‘The Thing That Ate The Birds’ (SXSW 2021) Interview

My interview with the director duo, Sophie Mair and Dan Gitsham, took place on Thursday, March 18th at 5:00 pm UK time. This married couple’s independent horror short film, The Thing that Ate the Birds, premiered at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival that same week. The following article presented here is the conversation that took place.

Warning: Some major spoilers ahead for those unfamiliar with the larger context of the story and/or who have not yet seen the short film!

Introductions

John Tangalin: Hi. My name is John. I am a film and television critic at The Cinema Spot. We’re an international news and editorial site. [F]or me, I review film and television. [When it comes to superhero movies, everyone is into comic books and whatnot. I also really have a great passion for horror films. [Y]our short film [The Thing that Ate the Birds] is actually one of the first that caught my eye. I really wanted to see this before anyone else because of just the title itself. And you [two published a] director’s statement that explained … the social background and also the historical authenticity of what’s going on with these characters.

Influences for the Conceptualisation of the Short Film

JT, con’t.: My first question is obviously this short film is a horror film. Are there any influences or inspirations that you may have gotten for the conception of this film?

Dan Gitsham: Nothing specific, I wouldn’t say. We love all horror, and horror’s our favorite genre. We will always make horror.

Sophie Mair: Yes, we will always make horror. Absolutely, but we do have a passion for character-focus. And we’re harking back, really, that some of our favorite directors and favorite movies are kind of back from the ’70s.

DG: Yeah. Like we love John Carpenter beyond most things. We love Don’t Look Now.

SM: Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Bad Timing, kind of.

DG: Yeah, like measured, deliberate horror, I suppose. Those kind[s] of things, nothing too fancy, I suppose.

JT: “Fancy” in a way that there’s these — like Stephen, King’s It, where it’s a whole universe of Stephen King monsters and stories. It’s just a grounded —

DG: Well, we love it all, but I guess our leanings, when we start to make stuff appropriate. Yeah. Just a little bit more sparse.

Sophie Mair and Dan Gitsham’s Love for All Eras of Horror

SM: But we [also] kind of like contemporary [horror]. We’re massive fans of Karyn Kusama’s, especially like [The] Invitation [which] is just such a huge inspiration for us.

DG: Yeah, we love that film because that’s like a boiling pot of dread that blows up at the end. So any film where it just feels something bad is going to happen…and then it does. That’s kind of our favorite type of movie, sometimes.

JT: The 2015 film, I believe.

DG: Yeah!

The Writing Process

JT: What was the writing process like?

SM: So we had two funders on board. We had the BFI [Network] in the UK, and we had Gunpowder & Sky — well, Alter [Studios] in the US. And you would’ve thought kind of one’s kind of public funding body and one’s a private kind of company. And honestly —

DG: They were very “get on with it.”

SM: They were so supportive of it. So when we initially started trying to finance or to get the financing for this short film, we had a feature that we wanted to get off the ground. And the talent exec at the time, Alice Cabanas, she was like, “Guys, your last big short was in 2011,” and that was Ella, which had Anthony Head in it. It did really, really well, and we kind of went into develop[ment] with our first feature film that took three years and was funded by Creative England. But it just ended up… It was like most first features. [When] you’re writing your first feature, you don’t necessarily —

Dan finishes Sophie’s sentence.

DG: — get them made straight away the main straightaway.

Starting from the Ground

SM: But also, it ended up probably being something that we didn’t want to make. Because your first feature is kind of like, you’ve got to be so passionate about it. And it’s kind of veered off in a direction, and we’re very much horror people. And I think that first feature was a —

DG: A horror-thriller.

SM: It’s a horror-thriller, where we’re trying to focus on the horror.

DG: Yeah, writing it was just a case of we’d take turns on the draft, simple as that at first. Get it to a point, and then we’d both sit down. It was just the funniest part [to] just act it out and just keep changing the lines and stuff. And then, once we got to a point where we had interest, we’d send it to our producers and people just to get a bit of feedback. But it was a pretty smooth process, and it just adapted slightly when we had our locations just to fit the location.

Some Tips for Novices

JT: Yeah, I see where you guys are coming from. I’m thinking of getting into some sort of a position in filmmaking in that field. Are there any tips that you would offer to people who are just starting out?

DG: It’s quite different. When I started, where we started, we were shooting on DV tapes. Have you heard of the DV tapes?

I said “yes,” but in retrospect, I thought they meant DVDs. Now my answer is “no.”

