Set in 1944, The Devil's Rock sees Captain Ben Grogan and Sergeant Joseph Tanesent on a top secret mission to destroy gun emplacements inside German occupied territory in the Channel Islands on the eve of D-Day. But soon, a mysterious Nazi officer and a beautiful but Devilish captive cause all kinds of bloody mayhem.
tvnz.co.nz caught up with director Paul Campion about his debut
feature.
Tell us where the idea for this came from.
I was screening my short film Eel Girl in Guernsey (in
the Channel Islands in the UK) in Nov 2009, and I was interviewed
by the local newspaper. One of the questions was did I know
anything about Guernsey's history of witchcraft, which I didn't but
that peaked my interest enough to learn about the Bad Books, which
are books of black magic that were supposed to exist in the Channel
Islands (they do in fact exist, and the one in our film is based
loosely on a genuine 250 year old book of black magic I found in a
vault in a library in Guernsey). Then on the same trip I saw
one of the WW2 German fortifications, and straight away thought it
would make a great setting for a horror film. I just put those
elements together - the Bad Books, the German occupation and
setting the whole thing in one of these fortresses and came up with
the basic premise of an Allied commando discovering a Nazi attempt
to summon up a demon. In fact apart from the demon, almost
everything else is based on a certain amount of fact.
Tell us how you decided upon your cast.
The whole cast came together really quickly. Gina
Varela was first on-board, she was recommended by Jeff Hurrell our
editor. Leanne Saunders the producer had worked with Matt
Sunderland before and she recommended him for Colonel Meyer
straight away. Craig Hall, who was working up in Auckland had
heard about the film and put an audition tape together
off his own back and sent it to us. For the Joe Tane
character we did hold auditions and Karlos Drinkwater completely
nailed his character.
What was the trickiest part of putting together this
film?
The script. It was written to be made originally
with just my money (I re-mortgaged my house to put up the cash) so
we knew our hands were really tied with how many characters,
locations and how much action we could get away with.
Everything else came together relatively easily - everyone loved
the premise and I can't remember a single person who we asked to be
involved turning us down. Finally the NZ Film Commission came
onboard with extra finance and that really made a huge difference
with the overall production value.
There's a lot of blood in this film - how much did you get
through - and was there ever any issues with that amount?
I'm not sure how many gallons - it wasn't that much as
it's surprisingly expensive. I think we used 10% of the
production design budget just on blood for the set dressing alone,
and it was never enough. The main room where the bunkers are
was supposed to be dripping in blood with more ripped apart bodies
splattered everywhere - normally it's just me who's asking for more
blood, but even Rob Marsh the Director of Photography wanted
more.
Tell us a little about the location shoots for the
film
The tunnel sequences, the gun pits and the scene with the
two soldiers walking up through the undergrowth was all shot around
Wrights Hill Fortress. That was an amazing place to have
access to - there can't be that many restored WW2 bunkers around
the world with 600m of tunnels that are almost identical the the
real German bunkers. It was a bit of a nightmare shooting in there
though, very claustrophobic, pitch black in places and very noisy
due to echoing. The gun pits were also a very lucky find - we
just embellished them with CGI gun based on the real one in
Guernsey. For the beach scenes we shot all that at Breaker
Bay in Wellington, and then extended them with matte paintings,
some of which were based on pictures of the real cliffs in the
Channel islands.
Was it always the intention to have a queasy mix of the
Exorcist and Saving Private Ryan? And it's much more of a measured
film than an out and out horror, was it always the intention to
make it a more intimate kind of film?
I'm not sure if we were aiming for quite those lofty
heights, but it was always meant to be a war film crossed with
something a little more cerebral - something that required a little
more thought from the audience and posed a question for them -
would you do a deal with the devil to have the love of your life
back again. The intimacy was out of necessity - we knew as we
started writing the scrip we could only afford 3 actors and a
single location and the challenge was how can we tell an
interesting story for 90 minutes.
What are your influences for these kinds of films?
