Interview: Prano Bailey-Bond and Niamh Algar Discuss Collaboration, the Video Nasties Era, and More for CENSOR

Last Friday, Prano Bailey-Bond’s feature film debut, Censor, debuted in theaters and is set to hit VOD and Digital platforms on June 18th, all courtesy of Magnet Releasing. Censor was this writer’s favorite film out of the 2021 Sundance lineup (you can read my review HERE), so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with both Bailey-Bond as well as Censor’s star, Niamh Algar. In the film, Algar portrays Enid, a film censor working in the UK during the height of the Video Nasty era, whose childhood trauma ends up intertwined with her professional life in some rather horrifying and heartbreaking ways.

During our interview, I spoke with Algar and Bailey-Bond about their experiences collaborating on Censor together, what drew them both to the material, creating the touchstones of Algar’s character Enid, and more.

Be sure to check out Censor, either currently in theaters, or when it makes its digital debut this upcoming weekend.

Thank you both so much for chatting with me today. Prano, I would love to start with you and talk about the inspiration behind the story of Censor. As somebody who lives in the States, I've always been really fascinated by the Video Nasties era over in the UK, because I don't really know what it was like to experience it, but I think it's also interesting that you've chosen to explore it from a very different perspective through Enid, who is somebody who basically made herself responsible for this movement. I just thought it was a really interesting way to go at this type of story and I would love it if you could talk a little bit about that process of putting this idea and script together.

Prano Bailey-Bond: The idea first came from the idea of censors working as I was looking at this article about the Hammer Horror era and how they had these specific rules, such as blood on the breast would make a man likely to commit rape, so they'd cut any image of blood on the breast. It made me think about, "Well, if these images do make us do these terrible things, then what stops the censor from losing control?" Because obviously there were probably a lot of men watching those films, so why weren't they going out and doing these things?

So it started in that space and I looked into censorship in the UK, throughout the ages really, but quickly landed in the Video Nasty era. I mean, I'm a child of the 80s. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, feasting on VHS because there was no cinema nearby. So I grew up watching some of these films like The Evil Dead and Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But what happened over here was that the birth of VHS basically led to a boom in low-budget horror being available as these films could now go direct to the home.

And so for the first time ever, people at home could rewind and rewatch these horrible films, and here in the UK, there was a hugely conservative reaction to these movies. Politicians and the tabloid press basically thought that these films were going to spawn the next generation of murderers and it turned into this crazy moral panic around what this bunch of horror titles were going to do to all of us. I was a kid during this period, so it was really interesting for me working on this film being able to go back with a different set of goggles and look at that period. 

Niamh, for you, what was the appeal of playing a character like Enid? And what was it about this project when you were considering coming on board that really caught your eye, in terms of taking on such an interesting character?

Niamh Algar: Well Prano and I had met really briefly at the Screen International Screen Stars of Tomorrow. We ended up sitting together at this dinner and I was just really struck by her passion for film. She had flagged this story that she had and then I think it was about six months later, my agent called me up about this role. So, I read the script and it was a character that I hadn't seen played before, especially by a woman. And I suppose just the journey that Enid goes on, it's a complete 180 from where the character begins and where she ends, and the idea of exploring repressed memory and psychological distortion and the idea of creating a character, I suppose, that people haven't seen portrayed before. So for me, that was it. I was like, "Please Prano, give me the job." But it came down to the story and Prano.

What I love about this, too, is watching Enid's trajectory in this, as haunting as it is, it's also really tragic. There's this one little touch that I noted, and it reminded me of The Fly, where Enid's got a structure down pat, which includes her clothing, her hair, the way she carries herself. But the minute that she breaks that structure is when everything in her life completely breaks down. I was curious, when you two were collaborating together and getting ready to embark on this film, did you discuss these little touchstones to Enid that you wanted to hit as she was going on this journey in this story?

Prano Bailey-Bond: Yeah, absolutely. Enid starts off as this coiled spring and then unravels through the film. So everybody, in terms of all of the departments, we were all thinking about how Enid unravels and how you show that visually. For example, with the costume and her hair, Enid starts off very much in cold blues and grays, which is the color of the censor's office. She's very smart so she's very upright and physically together. But as the film progresses, we see these little shifts, where she's wearing a red t-shirt, so she stands out slightly more from the background and it's maybe got a looser neck, whereas before things were very much tight around her neck. 

And then equally, with the way we shot the film, it's very still at the beginning of the film. But as Enid unravels, the camera starts to move more. Then, Niamh and I spoke a lot in the months leading up to the shoot about Enid's physicality, and it was Niamh who came up with the finger picking, which I really liked how that worked into her character.

Niamh Algar: Prano and I were lucky enough that we had about a week's rehearsal before the shoot, and we talked about the idea of this physical reset, which is all in the shoulders. It’s this idea that someone feels like, whenever they begin to lose control, the idea where they are breaking out of that physical structure and morphing into something else. And there was this idea that, for Enid, she always feels like there is something inside her that she can't understand, that she can't answer, that perhaps this is just the facade that she's always had on and doesn't really understand who it is that she is. So we discussed this idea of this kind of anxiety peeling away at her, and if you peel something away hard enough, what are you going to uncover?

So there were all these kinds of physicalities for the character. But honestly, we were so blessed with Prano because she is such a collaborator and allowed for each of the departments, like hair and makeup and costume, to bring forward their ideas on how we should physically transform the character from start to finish. When we opened up that conversation, Saffron [Cullane], our amazing costume designer, was slowly able to introduce each of these colors. And there was one prop in particular, Enid’s glasses, that really played into everything. Suddenly, when she begins to take them off, we’re introducing this idea that she's not properly seeing things clearly. I remember that we'd always be at the start of a scene and we’d ask, "Does she have the glasses or not? Where are the glasses?" But these are really important little details for a character and it's so nice, Heather, whenever an audience member notices these little nods, so I really appreciate that.