Christopher Smith Gets Radical With Black Death (2010)

British horror director Christopher Smith pours contemporary anxieties into his bleak medieval horror movie, Black Death

Christopher Smith's films have been a treat for gore-bores ever since Franke Potente (Run, Lola, Run) found herself up against a deranged killer living in the depths of the London Underground, in the Bristolian director's gruesome 2004 debut feature, Creep. But while there is plenty of grisliness to slaver over in his steadily growing oeuvre, Smith's movies are more than just the sum of their dismembered body parts – and often more than just straightforward horror movies.

His sophomore effort, Severance, might have starred Danny Dyer (to be fair, he's actually quite good fun), but underlying its story of weapons salespeople being hunted by masked psychos during a team-building exercise in eastern Europe, was a sly, blackly comic commentary on the absurdity of the war on terror.

The point is that Smith, whose favourite horror films include the classics The Exorcist and The Shining, has always consciously tried to do more than just scare people. In everything he has done, says the former EastEnders writer, he has “always ended up finding a kind of subtext that becomes really meaty. But that's what all the best movies do,” he enthuses. “In Invasion of the Bodysnatchers – brilliant movie – it was Communism. And when I watched Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde again recently, really it's about being a drug addict or an alcoholic and coming back and not realising that you've beaten-up your wife when you were drunk. I think all those stories are classics because you understand that subtext, but it's not in your face.”

Likewise his latest and most sophisticated film to date, Black Death, might be set 600 years ago, but after inheriting the project, with Sean Bean attached, from film-maker Geoffrey Sax (Stormbreaker), Smith reworked Dario Poloni's screenplay and turned it into something with striking, though not heavy-handed, contemporary resonance.

In it a young monk, Osmund (Eddie Redmayne), who is torn between his devotion to God and his love for a young woman, joins a mission to capture a necromancer that a bishop believes is using black magic to protect a village from the plague ravaging the rest of the country. What follows is a dark tale of innocence corrupted as the monk's liberal religious views, influenced first by the mission's fundamentalist leader, Ulric (Bean), then by events in the village, get twisted into something far less forgiving and uncompromising.

"For me the horror is how do you take a young soul and turn that guy into a monster?” says Smith. At the end of the version being developed by Sax, Osmund wound up actually in Hell. Smith wanted a far more realistic approach.

"To me it's the story of a suicide bomber,” he says. “It's about this boy who's radicalised and how does it happen? And do we like him? And do we understand how he has become what he has become at the end?” He had considered finishing the film with a coda entitled 'Modern Day', but opted for something less on the nose. Besides, his producer, Robert Bernstein, kept telling him the film wasn't about a suicide bomber. “I was saying, 'It's about radicalisation,'” Smith recalls, “and he was all worried. But I said, 'I believe when you touch on stuff [that's real], it gives you a dirty kind of uncomfortable feeling,' which is what I believe then opens up a certain part of the brain.”

I suggest that Black Death is the part of the story missed out by Chris Morris and his co-writers in Four Lions (they should put them on a double-bill, Smith jokes in response), where the lack of context made the would-be terrorists' actions seem all the more ridiculous and abstract. It is also the part of the story that often goes unexamined in, or is oversimplified by, the media, offers Smith. “In the press they give you the impression that [suicide bombers] are brainwashed. But if you look at the suicide bombers of 9/11, Mohamed Atta was a bright boy, a university student. He wasn't brainwashed. So where was his starting block? At what point did his journey towards radicalisation begin?”

The film-maker hastily adds that he is not trying to justify any act of violence. He is simply saying that “people are doing [these things] because they feel they have to or there's no other way. But, whatever happens, they're wrong and they shouldn't do that.”

When Smith was at university, his goal was to find a way of taking “really clever art house cinema ideas and twisting them into a palatable format” for the mainstream. Black Death, with its mixture of action, mystery, theology, politics, ideas about faith and God, and the potentially corrupting influence of (any) religion, is his boldest and most accomplished step towards this aim yet. However, there are risks involved. While the film should appeal to a broad audience, he says: “I have to be careful that I don't push myself into a box where my films become more interesting but not commercial, because then you find yourself in that difficult area where they're interesting but they never make any money. People are then likely to say, 'Where's that guy that made Severance? Let's get that guy back.'”

