SXSW 2019 Interview: Filmmaker Kate McCoid on Her Horror Short Film IT’S NOT CUSTARD

While in Austin earlier this month at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival, Daily Dead had the chance to catch up with up-and-coming British filmmaker Kate McCoid, whose darkly comedic short film, It’s Not Custard, played as part of the Midnight Shorts lineup at the fest this year, and revolves around a high schooler whose extreme acne issues come full circle in hilarious fashion. A first-time director, McCoid talked about her journey from school to making It’s Not Custard, how her background in visual effects and editorial work helped her prepare for the short film, all the audaciously gooey practical effects in It’s Not Custard, and more.

Great to speak with you, Kate, and I’d love to start at the beginning. Had you always wanted to direct? Was this something that had been building inside for a while?

Kate McCoid: Oh, yeah. I studied film at college and university. In the UK, we go to college for two years, and then we go to uni for three or four. I did it for five years at college and uni, and then got a job in post-production. I work in visual effects and editorial, and I just finished working on Detective Pikachu, which is all over here at the moment, which is really exciting to see.

I did a lot of writing and directing in college and at uni, and this was a natural progression for me to continue that, but at a higher standard than what I produced while in education. I didn't actually intend to do anything with this film. I wrote it for a joke. Then it got shown to someone I was working with and they were just like, "You have to make this. It's really funny." I was like, "Okay. If people find it funny, then I guess I should do something with it."

Because you’ve been working in visual effects, I feel like that gives you a really good sense of structure and visuals and things like that. How much did all of that work prepare you to be able to do this?

Kate McCoid: I think it really helped me editorial-wise. When I went on set, I went in with an editor's brain. We storyboarded. I knew what I did and didn't need, so there wasn't a lot of excess, in terms of coverage. I worked with our editor Matt quite closely to work out where we wanted to go before we got on set, so there wasn't just absolutely loads and loads of stuff that was unnecessary.

In terms of visual effects, it did really help, because we only have one visual effects shot in the entire film, which is when she walks into the room and it's all the spots on the wall. Because it was a 5'x5' set piece and we had to do a set extension, which required some matte painting and a bit of rotoscoping around, it's not the cleanest. We didn't film it perfectly, but it did help us prepare with even the smallest things. So I do think that work helped me prepare a lot, really.

Can you talk about the inspiration behind the story? I just think it's always fun when you see female characters coming into their own, and then seeing people who were horrible to them basically getting their comeuppance in a way.

Kate McCoid: That's a really good question. It's always been really hard for me to work out what the inspiration was behind this, because it just started with a vision of a girl sitting on her bed with a giant wall of acne in front of her. I didn't really know where that idea was going. The first note I made about it on my phone was, "What if the sister eats it?"

It came out one night. I'd had a couple of glasses of wine, and then the entire story just sort of spilled out in one go. But I'd like to think it's similar to a Roald Dahl story, where you have to be careful what you wish for. Things always go horribly wrong in his stories. They're kind of fairy tales, but they're icky. Nasty things happen all the time. So, yeah, I'd say kind of a Roald Dahl fable is probably where this came from. I love his work so much and grew up on his stories.

Charlotte is excellent as Louise, but Donal, your narrator, really makes this into something special. Can you talk about finding him and working with him on his delivery? It’s so great.

Kate McCoid: This is definitely Louise’s story, but I also wanted it to be the narrator's story. When I wrote it, for me it was like he's this grandfatherly figure who's come to work to do his job to narrate a story, and he's very posh and proper. But then things start going out of control and he's like, "I didn't sign up for this." So he starts losing his cool and starts swearing and going all over the show as well, and rooting for her. There was something I liked about the idea of someone going to work and having to break their professionalism, and going casual and him getting a bit out of control as well in the situation.

Our narrator, the actor Donal Cox, he's amazing. He's this Irish guy. I was looking for narrators online. I heard his advert reel and I was like, "That is an incredible voice." We only had 45 minutes of ADR time with him, and he just went for it. We did one take where I was just like, "Just say what you want, just as if you were watching this at home. Don't worry about the script. Just go for it." There's that one line where he says, "Jesus Christ on a bicycle," and he just improvised that at the time. I was crying silently, because it was so funny. So he really helped amp it up with a lot of things.

Before we go, let’s talk about your practical effects in this, because they are awesomely cringe-worthy and so wonderfully goopy.

Kate McCoid: It’s all due to Waldo Mason and Waldo Mason Effects. He's brilliant. If you look on his website, the stuff he's worked on is super cool. It was really weird, because when he was sending me test videos, they'd be next to other pieces of work he was working on, which were usually dead bodies. So it just looked super weird getting these videos.

But we started by sending disgusting YouTube pimple popper videos to one another and being like, "All right, we want that consistency. We want it to look like this." The first design we had for the wall, we wanted it to look as if the spots were growing out of the walls seamlessly, as if the paint was seamlessly growing into the spot. But because it was a wall set and the spots were made out of silicone, the paint wasn't blending together. So, Waldo came up with this suggestion of it breaking through the wall instead. He showed me it and it was like the paint cracking. It was amazing. I was like, "Yeah, that's a perfect idea for it." So that's how we ended up getting to that point with the spots being cracked out of the wall instead of growing through them seamlessly.

We also used wallpaper paste for the giant spot, and there's still some in there. He had this giant pump he was pushing them through at the time. The blackheads were made out of wax. It was really fun and disgusting to come up with it. The entire crew were just covered in all this crap. It was really good, but it was really disgusting [laughs].

[Photo credit: Above photo by Lala Photography.]

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