The director of a number of acclaimed short films, D. R. Hood’s feature debut is an impressive drama centred on the terse relationship between two brothers, as seen through the eyes of the eldest brother’s wife. Set within a small farming community in the Fens, Wreckers (2011) opens with Nick, having completed his military service, arriving at the ramshackle and half-decorated home of David and Dawn. No sooner has he settled in than the friction among the three increases, with Nick’s presence reviving memories from David’s past. Excluded from this world, Dawn finds herself isolated and questioning her marriage. A nuanced exploration of relationships, Hood’s film is visually ravishing, employs sound and music to unsettling effect, and features excellent performances by Benedict Cumberbatch, Shaun Evans and Claire Foy.
Because the film is very different to what we normally see in British cinema, and certainly in terms of the social strata of British society, did you encounter many problems in terms of funding?
It was impossible. It was funded independently, with a great deal of input from two post-production houses. We went to the major funding bodies at every single stage of the film, with no luck – from development to post-production.
The comments I received were actually quite instructive. In development, I was told it was a shame that the film is almost a thriller but not quite a thriller. And yet when Steve Jenkins bought the film for the BBC, one of the first things he said was that it’s great the film is a thriller yet not quite a thriller.
So films are problematic if they don’t fit within a certain category of recognisable parameters?
Yes. During post-production, concerns were raised over who the audience would be. I don’t know who the audience would have been without Benedict [Cumberbatch] and his immense fan base. One can’t speculate. If we’d cast someone else, it would obviously have been different.
Wreckers is, among other things, an unusual study of class.
The characters are middle class, but they’re lower middle class because it’s a farming family. The idea is that both brothers got out, albeit in very different ways. Nick remained within the class but also escaped from it to a degree by going into the army, whereas David ‘improved’ his class status. Something that isn’t discussed at all in the UK is how, within families, people can move between classes, both up and down. That fascinated me because we are still very class conscious. In some villages, there is a cross-section of this system that operates in a feudalist way.
I didn’t specifically set out to make a film about class, but rather one about a village, because I come from one. Within the village, people get out in various ways and that can affect their position within the class system. I’m pleased with the way that the two brothers have gone in different directions but you still buy into the idea that they’re brothers.
The casting had a huge impact on how the characters would be perceived. Dawn was originally meant to be a little less ‘posh’ than she is in the film, but I didn’t want to change Claire [Foy]’s accent. Benedict, who wasn’t as famous when we cast him as he is now, certainly isn’t from the background described in the script, but he brought elements to the role that worked brilliantly – this extraordinary ambiguity in the character – and I think he and Shaun [Evans] really do convince as brothers.
How did the story originate?
It began a long time ago when I read a book of Fenland tales, which were very graphic and brutal. I wrote a couple of shorts, and I had also written a script for a short that involved Gary, the garage owner in Wreckers. But that didn’t get made because it was too high-end. A few years later, I wrote a ten-page outline about a soldier coming back to his village, who now feels something of an outsider. He stays with his brother, who at that time was Gary, and Gary’s wife Dawn. It was told from Nick’s point of view. Then a year later I added a character called David, who appears at a party and is pretty sadistic in that scene. Suddenly, I realised that Dawn was married to David not Gary, and that she was the point-of-view character. From there the script really came together.
It was always based heavily on atmosphere and images and about someone coming into the village and creating havoc. One of the Fenland tales details the devil arriving in a village and he walks over rooftops in the snow, leaving his footprints behind in the morning.
Why did you choose the Fens for the story?
It’s very similar to the landscape I grew up in. But where I grew up is now a commuter belt. So the intact rural life and the Fenland stories benefitted my story. The villages are still intact there, with agricultural industry – they’re not just commuter villages.
It’s a very open landscape and yet the film feels incredibly claustrophobic.
That came partly out of the process of filming. We had to cut costs quite a lot, so we shot the drama first and then the landscape shots. The script was written more generally within the landscape. There were a few scenes we had to cut. But the claustrophobia works in terms of Dawn’s experience.
Do you see the role of nature, particularly the creeping effect on the walls of the house, as a major theme in the film?