Actually, he had planned to make a sequel to Severance in which the Americans would have been the bad guys, but the time passed. “Now that Obama's in the White House we're all back in love again and everything's cool,” he laughs. “It would've been kind of fun but that was a Bush movie.”

Instead he is writing a road movie and wants to make a noir thriller independently in the United States. There is also a “twisted little kids film” in the works adapted from the first book in Robert Muchamore's acclaimed CHERUB series about an MI5 unit that uses kids as spies. “It's characters like you would see in a Shane Meadows film but in a thriller environment,” he says.

This does not mean he is leaving horror behind him. He is justifiably proud of Black Death but still feels that he hasn't yet made his Exorcist: something really twisted and nasty but that also has substance.

"I haven't made that scary horror yet where I just feel, like, 'Wow!' I want to make that movie. I really want to scare people in a really traditional way. So I'm laying in bed at night trying to think up the idea that's going to do that.”

© Stephen Applebaum, 2011

Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu: "You see these borders getting worse and worse between human beings, cultures, nations and neighbourhoods."

Babel: One world, dissonant voices.
London, 2006



Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu could have done almost anything he liked after Amores Perros. The director's astounding debut film - three stories set in Mexico City, all connected by one car crash - saw the former DJ and commercials director hailed as a major talent. He could probably have gone to Hollywood there and then. But instead of being sucked into America's mainstream movie-making machinery, he took Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio del Toro to Memphis and immersed them in 21 Grams, an unremittingly grim story about grief, religious fundamentalism and redemption.

21 Grams felt like an anguished howl of pain. "It was very personal to me," Inarritu says when we meet in London. "I lost a kid with my wife and that was one of the things I wanted to explore." The film, like Amores Perros, was informed by this 43-year-old father of two's belief that "to arrive at the light you have to go through a very painful or dark process". Life is a "list of losses", he elaborates. "When you are born, you lose the security in your mother's womb. You lose your friends. You lose your hair. You lose your father. You lose your job. You lose your health. You know that you will lose your life. I think it's how you confront those losses that matters." That sounds awfully pessimistic, I say. "Oscar Wilde said a pessimist was an optimist well informed," he laughs. "I think that's how I feel."

This is nowhere more evident than in the director's new film. Babel concludes what is now an informal trilogy - though only in the sense that the films all concern parents and children, he says. Global rather than local, like Amores Perros, or spiritual like 21 Grams, Babel, Inarritu says, grew out of his need to talk about the world as he has experienced it since moving to LA - four days before 9/11 - and during his subsequent travels. The film is dark stuff, predictably, with only the slightest hint of light piercing the existential gloom. But it was something he felt compelled to make, despite the various appeals made to his vanity, his ego, his wallet and his creativity by screenplays coming from Hollywood. "If I had chosen them I knew it would be the wrong decision," he says. "For me, making a film is such a difficult thing, that it's better for me if it is a personal thing.

"I have the great privilege to be in a world where I can express my own fears, my own anxieties, and whatever moves me in my work. So, my life and my films are not very separated. I cannot hire my life to be telling something that I don't care about. It was a moral kind of decision to make this film. I needed to vomit a lot of things out that really bother me because of opening the newspapers, or that I experienced by myself, things that make me angry."

The coincidence of 9/11 with Inarritu's move to LA plunged the film-maker into depression. It's not easy being Mexican in the States at the best of times, but Inarritu also has a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance. In the atmosphere of paranoia and "aggravated nationalism" that followed the attacks, he found himself being regarded as "suspicious" and "dangerous". It was "a difficult and intense phase", he says. "Living as an immigrant, as a Mexican, in the US creates a lot of questions, a lot of emotions, a lot of feelings, a lot of anxiety."

