Sean Byrne

IONCINEMA.com’s “IONCINEPHILE of the Month” puts the spotlight on an emerging filmmaker from the world of cinema. With September being the month of the Toronto International Film Festival, we decided to profile a new talent from Australia who’ll be presenting his feature length debut film in the Midnight Madness section. This month we feature: Sean Byrne and his horror flick, The Loved Ones. To see Sean’s top ten films of all time as of September 2009 click here.

Though new to the feature director’s chair, Byrne cut his teeth in shorts, honing his instincts for dark, intense subject matter. With The Loved Ones, Byrne encourages the audience to laugh and have fun, only to sneak up and jolt them with horror when they’re least expecting it. When an image of a bloodied teenager in a tux on a balloon-littered floor came to Byrne, he sought to bring to the screen a fusion of two horror classics – The Evil Deadand Carrie. The Loved Ones mashes up sharp, swift drama with a series of imaginatively gruesome yet humorous thrills that are bound to provoke reactions from more squeamish audience members, who will surely have their hands over their eyes and grins on their faces. – TIFF

Eric Lavallee: During your childhood…what films were important to you?
Sean Byrne: My father is a HUGE movie buff so I grew up watching a lot of movies but as a little kid there were certain favorites I would watch ad nauseam: Jack the Giant Killer, The Thief of Baghdad, King Kong (original) and Robin Hood (with fellow Tasmanian Errol Flynn!)

As for horror movies when I was four dad took us to the drive-in to see the double feature, Burnt Offerings (a poor man’s Psycho) followed by The Pack, which was about killer rabid dogs. I was supposed to be asleep at the time but my eyes couldn’t have been wider. I’ve been hooked ever since.

E.L: During your formative years what films and filmmakers inspired you?
S.B: I was five when Star Wars reached Tasmania and I still vividly remember that feeling of being transported to another world. Same with the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg and Lucas made going to the movies an unforgettable event.

I also loved Rocky, which is the ultimate feel good movie and turned out being an influence on The Loved Ones because I wanted our hero to take the beating to end all beatings but still have the courage and determination to never take a backward step.

In high school John McTiernan’s Die Hard blew me away. I remember walking out and being sure that it couldn’t have gone for more than half an hour because it flew by so fast. Now I watch it and can see the set up is actually very considered and it’s structured in a way to make the rollercoaster get progressively faster. Same with Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon. I’m only mid-30’s so I don’t want to sound like an old grouch but I miss that about action movies today. They don’t have that pyramid build. They burst out of the blocks at full speed and give themselves nowhere to go. Consequently there can be more action but it begins to get numbing.

Beverly Hills Cop was super cool and genuinely funny and Top Gun still sticks in my mind for its MTV candy quality. It’s so glossy you feel like if you licked the screen it would taste sweet. I actually think the Bruckheimer/Simpson brand has integrity because it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. Those movies say loud and proud, WE ARE HERE TO ENTERTAIN YOU!

Toward the end of high school I discovered David Lynch. I’ve always been a daydreamer and no one knows how to create a dreamlike state more than David Lynch. More than any other filmmaker he asks his audience to surrender to the experience. If you do then it’s a wonderful, mysterious, dark, beautiful, spiraling adventure.

In The Loved Ones, our damaged hero is dragged from the literal world into something vividly surreal. In a way it mixes the slick Bruckheimer/Simpson hero’s journey model with the surreal and subconscious elements you might expect from a Lynch film.

E.L: At what point did you know you wanted to become a filmmaker?
S.B: Right about the time I finished Law School I thought, hmmm, unless I come up with something else I’ll be doing this for the rest of my life. I’ve always loved movies so as a 25-y.o. I went back to College and did a Media Production course with the fifteen and sixteen year olds. Without having a clue what I was really doing I made a few no budget short films starring family and friends then applied to AFTRS (Australian Film Television and Radio School) in Sydney, which launched the careers of Phillip Noyce and Alex Proyas and many other prominent Australian directors. It was just instinct that got me in then I started learning the craft and two years and four shorts later I graduated with my Masters, receiving both the Australian Directors Guild and Screen Sound Australia Awards for Excellence in Drama Directing.

