‘Daddy’s Head’ Director Benjamin Barfoot On The Horrors Of Divorce
Benjamin Barfoot’s provocatively titled Daddy’s Head turned, well, heads when it was first announced just based on that title alone. But when you watch the film, you’re brought into a hellish world of grief haunted by a harrowing creature that haunts the shadows and air vents. It’s surreal, it’s disturbing, and it’s a perfect Halloween watch for the freaks out there.
In Daddy’s Head:
In the wake of his father’s untimely death, a young boy is left in the eerie solitude of a sprawling country estate with his newly widowed stepmother. Struggling to navigate the overwhelming task of parenthood, his stepmother grows distant, leaving their fragile bond at risk of collapse. Amidst the growing tension, the boy begins to hear unsettling sounds echoing through the corridors, and is soon haunted by the presence of a grotesque creature bearing a disturbingly familiar resemblance to his late father. As the boy’s warnings are dismissed as the imagination of a grieving child, the sinister entity tightens its grip on their crumbling lives.
We spoke with Barfoot at Fantastic Fest 2024 about Rubber Johnny, committing to the provocative title, and the power of therapy.
Dread Central: Daddy’s Head. What an incredible title. Was that always the title in your head?
Benjamin Barfoot: It was, yeah. I dunno whether it says a lot about women to be honest with you, because when I first came up with [the title], I was like, “Yeah, I’ve got, it’s called Daddy’s Head because it’s about daddy’s head.”
DC: It’s pretty literal.
BB: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also I was like, “Oh, it sounds kind of punk, a little bit cool.” And then it wasn’t until I was getting more into the runway of doing it, even Julia Brown, when I first cast her, she was like, “So… the title.” I’m like, “What?” She’s like, “Daddy’s head?”[raises eyebrows] All women under 40 basically have a filthy mind. That’s what I’ve decided. [Laughs]
So we were going to change it briefly. There was a period where there were all sorts of ideas because it became evident that that was what was happening. I just remember being at a music festival and going up to these girls I knew, and they were probably in their early 30s. And I was like, “What do you think when I say Daddy’s Head?” They looked at me and [said suggestively], “Daddy’s Head?” I was like, “Oh shit, you’re all doing it. You’re all doing it. You’re all filth. The lot of you.”
We talked about it for a bit, and then I threw around a load of ideas, but it was all just bullshit. In the end, I was just like, “Do you know what? It is just memorable and I don’t give a shit.” And I quite like having a title that’s completely opposing what the film is.
DC: That’s what I’m saying though. It’s just so weird in the best way possible.
BB: The poster for me, because I helped put it together, when you look at it in the end, I’d like to think you go, “What? Is this a fetish porn movie? What’s going on?”
DC: Was it cool to watch it play in a theater? Have you seen it in a theater like that before?
BB: I’ve seen it in a cinema, but not at that scale. That was a lot bigger. But it’s really weird for me because all you can see is all the compromises you made. I’m so close. I scored it, I edited it.
DC: Oh, you scored it? So this is almost you on-screen.
BB: My head’s just inside it.
DC: You are daddy’s head.
BB: So when people are watching it, I’m a bit going, “Is anyone buying this?” That’s how it is for me because I just know every note, every sound that comes on, it’s a completely different experience for me. So I’m obviously overjoyed that people are liking it.
DC: Tell me more about the casting. I love our stepmom and our stepson and how they work together and how there’s this tentative chemistry between the two of them. And it’s almost like a fucked up version of the Love Actually segment with Liam Neeson., where it’s the step and the son together. We only see a stepparent and a kid together. So I wanted to hear about casting them and having them, the chemistry they develop.
BB: On a simple level, I mean, it really was actually just a casting call-out. But Sally McCleary, who was our casting director, is actually a child specialist. That’s what she was known for anyway, finding child actors. She’d done a lot of kids stuff.
So to find Isaac, it was pretty obvious, really. I mean, the first casting we did with Rupert [Turnbull], he walked into the room, he was probably eight and he was a tiny little thing. I was with Danny Morgan, who I did Double Date with. And he was acting off him for a favor. I think he just walked in and he said, “I should be stood there, Danny should be there.” And he told me what was happening and he’s like eight or nine. That really made me go, wow. Then we performed together with Danny and then we left and Danny was like, “Oh my God, that kid’s so smart. That’s wild.” Yeah, he’s brilliant. We had a lovely, I think very sweet relationship.
DC: At the Q&A, you said you gave him Leonardo DiCpario’s monologue Romeo + Juliet to prepare, right?
BB: Yeah, “I defy the stars.” It’s amazing. And I did another thing that I did where I said to him, I was actually going to try and find an email. I wrote this email to him. I remember sitting with him and I said, “You are going to sit in a room and you’re going to have all these adult actors around you, but I want you to know that I’m your boxing coach, and you are my little boxer, and I want you to sit there in the room. And when you look up at them, you look at them, you’re just going to fuck them up.”
Then I ended up talking to the actors later and they had been shooting for 10 days, and I could hear them talking, going like, “God, he’s amazing. When he looks at you like, Jesus Christ, it works.” It’s absolutely full credit to him. I think anyone, any director will ever say, you cast well, and that’s it, right? For me, if they’re the right actor, then you just kind of point them in the direction and that’s it.
DC: It sounds like it was just such a cool collaboration with him, especially
BB: 100%. And actually, with him and Julia—I didn’t purposely do this, they had to do it a bit anyway—but I kept them apart. I didn’t really want them hanging out too much because I just wanted them to not build much of a relationship with one another.