Tip No. 1: Film Where You Are Familiar

DG, con’t.: We feel a bit lost in this space now, in terms of social media and YouTube channels and all that kind of stuff. We do our best, but we feel like we’d sort of just got at the end of that when that all became quite popular. But in terms of making stuff, so we got funding for this. It was a big project we couldn’t do without money, but we also have made stuff where we thought, “Okay. We sit in our house, we look around the house just to try and figure out a film in the house.” I think that’s one of the best ways if you’re looking to write and direct. Come up with something that you can do in a couple of rooms or in your garden. Do you know what I mean?

Tip No. 2 and 3: Budget with Money & Network with Others

SM: And also … where we live in the UK, we’ve got some amazing kind of collaborators around us. People who are equally as creative as us, but have different… We know D0Ps [directors of photography], we know costume designers and things like that. … When there’s no money exchanging, it’s so freeing because you’re there purely because the creativity of it.

DG: We made a film called Bill, and we shot it in six or seven hours, I think? We had a really tiny crew and that’s yeah, that’s done okay. We made one before that called And The Baby Screamed, which was again, shot in a day and a night. Things that you can get people to maybe work for free for a day. That’s what we always say, but it depends. It’s just getting to know people, isn’t it? It’s a long process. I’ve just turned 40. We’re not spring chickens, you are. She’s a spring chicken.

Posing My Own Obstacles

SM: But also it’s kind of like in terms of — what are you trying to do? Are you wanting to be a script-writing for [the] screen, or are you wanting to get into more behind the camera or in front of the camera?

I tell the filmmaking duo about having my own filmmaking partner as well as the obstacles that I might face.

JT: I’m also writing as much as I can. And I also have graduate school. I think that when it comes to collaboration, I’m worried about not meeting in the middle because we’re always separate. I always get these anxieties or these worries that things won’t come together.

SM: Yeah, yeah!

DG: Don’t worry. That will never go.

SM: That will never, ever, ever go.

The Real Struggles of Filmmaking as a Process

SM, con’t.: It’s honestly kind of like the whole filmmaking process is one big ball of anxiety. Because the thing is, when you’re writer-directors, especially you, you kind of come up with these madcap ideas. It’s then trying to kind of get a producer on board and then trying to either A) Do it yourselves because you can, or B) Trying to get the funding for it. The anxiety of pitching — And also, I suppose, what I’m trying to get at — I’m such a wallflower — is don’t give up.

We’ve had so many doors shut in front of us, and we have thought, “Oh my gosh, nobody’s listening! Nobody believes in us!” and things like that. But it’s just that kind of ferocity of not giving up. Just believing in your idea and just trying your very best.

They begin to refer to my short review of their newest short film and how I answered a lot of what can be asked about it. In doing so, they relate my writing experiences to theirs. Upon hearing crying outside their room, Dan briefly exits to check up on their children.

SM, con’t.: When we make stuff there’s an ambiguity to it. But I also think that kind of short film form can be ambiguous. In a feature, you expect to be kind of told in a way. But in a short film, there’s room to play and there’s room to kind of question.

The Reason for the Short Film’s Setting

JT: I don’t know if Dan can explain this when he returns, but when it comes to the setting of your short film, why set it where it is? I think you guys did answer this just not too long ago [see Tip No. 1]. Why set The Thing that Ate The Birds where it’s located?

Dan comes back into the room.

SM: Yeah, yeah. Actually, that’s a question maybe that I should answer initially. It’s actually where I’m from and grew up. When we were writing our first feature, I took Dan back. We lived in a really remote farmhouse on top of the moor for a year of that writing. And during that time we got to know gamekeepers and go out on a couple of a few grass shoots and things and got to know the world and the terrain. Honestly … when we were up there, it’s hugely inspiring. In the UK, there [are] not swathes of land that [are] not built on. Whereas when you’re up on those moors, it feels as though you’re on your own. It’s kind of otherworldly, but also historically, that part of the world, or that part of the UK, was home to lead mining. Basically, underneath those moors, there was a rabbit warren of tunnels that dig down to the bows of the earth. Then we’ll shut off to the public.

Introducing Mair and Gitsham’s “The Thing”

DG: There just this sense that there’s — we always like to think there are creatures living underground. Living among us, you know?

SM: Also, you can let the creatures that have lived there for maybe thousands of years and they become kind of folklore and fairytales. But we live in harmony with one another, you know?

