At the risk of repeating myself, as I’m sure I have down through the years on the site, short films are often where it’s at in terms of promising new ideas, styles and approaches. When I watched Standing Woman as part of FrightFest’s recent short films digital package, I thought how well the film encapsulated all of that, taking a novel idea and addressing some fundamental human concerns in its brief but effective dystopian vision.
It’s often said that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’, and that is very true in the world of the film. Here, the government have decided on a novel approach to punish prisoners, not imprisoning them anymore, but by making them part of a new environmental campaign – literally turning them into plant matter, planting them in the ground and using a new process to change them. What happens to a person’s humanity in this brave new world? Once again, in a theme which is finding its way onto our screens more and more regularly, this is a piece of eco-horror as well as an unsettling vision of a world moving from the ridiculous to the sublime, and all in an ostensibly good cause.
I was delighted to connect with the director of Standing Woman, Tony Hipwell, who kindly answered a few of my questions.
WP: Firstly, more a comment than a question, but congratulations on Standing Woman. It is a fantastic piece of work, communicating so much in such a short running time. Tell us how you came to be involved in the film – an adaptation of a Japanese novelist’s work, if I’m correct?
TH: I became involved with Standing Woman when a friend of mine, Max Gee, sent me a screenplay she was working on as part of her PhD. She had come across a short story by Yasutaka Tsutsui and adapted it largely for personal enjoyment. She sent it to me for feedback and because she thought I’d enjoy it. She was right. I was immediately enraptured by the world it presented.
I knew we could make it despite the challenges of creating the tree people and so Max and I began a passionate pitch to Yasutaka Tsutsui to acquire the screen rights and produce the film. His work has been adapted into acclaimed anime films in the past, so we were nervous of being able to achieve our goal; but after many months of careful negotiation we were granted the rights. What followed was several years of script development and deep conceptual design to develop the look of the tree people and build a budget, while we assembled an incredibly talented crew.
WP: Standing Woman has been screening at a few acclaimed film festivals this year, such as Fantasia and FrightFest. How has that been going?
TH: The festivals have been great. Fantasia was digital for many, but they did an amazing job of creating social spaces for filmmakers to meet online and provided an incredible selection of films to view. I don’t think I’ve ever watched as many films in as short a time frame as I did with Fantasia. FrightFest was especially enjoyable as it was our UK premiere and the first time we’d been able to see the film on the big screen ourselves. It was also the first major film festival to be back at full capacity in the UK and the atmosphere was fantastic. It also meant I could meet other filmmakers in person, which was a treat after the last 18 months! We’re excited to see where the rest of the run takes us!
WP: As mentioned above, the film could be said to fall broadly under the category ‘eco-horror’ – a dystopian vision of the near future where care and concern for the environment takes a dark turn. Could you tell us any more about that – did you draw inspiration from any other films or TV, or any other sources other than the screenplay?
TH: The chief inspiration for the film was the screenplay and short story. It was a rare case where practically everything you needed was on the page. That said, there were a lot of stylistic and aesthetic inspirations that drove the approach. Given the source material, I was very keen to bring a Japanese voice to the film and that came through some of the cast and crew as well as the vast amount of anime and Japanese cinema, material that I’ve been influenced by for most of my life. Broader inspiration came from filmmakers like David Cronenberg and Paul Verhoeven. Their approaches to body horror and political satire had a huge impact on me when I was growing up and I couldn’t imagine another way of tackling the tone that didn’t harken back to their work.
There was of course the political climate. The film took five years to produce and the world saw a great deal of upheaval in that time. What went from quite a far-fetched scenario suddenly started to feel very possible, should the technology become real. It’s been interesting that we’ve had a lot of comparisons to Black Mirror, which is very flattering, but it was not something we were trying to copy as I felt it was something many had tried to do and failed. We simply tried to focus on the drama and reality of the story and characters rather than force a style on them.
WP: How challenging is it to generate empathy and to make an audience care for your characters in a short film format? You’re an experienced short film maker – what have you learned along the way?
TH: The simplest thing I’ve learned in terms of empathy is to focus on character. It’s something that I’m always trying to improve, be it on the page, how I work with an actor or place the camera and time the edit around them. It is always challenging to generate empathy because it needs to feel effortless. You don’t want the audience to feel the mechanisms at work that are coaxing them to feel something in particular. It should all feel natural and somewhat inevitable and a large part of that comes from life experience. The longer you’ve been around, the more people you encounter and the more that feeds into the stories you tell. As long as the audience can recognise something of themselves in the characters, you will gain their empathy. Hopefully we have succeeded in that with Standing Woman.
WP: Short films, in my opinion, are often unfairly under-viewed as they tend to screen at festivals, and then go without a wider release. Do you have anything to say regarding that? How do we get people to see the film?
TH: The issue of discovering short films is something I’m actively discussing right now. There does seem to be a frustrating inability to readily find them. There are of course platforms like YouTube, but that feels like a complete lottery for discovery and other platforms like Vimeo suffer from a small audience footprint. There are some great channels like DUST and ALTER or Arrow which champion Sci-Fi & Horror work. If you can get acquired by those channels, it gives you better visibility which is what shorts are often designed for – be it to boost your profile or that of a project. There is also the anthology route, which seems to be something audiences enjoy, albeit within specific genres. There is sadly no one-size-fits-all approach. For our part, we are very interested in either of those routes mentioned if we can and it will be something we’ll be considering very carefully as we move forward.
WP: Finally, you have recently completed what I think is your first feature-length, which I believe will be screening at Dead Northern here in York, UK later this month. Tell us a little about that…
TH: My feature playing at Dead Northern is actually my second. Both are co-writing and directing efforts. The first was Whoops! about an accidental serial killer, which premiered at Raindance and was the only British film selected that year for Raindance on Tour. My new feature, Zomblogalypse, is based on a web series I started with Hannah Bungard and Miles Watts back in 2008. A film version is something we’ve been wanting to make for a long time and we finally hit on an idea that we felt worked for a feature.
The film follows the same characters as the web series and picks them up ten years into the apocalypse where they have become so bored by it, they decide to make a film to commemorate their exploits and pass the time. Little do they realise that making a film at the end of the world is even more difficult than it was before. It’s essentially an apocalyptic mockumentary. If you crossed Shaun of the Dead with Tropic Thunder you’re halfway there. It was shot entirely in Yorkshire with a local crew and is the complete opposite of Standing Woman in terms of tone and style.
WP: Thank you very much for your time!
TH: I hope those answers work for you! Thanks!
Keep your eyes peeled on the autumn film festival schedule to stand a good chance of seeing Tony’s work and as/when we know more, we’ll say so on social media.