Premiering at Frightfest back in August, Playhouse centres around a notorious horror writer who moves into an ancient
castle with his teenage daughter to work on his next play; only to face
terrifying consequences when his daughter falls prey to a supernatural evil lurking within the castle walls.
It’s been five years since brothers Toby and
Fionn Watts first came up with the idea for Playhouse, as they explain to us in this exclusive interview.
Playhouse. How long of a journey has this been for you, lads?
Wow, yeah, a long time! Although we shot the film at the end of 2018, and
wrote the screenplay earlier that year, we were working on ideas that
eventually led to the outline for Playhouse some years
before that. So from script to screen, three years, but from starting
working on ideas that eventually became Playhouse, more like five years. And if we go back further to when we decided to
go for it as filmmakers with the aim of one day making that first feature,
more like 15 years!
When did you first put pen to paper on the script?
We started developing the treatment for the film at the end of 2017
through until early 2018. It was probably around March or so of 2018 when
Toby actually started writing the screenplay, and it took a few months of
work and revisions to have a final draft. And even then we were pulling
scenes out and making changes up until right before the shoot at the end
of 2018. Scheduling and limitations of the location can impose some
interesting restraints on the screenplay! But these can also create new
ideas and opportunities, so bring it on.
And the idea evolved over time, I believe?
Yeah, we went through so many different ideas, all set at the location
that we filmed at in the north of Scotland. We knew we had to make a film
here - how could we not? - the question was simply, ‘what’s the film?’ We
had ideas for a comedy mock documentary, for a heart-searing family drama,
a sci-fi thriller. We spent months developing each of these, creating
characters, backstory, controlling ideas. We loved all the ideas but
eventually we realised that the location just didn’t feel like it made
sense of the story. It’s a really unique place and if we made a film that
didn’t belong there, audiences would be confused. Only certain kinds of
characters would actually live there or move there. Ultimately, we landed
on this ambitious, unhinged horror writer - exactly the kind of person who
would buy a dilapidated Scottish castle by the sea - and worked out the
idea from there. And the rest is history!
Do you find one of you are better at writing situations, and the other
dialogue? Who writes what?
We both work together intensively on the treatment, which is mostly plot
and events, tone and subtext. But when it comes to actually writing the
screenplay, it’s Toby who sits down and does the lonely job of hammering
the keys. The craft of writing has always been more Toby’s thing, whilst
Fionn has always been happy to be involved at the ideas and development
stage and then let Toby get on with creating the dialogue and grafting
through the script itself. After the first draft, Fionn always comes in
with really helpful notes on the tone, the pacing, the dialogue and
characterisation and more, which is key for Toby to get perspective on the
drafts he’s working on. In fact, Toby made a joke when we had a meeting
with all our crew the night before shooting, which was that he had one
more credit than Fionn, that of the ‘Writer’, so you need to listen to him
more. We can laugh about it because although it’s true that Toby has the
screenplay credit and Fionn has a ‘Story By’ credit, when it comes down to
it, we’re both so involved at the concept and outlining stage that even
though Toby wrote the screenplay, it has never felt like it’s ‘Toby’s
script’. It’s both of ours. Toby is just doing the labour!
Co-directing. So who gets to hold the megaphone? In all seriousness, I
imagine there’s a lot of compromising going on?
We have quite a fluid process between us. We’ve been making films as
brothers for years and we’ve just found a way of working and communicating
that makes sense for us. Broadly, Toby will get more hands on with the
director of photography and actors and work out the blocking and shot
grammar, whilst Fionn keeps a close eye on performances and how things are
working as a whole. But this could change depending on how strongly either
of us would feel about a scene. Sometimes Fionn would jump in and Toby
would step back so Fionn could really drive things the way he sees it. The
key to this working, though, is that we were so incredibly unified in our
vision from the start and in our planning of the shoot, that we never had
to debate anything on set. We’d only have creative discussions around the
nuances of performance or whether we were achieving what we planned.
There’s simply no time on set to be disagreeing with each other or talking
about who’s going to do what, or working out from scratch what a scene
needs to accomplish, let’s put it that way.
Have you always got along? I can’t imagine two squabbling brothers
directing a movie together…
In a nutshell, yes. We’re best of friends. In our early days of
filmmaking, we definitely stood on each other’s toes. We were both making
films separately for a few years before joining together and this created
a lot of tension when we’d be working together, particularly in the edit.
There’s no right or wrong way to make a film, so you really have to learn
to respect each other’s way of doing things. It took time, but now we
instinctively know what the other wants and we can sense when one of us
isn’t happy with something. Most if not all of these issues are worked out
before the shoot, though, during the hard graft of creating the story and
the screenplay. If it ain’t right on the page it ain’t right on the stage.
When it comes to directing on set, we were just referring to our notes and
our shot list and simply executing what we’d discussed in detail long
before. However, we had to stay open to new ideas, of course, and numerous
times one or the other of us would have a brain wave and suggest a new
shot or different approach to a scene. But because we were so unified in
our vision from the outset, we knew we could trust each other, even if we
needed to see it play out in front of the camera before we knew it
worked.
Without going into spoiler territory, do you have a favourite moment in
Playhouse?
Great question! We could probably pick a few for different reasons. For
example, when a tricky steadicam shot just worked beautifully, or when the
light fell unexpectedly and enhanced a moment, or when an actor gave a
brilliantly nuanced performance you didn’t expect. But if we had to choose
one moment, it’s when a couple of the characters are having a drink
together and there’s a shot we never planned to get but happened to spot
in a window reflection whilst shooting a different angle. The scene didn’t
feel like it was working until we swung the camera around and grabbed this
shot - and from that moment on, everyone in the room knew we had cracked
it, and it just made sense of what the scene was about. A happy accident,
they call it!
Playhouse is on US/CAN VOD now. A UK/ROI release has yet to
be announced.