He thought about the archetypes and the stereotypes and the preconceptions that we all have about one another, which trap us and alienate us, and prevent proper communication. He thought about how these are exploited by politicians to justify policy, and perpetuated through the media. "It's so sad when you see Fox News in the United States, because they completely spoil and poison any culture or any news," he says. "They ban images. They haven't shown one single coffin or one single video of what is going on in Iraq right now."

Travelling abroad, he says, "you can see these borders getting worse and worse and worse, between human beings, between cultures, between nations, between neighbourhoods. That's something I wanted to talk about."

He started work on Babel with Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón's scriptwriter/director brother, Carlos, and then called in Guillermo Arriaga (who wrote Amores Perros and 21 Grams) when Cuarón switched to another project. Arriaga came up with five stories, two of which - about Moroccan children, and an American couple - survived. Inarritu himself supplied stories about a Mexican nanny looking after North American siblings, because he wanted to address the subject of immigration and the tensions along the US-Mexico border, and about a deaf-mute Japanese girl trying to cope with loneliness, her mother's suicide and her burgeoning sexuality.

When he started the multi-lingual film, which takes us from California to the Moroccan desert, to Mexico and Japan, Inarritu thought he was making something about the differences between people. Gradually, though, he discovered he was actually making a film about the things which, he believes, make us all the same. A much more positive outlook, you might think. But it really depends on whether you are someone who sees the cup as half empty or half full.

In the film, an American couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett), grieving over the death of a child, are struck by further tragedy when the wife is accidentally shot on a tourist bus in Morocco. As she fights for her life in a poor village, the US government treats the shooting as a terrorist attack, turning it into an international incident. Meanwhile, the couple's children in America are fighting for their own lives in the desert after being taken to a wedding in Mexico by their nanny, only to find themselves caught up in a border incident as they try to re-enter the US. Later, the gun used in the shooting is traced back to the father of the girl in Tokyo, who gifted it to a guide after a hunting trip. Each story ends with a kind of moment of grace as people connect, or reconnect, through touch.

"I think that as human beings what makes us happy is very different and depends on races and cultures. But what makes us sad and miserable is exactly what we share," says Inarritu. "That thing is basically the impossibility of love: the impossibility to be touched by love, the impossibility to touch with love and express it. In this film those connections between characters are about that."

The paradox is that politics and prejudice, religion and culture, drive us apart. The proposed US-Mexico border wall is a tragic example of this, he says. It won't stop people dreaming of a better life. "It will just put more people in danger and they will have to risk their lives a little harder. There will be more security that will threaten the lives of all these humble people. They will not be stopped by a fence."

I ask Inarritu whether putting two blonde American kids in the same situation as desperate Mexican migrants was his way of trying to make bigots empathise with people they normally just regard as negative statistics. "It's a paradox," he says. "It seems that maybe I want to just get closer to people who agree to build that wall to make them feel in a human perspective, not in news and magazine terms, so that they can just think about that. One thousand people die in those conditions, including kids. And if they get closer to that story in a human way, and can just see that angle, maybe they can change a little bit their minds. Or they can think about whether a fence is really the answer to these problems. I think these American kids, just by the juxtaposition of images, will make them feel more the impact in it, and see that kids are kids, no matter whether they are blonde or Mexican. It's kids, you know? So, yeah, I think that can be effective."

Babel earned Inarritu the best director award at Cannes in May. It performed spectacularly when it opened in limited release in America, but rather more sluggishly nationwide. Critically, the film has been furiously debated. Some reviewers have called it a masterpiece, others a pretentious folly, deep and meaningful or well-made, but possibly signifying nothing. Some have dubbed it this year's Crash - which, depending on your view of that film, is either a good or bad thing.

I liked Paul Haggis's multi-Oscar winner, but Babel is an altogether subtler, more ambitious film, in which Inarritu draws on all his considerable resources as a film-maker to empathetically reveal not only the barriers that keep us apart, but also the ties that bind us together as a species. In a world that is in danger of collapsing around us like the biblical Tower of Babel, this surely cannot be a bad thing.

"If you see a film about human beings and not about Moroccans or Mexicans or Americans, if you see human beings and you forget about the languages and you just see a film, then I feel I succeeded," says Inarritu.





© Stephen Applebaum, 2006