Interview: Filmmaker Corin Hardy Takes Us Into THE HALLOW

Arriving in select theaters and on VOD this week is Corin Hardy’s The Hallow, a dark spin on the world of fairytales and folklore that follows two parents (portrayed by Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic) fighting against a deadly magical force hidden deep in the woods surrounding their remote home in Ireland—a force that wants nothing more than to steal their infant child away from them forever.

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Hardy about the inspirations behind the story of The Hallow and how his love for ’70s and ’80s genre cinema fueled his desire to do as much in-camera as he possibly could on the ambitious indie horror film. Hardy also chatted about The Hallow’s co-stars and the challenges he faced along the way in making his feature film debut.

Congrats on The Hallow, Corin. I thought it was a really interesting take on fairy tales, especially since most of us think of fairies or magical creatures as pleasant entities, especially here in the States. I loved how you dug into this mythology and folklore to do something wholly different.

Corin Hardy: Thanks very much. I'm a big fan of fairy tales and fantastical movies, but I also wanted to try and translate what normally gets made as some sort of children's fantasy film or magic film, into something that could feel realistic in our world, and explore the idea of what it might be like to explore the dark side in the present kids' fairies and folklore.

The story lends itself so well to this location, because I kept getting caught up in all the details—from the forest to the house. I just think everything complimented each other very well visually in the film.

Corin Hardy: I'm pleased to hear that. It was trying to create a world that felt real, but became a fairy tale very gradually, that involved the woods being a character, the house being a character, the creatures being believable and the couple being believable. It was real ambition and a challenge.

There’s a lot of ambition at play in the film which I really appreciate—what were some of the challenges you faced along the way to get The Hallow made?

Corin Hardy: It would be lovely to think that this all came together quickly, but particularly with horror or something which involves lore and mythology, and then also visual execution, and design and pre-production, it's kind of critical to get all of these different mechanisms working, both in terms of storytelling and physically and practically. And that can take a long time.

I'd love for it to have not taken as long as it took, but I also made a stop-motion film when I was younger that took five years to make physically. I was introduced to the notion of patience through stop-motion. Or maybe I used up all my patience [laugh]. But then, when looking to develop my own feature ideas, I came up with five different ideas and was developing them and writing and co-writing over the last ten years, and The Hallow was always the movie I wanted to make first, because it was written with a very contained plot, characters, idea and location in mind.

It turned out less contained than I thought, in the sense of the action that takes place and the scale of the movie I wanted to make, even though it is, essentially, a small cast centered around a single location. Also, what I look for in films that I love is that extra cinematic world that's created that you can lose yourself in, and that's kind of hard to do when you literally are in one house. The combination of the space and trying to be ambitious with a first film—it was important that viewers felt satisfied visually with what we see and that it fulfills on its promises.

It does and speaking about ambition, it would have been so much easier to fake a lot more of these elements in post than actually doing a lot of them practically, just because that's where filmmaking is these days. How important was it to make sure that you got as many of those practical elements in there as possible?

Corin Hardy: It's really based on a belief and the love of the movies that I grew up watching, that always still stand the test of time. Films like Alien, The Thing, The Fly, American Werewolf in London, Evil Dead—all for different reasons—and particularly movies in the’70s as well. I wanted to make a classic movie, but modeled towards that golden era of ’70s and ’80s filmmaking.

I had wanted originally to be a monster-maker when I was about 12; I was sculpting in my back shed with clay and latex and testing out different makeup effects. A lot of what I learned was based on reading Fangoria magazines and books from Rick Baker and Stan Winston, so when I see a movie where everything is CG, it makes me feel a little bit out of touch as an artist, because I didn't train in that.

But there is something to be said for when you have a human performer behind a costume or a mask or a prosthetic appliance on them; you're being driven by life that is existing in a human that can create a performance, compared to, no matter how great the technology is, and how talented the animators are, they are sitting in front of a screen that they are rendering things on. I wanted The Hallow to feel entirely real and as organic as possible, and gritty—again, going back to that ’70s vibe of cinematography and real location and real, authentic performances.

It just didn't make sense to think of going CG. Having said that, I'm also a massive believer that, as a whole, a film is a magical illusion in itself and and effects are individual sleights of hand. Each creature effect in the movie, or set piece, were a number of techniques, ranging from puppetry and prosthetics animatronics and visual effects, and there was some CG in those, but generally we only relied on CG to create an illusion we couldn't pin down. By and large, it was very much a combination of different techniques and lots of different talented people's hard work.

I totally agree, if you can use it to where it can benefit practical effects in a way that benefits the film and the story. It's all good with me, because it's really hard to make movies practically.

I wanted to discuss the family in The Hallow, played by Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic. This story hinges on that family, and I thought they were really, really great together. They weren't "the perfect couple", but they were so believable together and I think they did a really fantastic job. Could you talk just a little bit about casting them in these roles?

Corin Hardy: Thanks. I'm really glad you said that. I didn't want a perfect couple. I wanted a convincing, authentic relationship that you didn't have to explain too much, but that you could just buy into it as well. I've always been a fan of Joseph Mawle, who is a British actor. A lot of his performances have always blown me away. He's quite a chameleon and he's in a lot of television and people know him from things like Game of Thrones, but he is also in a lot of independent dramas and features where he is a secondary cast member.

I was always interested to see what he might be like in a lead, inspired by thinking of what Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs was like, or Sigourney Weaver in Alien, or Jeff Goldblum in The Fly—brilliant character actors in the lead role in a genre movie, so I was really glad to have Joe.

Bojana, I was less familiar with. I had seen her in Devil, the M. Night Shyamalan [-produced] movie, and Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, too. But when she auditioned, she did such a great, convincing audition in the scene—without spoiling too much—but it was the scene where the husband has to tell her that the baby he's looking at isn't theirs, and it could be something else. She did an audition where she had nothing in front of her, but she made me feel terrified by the way she was acting, so putting them together and creating an authentic couple was the challenge, and I was really proud of what they did, particularly when the pressure's on.

Going back really quick to getting this film made; I'm really always fascinated about what it takes to get movies made in other countries, and I'm curious, is there a really supportive filmmaking community out in Ireland, or was this a movie that you had to fight for to get made?

Corin Hardy: No, I definitely had to fight to get it made, hence the reason that it took eight years, as well as partly [due to] writing the scripts and getting the story right. I had, early on, the US production company, Occupant Films, developing the film—Joe Neurauter and Felipe Marino. They had made a number of independent movies in the States, but I wanted the film set in Ireland, so I wanted to shoot it in Ireland, but for some time we were looking at different countries—something to do with tax prices to raise the finances. But luckily, between a combination of pre-sales and investors and then the Irish Film Board coming on and completing the finances, it meant that it could happen in Ireland, finally.

But it was definitely difficult to convey why you want to make this idea for a certain amount of money and to get other people's money to do that, so I was very thrilled when we finally got the money and then we were full steam ahead to make it the way I had envisioned it.