Exclusive Q&A with "Daylight" Director David Barker!

Posted By:	Adam Mast
Posted On:	Mon Sep 28th, 2009

A Q & A WITH "DAYLIGHT" DIRECTOR DAVID BARKER!

Last June, at Cinevegas, I was lucky enough to catch a screening of a really outstanding independent gem called Daylight (not to be confused with the silly Sylvester Stallone actioneer of the same name). To check out my review, click on this link; https://zboneman.com/blog/More-Flicks-From-Cinevegas-Daylight-The-Square-21757.html Currently, director David Barker is taking Daylight to various film festivals around the world. Through the past few months, we've had a few conversations about movies in general and he was good enough to do this exclusive Q & A with Zboneman.com.

ADAM MAST: First of all David, congratulations on Daylight. It's a tight, effective little thriller, and a very intriguing play on the horror genre. Can you give our readers a little insight into the project?

DAVID BARKER: I love American genre films, and I love the French New Wave approach to filmmaking, where the film is both a documentary and a narrative at the same time. This is a thriller that combines both, and that takes an almost horror film situation - the kidnapping of a pregnant woman and her husband - and complicates it by making you care about both the victims and the aggressors. Ultimately, it is an almost spiritual film about the ways that people affect and change each other, but it is also brutal, and there are no easy answers.

A.M.:
How long was the shoot?

D.B.: This one is easy: 2 weeks.

A.M.: I understand that Daylight is loosely based on a 50's B western called The Tall T. Were there any other films that influenced your picture?

D.B.: The Tall T was an inspiration, because I love B movies, and I loved the simple approach to the low budget of this. A couple get kidnapped by stagecoach robbers, and after the initial action of the hold-up, they spend the rest of the movie in a cave talking about life - what they want, what their disappointments have been...it was a very human approach to the situation, and the lead robber is humanized in a way that I thought was great. You might not agree with his choices, but you can understand how he came to them. This was the main approach to DAYLIGHT, that we would take a horrific situation - and it is a situation that happened several times in the area in the months before we shot the film - where a couple or family is violently taken hostage by people who want to get money from them, and look at it in depth this way. We just had a screening in Paris a couple days ago, and from minute 7 people were terrified. At minute 30 several people groaned aloud, and after the screening I asked them why. They said it was because at that point they were beginning to identify with the captors as well as the as the victims and they felt conflicted. I think this is as perfect a reaction as I could have hoped for.

A.M.: You put together a very effective cast here. Alexandra Meierhans and Ivan Martin are both outstanding, but I was particularly affected by Michael Godere. He is positively chilling in this picture bringing a childlike sense of innocence to his role of a violent thug who impulsively commits horrific acts in an almost nonchalant manner. Can you talk a bit about casting and tell us how much input your cast had in the story development process?

D.B.: Alexandra and I started the film together after working for a year on another script that still wasn't getting to the point we wanted. Alexandra was pregnant, and we wanted to make a film together that would make use of her pregnancy. So that was the starting point, that, and my love of B films, and two really brutal kidnappings that had happening in Connecticut that Summer that we were trying to make sense of. Aidan Redmond, who plays her husband, had read a part in a staged reading of our other screenplay, and he was great at bringing humanity to a husband who might otherwise have not been so sympathetic to the audience, so I thought of him immediately once we wrote this part. Ivan Martin is a fantastic actor that I had done a play with many years ago and lost touch with until I ran into him in the street, and he introduced me to Michael Godere. We wrote an outline of the film, but then developed the scenes through several months of workshopping, where I would write a scene, and then we would rehearse it, and through the rehearsals it would change and develop. Because the parts were cast before the dialogue was written, the actors and their personalities had a lot to do with the characters as they developed. For example, Michael had a quality that made him very innocent the day I met him, and this became Renny's innocent, almost saint-like character as the ruthless killer. The whole section of the carjacking and taking Daniel down to the river came out of a long improvisation one day, and it plays in the film pretty close to how the actors improved it that day. Instead of saying 'cut' at the end of the section we were working on, I just let them go on, and what they came up with terrified me in a way that I had never seen before. I transcribed it and edited it a little, but it more or less came from one afternoon where Ivan and Michael really got into their characters, and asked themselves what they would do if they were in that situation. It has an authenticity that you would never get from sitting in a room writing on your computer. And of course, working with great actors who are unknown means that you don't know what is coming - who will die, who will live...

A.M.: Many of the horror films we've been seeing in the past few years (i.e. The Strangers, The Last House on the Left, etc.) have been extremely nihilistic in nature. This is fine I suppose. On occasion, I admire such pictures as long as they're well crafted, but what I found refreshing about your film is the fashion in which you lead the audience to believe that this might be your standard horror film, but then you sort of flip the genre on its ear. I guess it isn't even entirely fair to classify Daylight as a horror film at all, but it certainly has that element to it. This is a tale of survival, but you don't just put us in the mind of the potential victims. You also put us in the minds of these vicious but very human antagonists. Having said all of that, what is your opinion of contemporary horror films?

