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SXSW 2022

Brendan Muldowney • Director de The Cellar

"El público espera ver algo, no solo completa oscuridad"

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- El director nos cuenta cómo convirtió su exitoso cortometraje en un largometraje y cómo trabajó durante la pandemia

Brendan Muldowney • Director de The Cellar

Este artículo está disponible en inglés.

Irish director Brendan Muldowney presented his horror-thriller The Cellar [+lee también:
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at this year's edition of SXSW and at the Fantasy Filmfest touring through several German cities. The film is now being released on Shudder for streaming. We talked to the director about how he developed the story of his short film into a feature-length version.

Cineuropa: Where does the idea of The Cellar come from? Are you afraid to go to the cellar?
Brendan Muldowney: When I was younger I grew up in a house, we had a cellar where the coals were stored. My brother and I took turns to go fetch them. Well, I didn't particularly like it. But the idea for the film is related to my short film Ten Steps from 2004. It was very successful for our company. It did well at festivals and it apparently has something special, some kind of a transgressive darkness, that worked for the audience. The film is available on YouTube and has a lot of comments in which people wonder how the story might continue. I thought of some alternative endings and tried to write versions of it. I always wanted to get back to it.

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Does the idea with the counting come from the short as well?
Yes, it's the core motif of the short film.

Was it difficult to find the house in which you shot the film?
A part of the financing structure relied on a fund that encourages incentive shooting in other parts of Ireland, outside Dublin and in counties that are less attractive. This is why we tried to scout a house first in Sligo and then found it in Roscommon. I wanted a house with a corridor, that lead to a cellar door and a cellar. We didn't find the cellar, but the corridor, and built the former. The house is beautiful, with a spectacular entrance and with a lot of symbolic elements and full of antiques in it. 

Was it difficult to find the right actors?
For the two leads, it was easy, since I knew them. For the children, it was more work. Our casting director asked for self tapes. I made short lists out of them and had a zoom meeting with the candidates. We did auditioning and rehearsals for some scenes online before deciding.

You decide to tell a story set in the present, but to link it to ancient artefacts and beliefs. What would you say is your own fascination with past cultures?
I had to invent a mythology and first started with Judaism and Christianity, where you actually don't have much more than heaven and hell. I wanted to try something new and turned to Irish mythology, and finally ended up with the concept of Hokum, which means nonsense. I replaced hell with void, for example. I guess the closest thing to what we created is the world of H.P. Lovecraft.

Could you say what were the most important aspects for the aesthetics of the film?
I work with the same director of photography for most of my films. He also did the cinematography for the original short. We shot that on 16 mm, using a double wig candle in complete darkness. This time, we didn't want to go that way. The audience expects to see something, not complete darkness. But still I am not too much into colour in general, which also determined the look of the house. And as for the camera work, I wanted a more classic approach like the one of Hitchcock, where the moving camera creates the tension.

What were the biggest challenges for the production?
We started preparing the film during the third lockdown in Ireland and had to stop for a while. Then the conditions on set, with quarantine, testing, masks, couldn't do live casting, etc. were awkward. But it was also a chance. We shot in November and therefore were able to shoot in proper night light, without having to create it artificially. Also we had scenes in a county house and since staff worked from home it was possible to do the shooting, which would have been much more difficult in normal conditions.

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