Not so much nature as fertility. Later in the script development I began reading Viking myths, and you could say that Dawn is Freya, Nick is Loki and David is Odin, who sees everything with only one eye. There’s also the cherry tree carol that played into the story. So the flower and bird images painted on the walls of the house tap into that idea.
So you have fertility on one side, but also this sense of a simmering violence beneath the veneer of quiet country life. Nick seems to be the open wound in exhibiting this – someone who has experienced violence first hand, in open combat.
Yes. I feel that we know we’re capable of violence but it’s often carried out by soldiers in foreign lands. That’s a topic I’m going to explore further in another project. We’re exporting our wars. At the same time, I know that violence can come from within, from within families. Look at Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009), which I saw after we completed this film. The effect of this kind of violence leads directly to conflict on a huge scale. I think there’s something about the life the brothers have lived that comes home to roost.
The violence in the film seems to erupt from the inability to communicate, to express frustration or anger in any way other than through pure brute force. Both Nick and Gary are like this.
Gary is definitely someone who isn’t able to speak at all. It’s not class-based. I think there’s a reticence and a pride among the English that covers all facets of society. David is angry and doesn’t know where to place his anger at all – not that he’s a bad man.
The past comes across with such a sense of menace. It’s a secret world that Dawn isn’t privy to.
I didn’t necessarily think of it in exactly that way. The backstory is incredibly important to me – and I am obsessed with the past. Perhaps too obsessed by it. Most families do have secrets generally and these things fester. And sooner or later it affects people’s lives. What David is holding back is ultimately going to affect the relationship.
I always thought of the situation as: Dawn clearly wants to know about her husband – who he really is. But what I liked doing here is that in most films someone finds out the secret and then does something about it. But here, Dawn goes right to the very edge and then decides she doesn’t want to know, and she and David find a way to live with that.
It becomes an exploration of the breaking point in relationships – how far can you go before there’s no turning back, when the trust is gone and the relationship implodes?
That’s right. And in the first draft of the screenplay they did fall off the edge. It was much more like a conventional thriller. However, the performances didn’t support that scenario and, ultimately, I don’t think we really had faith in that ending. Frankly, those scenes didn’t work. So it becomes more a portrait of a marriage.
What was wonderful when we first showed the film to the crew, the London Film Festival and potential distributors, is that we saw people becoming very tense as they watched it, which was nice, because we cut it so that it became an examination of relationships and the tension arises from that.
Part of the thriller element – the mystery of the past that draws us in – is the way you capture snippets of dialogue. Sometimes it feels that we’re privy to a private conversation, but often only part of it. More often than not, these scenes revolve around two of the characters.
That was constructed to be like that, to give a sense of unease. It’s mostly Dawn on the outside, but not always. We improvised those scenes in rehearsal – two characters with one always outside, and mainly Dawn as the outsider – and then we shot it like that, to give you that strange feeling.
I’m glad you realise the fragments of information and feeling are intentional. We weren’t sure whether we had achieved that, and so it’s good when people point that out. Originally, it was more of a Russian doll structure, with Dawn looking back. But that seemed a bit too tricksy.
The ambiguity of the film is present in the way it was shot. It is both very real, yet possessed of an ethereal, dreamlike quality.
I thought of Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1971). I’ve only seen it once – perhaps once is enough! – but I think it’s an amazing film. And The Wicker Man (1973). Annemarie [Lean-Vercoe, the cinematographer] made me watch a number of Korean horror films, like A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), because they’re so creepy. And David Lynch. I remember watching Twin Peaks – normally from halfway up the stairs because it was so scary – and you always knew the episodes he had directed. They’re so simple, yet terrifying. We also watched Tarkovsky. We specifically took something from Stalker (1979), which is to de-saturate the green in the grade.
When we were preparing to film we looked at a lot of photographs and picture books, Edward Hopper among others, but in terms of the shooting style, we spoke a great deal about close-ups and landscape. And we had a lot of discussions about point of view. We also played with thirty frames a second. There are a few sequences in the film, such as when they’re coming down the towpath, that are just that little bit slower and the effect is wonderfully subliminal.
This contrast between the dreamy and the real was worked out in the edit. We discovered how powerful it could be to juxtapose the dreamy scenes with moments of violence. It was through experimenting with structure, and it worked out so well.
Sally El Hosaini (photo: Francesca D’Ascari)