Exclusive Q&A with P.O.V. Filmmaker Dennis Bartok; New Stills
Dread Central caught up with Trapped Ashes filmmaker Dennis Bartok recently to chat regarding his latest project, the currently in post-production horror feature P.O.V.; and in addition to shining some light on the project, he delivered a trio of exclusive stills. Read on!
Directed by Bartok from a script he co-wrote with Tom Abrams, P.O.V. is being produced by Brendan McCarthy and John McDonnell. It stars Shauna Macdonald (The Descent films), Ross Noble, Leah McNamara, Richard Foster-King, Steve Wall, Charlotte Bradley, and Robert O’Mahoney with makeup FX provided by Stephanie Smith and Cassi Brookes. James Mather served as the flick’s cinematographer.
Filmed in Dublin, Ireland, on the Red Dragon camera during October and November of 2015, P.O.V. tells the story of Dana Milgrom (Macdonald), a track coach who survives a near-death car accident, only to find herself almost completely paralyzed and trapped inside her own body, forced to communicate via an artificial voice program. While recovering, she becomes convinced that some evil presence exists inside her hospital room and is intent on killing her. No one believes her – not even her own husband and daughter, who think she’s experienced a mental breakdown.
Bartok, a respected and well-renowned film historian (who, in addition to having programmed in the past Los Angeles’ venerated American Cinematheque, has co-penned the book A Thousand Cuts: The Bizarre Underground World of Collectors and Dealers Who Saved the Movies, due out this September via the University of Mississippi Press), opened up to us regarding his inspirations for P.O.V.
Dread Central: You’ve long wanted to shoot in Ireland. What was the draw, and what was the inspiration for the script?
Bartok: I love Ireland, and I’d talked for a while with Brendan McCarthy and John McDonnell at Fantastic Films about doing a film there. But I didn’t think it would be P.O.V. because honestly, it’s not an Irish horror film thematically. It could have been shot anywhere. It’s really about the universal experience of being in a hospital and how terrifying and powerless that is if you’re a patient. My writing partner, Tom Abrams, and I wanted to do a story that was very intense and claustrophobic, was female-driven, and I could direct on a very tight budget. So that meant a limited number of locations, which turned out to work well for a story about a woman who’s paralyzed for most of the film. The lead character, Dana, was loosely inspired by a dear friend of mine, Gretchen Corrales, who was a track coach and was tragically murdered in 2012 by her estranged husband. She was still alive when I wrote the first drafts in 2011 so she knew I was doing a horror film about an athlete who’s paralyzed.
Dread Central: In what ways do you feel your background shaped the script?
Bartok: Everything in the script grew out of the concept: A woman is paralyzed in a hit-and-run car accident. While she’s hooked to a ventilator recovering, she starts to see a ghost. No one believes her. Once you set up those limitations — that she can’t walk; she can’t talk without the aid of a computer — everything follows from there. It’s basically a horror version of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Dread Central: Sub-thematically, as a writer and director, what did you hope to explore?
Bartok: P.O.V. is very much about the hospital as a place of suffering and death. Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom was a constant reference for me on the film, along with recent Blumhouse films like Sinister and Insidious, which are about families under enormous pressure. I come from a medical family myself – my father was a doctor, my mother a nurse – so I grew up around hospitals. I’ve always found them to be deeply disturbing places: the clinical atmosphere, the tile floors, and gauzy screens and curtains.
Dread Central: Current status?
Bartok: Post is going great on the film. It’s much easier than directing, which is basically the hardest job I’ve ever done. Every day of directing is like climbing the steepest, most impossible mountain you’ve ever climbed, standing up at the top – and realizing there’s a mountain twice as high looming over you.
Stay tuned for more.
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