‘Out of Darkness’ Director Andrew Cumming Discusses Stone Age Horror And Crafting A Whole New Language [Fantastic Fest 2023]
Andrew Cumming’s feature film debut Out of Darkness is stunning, to say the least. He gave himself the unique challenge of a period piece set in the Stone Age, while also creating a language and filming with entirely natural light. Go big or go home, right? The result is a dazzling look at survival, humanity, and what we’ll do to protect ourselves.
Read the official synopsis below:
A small boat reaches the shores of a raw and desolate landscape. A group of six have struggled across the narrow sea to find a new home. They are starving, desperate, and living 45,000 years ago. First, they must find shelter, and they strike out across the tundra wastes towards the distant mountains that promise the abundant caves they need to survive. But when night falls, anticipation turns to fear and doubt as they realize they are not alone. Terrifying sounds suggest something monstrous at large in this landscape, something that could kill or steal them away. As relationships in the group fracture, the determination of one young woman reveals the terrible actions taken to survive.
Dread Central found time to speak with Cumming during Fantastic Fest to chat about his wildly ambitious debut, creating an entire language, James Wan jump scares, and more.
Dread Central: Why this time period?
Andrew Cumming: All of this, it took me by surprise. I saw a BBC documentary back when I was in film school, so it was like 10 years ago, and it was called The History of Us. The first episode was about early modern humans migrating through Africa, coming into Europe, and meeting these Neanderthals. And I was just really hooked on this moment. You can maybe tell the Romeo and Juliet story because every Caucasian in Western Europe has at least 4% Neanderthal DNA in them. But my instincts are always, no, some of them fell in love but what about the ones that didn’t?
Then I read William Golding’s follow-up to Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, which is a great book in that same world. I put that book down and I just had this epiphany about us as a species and what we’re capable of and what we do to each other. And it hasn’t been tackled in film for a while. I mean there’s been like 10,000 BC and there was Alpha. Quest for Fire was in the mid-1980s, but all those films felt kind of cuddly and a bit too box office, with almost too much money thrown out at it.
And I was like, what’s the gnarly, low-budget version of this where you can just take a bunch of people out into the wilderness and just put them through hell for a bit? So then I met Oliver Kassman, the producer. We had this hour-long chat and at the end of the meeting he said, “Oh yeah, and I want to do a monster movie where the monster isn’t really a monster set in this time period”. And I was like, you’ve just described the movie I want to make in 20 years. So that was when it was like, okay, the two of us need to do this, but he said, “Well, let’s do it as your debut.”
I was like, are you nuts? I just thought, there’s no way in hell we’re going to get the money for this. It’s a debut feature period piece with a made-up language and discovery cast. This isn’t going to happen. But anyway, we came up with this little three-page treatment, very bare bones. Oliver had already been working with Ruth Greenberg, the writer. She came in, and we pitched to her the rough three-act structure, and how it’s about man’s inhumanity and how that actually is what helped humanity survive.
She said, “That’s really cool, but as a woman, I want to do something about violence perpetrated upon women and also perpetrated by women.” It was like we were all singing from the same hymn sheet because I’d always been really fascinated by Ripley from Alien and the fact that from [the Xenomorph’s] point of view, she’s a fucking genocidal maniac. Especially in Aliens. So that was really fun to say, “OK let’s change the final girl trope with this movie as well.” She isn’t just Marilyn Burns screaming in the woods. It’s like she’s the genocidal zealot, but it’s because of her upbringing, it’s because of what she’s been through in this patriarchal structure. So that was it. Then the three of us went off on this beautiful journey together for a few years.
DC: Wow. And it’s inspiring to see a film like this being made when, as you said, it’s hard to get money for films like this. And from a technical perspective too, I mean, how much does your cinematographer hate you, especially with all of the lighting difficulties?
AC: Honestly, no. Ben [Fordesman]’s great. So Oliver produced a movie called St. Maud. They were doing some pickups on that, and Oliver knew I was short on cash. He said, “You know what would be really good for my pickups? If you were the first assistant director because a good Scottish voice on set really picks up the pace.” And I knew Rose [Glass] from film school, she was the year below me. So I was like, yeah, I’ll come and first AD and whatever. So it was good. I got to see Ben work for those four days, and I’d already seen a rough cut of St. Maud and I thought, “This is going to be great.” I knew there were loads of big holes in it where they were going to put stuff, but I was like, this is going to be a really great movie. Ben’s really talented. So when the time came to look for a cinematographer, Ben was on top of our list.
