“Never work with children or animals,” goes the old showbiz saying. First-time filmmaker Andrew Cumming technically adhered to that wisdom…although “set in the Stone Age” might soon find itself on the avoid-for-your-own-health list.
It is set 45,000 years ago and is set in the Scottish Highlands. Out of the darkness follows six prehistoric people who wash up in a new world, looking for an evolved future. Cumming, Ruth Greenberg and Oliver Kassman wrote the script in a completely fictional language called Tola, with a story in which the group’s immediate survival efforts are threatened by something lurking in the shadows. As the leaders of the patriarchal society fall, a young woman, Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), faces the threat herself. With a thick atmosphere and enough in mind to bring some much-needed specificity to familiar horror tropes, Cummings’ directorial debut kicks off a promising career. But making the film wasn’t easy.
Of Out of the darkness at the theater, I talked to Cumming about taking a big swing and sticking to his guns despite the many raised eyebrows he encountered during the film’s years of development.
Out of the darkness has been a journey. How many years ago did you start it?
In September 2015 we put pen to paper. Then we put words to sentences on the subject for the first time.
This is your directorial debut. Very few people start out making a prehistoric horror film. Did it feel like a risk? Is it still?
It brings me comfort now, but not at the time, because there wasn’t really a template. With a lot of debuts you can say, ‘Okay, I see this is a contemporary drama,’ or ‘It’s some kind of comedy thriller’ – you can tell what it is. But when we were pitching this movie, we said, “Oh, it’s kind of like Alien. But it’s also a bit like that The hills have eyes. Also, The witch?” So you borrow percentages from all these different movies and make this Frankenstein monster, and then you say, “Oh, by the way, it’s my first movie, it’s going to be in a made-up language, a discovery cast.”
But it got me excited. I felt like this was a movie I would pay to see. It felt like it could be really cool, and it would say something about humanity. But even when we were filming… I remember saying to the cast the day before we started filming that I was afraid this was just going to be a big Scooby-Doo movie. Without spoiling anything, you’re always afraid that people will think it’s rubbish. When we pitched it, we were always asked, “Do they speak?” I was worried that people were expecting a Raquel Welch return (like the 1966 film). One million years before Christ), or something cuddlier like Alpha. I was filled with a lot of anxiety because it was my first feature film and because there was no roadmap for making the prehistoric horror film.
Image: Bleeckerstraat
It’s a smart pitch on paper, but how did you find your way to the actual premise? What grounded you in this alien world?
The operational statement was: this is a film that asked the question: Did people survive because of our own inhumanity? So that’s what we kept coming back to, whether it’s through a patriarchal aggressor, or through the kind of strange spiritual dogmatic elders, or through abusive young people – whatever you want to call it, whatever humanity presents itself as. Or that it is because of the wars that are currently going on. That was the guiding principle: Are we at the top of the food chain because when push comes to shove, if we’re scared, we can just turn on each other and do the most horrendously bad things to each other to keep ourselves alive? So that cycle of fear leading to survival and just going around in circles felt like good form.
I think with your first feature film you lean on your own influences – subconsciously, or you’re extremely aware of them. And one of them before me, Oliver, and Ruth was Alien. Much has been written about it Alien – I’m not going to add any new insight there. It’s just a fantastic movie. It is more than the sum of its parts. It’s a horror movie. It’s a science fiction movie. It’s one of the first movies I remember where a woman rises to the top and takes control, but she’s not like a badass. She’s just a woman in a terrible situation who did her best to get through it.
There is a lot of structural overlap between them Alien And Out of the darkness. We have unashamedly adopted that structure, because it works. And it was very important – it wasn’t like that Eeny meeny miny tired, let’s choose Alien. We wanted to chart Beyah’s journey from orphan to apex predator. The Alien template works because she is the runt of the litter. She has been oppressed all her life. And if this group had not encountered this supernatural presence, they would have turned out to be just like Ave, the leader’s pregnant companion, just this downtrodden, oppressed woman.
When Beyah is finally handed the spear, it turns out that she is actually quite capable of it, and that she has a lot of hatred and venom within her, because of the way she was raised and what she was exposed to. That’s what it felt like Alien And Out of the darkness explored the same thematic journey.
And what I love about the Alien saga, especially those first two films, is that Ellen Ripley, from the xenomorph point of view, is a genocidal maniac. So that wasn’t too bad Out of the darknessbecause the film becomes a meditation on all these things I’ve said, on what you’re willing to do when it comes down to it.
