Perfect Creature

When Horror Gives Humanism a Hand

New Zealand director Glenn Standring, (The Irrefutable Truth About Demons) has created a dark, gritty, alternate reality where vampires and humans live in a symbiotic relationship until genetic alchemy upsets the balance. In 2004 Standring talked about his latest film, Perfect Creature, to HF.


What is Perfect Creature about?
The movie is set in an alternate 1969. Three hundred years ago things happened differently and this changed the way history has gone. So rather than it being the world as we knew it with modernism, clean fuels and the swinging sixties, you have this world that is built around a later and greater industrial revolution, which has just kept going and pumping. Science and religion never split off, and there has been a discovery of a new race of human beings – the next evolutionary step, who, for want of a better word, are vampires.
Rather than being supernatural monsters they are like more perfected human beings. In this society they have become associated with a huge church which is a kind of metaphor for the Catholic Church. The vampires are known as the Brothers and are responsible for giving spiritual support and guidance to human beings, so its almost like God has sent angels to look after people.

And they live off human blood? The vampire Brotherhood live off human blood, which is gifted to them in rituals, ceremoniously and willingly by human beings rather than the vampires going out in the night. The blood is given as part of this total symbiotic relationship, and the vampires are seen as God’s emissaries on earth.

What goes wrong?
The people living in this industrial slum of a world think of the Brothers as being sent by God to protect them. The Brothers are born at random and there have been attempts to control the births so there can be more of them in the world to help human beings.
An alchemist has had a very crude insight into genetics and evolution – not in the way that we would understand necessarily, but in a very alchemistic way.
They experiment with a very crude form of genetics and end up creating a mutant virus. The virus drives one of the Brothers, Edgar (Leo Gregory) insane and he starts to behave as we would expect a vampire to behave, killing people and spreading the virus. Thematically it’s about playing with the stuff of life rather than any supernatural element.

How do the characters play out this theme?
Lilly (Saffron Burrows), a woman cop, joins forces with Silus to catch the predator. Silus, the lead character (Dougray Scott), is a priest of the Brotherhood, who is quite high up in the church. Edgar and Silus have the same mother, and are brothers in the true sense as well.
In his insanity, Edgar wants Silus to join him and he learns very quickly that Silus has formed a bond with Lilly. Silus is watching Lilly’s life and she struggles because it’s a very hard world. I think Silus sees something beautiful in her continuing struggle even though the world is completely shitty and horrible.
It’s like two noble people recognising that quality in each other. Edgar sees this and twists it, trying to use Lilly to bring Silus round to being more like him.
Augustus (Stuart Wilson), the senior Brother, is leader of the church, and has to make some heart wrenching decisions when things go wrong. He is at first a mentor to Silus, then opposes him as Silus struggles to save innocent lives.
Scott Wills plays Jones, a world-weary cop, who has trouble accepting the status of the Brotherhood. He is a natural cynic with a soft spot for Lilly and competes with Silus to be her protector.

How has the casting worked out?
That was quite interesting. We thought we had cast Edgar and then the actor in question decided he didn’t want to be away from England for three months. It was kind of late in the day and we didn’t want to screw this up because he was such an important character. We went to Hubbard’s in the UK with whom Tim had worked on LOTR and they recommended this really shit hot young actor, Leo Gregory, who has got a real edge about him. He’s like a young De Niro mixed with Klaus Klimsky so he brings that necessary intensity and makes it real.
Saffron and Dougray are both very skilled in their craft, which comes from working with other good directors, writers and actors. Saffron is a brilliant human being, highly educated and well read, from a liberal, activist, Bloomsbury background. For some of the crew a little bit of them died when the film wrapped because she is such a great person to be around.

The names of the characters and their world have an old ring.
Nuovo Zelandia is the old term for New Zealand when Tasman and those guys were floating around. It’s a descriptive name from the times. The film is rooted in Europe in many ways, because for six months of the year, the Queen of the Empire moves her court to the Antipodes, which is why it is a power base and a centre for the story. The film is not contemporary and it is not wholly Victorian. The best way to describe it is a period drama or period action movie, but that period has never existed before.
Some of the issues from the 1960s on have filtered through, via the genetic engineering and the racial tensions between the vampires and the humans. I was also interested to see how I could bind notions of alchemy into the whole thing after spending six months doing solid research.
Thematically and in terms of the amount of texture and ideas in the film it’s quite rich and gives a really established genre figure, the vampire, a completely original twist. It is quite a simple story on the top but there are lots of thematic complexities and resonances in it. Now we have cut it the film has a lot more dramatic resonance than a genre movie is normally going to have.