We sent him the script and I said, “Look man, this is going to be quite different from St. Maud. That was a lot of interiors. We’re going to be outside. Generators, forget it. It’s going to be sculpting natural light a lot.” And he and his team, Ed, the focus puller, and Lee, his grip, they were just up for the adventure.
When we did the exterior of the caves, that was a two-hour drive and then a 45-minute hike. We had to put everything on our backs and carry everything up the side of the mountain. Actually, in a lot of the daytime scenes, there are no lights. His gaffer at times was just holding a poly board.
But it’s great because what he could do with some poly boards and an ND filter, I mean the richness of the images, it’s wild. Then we got into the grades and worked with Rob Pizzey who’s also just so good on color. We were able to tweak things, but we were really just tweaking what Ben had already cemented. And for the fire sequences, we had a real fire, but you’re bringing in a bit of something just to give a little bit extra in the eyes. Then there was the Aurora Borealis sequence.
DC: That Aurora Borealis sequence, and using natural light to generate scares is so cool.
AC: It’s funny because, in every movie where there’s a northern light sequence, it’s always the characters looking up and thinking, “I’ve been touched by God” or something. Can you imagine living 45,000 years ago and seeing that shit? I would just be like, “Oh, the world is going to end.” The other thing is you don’t want the film to be just all one color. So it was also, how do we get color in? Because you can’t rely on car headlights, you can’t rely on mobile phone torches. How do you light this fucking thing at night? So just to find new ways to do it, to inject new color, the Aurora Borealis felt good, but doing it in a much more sickening way. So it felt like a kind of hallucination nightmare thing.
DC: That’s incredible. What was the research process like for the entire film?
AC: The starting point for me was looking back at how early modern humans had been depicted in cinema before. So, Raquel Welch of a fur bikini, we know what that looks like. At that time they used a lot of quite cutting-edge thoughts and research. But the depictions are quite, dare I say, primal. There’s a lot of ooga-booga-type stuff. I just felt from the get-go, whether you’re going to watch a Shakespeare play or you’re watching a Paleolithic horror film or whatever, what you don’t want the audience to do is to sit back and go, “Oh look, they’re so like us.” What you want is for the audience to go, “Oh God, I’m so like them.”
So the whole challenge was how do we make these people relatable? How do we close that gap? So what I said to my production designer was, go and do the research and speak to our Paleolithic advisor.
But we’re not making the National Geographic version of the Stone Age. This is still a movie. And ultimately what I want is if you took the 45,000 BC title off the start of the movie, could this be the future? Because it feeds into that idea of the cyclical idea of fear, survival, and destruction, right? So what I said to Niamh Morrison, our hair and makeup department head, was shaggy beards and all that shit is just not practical. Could you imagine these guys running marathons every couple of days to find food? Can you imagine having all those ill-fitting clothes that snag on branches and you’re constantly having to repair shit? It just felt like maybe there’s a different way to approach these people and make it feel a bit fresher. That was a guiding principle.
The other thing was Rob the paleontologist, he’s very much of the new school. There’s an old school that goes, if we didn’t dig it up, we can’t prove it happened. But he’s from the school of “Well, actually, these people were really sophisticated”. They were culturally sound. They had a lot of technology that even we don’t understand yet. We don’t know how they were able to straighten ivory to make spears. We don’t know how they did it, but they did it. So these people were smart and they spoke to each other and they had stories and culture and artwork. So he very much encouraged us to say, just go for it. Do your thing. Blue sky thinking.
That just freed us up. We didn’t have to worry about too much. We would check in and he would say, “Oh, you should check this dig site”, or “We found this in Russia”, or yada yada. So he was really on point with that stuff, but at no point was he overbearing. He was really supportive and it was great. Then it was this nice symbiosis between the made-up stuff and this stuff that we were taking from actual factual digs and research.
DC: So in just casually creating a whole language for a movie, how did you write the language and get all this together? I’m so curious about how you taught the actors the language.
