‘Lola’ Director Andrew Legge On Crafting Time Machines And Found Footage
Period piece found footage horror is few and far between, with examples like The Devil’s Doorway appearing occasionally to illustrate the creativity possible with the format. Now, director Andrew Legge is tackling such a challenge with his feature film debut Lola, a pseudo-documentary about two sisters who have a machine that can look into the future.
Read the full synopsis:
The year is 1941, and brilliant UK sisters Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Martha (Stefanie Martini) have created a device that intercepts broadcasts from the future. Besides revealing the coming glories of rock & roll, the invention—which they call ‘Lola’—also allows them to alter the course of World War II. But will their unmaking of history provoke a lifetime of shocking consequences?
Dread Central spoke with Legge about filming found footage on 16mm, building a time machine, and the magic of Cloverfield.
Dread Central: I’m a huge found footage freak, and I love what you do with the idea of found footage with Lola. I mean, we never get found footage black and white looking like it’s shot on film. So I wanted to hear more about why this format called to you for your first feature.
Andrew Legge: Well, actually we did shoot it on film. We shot it on a Bolex. Do you know the Bolex camera?
DC: I do not.
AL: It’s like a really old-fashioned 16 mm camera that you wind up. It’s got a clockwork motor. We used that for a lot of Martha’s footage and then we used a reflex 16 mm camera as well, like a more modern 16 mil camera, but with all lenses. For the newsreel stuff, we used a 35 mm camera, a thing called the Newman-Sinclair for some of the stuff, which is a really, really old newsreel camera, but it’s all film. Everything was film.
DC: That’s crazy. I mean, what was that experience like shooting this entire feature on film?
AL: Well, I’ve always used film. My short films were all shot on film, so I’ve never really shot on digital. I don’t really like shooting on digital.
DC: Oh, cool.
AL: Yeah. I like the surprise you get with film because you shoot it and you don’t really know what it’s going to look like. Then it comes back from the lab and there’s always this kind of magic feeling when you get your rushes back.
DC: This found footage, so you don’t do a lot of takes anyway because you want it to feel naturalistic. So how do you handle takes then also with the film? Did you do a lot of takes? Were you more of just like, “Go and we’ll see what happens”? What was kind of the strategy with that?
AL: No, we would’ve done probably an average of six takes, I’d say, for each scene. I mean, the problem we had was that you have with found footage is coverage, we couldn’t do it. And that’s a pain in the ass. You can’t do your multiple angles. So that was tricky. I mean, I wouldn’t do found footage again.
DC: Oh, really?
AL: Well, for Lola, I felt like you. I liked the idea of doing period found footage. We haven’t really seen them, and I liked the idea of shooting on film and all that, but for me, the problem with the found footage was motivating the camera. I tried to motivate the camera constantly. And I think this with Lola, we push it a little bit. We have a little bit of a get-of-jail card in that we’ve got the newsreel footage as well that Martha’s able to cut into her film, and that was quite a good thing for us to be able to do. But it is still really hard. There are still scenes that I’d like to have written that I couldn’t write because of the camera, but that’s the classic problem.
DC: Well, I was curious about the way you got around having it always with Martha and Thomasina and having it with the newsreel footage. What was the balance between having to shoot things to look like it’s in the past versus using archival footage in the film?
AL: So we did both, but how did that work? So we kind of retro-engineered stuff. I would go looking in the archive for material for a scene that I was doing. So for example, when the sisters get arrested and they get taken to court, I needed to get footage of a mob, an angry mob outside of prison. I couldn’t find any angry mobs outside of prison. But I found the protesters with the balloon. So I wrote the scene around the balloon. That footage comes from London, but we shot the film in Dublin. We found a building in Dublin, which had a kind of archway and entrance very similar to [what’s in the archival footage]. And so we were able to make a shot list around the shots of the found footage of the archival footage, if that makes sense.
DC: Wait, that sounds so complex in terms of you have the script, then you have to rewrite the script, but make sure you have the archival footage before you shoot the scene. That sounds like a very complex puzzle of what you need and when to make sure you have everything to complete the film.
AL: A little bit. But in a way it kind of makes it easier because once you found the archival footage of the balloon, for example, you were dictated by the footage of how you shot it. You’d have to be shot on similar lenses, and it all had to be street gravel. You wouldn’t have people on the street with the cameras, and it had to be a rainy day because it’s rainy in the footage. The road is wet. So we had to do a wet down. The lighting was dictated. It was kind of flat lighting, an overcast state. So that was kind of cool.
And then we had the kind of wide shots in the archival. So then we had to go, okay, we’ve got our three kinds of establishing wide shots in the archival. Now we have to go slightly tighter with the balloon footage, and we had the balloon moon in the same kind of direction. So that kind of made it much easier. Then in the day, it was just like, “OK, this is what we have to do. Boom, boom, boom, boom.” That’s cool. It was a bit like that. So we made our own balloon, and then the only VFX was just getting the Nazi Whores written onto it. That was written on our own prop balloon, but [VFX was used] getting that written onto the balloon in the archival footage.
DC: That’s so neat. So why found footage though? Why did you want to do a found footage movie, this feature?
AL: Well, I do have a soft spot for found footage films. I like them. And also with Lola, there wasn’t any other way of telling the story because the whole movie is meant to be footage assembled by Martha. So in a way, the film is meant to be an artifact that’s found on Lola that they’ve picked up in the past. So how can you tell that story without doing it just found footage? It’s impossible. It was the only way we could do it to do it. It wouldn’t have worked in any other form. Would you agree with that?
