Eden Lake - The look and design of the movie
Eden Lake is a terrifying new British thriller from the writer of My Little Eye and The Descent 2, starring Michael Fassbender (Hunger, 300) and Thomas Turgoose (This Is England).
There was one particular movie James Watkins asked his director of photography Christopher Ross to view before starting on EDEN LAKE. “That was Alexandre Aja’s High Tension/Switchblade Romance”, Watkins reveals. “It had the stark reality I was aiming for. We show people’s heads on fire, neck stabbing with glass, stomach slashing revealing intestines and kidneys, and metal spikes through feet. Gritty realism in moments of ramped up tension. EDEN LAKE lulls you in the beginning, then sends you through a complete nightmare before a totally unexpected ending. It’s horrifying and credible in a way few genre movies are and I felt that very real terror had to be grounded in visceral audience emotions”.
“James was very clear on what he wanted”, states Chris Ross, the former Panavision technician tuned cinematographer for London to Brighton and The Cottage. “He requested an emotionally charged rollercoaster ride, but a rickety one that could suddenly come off the rails at any point adding further unease and possible jeopardy. So I took the sense of foreboding from Switchblade Romance and carried that across to EDEN LAKE. The idea being that as soon as you see the gang of kids, you always had to have the sense they were ever-present even if they weren’t around. You never feel free of their malevolence”.
“I’d call the EDEN LAKE look Heightened Naturalism”, adds Ross. “The sort of look you got from such 1970s classics as Deliverance and Straw Dogs. For me the 70s was the greatest cinema era ever and it defines my own style. Those were the days when films could end badly and people would love them for it. I see EDEN LAKE in similar terms. James hired me to work on the shorts and his debut feature because he saw London to Brighton. It’s that refined rawness I’ve brought to the genre beats”.
“A director of photography reads between the lines of the script to bring out the unwritten”, observes Ross. .”EDEN LAKE begins like a holiday romance, for the first thirty minutes its all sweetness and light and glamorous. I use a slinky film stock for those sun-kissed snapshots and a long lens to make the character of Steve handsome and strong, and Jenny as pretty as a picture. It’s The Beach meets Summer Holiday, a place you really want to visit. Then the gang arrives on the scene and the image gets roughed up a bit. The sunlight moves from being a backlight to a contrasting sidelight. Everything looks harsher, less flattering. You won’t notice this at all but it will have the intended psychological effect on the viewer”.
He continues, “Then the moment Jenny gets discovered and starts running through the woods, EDEN LAKE becomes an unapologetic chase movie. She doesn’t stop running and for one particular 8-minute long sequence we used Steadicam and bicycle mounts. For the confrontational moments hand-held cameras were used and thrust into people’s faces for an up close and personal feel”.
An exacting challenge for Ross was photographing Paul Hyett’s special make-up prosthetics. “You usually can’t linger too long on this type of effect just in case it begins to look fake. But Paul’s work was exemplary and so subtle it bore closer scrutiny. That’s when I came up with the idea of keeping the frame allied to the reality of the scene from the character’s point of view. Steve can’t bear to look at his stomach wound because he’s hiding the truth of the situation from himself. Therefore only a fleeting glance was necessary from his perspective. But when Jenny had to more clinically inspect it, I went closer so the full force shock would leave the seriousness of it in no doubt whatsoever”.
The most troublesome sequence turned out to be the death of Bonnie, the Rottweiler recalls Ross with a sigh. “There were nine characters crowded around a special effect campfire with a Rottweiler getting stabbed in the chest. It was a cold 8-hour night shoot in Black Park and Klaus the dog was absolutely brilliant at dying. But the moment Jack O’Connell opened his mouth to scream in horror Klaus would leap up and ruin the shot. A zombie dog was not required! After endless takes where it became clear Klaus would never behave as we wanted him to, we had to devise a way of shooting Jack and Klaus in two separate passes”.
James Watkins encapsulates: “From the start, I wanted the EDEN LAKE shooting style to be bold and cinematic, full of sunlight and promise. Only we were shooting in the worst summer on record. Fortunately the film gods shone on us for our four days on the beach. Chris did a valiant job fighting the light throughout. Together, we conceived a shooting style and lens plot to reflect the degeneration: grainier, rougher stock; the colour palate more bleached out; the glamour of long focal lengths surrendering to the paranoia of wider lens close-ups. No more wide summer skies. Instead something more claustrophobic: thrusting phallic pines blocking out the sky; framing that works the dark corners of the forest. This central forest location became a character in itself: primal, elemental, universal, tapping our fairytale fears. Horror has its own grammar: slow-burn subjective tension, horror jolts and stings, teasing voyeuristic tracking. Chris and I tried hard to weave these seamlessly into a story that felt snatched from the headlines”.
“Chris Ross was one of the few people on the EDEN LAKE crew who we hadn’t worked with before”, remarks producer Christian Colson. “James developed his own special relationship with Chris through the short films. I wanted James surrounded by a crack group of technicians I knew would support him well and take away any problems so he could really focus. Jon Harris edited The Descent, is editing EDEN LAKE and took charge of the second unit direction. Production designer Simon Bowles who did such a brilliant job on The Descent too was also an easy pick. Paul Hyett created the creatures and special prosthetic make-up for The Descent and was our first choice to fill the same capacity. And The Descent composer David Julyan has added another memorable score to his repertoire. David was a constant visitor on location so he could absorb the atmospheres. EDEN LAKE had a team I was confident in and James felt comfortable with”.
“I wanted to create a timeless look to the costumes and make-up”, observes James Watkins. “I’d admired the mythic look of Pawel Pawlikoski’s My Summer of Love. I wanted to clean the frame of all logos, brands, hoods or jewellery. I wanted to make a British film that doesn’t feel like a small British film. Simon Bowles’ wonderful production design gave me fantastic scale and forensic attention to detail”.
Simon Bowles is a production designer who can always be relied upon to bring singular looks to such diverse projects as the sci-fi adventure Doomsday and thriller Straightheads. “What was important for EDEN LAKE”, he says, “Was the cohesive look of the forest. I thought a tree was a tree, but it’s surprising how that is so not the case. We needed many different locations to form the one forest setting because there is such an amazing variety and density of trees, land and natural lighting effects. Knitting together our three main locations so as not to undermine the film’s credibility was a very interesting exercise and one detailed extensively during pre-production”.
Bowles continues, “The lake was key of course and we found that at Frensham Ponds where Warren Beatty’s Reds was filmed back in 1980. The beach setting had to look dreamy, exotic and inviting. Unusual terrain mattered more than any architecture so we had to match it up in Black Park, Pinewood, where practically every Hammer Horror movie was filmed in the 1960s, and Burnham Beeches, where Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was shot. Black Park is very flat and Burnham supplied us with the big dips and spiky, protruding tree roots so the landscape wouldn’t get boring as Jenny runs through it”
“While I created every single cave in The Descent”, he adds, “I only had one build on EDEN LAKE. And that was the bird hide over-hanging the lake, covered in carved initials and graffiti, where mortally wounded Steve and Jenny conceal themselves from the gang. But while the building work was minimal it was the most hectic shoot as we had to be on the run to cover a lot of space between each location”.
“Sound design is key in horror too”, announces James Watkins. “I wanted EDEN LAKE reverberations to scour the murky corners of the mind. Composer David Julyan, whose scores for Chris Nolan and Neil Marshall I’d long admired, has been a dream to work with. I believe he has come up with a haunting, modern score that hits the horror and suspense beats without being cheesy-chase movie. One suffused with an elegiac sense that plays as the heartbeat of the film”.
Eden Lake will be released in UK cinemas on 12th September 2008.