AC: So I originally thought we’d do this in English. When you do the elevator pitch for a Stone Age horror, the first question everybody asks is do they speak? Then it’s, OK, what are they speaking? And I always say, “Well, I think we’ll probably just do it in English” because it’s my debut. I was worried about alienating the audience. I don’t want to kibosh my career with the first movie.
But then Oliver, Ruth, and I would workshop scenes and we’d act them out and it sounded so corny, so cheesy. We had to just embrace the language thing and go for it. So Oliver knew a guy from his days at university, Daniel Anderson, a very smart academic, not a linguist by any stretch, but he’s an academic who has a lot of experience translating papers from various Indo-European languages into English. So he’s an incredibly clever man.
Oliver set him the challenge of saying, do you think you could do something for us? Can we find some sort of mother tongue that could have potentially spawned all these languages? So he disappeared with the script for about three or four weeks. There’s not a lot of dialogue so it wasn’t like he was having to translate fucking, I dunno, crazy academic papers or an Aaron Sorkin script or whatever.
He came back and he had it down and I started reading it, and there were asterisks that showed where a glottal stop was supposed to happen. It was a bit too much of a deep cut, do you know what I mean? It needed to be simplified a little. But I read it and I went, “This is going to work.”
So once we smoothed it off a little and refined it, when we did the casting process, it was self-tapes because it was COVID. The first self-tapes were in English, and then the people we liked were given some Tola, which is the name of the language, which just stands for The Origin Language. It’s nothing fancy.
DC: It does sound really cool, though.
AC: Yeah, apparently in Sanskrit, Tola is a measurement of gold. So actors were given the Tola script and then the people we liked, we got them in person. And then again, the people we liked there, we gave them the part. Daniel spent time with each of them on Zoom just to give them the laws of Tola. Then we just got to work. We did the first read-through about two days before we started shooting.
Everybody is really committed, like Arno [Luening], who’s from Berlin. He has this monologue at the start where he tells the story. He was memorizing that like crazy, just walking around. Pacing and just praying almost because he’s kicking off the movie. It’s all on him.
I think from my point of view, it was really freeing because I wasn’t getting bogged down in the minutia of the English language. You’re just watching the monitor and the thrust of the scene. You know what it’s about, but you’re watching the actor and you’re looking in their eyes and saying, “Do I fucking believe it? Do I believe the intent?” And I think that just freed the actors up because once they were all bouncing off each other. Because we shot in chronological order, it meant that by the end of the shoot, they were improving it totally.
DC: I do want to ask, are you a big horror fan? Do you want to make horror movies?
AC: I’m not a horror super nerd. And I mean, I love horror, I love every part of horror. But I don’t think I could make—and this isn’t because I think I’m above it, it’s just a sensibility thing—a film like The Toxic Avenger. It’s not technically a horror movie, but I don’t think I could make something like that. I have limitations as a filmmaker. And again, I’m a huge fan of James Wan. I know the difference between a James Wan jump scare and anybody else. The guy’s a fucking auteur. Oh,
But I can’t do that either. We’re all in our different lanes and horror is this really broad church. But I think my horror, because I’ve been sent a few things since Out of Darkness, but nothing’s really given me that same chill in my bones that I felt with Out of Darkness.
The horror stuff that I grew up with, like Alien and Aliens, was such a huge jumping-off point for Out of Darkness just in terms of the structure of the movie. In the last five or ten years, you see how, and again, it’s because of the time period we live in, the world’s a scary place. There are monsters everywhere. And I just feel that now horror is just in this great sweet spot where you’ve got some stuff that’s quite high-minded, but you’ve still got the horror that is just horror for horror’s sake. And that’s great. Again, I don’t think, I always get really annoyed when people get snooty at that stuff. Horror is a broad chart.
DC: It is. Horror is such a ridiculously humongous label. And I feel like people want to say things like, I don’t like horror. But horror is so many things, it’s almost too broad sometimes, even for someone who works in horror.
AC: For me, it was the horror of what humans can do to each other because [Out of Darkness] is a monster movie up until a point. Then the horror becomes about what humans do to each other. So I think going forward, I think there’ll always be horrific elements within my movies because that’s just the movies I love, movies that pin you to your seat and don’t let you go for 100 minutes.
Categorized:Interviews