DC: I would agree with that. I think you get what I love about found footage and how it works for this film. You get that sense of intimacy between the sisters. You can get that in a narrative film, but I think found footage really gives you that illusion of being somewhere for a private conversation and a candid conversation. And I love that. That adds even more layers to the stakes of this movie, which I think have a lot of different stakes, but it gives us more insight into who these sisters are. I love how you wrote them and how they interact with each other in the world. So that actually leads to wanting to know about how you crafted Martha and Thomason and bringing these characters to life in Lola.
AL: Gosh, I guess organically in a way. I wrote Thomasina first and then I liked the idea of this mad scientist having a sister. So then Martha got written. There was kind of a script, I guess, and there was a lot of discussion with the actresses as well about it. And I liked the idea of them being feral. I liked the idea of these two women who were bored up in this house by themselves who were outside the norms and who got all their cultural references from what they saw in Lola. I liked that idea. And I liked them as being not women that you see normally in period films. So-called well-behaved.
DC: Cool. Well, and then Lola herself, how did you figure out what Lola was going to look like? Did you build an actual Lola machine?
AL: Yeah, I wanted Lola to look real. I wanted it to feel real as well, like it came from the 1940s. So all our references for Lola were really like the 1930s and 1940s televisions. It was like those old radio systems. We actually found a very similar kind of tower structure, which had your circuit boards. I wanted the materials to feel like stuff that the women would’ve had access to. So I liked the idea of them going up to London and buying loads of valve radios and then butchering them and butchering a TV and stuff. So that was very much the inspiration. Then it was using organic materials like wood, metal, glass, the materials that they would, again, have had access to.
DC: So you were like a mad scientist almost too, with your team constructing all this stuff. Did you have to dismantle Lola afterward?
AL: Yeah. I mean, we have all the bits. There’s footage, there’s actually, there’s a shot there you can see of Stefanie [Martini, who played Martha] with the Bolex and Emma [Appleton, who plays Thomasina]. She filmed that, and really, she shot a lot of the material herself.
DC: I was going to ask about that. I know we see Stepfanie in the mirror a couple of times holding the camera, but did she actually shoot a lot of her film?
AL: Totally, yeah. I would say she probably shot a third of the film.
DC: No way. So what was that experience? Was it a lot of letting her kind of giving her a lot of pointers about how to frame things? Or was it more like letting her do her own thing?
AL: It was kind letting her do it, she was very good. Okay. So it was just kind of giving her the camera and going “Off you going there”, which we like.
DC: That’s so cool. I love that you were just like, “All right, we’ll see what happens.” And then again, because you didn’t have a monitor, you’re just going to see what she gets on film.
AL: No monitor. Which is wonderful. I mean, I hate monitors.
DC: That’s so freeing to not have to overanalyze.
AL: I totally agree. Everyone is just looking at the monitor then. I mean, it’s, I think it’s brilliant if you’re doing a big kind of scene with stunts and stuff. But if it’s just a little scene, it’s great. It’s just not up on the monitor. I think there was a monitor on one of the 16 mm cameras. I think we actually did for the stunt scenes and stuff, just because we had to make sure that we got the stuff.
DC: There are all these moments where Martha and Thomasina are bringing in cultural touchstones to the past, and I wanted to know, do you have a favorite moment that you brought into their time period?
AL: It must be David Bowie, isn’t it?
DC: That was my favorite.
AL: I think it has to be David Bowie. Yeah, it was funny because in an early draft of the script, I didn’t have David Bowie in it. The machine was more just like a weapon almost. So it was actually when we got all way into it that it really felt like something more fun as a script.
DC: Oh, cool. How did you fall on Bowie? Did you write him in or was it just what you could get access to in terms of footage?
AL: No, we wrote him in. I was just thinking it’d be hilarious if they put tuned into Bowie and she’s a Bowie fan in the 1940s. So I just like that idea. It was always David Bowie before we had the right to anything. So that was just lucky that we then got the rights to the music
DC: Do you have a favorite found footage movie and one that really inspired you to work in the subgenre?
AL: Gosh, what’s my favorite found footage movie? I love Cloverfield. And I love the way they’ve got the footage underneath the footage because I think that’s smart. Would that be one of my favorites?
DC: We don’t do creature features like that in found footage. I know it’s hard, but I love a big monster in found footage.
AL: But in your eyes, is Lola a found footage film? I’m not sure if it is because it’s being constructed. It’s not unedited.
DC: Okay. That’s a really interesting thing because I think when you think of traditional found footage, you can think about it like that. But I also think that pseudo-documentary like Lake Mungo. Have you seen Lake Mungo?
AL: Oh, I love it.
DC: I love Lake Mungo. I call them pseudo documentaries because yes, they are constructed, but they’re still telling a story that they’re claiming purporting to be true. That’s using footage that was found. So I think found footage is such a bigger umbrella, and I would consider this part of that because again, it is discovered footage. Even though it’s edited together, it’s still being discovered and trying to paint an idea of something that actually happened and purporting truth. So I would consider it found footage personally.
AL: Yeah, yeah, I get you. Lake Mungo, I found it actually really creepy, quite scary.
DC: Oh, it’s one of my all-time favorite horror movies. I don’t think it’s traditionally scary, but I think it’s dreadful.
Lola is available for pre-order on Blu-ray from Severine Films now.
Categorized:Interviews