E.L: What is the genesis of The Loved Ones?
S.B: I was searching for a low budget horror idea and woke up one morning thinking what if I fused Carrie and Evil Dead, bringing the Prom to the cabin and making its very traditions – the decorations, the dress up, the dancing and, of course, the crowning of the King and Queen – the instruments of torture. I got this image of a bloodied teenager in a tuxedo tied to a chair in the middle of a balloon littered floor. So then I started asking, who is this kid, why is he here and how’s he going to get out?

After the screenplay was written it was about finding an experienced producer to help offset the fact this would be my first feature followed by two years of investor meetings, scratching and clawing, putting your bloody heart on a platter, hoping and praying to get the money.

E.L: What kind of characteristics/features were you looking for your main characters/during the casting process?
S.B: This is a multiplex movie so the look of the cast was important but more important to me was the depth. Our motto going into the film was if you don’t care then you don’t scare so I looked for young actors who were completely committed to their craft. I wanted the film to be performed with integrity and they didn’t let me down. Horror movies invariably use archetypes but I really feel like the cast went beyond that and brought the characters to life in a genuinely interesting and fresh way.

E.L: How did you prep for the performances and how did you prep for each scene (was there storyboarding involved?)
S.B: There was a little bit of rehearsal time but that also involved wardrobe fittings, stunt rehearsal, hair, make up and camera tests so performance rehearsal was predominantly about building a rapport with the cast and talking through the subtext of each scene. That said, we managed to rehearse a couple of key scenes, which helped inform what had gone before as well as having a flow on effect.
Over the years I’d built up a 250 page scrapbook containing character briefs, news clippings, book extracts and imagery to help plug the department heads and actors into my head as quickly as possible.

I also gave a few of the cast iPods filled with music their character would listen to because taste in music plays a big part in separating the characters in the film and I believe you can learn a lot about a person’s interior life through their taste in music.

As for the shoot, I knew a couple of directors who had gone through the experience so was aware how grueling it would be. We were only a five and a half week shoot so I prepared obsessively, storyboarding everything to maximize time on set. Each day I carried a master document that contained the shot-list, corresponding boards, section of the screenplay being shot and notes on scene actions and character objectives. One document to fit into my pocket was the plan so things wouldn’t get too messy.

E.L: What ideas did you have for the style of the film? What inspirations did you draw upon for the look/style, aesthetics of the film?
S.B: My filmic influences were a real mash up. Structurally the film is closest to Misery but tonally there are shades of Carrie, Dazed and Confused, Footloose, The Terminator, Tarantino, Lynch and even Walt Disney. Audiences may recognize some of the influences but hopefully the film, as a whole, will be a fresh experience.

In terms of a look we went for vivid, glossy and colorful with rich velvety blacks. Unlike many horror movies that look as bleak as the situation the characters find themselves in The Loved Ones is a veritable party for the eyes that celebrates Prom dresses, mirrorballs, balloons and hotted-up cars. Visually we give our teenage characters the spark of life so it hurts more when we rip it away from them. The dirt comes from the costumes, make-up and set design.

As for sound design we followed a simple brief that the violence should be inescapably real but the surrounding world, as informed by our hero’s fraying mind, should be surreal.

E.L: Can you discuss the collaborative process you had with the cinematographer?
S.B: I’d worked with Simon Chapman on my last short, a supernatural horror called Advantage. The film played at Sundance and over twenty other Festivals around the world and was a major factor in getting The Loved Ones off the ground. With Advantage we went for a slick, big budget look on a modest budget, which was a big ask because those movies look that way for a very expensive reason and it’s obvious and embarrassing to come up short. Simon pulled it off though and given The Loved Ones was following the same brief I knew he could do it again under pressure. With Simon it’s not just about cool shots. He’s a storytelling cinematographer and a calm, lateral thinker with a great eye. He got and was excited about the fact we were making a bent popcorn movie that had to compete with movies twenty times our budget. I was referencing work by John Schwartzman, Harris Savides and the great Conrad Hall and he never shied away from such expectations despite our limited resources.