Image: Bleeckerstraat
You’ve worked extensively with experts to develop a unique language for the prehistoric people, and even then the dialogue is limited. How did the casting go? What were you ultimately looking for in your actors?
First of all, you need that group, that core ensemble, to look like they have the same ancestors. I occasionally joked that we were making a pop supergroup. You work with figures of speech. Okay, you’ve got the tall athletic one, you’ve got the clown, you’ve got the scholar, you’ve got the ‘virgin’ – I borrow a bit from Cabin in the woods here, but you get my point. You take these tropes, and then it’s about how you subvert them and play with them over the course of the film.
When you cast the film, you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, but then someone comes in with a certain energy. Safia came in and read for Beyah – she was just a force of nature, a little 19-year-old pocket rocket who had trained as a dancer, so she was incredibly physical in her movements, but she could act. So we got Beyah, and I thought that was going to be harder. Sometimes you just get lucky. And everyone brought something very different, but when you combine them, their energies all bounced off each other in a very helpful way.
Then we’re talking costume and makeup. I encouraged my production and costume designer to start looking at Inuit fashion because they live in a similar climate, and when they kill an animal they use every part of it in their costumes and jewelry, etc. So it all went to try to make these people feel human, and that they have culture and can express themselves, and there is real intelligence and artistic ability. I think this will hopefully help them feel a little more lived in, and more like three-dimensional characters rather than wax figures in the museum.
Did making up your own language give you any freedom to let actors say whatever they wanted to sound cooler? Can you bend the rules?
I don’t know about other directors, but I have a strong sense of rhythm and dialogue. Somebody told me When I read the script, there was a musicality to it. I think this helps actors learn their lines better, giving them a sense of rhythm. They speak in this language, Tola, so the first thing is: Do I believe it in my eyes? Beyah wants something from Geirr, so do I believe Safia’s performance that she really wants this thing? Since they don’t speak English, you don’t worry about the words, you just worry about the meaning.
And then it’s just that: Does it have a rhythm? Does it feel lived in? Are there colloquialisms? Does this line have too many syllables? Can we shorten it and make it feel more lived, that these two people are friends, as opposed to strangers who just met? They would talk to each other in a different way. So yeah, you just feel it in the moment. We didn’t write an encyclopedia; it was a script, and all you ask after every take is: Did I believe it? And if you say no, you do it again.
Image: Bleeckerstraat
The film takes full advantage of beautiful, misty landscapes in Scotland. How did the country change the way you wanted to stage action and some of the creepier horror beats?
Originally in the middle of the film they come across what we called the “blood pit.” Originally, that blood pit was supposed to be at the bottom of a 30-foot cliff. And we couldn’t find a 30-foot cliff anywhere within 45 minutes of our hotel, so we ended up having to change it and create this rock that became an altar. And something very terrible happens at that altar that was originally expected to have something to do with the cliff. A complicated example, but one of those moments when Ruth and I looked at each other and said, “We’re not going to find this, we have to think of something else.” And then what you come up with is infinitely better.
We were in some locations where you were up to your ankles in swampy swamp. So we couldn’t put any tracks there, but I didn’t want to play handheld. So it is Can we make sure it’s flat and doesn’t sink halfway through the shot? It was a challenge every day. Even if the weather changes from day to day, you see a location in beautiful sunshine, and then you get there with a wind speed of 40 miles per hour. That changes performance, that changes the way you go about shooting, it changes your energy level. So you’re reacting to things every day, but trying to stick to that thesis, how each scene leads us to the denouement. As long as you get that thesis tattooed under your eyelids, you’ll be fine.
Who or what was the guiding light that kept you through this?
I am a disciple of David Fincher. I saw Seven too young, and that was a big part of my character. I also came of age when (Steven) Soderbergh was making some extremely interesting films. But even if we go back to John Ford, or Hitchcock, or Polanski – can you say Polanski? – just any filmmaker who has an idea of what he wants to do and executes it, and it looks like there’s a plan, that’s a good start.
Let the record show that you have a giant too Akira poster hanging on the wall of your office.
I convinced my father to buy me Akira on VHS when I was 11 because he thought it was a Disney movie! While the rest of my friends were watching actual Disney movies, I was watching Akira.