our sound design. So often people think that just slamming doors and whatnot in a horror film is going to create the “Oooh!” jump in the seat moment. These are very calculated sounds that we hear in THE QUIET ONES. They are also a very eclectic blend. If an oscilloscope was reading these sounds we’d be seeing a lot of peaks and valleys and a lot of static. It is so well designed. It’s another entire layer of emotion that comes into the film as a whole.
Thank you. I’m glad that you feel that way. Lucas Vidal is a Spanish composer. I said, ‘I don’t want any music in the movie other than practical music. I want to create sound design from the machines that we use in the movie and let that be the music and let that be the sound.’ What we did was we recorded the oscilloscope, the brain scanning machine, all the amplifiers, the feedback from the microphones, the little clicking sound that the EEG and the EMF make, we took all of that and we created music out of it, Lucas did. He avoided, and this was a process because naturally you try to create sound to sort of up your scares, we tried to avoid genre horror as much as possible and just have it be about these sounds are sort of creeping in to create a sense of terror and that the sounds were practically sourced from the environment so that you felt that era, you felt those sounds. I felt like that was much creepier with the subtle approach. I hate being manipulated in a horror movie where the violins go up and you’re like, ‘Okay. Something scary is gonna happen.’ I hate that. For me, a lot of audiences don’t like that either so we tried to be very very subtle in our approach.
At the end of the day and at the end of this process, what did you learn about yourself in the making of this movie?
Wow. Nobody’s asked me that question! That’s a very interesting question. I’ve learned that I was the only US citizen on the set. It was very interesting being a fish out of water in that respect. I’ve learned that, even more than I thought, anything is possible if you just fight for it. There were a lot of moments where I was unsure that things were gonna happen but I felt in my gut that they could if I push for them, so trust your gut is what I learned.
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4/22/2014