In a television interview Saffron Burrows said how attracted she was by the complexity of the characters and themes.
It’s been important to give the characters a real background and to give a little air for them to have character moments. That way the audience can come to identify with the characters, so when they are in jeopardy you care so much about them. It’s always a balancing act because it’s also about creating the world of the movie and the suspense scenes.
A classic example is James Cameron’s Alien and the way he creates the very human character played by Sigourney Weaver. We see that she has nightmares, and that basically she too is a broken person. The only way she can heal herself is to face the past and face what she has been through. This makes you really want to go on to the journey with her.

What other films have inspired you?
In some ways the story is almost like Oliver Twist meets Blade Runner. At the beginning I gave a mission statement to my heads of department and made obvious references to Blade Runner; Fritz Lang’s, Metropolis; the first Alien movie and Seven. But the more I’ve looked at the film, the thing that has turned me on most, is the fact it is just its own thing. You step into this whole other world, which is strange and different, and makes sense and feels populated.

What kind of action scenes can we expect?
Lilly is attacked by Edgar at one point where he bites her and nearly kills her. But the way he bites her and the way we’ve done it is very different from what you’ve seen in other vampire movies. [Sardonic, camp tone] Rather than it being really lovely and sensuous with your classic close up of two fangs going into The Vein on Neck and the Woman swooning and going, ‘Oh no, oh yes, oh no’ – it’s violent, and it’s a guy, yes with teeth, but tearing a woman’s throat open. And you don’t see it.
I made a point of not doing the cliché – the close up when the eyes go red and the fangs go in and blood drips out and the woman swoons – well that’s a bore, it’s been done a million times. So I chose, when Lilly is bitten, to play it all on her face and play her reaction to the gritty horror of it. All you see is the back of Edgar’s head and arterial blood spraying in a squirt on a wall.
I knew it was better to sometimes not show it all, and to let the audience imagine, but on the day we shot it we all sat around the monitor saying,
“Oh my god, it’s so violent,” And because you’re focused on the character of Lilly and like her, and focused on her reaction, it just seems so much more dangerous and real and less kind of camp. It’s not camp at all.
The emotional effect of the horror scenes also comes from the fact that we give time in the story for Lilly’s character and her personal history to slowly come out, so that you understand that she’s a broken human being who is trying to put herself back together. People can connect with her. She’s very human and it’s also a very tough world. We can also understand how a being such as Silus, who is almost like something from Wings of Desire, sees the beauty of this classic human struggle and responds to how Lilly fights back after tragedy and move on.
Lilly’s fear when she is being attacked also has to do with the fact that Leo Gregory is quite a scary dude.

Saffron Burrows has said “The world Glenn has created is fantastically exciting and his vision has obviously bled through to the art and visuals, the look of the whole thing.” I did have a very clear idea of that world and what I wanted it to be like, and I write in a highly descriptive way, so the art department knew exactly the kind of external and internal locations to look for and create. That’s one thing, but if you cast the wrong people or have heads of department who fight against it, it’s not fun. Through Tim’s efforts (producer Tim Sanders) and to a certain extent my own, by casting the right people in the right positions, you pump and everyone does their best work.

What has been the role of special effects in building this world?
Animation Research was involved in our pre-pre-production work and our animatic, which was a vital part of our prep and selling the film in advance. We then set up our own VFX department as part of the production instead of farming out shots to FX houses. This department was responsible for all conceptual work, all on-set work (including real time comping and other "world first" type stuff) and for overseeing and supervising the work of several individual FX houses working to our direction

The team was great. They operated without ego, as I try to do, so anyone can contribute an idea as long as it’s within the framework of what’s going to work for the film. Charlie Maclellan the effects producer and John Shields the special effects director understood that with this analogue, dirty, cold, smoky, rainy world the last thing we wanted to do was to have bright and shiny computer effects all over the place. So they tried to make all the effects feel like they were part of that world. That really drove the aesthetics and we used real world examples wherever we could.