DG: Also, as you get older, there’s this fear that when you’re being creative, you lose that sort of childlike, wide-eyed, find everything kind of interesting and believable and creative, and it’s not wanting to lose that. So for us, even in this film, the creature represents [the] idea that there’s this magnificent, childlike, weird thing out there. [Protagonist Abel, played by Eoin Slattery] can’t deal with that. He can’t see anything different or deal with that side of him. See, that makes him scared. When people are scared, they pulled triggers or do violent acts. So that felt really interesting for us.

Their response to my first question became the answer to my next question.

Further Descriptions of “The Thing”

JT: How do you guys describe [The Thing]? Because it is like like as you said Dan, it’s this child-like entity but what else can we say about the Thing?

DG: Well, we actually had a drawing on the front of our script when we gave it to people. And it’s pretty close to what we ended up with.

SM: I suppose the makeup of the creature — because the creature was inspired by these tunnels underground. And we thought, “What color would you be if you were spending your life in the darkness and in the dirt?” It’s kind of like that really translucent gray, especially on the first creature. And yeah, it’s basically pretty much an earth creature.

DG: How could a creature live out there and not be seen? Well, let’s make it a color that doesn’t quite stand out, which is why I see this one as a child. It stood out, it’s not moved really. If it was an adult, it would have hidden somewhere.

Multiple “Things”

SM: The story behind the Things, because there’s actually two.

JT: Oh!

This revelation actually caught me by genuine surprise.

SM: The dead birds essentially… In the UK, foxes and stoats, you get them on the moor top. Basically, when foxes and stoats are fed enough and they’re just being narky, really, they are playful as well. They can bite the head off grouse and they just leave it. They don’t eat it, nothing, they just leave it. That’s the moment when Jake [played by Lewis MacKinnon] says to Abel, “Could it be a fox? Could it be a stoat?” What we like to think happened was…take these rabbit warren of tunnels. It was meant to be like a baby creature has escaped from the tunnel and got out into the open. It’s seen a fox or a stoat bite off these heads and playfully just kind of do the same. That’s when the collision between the creature and Abel at the very beginning [happens]. And then what was supposed to happen was the daddy creature. That’s the daddy creature who comes and gets him at the end, and does that to him.

DG: Yeah, it’s a complicated one, because, on the day with our scheduling with our actors, we couldn’t have a monster outside. But we didn’t really know until probably a couple of days beforehand. So we had to kind of tweak it a little bit. And originally there was going to be a sense that there [are] lots of them outside, which would have been really cool. But we just had to play it with sound design and just keep it simple. That’s when we thought, “Right, let’s stick up grouse head on the fence!”

How They Resorted to the Appearance of One Thing On-Screen

SM: But yeah, so because of the limitations of budgetary constraints and things, especially towards the SFX, we were meant to have two creatures. Like either a very small person in the initial creature and a big person for the second creature. However, we had to use the same actor, who was absolutely amazing. His name was James Swanton.

DG: It’s because of the molds. We could maybe make one mold of a face, not two. It was like, “Right, let’s find a great actor who can play two different [creatures].”

SM: What then became this concept! The closer we’re getting the story of the creatures was that actually, it was his wife — The first creature is his wife, and the next creature is the husband. Yeah.

DG, jokingly: We just make it up as we go along.

SM: But it’s the same thing. It’s vengeance. It’s kind of like…so there [are] definitely two creatures.

Interpretation of the Narrative is, Indeed, Subjective

DG: It’s basically vengeance.

But we’ve read a few different reviews, and some people see it as the same one, and some people don’t. Films are there just to be interpreted. It’s funny with that director statement, we didn’t actually know it was [published] live to [just] anybody. We thought that was just on Film Freeway or somewhere. It was interesting because that was actually one of the pages that we used to pitch to get funding. So it’s been an interesting sort of journey, isn’t it? Sort of seeing what people know and what people don’t, and what people sort of get from it on their own. So yeah, films are there to be interpreted any way you’d like, basically.

JT: I love that you bring up how … the Thing is a child because when Abel and Jake see it, it’s hiding in the bushes like a child. When a child or a dog do[es] something wrong, they’re always hiding from the bigger people or the adults. I really loved that connection that you made.

Linking the Characters to Familiar Stories

JT, con’t.: Also, since you bring up their names — because it didn’t register with me until just now that Abel, Jake, and Grace, I believe — just thinking about it, they’re sort of Biblical names. Because even with Abel, his brother was Cain, and Cain is the one who does the bad thing. It’s never Abel. This character that you have is kind of that duality of Cain and Abel, where “Am I doing something wrong, or am I doing something right?” I feel like there’s something there. And I’m not too sure about Jake and Grace [the latter portrayed by Rebecca Palmer].

