Alice Lowe in Prevenge, which she wrote, directed and acted in while pregnant
In her debut film Prevenge, writer-director Alice Lowe takes a blowtorch to the picture postcard image of pregnancy. In this deliciously twisted serial killer black comedy, she plays the 30-something, very pregnant, Ruth. If things weren’t hard enough for Ruth, trying to deal with her grief at the recent death of her husband in a climbing accident, she also has to battle the strange voices emanating from…her womb. Yup, Ruth’s baby seems to be talking to her, and the squeaky, bitter voice is impelling her on to murder everyone involved in her husband’s death. Equipped with a clunky kitchen knife and a dour sense of humour, Ruth waddles off to carry out the bloody deeds, though as the bodies pile up, she starts to fear she is being consumed by this being inside her. In a neat coincidence, Lowe was pregnant herself when she starred in her own debut, a directing challenge she was well-prepared for after years starring in and writing dark comedy material, ranging from Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place to Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers.
Smoke Screen had the pleasure of sitting down with Lowe at London Film Festival – where the film played in the Dare strand – to talk about murder, motherhood and moviemaking.
You can read the review of Prevenge here.
It’s rare to see a debut director write, direct and star in their own movie, and when pregnant!
AL: Yes, it certainly was greedy of me, wasn’t it! I wanted to direct, but I really didn’t think I’d direct while pregnant. That wasn’t really the plan. I came up with the idea for a director called Jamie Adams, who directed a film called Black Mountain Poets. When I gave him the pitch, he said: “its brilliant, but I can’t direct it as I do rom-coms. This is dark, and I think you should direct this instead.” I knew already that I wanted to direct, but I was wondering if I could star, write and direct while pregnant. And I had had these frustrations over a long period of time of wanting to direct but thinking people wouldn’t trust me: the catch-22 of “you can’t make a first film until you’ve made a first film.”
So I just felt that if I could pull this off it would be such a good thing. You fight battles to protect your creative voice, especially in film with budgets and lots of people scared to give you money only to see you screw it up. But this film would be low budget. I felt now was the time to take that risk. And if I got it right people would respond: “ah, I see what you can do now.” I was whinging about it for so many years, but you’ve got to get out there and do it! Still, it wasn’t an easy decision. It was terrifying! So it ended up being a kamikaze approach, do or die. But I’d made a lot of short films, and in my view you never regret making something. You regret NOT making something. I put all of that into the film.
There seems to be this gleeful aspect to the film, where all the joyful tropes of pregnancy are slashed and burned…
AL: Definitely. When it came to doing research for the film, I was technically right in the middle of the research! It was strange; like being a freelancer, joining this odd club that is pregnancy, which I have seen as being an industrialised, fetishised thing. I felt very outsider-ish about it. That was already going through my head. So when I was making the film I was pooling all of this stuff that I had experienced. I hope people do see it as cathartic! Some people have suggested pregnant women might be disturbed watching the film, to me they are about to give birth, I don’t think we should patronise them. They’re about to go through something very painful and life changing, I think they are stronger than we think they are.
But at the same time, just because I’m pregnant doesn’t mean I’m going to stop watching horror or be a different person. It’s only society that would change me. All those issues were running into the film, and I do hope people watch it and feel that it’s a film talking about all the things they aren’t allowed to do. There is a relief and release in that. Just because you are pregnant doesn’t mean you have to pack all that stuff away; I think that would be really unhealthy. So there’s a lot of taboo stuff I put in the film, stuff which I felt was current and people don’t talk about. Like those trendy new parenting things like prenatal yoga – those kind of things just stressed me out. I just wanted to put a pin in all that.
Your character murders a whole lot of people, did you think about how that could alienate the audience?
AL: I definitely wanted it to be quite alienating. What I was trying to do was do a kind inverse character arc, where the viewer almost starts off hating the character, only to come to empathise with them later after you come to understand them. A risky enterprise according to the screenwriting handbooks! I wanted to test the audience, see how far they could go. This woman you see on screen is pregnant, as a society we are used to such figures being seen as “nice and lovely”. The first two men Ruth kills I wanted to present as if they might be victims of some kind of feminist vengeance, but then flip it on its head by suggesting its society that she hates, and the hypocrisies she is experiencing.
It is an interesting word: “alienating”, as I did think of this as a secret sci-fi film. It doesn’t have to be out there for everyone to see, but Ruth is a sort of alien character. She’s an anti-superheroine! Her special powers are her pregnancy! She feels that what is happening to her is very strange and new. Hence the score and everything had to be futuristic in a retro kind of way. I deliberately didn’t want the audience to feel comfortable at any stage: hence all the footage of spiders and lizards early on! The scene with Mike Wozniak (whop plays the affable flatmate of one of Ruth’s male victims, whom she considers killing too) was a moment where I wanted Ruth’s worldview to be challenged too.
This feels like it would be a perfect companion piece to Sightseers; what did you bring from that and all the other films and TV shows you’ve worked on?
AL: I co-wrote Sightseers, and I think they are genetically related for sure, like siblings. A lot of this just comes down to my sense of humour, and I do have a dark one. I like improvisation, mixing up realism with surrealism. The main thing I developed on from Sightseers was having a real sense of drama, which I put into Prevenge. Some of the themes are more serious. Pregnancy is serious. I’ve seen enough comedies about it. I wanted a dark crises to be going on in Ruth’s world, death is mixed up with birth and life for her. So I was dabbling more with drama here, making it more of a thriller than Sightseers.
I didn’t go to film school, so everything is a learning curve and building on what you’ve done. Pushing it a little bit further. I do want to branch out and tackle different genres. I see myself more of a fantasy writer. I get accused of being a horror writer, but, for example, I do a lot of surrealism. I’d love to do sci-fi and period dramas. My next film is going to be very concept driven, but it not ready to be talked about yet! I would like to make films were people can sense it has its own personality, with its own traits.
Did you draw on any other filmmakers for inspiration? There seemed to be a few homages to other movies in Prevenge:
AL: Possession and Halloween certainly, I also wanted to have lots of colour in it, so I was thinking a lot about Brian De Palma. We were so lucky with locations too: like, the reptile shop was the biggest coup ever! This could have cost us a fortune. I wanted the film to look like it was a travel through the circles of hell, with each scene having its own feeling. And we actually got those things! For example, we filmed at Saatch and Saatchi, and they had huge blue ice-like table! Just what I had in my head!