There are tons of special effects. We dressed the streets with costumed characters from our world. Then beyond the roofs of the buildings CG extrapolated that world out and beyond to create a greater sense of what the world is about. For example they added a thousand zepplins into the sky which are the major form of mass transport and freightage.

As for makeup, one example is the effects of the virus. Edgar is infected and driven insane. He starts infecting human beings with it. People become sick, so make up has to come to the party in terms of prosthetic appliances and swollen glands, but always going for the real. So we didn’t go [Sardonic tone] “Let’s put in the monster eye lenses”. If there was a mutant form of influenza, what would it do to people. Is it like ebola, is it like small pox? Again, the real world sources we used make the film less camp and more believable.

The film is shot in Auckland, the South Island city of Dunedin, and the town of Oamaru where the mid- 19th century stone architecture gives the film its Victorian feel. How important were the locations?
Locations were a crucial element to the whole film. In some films you have a street scene at the beginning and the rest is all in rooms. That kind of film closes down. We wanted the world of the film to really expand out. So yes you do see that world in the street scenes, and from then it gets bigger. So it was very important to choose real locations for what we wanted, and could afford to build, as a set. This enriches the texture.
The beauty about Oamaru was that we were able to take a whole street over for about a month and do what we liked. We paid the businesses what they would have got in takings. The street became almost like a backcloth, but one filmed with real texture - a real street to which we could add and retro fit things from our world.

What were the main challenges?
Staying true to the story and remembering the emotional journeys for the characters. It was also a challenge to maintain the story’s integrity while dealing with continual changes of locations and building in the special effects references which can get in the way of the drama if you let them. The special effects team were clear though that the story and the characters were the most important elements”.

You have studied archeology and philosophy. How does the film reflect your personal philosophy and beliefs?
My film career started off with a short film Lenny Minute which was selected for the competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. It was kind of experimental animation and that was great, but when I was watching some of the feature films at Cannes I thought, “I don’t want to make films that are arty for their own sake. I want to make films that have stories that grip people, and take them into a new world they can believe in, where they can play with thematic and philosophical ideas. That’s what I love about science fiction books – as much as they are about experiments in the world and imagination, they are also filled with philosophical ideas - like Philip K. Dick’s Man and the High Castle, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
And with archelogy it’s understanding how societies have been built and evolve. When you study something like that, you see great empires rise and fall, and you realise that, as much as we are arrogant now and think we’ll be here forever, all this will end and another thing will take over, whether it’s an Islamic world, or whatever. That’s the nature of life and change and that kind of idea gets inputted into a film like Perfect Creature.

After I did Demons I realised it wasn’t as humanistic as I thought it was going to be so I decided I would do a film that represented my values. Sometimes they are edgy and not politically correct. I’m a humanist at heart, which is why I think the film has ended up as gritty and scary as dark and grimy as it is, just like Charles Dickens’s novels which I love because they are grimy, sad and tragic and very humanist.

Lilly is a character repairing herself and Silus is helping her. In doing so he has to face choices, either to help Lilly and the human beings or to think about his career. The Church has become a technocracy run by technocrats who are forgetting more and more what it’s really meant to be about – protecting and caring for human beings.

Silus believes the brothers are sent to earth by God to preserve, maintain and protect human beings. He believes this fervently and yet sees the Church becoming more and more corrupt. Edgar being infected with the virus and creating mayhem is a sign of that corruption.

Who is doing the music?
Anne Douglas (sound track for The Crying Game and an Oscar for Monty) is doing the music. She can work in both an electronic medium and with classical instruments. Her last work was called Ancient and Modern and its theme and sound really fits the tone of Perfect Creature.
There are no release dates as yet. The film will be completed in January 2005 and we would expect it in theatres some time later in 2005.

Do you have plans for other films?
I have been developing a project called This Virtual Life based on the short film I made in 1993 and took to Cannes. It’s around the character Lenny Minute who is a kind of noir detective living 200 years in the future. So when we have put Perfect Creature together we’ll go straight into that using the same kind of co-production structure that has worked so well for this film.

[Perfect Creature had a $20,000,000 budget. 25% came out of the New Zealand Film Commission’s film fund and the rest came from UK companies, Mo-Vision and Spice Factory.]