Then Julia was, again, a casting thing.
DC: She’s incredible.
BB: It’s her first film. And I had a real journey in trying to cast for Daddy’s Head, because if you’re trying to start a movie, the first thing to do is go for stars. So I basically proceeded to speed date with almost every British actress in Britain. For two years. And it was just basically, for two years, just going around to every British female actor and them just going, “No.” By the end, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
I was so broken over this. It really was the worst bit of a movie. It was demoralizing and just, I mean, everyone does it, but I hate it. And then they finally went, “OK, look, we’re going to go out now and we’re just going to put our proper casting thing.” I’d been through two years of hell and Julia’s tape play, and I just instantly looked at her and thought, “Oh, thank God, thank God.”
She had it all in her eyes. Her boyfriend is talking to her, he’s like a pilot, and he’s talking to her like a zombie. We’re just feeding her the lines and she’s acting off nothing. And I was like, “Oh my God, this girl’s totally got something amazing.” Then I go in and do a casting with her. She’s just bawling her eyes out, doing all of these amazing performances. She’s just super smart, super clever.
DC: I wanted to hear about how you cast Daddy because his face is so important.
BB: When you were casting, it was like, you need to have a distinct face. And again, it was
Charles’s tape. It’s just that thing. You just go through a load of tapes and you just see it. So I wanted to know what they were like as a human, as a normal person. I said, “In your casting tape, can you tell me a story, a funny anecdote about your family life?” Because I knew I was going to do a load of home videos where he was just being natural. So I was like, “Give me a story first, and then be Daddy at the end.”
He basically told this whole story around his wife and him coming over to America with the family and coming back again. Anyway, funny story, blah, blah, blah. Then he suddenly turned around in the dark and was just amazing. And his voice was incredible. When I gave him the part I was like, “You were the best by far.”
Then he told me we were on set, “Oh, by the way, I affected my voice in the tape.” He got it past me because the way he only dialed it 10%, 20%, just enough. And I was like, “Well, I love that, that you’re just smart enough to dial it down.”
DC: Why did you want to write this specifically about a stepmother and a son or a boy who doesn’t have parents anymore, and they’re kind of clinging to each other, very tenuously? Why that was important for you for the story?
BB: Initially, I thought I was just writing a cool film, inspired by Alien and Under The Skin and a bit of The Exorcist and Chris Cunningham.
DC: Chris Cunningham! Rubber Johnny was a big influence on me as a teenager.
BB: The guy who built the suit [in Daddy’s Head] did Rubber Johnny!
DC: That’s so cool!
BB: So imagine I’m in that world thinking I’m just doing something that’s visceral and stylish. Then all of a sudden I went through this journey and just before I went into production, I decided I just wanted to do a bit of therapy around the divorce with my parents. And I’ve gone back home and visited my family home, which is this big house, not surrounded by forest and everything, but it’s in the country in Devon. And I just went and saw the house and I just burst into tears. I was walking around all these old areas and I just burst into tears. And I was a bit like, “Whoa, what’s wrong with me?”
So I go to the therapist and then I chat to her all about it, and she diagnoses me with childhood trauma and fragmentation. She was going, “Look, you’re really upset about this, but I don’t think you’ve really identified it. You’ve pushed it to the back. And then when I bring it up, you are quite emotional, especially when you want to talk about your father” and all this sort of stuff. So we go through it all. I think we did only five to 10 sessions and it was very therapeutic. So I just never really processed it all. I never really talked about it.
Then she just asked me, “What’s your film about?” And I said, “Oh, it’s this film, Daddy’s Head.” And I described it all, and she’s like, “Ben, you’ve been writing about all of this [trauma].”
DC: Isn’t that wild when that happens?
BB: It’s been such an amazing experience. It taught me a lot about how you can’t escape yourself as a writer, so you can actually just let your head go. I was always worried about shoehorning myself into something too much or shoehorning my emotions because it just would feel like I was sticking it in. It’s like, you don’t need to just write about it. Find something you want to do, and you’ll find yourself in it and you will project yourself into that work. Because I’m quite like that anyway, quite an open, dreamy-headed person, it just seemed to all sort of come naturally.
I have a great relationship with my parents. I adore them. I’m very close to them. But my dad, I went from being around him all the time to being with him every fortnight. And then this stepmother came along. I won’t go into it fully because it’s all my family, and I’m very protective of them. But it was like I just can see myself in it and, if I think about myself at Isaac’s age or when I think about that period, I talk to my sister about, it’s like the world kind of exploded. I just had this home and then bang, everything just disappears.
I just look at Daddy’s Head and I go, that’s what I’m writing about. It’s the destruction of family, and then it comes together at the end. I really had to tell myself at some points when I was doing this, “Remember, you’re doing a horror, remember you’re doing a horror.” I just was getting so into the characters and the emotion of it all that I was like, “Remember, people want to be scared.”
DC: Was it cathartic at all for you?
BB: Yeah, massively. But more so in the sense that it was a coming together of these conflicts of me wanting to do style and realism. It’s like how I’m molding these two together. This was sort of an amalgamation of it all where I was like, “OK, I get it. Now I know what I’m trying to do here. I know what I want to do. I know what I believe in.” And then to land in Austin and then people coming up to you going, Ben Barfoot from Daddy’s Head is here! I’m like, “Oh shit. It’s worked. It’s worked!”
Daddy’s Head is out now on Shudder and AMC+.
Categorized:Interviews