Jake and Grace’s Respective Roles

JT, con’t.: I do want to ask — What are their [Jake and Grace’s] roles in the film? What are their backgrounds?

Grace’s Relationship with Abel

SM: Well, Grace… She…

DG: She is a teacher. There was a little detail we took out where she was marking textbooks. And one of them was the thing that ate my homework, but it felt a bit too funny in the context of the film. But yeah, she’s a teacher, but quite a more progressive and she —

SM: Yeah, yeah. She’s progressive, she’s a teacher. She works with young people. I think the thing is… What we like to think is that Abel is not inherently a bad man. You don’t like to think of him as a bad man. He’s just lost his way, he’s stagnated, he doesn’t know how to adapt to change. And I think we can all relate [to his circumstance]. There [are] people that we know, especially like an older generation and things like that. They’re not bad people inherently, they just don’t know how to embrace change. And I think we all know as younger people, it’s so important to embrace change and to adapt and to learn and to kind of move forward. Never, ever, ever, stop learning, you know?

Their relationship, I suppose, within the context of the film, the phone call that [Grace]’s on is [with] somebody who is interested. We kind of wanted it to feel as though that the person she’s speaking to is maybe a colleague at work.

DG: Maybe [the colleague] has a bit of a crush —

SM: Maybe has a bit of a crush on her, and she’s kind of considering it.

Grace as a Character

SM, con’t.: We felt as though she was actually a really inwardly strong woman, and we wanted her to… The way that she reacts to [Abel]. She’s willing to fight against him. She still loves him. They’ve been together for an awful long time. She still loves him, but the communication has just broken down. And that moment, when they’re in the kitchen, when she says, “Do you want me to pack my bags and leave?” and he says, “No,” we kind of wanted to create maybe some level of tragedy to the whole situation. Because actually, that could have been the start of something. If the car alarm hadn’t gone off, if he hadn’t killed the creature, [etc.]. You know, [if] all of these things have kind of come to ahead, they could have just woken up the next morning and been like, “Actually, we can sort our lives out. We can do this.”

DG: It’s a tragedy. We see it as like a tragedy, like a really sad tale about just people not being able to do the right thing or communicate and all the shit that comes out there.

Jake as a Character

SM: With Jake, when we were getting to know the gamekeepers and things… You’d often have a head gamekeeper and you’d have a gamekeeper’s assistant. And the assistant would often be much younger and a bit cheeky. Because gamekeepers’ houses are paid for and they’ve got a salary and things and their electricity’s paid for and things like that, rather than investing, they’ve got spare cash. I think [Jake]’s just like somebody who’s very cheeky.

DG: Yeah, he’s like his dog. Abel takes him around like a dog. Gamekeepers would normally have dogs as well, but yeah, we couldn’t quite stretch to a dog on our set.

Sophie and Dan’s Experience During Principal Photography

JT: What was your experience during the production of this project?

DG: Positive, generally. Yeah, it’s up and down. So getting it, writing it, and then having an interest was surprisingly smooth, and that was great. Getting the producers on board, getting the team on-board, that side of it was pretty smooth. The shoot was pretty solid. There [were] ups and downs. I mean, all the stuff on the moors, all the monster stuff, the first monster scene was mega rushed. We’d run out of time, the sun was going [down]. We had to chuck all our shots away and keep it as simple as possible, so there was that. There [were] a few bits and bobs on the shoot, which there’s always things that you’re going to have to encounter. Like we said, we couldn’t have the actor for three days. We could only have them for two days for the monster.

One of Sophie and Dan’s children enters the room.

DG, con’t.: Oh, we’re about to have a visitor.

Sophie briefly leaves the room to tend to the children.

DG, con’t.: Post-shoot, it was pretty good. The edit, we did it in about six or seven days with the editor. So we were picture-locked by October 2019. Then, obviously, we were heading to the post-production houses and the color grading and the sound mix, and then COVID comes along. … But yeah, COVID came along and just created massive delays. It’s really difficult being on a phone color-grading looking at a JPEG. That sort of thing.

Discussing the Delay of SXSW 2020

JT: I think South by Southwest was supposed to happen last year, but I believe it was canceled last minute, right?

DG: I think some of it went online last minute, but yeah, it was just as it was hitting, COVID and South By [arrived both] at the same time. Wasn’t it?

JT: Yeah. ‘Cause it’s the one-year anniversary, I guess, around this month. Plus South By Southwest is this month also, so it kind of aligns with what’s going on.

DG: Yeah. Maybe, we would have been ready [in] March last year, so we’re like a year behind, I would say.