It wasn't actually that influenced by other horror
films. The main films I watched for reference were David
Slade's Hard Candy, and Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat and also
Rope. They're all films with a limited number of characters
set in a single location, and that was really the challenge with
our film - how do we make a story with just 3 main characters in a
single location interesting. Hard Candy I think is a great
bit of filmmaking - just two characters essentially in a single
room. If you study the structure of it it's very well paced - every
time it starts getting a little too talky and starts slowing down a
bit, there's a burst of action.
How much research did you do over the Nazi occupation? What
was the most interesting fact you discovered?
From the moment I thrashed out the basic treatment in Feb
2010 right up until we started shooting I was constantly doing
research. The intention was to make a horror film that was
based on a certain amount of historical fact, and the more research
I did the more interesting facts we tried to weave the story
around. The books of black magic are real, I found 250 year
old versions of them in a vault in Guernsey, as is the Channel
Islands history of witchcraft. The Channel Islands were the only
part of the UK that were occupied during the war, and the
fortification we based the film on is based on the real one in
Guernsey. By 1944 the Germans (and the islanders) were
practically starving - the Red Cross eventually had broker a
temporary truce from both the Germans and the British to send food
ships to the islands. That formed the idea for how the German's
found the book - they were stationed on this lonely island, and
went looking for food and found the book instead. The Special Boat
Service (amphibious equivalent of the SAS) did carry out deception
raids on the Channel Islands, and one of those raids famously led
to Hitler's commando order, which is the basis of the whole
interrogation scene. A team of commandos raided the island of Sark,
capturing several German prisoners. They tied their hands behind
their backs and were going to take them back to the UK mainland for
interrogation, when one of the prisoners cried out for help as
there was a garrison of Germans nearby. The prisoner was shot
to silence him, and the commandos left his body there, with his
hands tied, which was against the Geneva convention. The British
soldier who shot him was appalled at what he'd had to do, and
wanted to go back and remove the bindings from the dead German's
hands, but didn't' have time. Word of this killing got back
to Hitler, who issued what was known as the Commando Order, where
any allied commandos or special forces solders caught behind enemy
lines, were to be interrogated, tortured and executed without trial
- all breaking the Geneva convention. The whole interrogation
scene was based on that (the thumb tying is a genuine
interrogation/torture technique), and there's also a reference to a
famous raid called the Cockleshell raid, led by Major Blondie
Hasler, where 10 commandos kayaked up a river to Bordeaux to blow
up enemy ships. Several of them where known to have been
captured, tortured and executed under the Commando Order.
There's an old 1950's film about the raid which I'd love to remake
(the original is a bit quaint by today's standards).
Is everything in the film you'd wanted - or were there
some parts you had to hold back on for fear of going too far?
If we'd had more time to work on the script we'd probably
have found a way to put in a little more action and possibly a few
more plot twists. It was a conscious decision not to make the
interrogation scene too nasty - it could've been easy to go into a
'torture porn' type scenario but I thought it was more interesting
to hold back and just leave the potential for violence (from Meyer)
there. I actually wanted a little more nudity in the film, not
necessarily gratuitous, but a little more provocative - the
whole Helena/Demon character was supposed to be a succubus -a
seductress. Normally in horror films naked women are the
victims, I wanted to turn things around and make her very sexy but
very dangerous. She's also the most honest character of the
three of them - she just wants to eat them and will us whatever she
can to try and seduce them so she can get close enough to kill
them.
It seems to be open to a potential for a sequel - would you
do one and what would be the basic premise of it?
Yes, we're currently talking about a sequel at the
moment - it would be nice to go back and make a slightly bigger
film - less talky and more characters, more action, more
demons, something that would work better for a more mainstream
audience. There was never any thought to a sequel at all when we
were making it, it was only recently that I realised the film has
set itself up for one - we now have a demon loose on the island, a
boatload of germans just arriving, the book is in Allied hands, and
the Allies know that at some point they're going to have to return
to the island and dispel the demon with a willing human
sacrifice. Potentially you could even go back to a prequel -
right back to the middle ages in the Channel Islands and burning
witches at the stake and the creation of the book.
