Gary Irwin: Director
Interview: Gary Irwin [Part 1]
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Irwin and his crew had a vision, however. In their pursuit of it they made choices that eliminated the usual pitfalls of genre film the potential for poor special effects, paper-thin sets, uncertain photography.
"Of Darkness" emerges as a Spielbergian effort, a modestly gorgeous and cinematically adventurous first stab at the mainstream for Irwins team. Part one of Cinescares October DISCOVERIES interview looks at the nuts-and-bolts technical achievements Irwin wrestled from his environment, from inception to execution.
Cinescare: How did you and screenwriter Matt Casale came together to work on "Of Darkness?" What tipped you off in the early stages that this was the script you needed to put to film as your next major project.
Gary Irwin: Matt and myself, and Paul -- my brother were kind of looking for the next thing to do. Matt has this idea, lets say the story, for "Of Darkness" kicking around in his head. Basically what he had was the idea of a bunch a kids, and then they find a book and bad things start to happen. That was kind of the shell of the idea. I think he even did something when he was young he used to make shorts and those kinds of things when he was a kid.
Thats kind of how it got started. We were hanging around one night. We were talking. We started talking about how it would be cool to do a horror film. I love horror films. Matts a huge horror fan. Then we just started brainstorming. We had this kind of pitch session. Matt threw out this idea. It was just a nugget of a story but here it is. He kind of laid it out.
Cinescare: Talk about how this film uses very little in the way of on-screen special effects. Its a remarkable use of simple technology to create complicated scares.
Gary Irwin: I think the idea of the actual presence, of the evil presence being darkness, that came later. Thats when I thought we had something kind of interesting. We started talking about this project. It seemed pretty straightforward at first. We started talking about it and were saying, "How are we going to represent the evil?"
The obvious answers get thrown out first. Fog, or a mist, or those kinds of things. Obviously those things have all been done. So, we were trying to think of something that could be interesting but also be doable for a short film. That kind of led down this path of the absence of light as opposed to doing some sort of on-screen trickery, or special effects.
Cinescare: That the thing thats brilliant about "Of Darkness." It brings people who are real fans of genre film, and of horror storytelling, and of scary storytelling back to campfire level scary stories. Theyre going to see this and be blown away by how incredible a light being turned off can look. Was it really as simple as somebody sitting at a fader board and bringing lights up and down?
Gary Irwin: I wouldnt say that it was overly complicated. We didnt have a master dimmer board or anything like that. The most interesting thing about preproduction with this project was that we wanted to do a film that was so light-intensive. We went through three cinematographers in pre-production. The only constant was the idea that I had in my head.
All throughout pre-production I was developing the choreography of what happens, the technical side of how this stuff would work. As we brought on different cinematographers, everybody gave their own opinion about, "What if we did this? Or what if we did this?"
I thank all three cinematographers in the credits because, although we worked with Daniel Watchulonis, who is amazing, there were two other cinematographers ... who I had met with early on.
Cinescare: Given those resources, you plotted out how lights would work on-set?
Gary Irwin: Once we settled on Dan, we mapped out the house. We thought of it as a living thing, and we just took it room by room. We looked at it as a cat-and-mouse game. When you break it down like that and you take it room to room, it becomes a little bit more manageable. This room is going to have seven lights in it. There are going to five or six practical lights coming from under the cabinets. There are going to be two ceiling fans. Theres going to be a light over the stove. So, each one of those lights is going to have to be on a separate dimmer. It can get complicated.
The thing that was difficult was that we werent working on a stage, we were working in an existing house. We had to use the electricity in the house, and then we had to just rerun things as we needed. A lot of lights were subbed in for movie lights. Instead of using existing practicals, we put in our own practicals.
Cinescare: And then, you were looking at initial footage. You needed to figure out how to synch up the extraordinary sound editing in this film with the way the lights work.
Gary Irwin: Absolutely. I credit that to the guy at Milkboy Recording, which is where we did all the post sound work. Those guys took it to the next level.
Cinescare: The fact that theres a real geography to this house, that in the space of twenty-something minutes the audience can really understand where the rooms are and how much space these characters have left to work with, is really important to "Of Darkness." When the cinematography really kicks in, theres fabulous tracking work and dolly work. Did you have to tear out walls and break out counters to get the camera around everything?
Gary Irwin: [laughs] Not really. I mean, we had been looking. When we first started prep on "Of Darkness," there were two major hurdles to overcome. The first was that we were going to be working with all-kids cast. The second was that we were going to need to find the perfect house. Because were not a Hollywood film, because were a low-budget indie short film, we were going to have to find an existing house.
We scouted a bunch of different houses. The one we wound up using was actually my fiances parents house. Which Im actually at right now. Now, every time I come here its the "Of Darkness" house.
Its a big house and theres a lot of things I liked about it when we walked through it. You can see through a lot of the rooms, into other rooms. So, you get a lot of depth of field through the different rooms. You can see from the living room into the kitchen. You can see through the kitchen into the laundry room.
I use something like "Panic Room" as an example of a movie that did a great job, being all in one house. Tracking through the house, dolly-ing through doorways you can really craft an interesting, tense story using one house. Obviously, Panic Room had computer graphics and a stage, but the essence of what they did, I really tried to hone in on. I watched that film a couple times as we were prepping "Of Darkness."
To speak a little bit more about the house, and even the lighting, what was really important for was to give the sense that these kids were in a safe environment.
Theyre at somebodys house, theyre hanging out, all the lights are on and its just like any other suburban house where kids feel safe. Theyre going to scare each other, theyre going to tell each other scary stories, theyre going to watch scary movies, but at the end of the day they have the light, they have the comfort of the house and theyre okay.
When I was working with the art director and the production designer, that was something I was really worried about. This should be a comfortable place. We dont want this to be an eerie old house. It was important to me to have this safe haven and then to start eating that safety away.
Cinescare: The combination of technical and aesthetic decisions, combined with Matts script, brought out of a kind of immediacy and authenticity about suburban kids at home on that inevitable weekend night they get to hang out together and sort abuse each other
Gary Irwin: Which weve all done when we were younger.
Cinescare: These kids these were young people coming to you from a local acting rep theater?
Gary Irwin: We cast the film through a local casting agency, Kathy Wickline Casting. We basically did multiple open calls to find younger kids. We gave them our script breakdown and our character breakdowns.
I was worried off the bat. If we werent going to be able to find kids that could pull this off, the film was going to suffer. We were all very excited about doing a film like this, but we were also very worried about the idea. If these kids dont seem like theyre friends, this film is not going to work.
[NEXT: Casting and working with kids, the fulcrum upon which "Of Darkness" works. Cinescare and director Gary Irwin talk evil, childhood, Columbine and next steps this Wednesday, in the second half of this months DISCOVERIES interview.]