How “The Thing” Gains Access to Abel and Grace

JT: Does the Thing ever get inside the house? Because I always, I always wondered about that. It does still have human abilities, right?

DG: No, he’s totally human-based. But because he’s in it very little, he becomes a little more super supernatural, I think. He basically distracts Abel with the car alarm. He goes in, attacks his wife, and pulls her throat off, and then waits for Abel to come back. That’s kind of the idea behind that stuff, so yeah, he’s in [the house]. But you know, in many of the drafts, there [were] four or five creatures crawling up holes.

Playing with Multiplicities of “The Things”

JT: Yeah. Because the title is The Thing… . I always thought it was just one singular entity, but it never occurred to me that there would be other “Things”. Maybe that could be a sequel.

DG: Well, we thought, when we had [the film] edited, [that] it might play as like the reincarnation of the dead creature, or the creature kind of comes back. We did think it might play that way a little bit. If you notice — or you won’t notice, but someone might — in the credits, it says The Things that Ate The Birds, James Swanton, and [The Thing] has an S on the end, just for fun.

JT: Now I need to rewatch [the fiilm] then.

By this point, Sophie returns to the room.

Jake’s Fate by the End of the Story

JT, con’t.: Does the Thing ever get to Jake? Because there is a time-lapse in terms of the story. When Jake and Abel meet — or [rather] shoot the Thing, the first Thing — that’s during the daytime. But then when Abel returns home, that’s maybe dusk? Would it be possible that something gets to Jake, or are there hints as to his fate by the end of the film? Or can we just hope that something good happened to him?

DG: Well, I think he’s going to be shook up by the experience. Yeah, he’s fine. I think we probably had other bits of the script that we slowly cut down.

SM: We did!

DG: [Abel and Jake] kind of went back to the car. I think, maybe in our heads, maybe they burnt the creature and just dumped it somewhere and just hid its body.

SM: So I think that’s the thing. I remember one of the versions of the script — because the thing is when we started writing, it was like 20 pages and obviously kind of a minute per page and because of, just…

DG: It’s too complicated.

SM: Yeah, too complicated. But one of them, … Abel knew that he shouldn’t have done what he did. And he basically tells Jake to go and not speak about it ever. And I think Abel put [the wife Thing] in the back of his Land Rover, didn’t he? He took it back and put it in a barn outside kind of thinking, “What am I going to do with this?” And yeah, that didn’t happen.

DG: But we didn’t need it. We quite like leaving space so that people can kind of make their own opinions of what might happen there, personally. Getting that right’s not always easy, but it is nice suggesting stuff to an audience. Put in a few little clues in there, and then letting people make their own minds up. Maybe [Jake] came in the morning and found the headless body.

JT: Oh, maybe that’s the camera, [as if] that’s from his perspective.

Moral of the Story

JT, con’t.: Final question. What are some lessons that we — myself and you guys, and the viewers as well — what are some lessons that we as moviegoers and fans of the horror genre can take from this film?

DG: Be kind.

SM: Be kind to each other, absolutely. I think the end shot, the headless body. So an artist that has really inspired us, and we know we recreated what they did — Gregory Crewdson, the way his still images tell such a deep story. With our final shot, it was just the inspiration, I suppose. But it was that feeling of the dawning of a new day. Do you know what I mean? It was that feeling that life moves on. Whatever happens, time doesn’t stop.

DG: Yeah, the sun’s gonna come up.

SM: The sun’s gonna come up.

DG: The grass is going to grow.

SM: And in a strange way, it was that we kind of hope people are slightly relieved that there’s another day coming. But I don’t know whether people feel that. Just —

DG: Be kind to people.

Wrap-Up

JT: Well, thank you guys for you know taking [the] time to have this thorough discussion about your short film. I really loved it. There’s a lot to analyze here. I wish you guys luck with your future endeavors, as well as your current one with South By Southwest. And I wish you also luck with your family.

I don’t remember what was discussed after I stopped recording. Although, I will say that — as the last of my SXSW 2021 interviews — speaking with Sophie Mair and Dan Gitsham was truly inspiring and meaningful. The same can be said for my other/previous interviews. However, this writer-director duo provided some filmmaking tips that I could take with me and could last for years to come. I cannot more grateful to have seen their work, and I hope they continue to make more powerful horror tales.

For more horror and short film-related news and reviews, follow The Cinema Spot on Twitter (@TheCinemaSpot) and Instagram (@thecinemaspot_). Also, you can now find us on Facebook (TheCinemaSpotFB)!

Also, check out my review on Mair and Gitsham’s short horror film, The Thing That Ate the Birds!