Shepherd, a psychological horror written and directed by Owen, tells the story of a man who escapes to a remote island, but is haunted by trauma and depression manifested in bleak landscapes and folk horror imagery.
How did you decide on that location?
I was trying to find a lighthouse with a really interesting landscape nearby we could shoot on. It was almost impossible because all lighthouses are either really nice AirBnBs or they're really remote and you can't get to them.
One the last locations we looked at, the Isle of Mull - I went right down to the far side of the island where it's quite difficult to get to ... and I saw this amazing incredible landscape. I couldn't believe no-one had filmed here. But then I recognised because the roads are tiny and all the rest. But I thought, by hook or by crook we're gonna do it here, so it would film a little bit unique.
I had a very clear vision of what the film would look like. I wrote it in 2005, the first draft. So yeah, it was great to find that location and see how it all fitted in there.
So you started writing the film in 2005. How's the process been? It must have been a long journey from conception to the final product.
Yeah, it really has. I was a storyboarder doing concept art for years, working with other directors. People are like 'oh you need to get more experience' and stuff like that, and I ended up making a short film and that ended up getting me directing commercials and all the rest of it. But the film itself, although it's quite a simple traditional story, no one was willing to finance it until people like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers and Jordan Peele. It tended to fit in more to that new wave of slightly abstract horrors. So thanks to those guys I finally got the funding. It was like 'Oh yeah, people do want to want to see that kind of thing. OK fine, here's some cash', 16 years later. It's been very very tough.
There's a zombie film I made with a really bad script ... I said, 'Look, this is hardly a career starter for me, but I'm gonna make this film look as great as I can, and I won't take any money, I'll do it for free if the next film on your slate is Shepherd.' And the producers agreed. The second a director says 'I'll do it for free, if you do this', that's just saving them money and they're getting another film after it.
You mentioned Robert Eggers, and you've said this is based off the Smalls Lighthouse story, which also partly inspired The Lighthouse...
Yeah, I was quite surprised. You dream about 'maybe critics will like it', but I didn't expect it to be in the BFI Film Festival, and I certainly didn't expect it to be Mark Kermode's film of the week.
Obviously, I wrote this back in 2005. That's a famous Welsh ghost story, so I had no idea other people would start making a film about it. I only heard about The Lighthouse because Kate Dickie is in Shepherd and she's friends with Robert Eggers. She's like, 'Oh Robert's making that film' and I'm like 'What?' I couldn't believe someone else was doing it. Obviously, it only took very loose inspiration from it. It's a combination of that and those jobs you get in the back of a paper, and it's like the ideal job, you get 10,000 applicants - 'Run away from it all! Escape! Isn't it gonna be great!'. Of course, it's not. To me, that's a horror film in itself.
The horror is all a very coherent metaphor for this psychological process. Was this the most important thing for you, or are you interested in the horror aspects on their own?
Horror's so malleable. It's always changing all the time. Other genres struggle to reinvent, whereas horror can reinvent a lot of the time. If you're not reflecting what's happening at the time, you're reflecting an emotion so it's always engaging. For instance, Shepherd is rooted in depression. If you just focus on one man's depression and grief, that's what the film's about, and him trying to run away from it and he can't. As a genre, you can take any subject and apply it to horror and suddenly you see it in a different light.
How do you illustrate depression? Like in Get Out, how do you illustrate racism? It's horror. So if you're a white person wondering what racism feels like, Jordan Peele shows you in horror. He doesn't do another drama about racism. He creates a horror film which makes you suddenly terrified of this white family, and it was great in that sense. So this is me trying to use horror to illustrate depression.
How have you found the reception to the film so far?
Yeah, I was quite surprised. You dream about 'maybe critics will like it', but I didn't expect it to be in the BFI Film Festival, and I certainly didn't expect it to be Mark Kermode's film of the week. In general, it got a really warm response, and it's 'fresh' on Rotten Tomatoes. When you go into these things, no matter how hard you work, you always expect it's going to be a complete disaster and move on, so I'm really pleased with that.
I think what pleases me more is that people have different theories about if it's all in his head, or if he's dead, or is imagining it, or the island's a real place, or it's witchcraft. I'd had about five or six scenarios written down, and I'd tell Richard Stoddard who's the DOP and Tom, playing Eric, a different scenario, so people can build up their own images.
That must be fun. I've gotta say, it seems like a film made for Mark Kermode. He loves folk horror.
Yeah, with Kate Dickie in, I know he's a big fan.
Shepherd is now available on Blu-ray and Digital Download