Interview: Co-Writer/Director Joe Marcantonio on Getting Personal for KINDRED

Arriving in select theaters and on VOD and digital platforms this Friday is Kindred, co-written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Joe Marcantonio. The film follows a grieving mother-to-be named Charlotte (played by Tamara Lawrence) who ends up staying with the mother (Fiona Shaw) and brother (Jack Lowden) of her deceased boyfriend. The longer Charlotte lives at their remote family estate, the more she begins to become suspicious of their motives, and she begins to fear for both her safety and the well-being of her unborn child.

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Marcantonio about his transition into feature filmmaking for Kindred, and he discussed the personal inspiration behind the project’s story, his approach to the characters and more.

Kindred is being released this Friday, courtesy of IFC Midnight.

So first of all, congratulations on Kindred, Joe. I was completely shocked that this is your first feature, but I've noticed that you you've been working in commercials and doing a lot of short short films and things like that for some time now. Can you talk about making that transition to features for this project?

Joe Marcantonio: I mean, it's been a bit of a long process for me. I feel really old. I'm 39 and Fiona kept referring to me as a young filmmaker, which was quite nice (laughs). But I went to film school in Newport, in South Wales, which is not one of the world's most glamorous film schools, but me and Jason [Jason McColgan], my co-writer studied together. And from 1999 to 2002, and then I left there and I was like a runner and was quite lucky. Before that, my dad worked in commercials; he wrote TV ads, some of which were quite famous in the U.K. But I remember going on set with him to shoot a beer commercial and I think it must have been the first Batman was also being shot there.

I remember seeing that and it blew my mind. And from then on, I wanted to be a filmmaker.

I worked for Ridley Scott's company, RSA, for a while. They're a big commercials company, but I was only there for a couple of years, and I only met Ridley a couple of times because he was always in L.A. Then I worked in commercials and did corporate videos for fashion brands and kind of all kinds of weird stuff, and then, I started doing these documentaries and short films with my money and my spare time trying to up my show reel. And that's been like a 10 year process for me. 

But as I was doing documentaries, that’s when I started realizing what my voice, stylistically, and what I was into and what I wasn't. Up until then, I guess I'd always been trying to mimic what other people had done or trying to make things that were a bit more stereotypically when they're supposed to be, if you know what I mean. The process of doing all those shorts was great though because there was no risk involved and I was paying for them myself, so they gave me some freedom to express myself. 

I think during that process, I found what I like to do and what I didn't like to do and what worked and what didn't. Jumping forward a few years, I did a short called Red Light with Jesse Buckley in it, and after I finished that, the producer from that, Dominic [Norris] and I decided to try and do a features together. By that point, I had a couple of other films written but they weren't really right for a first time. So, we settled on this idea and developed it from there.

What was the genesis of this story in particular then? I really love this central character of Charlotte, who has already been through a lot and she ends up dealing with even more trauma than we could possibly imagine by the time the film finishes. Her journey is positively frustrating, but in the best possible way.

Joe Marcantonio: Pretty much every film I've made, I seem to be slightly obsessed with the idea of truth and manipulation, where you realize that you never really get to know the inner workings of other people's minds. I think that's something that naturally I seem to be quite drawn towards, probably some repressed childhood trauma or something. But with this concept, I came up with this idea a long time ago, like 10 years ago probably. I just toyed with it and realized it was a bit dark, but I didn't really know the right way into the concept then. So, I stuck it in my ideas folder.

When it came to finding a good debut film, I thought about starting to write something from scratch, but I re-read this idea and it really popped out at me this time, which I think is because I'm a parent now. We had a three-year-old at the time and we were expecting our second. I had a lot of the anxieties and the worries and the things were going through my brain, and I think that really played into the angle on the script that I hadn't seen before. It was the same for Jason, who I had never actually written with before. We've been good friends for 20 years and he's got a day job working at an ad agency. We had been looking for something to do together and I don't know why, but as soon as I came up with the concept and I knew I needed someone to work on this with me, and he seemed like a really good fit.

The odd thing was he was also expecting twins at the time and they were born incredibly premature, like at 27 weeks or something like, so they were in the hospital for like two months almost. Suddenly, he had loads of time on his hands because he had time off work for the babies, but they were in hospital and he couldn't go and see them, so that was a window for us to do a lot of work. I think a lot of our anxieties and what we were personally going through at the time came through in our work, because at that point, we had just had my daughter and she was born on my bedroom floor. We were going to have a home birth anyway, but it all went a bit faster than we thought, and it ended up being just my wife and I. So we had quite a lot of stuff going on. 

I think a lot of that found its way into the film, that parental anxiety. And one of the nerve wracking things about this film, more than any other written or tried to develop, is that this a lot more personal. There's an awful lot of me in it, as potentially terrifying as that sounds.

How was it working with Tamara on her character Charlotte for this film?

Joe Marcantonio: There are two parts to this story. The first part is that I met her actually through Jack, who plays Thomas in the film, and he just worked with her a TV series that was on the BBC called The Long Song. When he got back from filming, we had a chat about casting this and he suggested that I should speak to Tam. So we got her in on a bit of a whim, at the end of the casting session just to see what she was like, and I was just totally blown away by her. She hasn't done a lot of film at this point, but she's come up through the national theater, which is quite a big thing in London, so she certainly knew what she was doing.

As far as the character of Charlotte goes, in writing her, I worked quite a lot on the character, even before we wrote the script, during the outlining phase. I had like eight or nine pages of Charlotte’s background; what she’s like, what radio station she listens to, what kind of newspaper she reads and what kind of food she eats. I try to work out the character for the most part and then build them up from there. Another thing I do is during the rehearsal period is I tend to work with the cast, rather than have a traditional rehearsal space where you go into the location and work out where everyone's going to stand. I tend to workshop and worship the scripts. 

We all just sit in a circle and go through the script line by line and go over what the character is saying and what they mean and why they're saying it. And in that process, we changed the script a bit, and the dialogue, because I want them to feel invested in the character, and I wanted what the character is saying to feel authentic. I think that all that early work is a very useful tool for getting what you need on set.