D.B.: I never thought of it as a horror film, but most people who have reviewed it have seen it that way. I don't see a lot of horror like what you mention because I am not so into the cruelty of it. I loved for example many of Wes Craven's movies, but not LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. I loved the NIGHTMARE films and SHOCKER for example, because they are all about the edge of reality, looking at whether you are awake or asleep...sometimes you are listening to sounds, trying to hear whether footsteps sound different? If they do, you are dreaming not awake and in danger... LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT is about cruelty from the victims point of view and I don't get into this. That film was actually ripped off from Ingmar Bergman's VIRGIN SPRING, and that to me is much more interesting, which is to look at the cruelty from the point of the view of the father who is getting revenge for his daughter's rape and murder. It has the same beginning, but ultimately what it's about is being driven to that point of getting revenge in that way, the cruelty of the rape and murder put us in a position to identify with the husband, but both with his anger and with his weird feelings afterwards. LAST HOUSE was more cartoony in the end, and I always want to go for the extreme experience, but one which has me reflect back into my own life. Horror which is about cruelty I guess is related to the same things that make us sort of stop and sort of look at an accident: this fascination with life and death and who are we as humans...but in movies like the SAW movies or the HOSTEL movies, it doesn't go beyond the surface titillation. Horror which takes that as a starting point and that goes a little deeper and takes advantage of an extreme situation to explore some of our fears in some real depth where it gets uncomfortable is great. I guess I could sum it up by saying that - as with any kind of genre film - a horror film where you ultimately don't know who is good and who is bad is more interesting to me than one where there are bad people and good people and you hope the good people survive. That's a bit too easy.

A.M.: Daylight has a fairly brisk running time, but it still has a complexity that seems to be lacking in some films that are twice as long. For instance, there's a sort of underlining spiritual bond that develops between Meierhans' Irene and her kidnappers, and while this part of the film is very subtle in nature, it still comes across. Was it always part of the master plan that Daylight be short and to the point, or were there areas that you wanted to explore further, but were unable to because of budget issues or lack of time?

D.B.: I LOVE the Hollywood B movies of the 1940s, films by directors like Budd Boetticher, Richard Fleischer, Jacques Tourneur, Don Siegel, Anthony Mann. Its like with short films now - there is a freedom to experiment both formally and subject-wise that you don't have in the bigger budget films that need to follow a formula. With Daylight, we wanted to make a contemporary B-movie - which to me means a movie that deals with subjects or with a complexity that Hollywood won't, that does it through the medium of a genre story, and that does it in about 70 minutes. We came in around 75 minutes, so it is actually a bit longer than I'd have liked. I love brevity, though I know it is more of the fashion to make a movie that is over two hours right now rather than one that is 70 minutes. I get bored easily and I find that the 70 minute mark is about where I start checking my watch in the theater unless a film is very well made.
A.M.: So would you say this is the film you and your crew always set out to make?

D.B.: So far, the movies I have made have not been of the sort where I come up with an idea in my head and then move heaven and earth to get reality to correspond to my vision. One of my biggest influences in this respect has been the French New Wave, in that I want the films to contain elements of both narrative and documentary, I want the films to develop around the personalities of the actors and the situations we encounter, and the actual production of the films is very open in the way that they will incorporate the interests and lives of the people involved and the circumstances in which they were made.

A.M.: On a more personal note, who were some of your biggest inspirations growing up, both personally and professionally?

D.B.: I grew up around Boston, and for a kid getting interested in movies, it was a great place to be. There were a lot of repertory theaters, so you could see all the great films projected in a theater for very little money. I remember seeing a lot of Scorsese movies, Polanski, Herzog... there was a double feature of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver that played every couple months, and I saw that over and over. We didn't have a VCR, so what I did was bring a tape recorder, and tape recorded MEAN STREETS, then sat down and typed out the the screenplay myself as a way of learning how to write. I also volunteered at the Harvard Film Archive when I was 14-15, putting up posters in exchange for free admission to all their screenings. The French New Wave was also a big influence at the time, discovering the films of Truffaut and Godard and this kind of filmmaking that lived between narrative and documentary as I mentioned above.

A.M.: Given that you've been busy on the festival circuit, has this allowed you any time to decide what you might want to do next?

D.B.: Yes, I am making a little switch and developing a script that is much more fully written in a traditional sense. It is a supernatural drama about a family in Boston and how some very special abilities come to affect their lives. I'm also working on some projects in Europe and want to do more of that cross-cultural collaboration.

A.M.: I thought I'd have a little fun with my final question. Its clear you're a fan of movies or your chosen profession would not be that of a film maker. If you were stuck all alone with a DVD player and could only have five movies with you for the rest of your life, what five movies would you choose?

D.B.: Adam, this question is impossible to answer! It would be easier to pick 5 CDs. Right now I might choose Tarkovsky's Solaris, Cukor's Philadelphia Story, Bergman's Persona, Preston Sturges Lady Eve, and Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Its an eclectic list for sure, but all films that I could spend a lot of time learning the secrets of. But I know that as soon as I got to the Island I would look at this collection of DVDs and be disappointed. I wouldn't want to see any of them, and there would be five others that I'd kill to have.

A.M.: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us David. We wish you the best of luck with future projects. Daylight is a terrific picture and we look forward to seeing it in theaters soon.

D.B.: Thank you!

We'll be sure to keep everyone updated on Daylight. It really is a terrific picture and well worth seeking out.