So we could jump out of the blocks – Simon and I spent a month of unofficial pre-production going over the screenplay and preliminary boards I’d drawn. He had incredibly insightful suggestions about the screenplay, the look and the boards and together we revised things until we were happy all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle would neatly fit together.

By the time we were shooting a short hand had developed and it needed to because we were averaging around twenty-five set ups per day. Our careers were on the line and we were being incredibly ambitious to the point of almost over reaching but there’s something to be said for that kind of hunger. It was a sprint up Mount Everest and Simon did it with a heavy camera on his shoulder.

E.L: Can you discuss the collaborative process you had with the designer?
S.B: Robert Webb had done horror features (Rogue, Wolf Creek) and done them well, which makes the production company relax. However, he’d also done a coming of age film called Caterpillar Wish, which showed a character based sensitivity and nuance not typical of horror. The Loved Ones is also about the sweet trauma of adolescence so this versatility was important.

During pre-production I had a conversation with Robert about design in horror movies, mentioning that most were overly designed and you could see the hand of the designer. If there’s a doll featured it always looks like it’s from a gothic museum. Everything’s too perfect and unless the ‘monsters’ are designers themselves then surely the aesthetic should be a little more imperfect. The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre does this well. Every stitch feels threaded by the hand of a psychopath rather than a filmmaker.

This discussion informed the choice of our farmhouse and its interior design, which was made up of three sets. Nothing screams horror. If there are kids missing in a small town and a house on the hill that looks like Satan lives there then where’s the first place the police are going to look? So we tried to bring the horror closer to home. Our thinking was if the audience can relate to the design then they’re one step closer to the nightmare. They’re in the film rather than outside of it.

Robert did an amazing job all round but his piece de resistance was the antagonists’ kitchen / dining room set where all sorts of hell breaks loose. From writing and visualizing the room I knew where I wanted certain things to be for blocking the scenes but Robert took our early discussions to a whole other level, making choices that perfectly captured character and sat well with the fun, retro, rollercoaster vibe of the movie. Half the movie takes place in this set but it doesn’t feel repetitive when we revisit it, which is a credit to Robert’s wonderful imagination and the tight knit collaboration he shared with Simon our cinematographer, who covered pretty much every inch of that room before the shoot was through.

E.L: Can you discuss the collaborative process you had with the editor?
S.B: Andy Canny and I had worked together on ads and my short Advantage. Typical of Andy’s lightning fast brain the plan with the edit was not to waste a frame. We wanted to take the audience on a rollercoaster so no indulgences. It had to fly by.

There’s quite a bit of torture in the movie but also comic moments, which are a welcome pressure release and Andy did a fearless job pushing the audience right to the edge then snapping them out for a quick recovery breath before jolting them back into a new kind of hell with a new kind of rhythm.

Andy is a polished, ‘sexy’ editor. When it calls for it he can out ‘MTV’ MTV! But he’s also a storyteller with genuine integrity. Early on he was loath to show off his crazily inventive tricks but I coaxed him into fracturing and warping a scene where the baddies are chanting a childish mantra in our fraying hero’s face because tonally it would suit. Once he did it the floodgates opened and other moments got the Canny (CTV) treatment. I’d call these his guitar solos! Perhaps my fondest memory during the edit is of Andy turning a single gunshot into six. Like all his guitar solos he managed to turn what could have been a potential weakness into a great strength. Now I can’t imagine those scenes any other way.

The Loved Ones receives its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Midnight Madness Section. Here are the screening times.