By DEIRDRE CRIMMINS
Like many monster kids, director Kourtney Roy has a thing for cryptids. From Mothman to Yeti, there is something enticing about the possibility of unconfirmed species wandering around this crazy planet, just like us humans. Her love for these mythical beings shows clearly in her debut feature film, KRYPTIC. Premiered at South by Southwest and playing this week at the Fantasia International Film Festival, we were able to sit down with Roy to discuss everything from casting to gender, with a healthy side of cryptid talk.
How did the project first come to you?
It was 2019. Paul [Bromley], the writer, he’s a very good friend of mine. I was visiting him in London, and we were just drinking a lot of wine. At two in the morning, he’s like, “You know, I should write a script for you.” I’m a photographer by trade and I work a lot in the art fields. I have my own work, galleries. I have my own style. He was like, “We should write a script for you, a feature film. I’ll write it for you. We’ll work on it together. And it’ll be based on your style and your themes and stuff like this.” I was kind of naive. I was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” It was quite organic in a way – there wasn’t any sort of specific structure to it. A couple weeks later we’d sit down and go through things. “What would you like to see in a film? What do I wanna see in a film?” Just very simple. I had no idea about creating a feature film. He had this article he had read a while ago that he’d held onto about a woman who had gone on a trip to Iceland. And this woman, at some point, changed her clothes or something, went to the bathroom and put on a different jacket. When she got back, they said there was a woman missing and nobody recognized that it was her. She basically embarked on like six hours of searching for a woman who was missing on the tour guide, but it was actually herself! So that, for him, was a big starting point. He really liked that, which I understand a hundred percent. He’s a writer. He wants a female-driven lead, and I want monsters and supernatural elements. I want mucus and awkward sex. We mashed our ideas together and he took that and started writing the first act. Then he would send it to me and we’d go over it and talk about it. We’d take notes. We’d go back and keep writing. It was very easy going, not stressful. We just thought we’ll see what happens when it’s done. I didn’t have a game plan.
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It’s almost like a thought exercise.
Yeah. Obviously, he knows how to write. It’s really nice. So that’s basically where it came from. It was just two friends kind of getting drunk and wanting to make a movie together. [Laughs]
If you talk to people at Fantasia, that’s likely very common.
Yeah. Not very original. [Laughs]
When you said you want something supernatural, were you thinking cryptozoology? There are so many ways you could go with that.
I do like cryptids. I’m not an expert in any of that, but I definitely have a bit of a fascination. I would say the time bending element of the film, which for me is something perhaps not necessarily supernatural, but has a sort of a metaphysical element. Or the super spectrum and stuff like that are elements of the supernatural or of otherworldly things that I do find interesting and I kind of dabble in. That is, in terms of reading about and fascinated with in an amateur way.
How did the casting go for the lead actress?
We didn’t cast our film until about three weeks before rolling into production, which Amber [Ripley] told me was quite normal. She actually has had casting much tighter before. That’s not ideal, but that can happen. But we made it because we had to. We had been looking for quite a while. Many months in and we had not been successful in our search. Then we regrouped with our UK producer, and the casting director set up a bunch of reels of self-tapes from a group of very talented actors. We saw Chloe [Pirrie] and she jumped out of the water immediately. My first thought was that she must have gone to the wrong casting, because she’s so good! We must have got her by mistake. Let’s sign her on before she realizes what happened [Laughs].
It was very evident that she doesn’t have a lot of dialogue. Barb is kind of a blank slate. There’s a lot of mystery. And everything’s from her point of view, so everything has to be really expressive. She has to be able to give a lot of character and she has to flesh it out using her body and her face in her eyes. And her eyes are incredible. It’s not always about looks, but it’s the fact that she’s very beautiful, but at the same time, I find her to be timeless.
She looks like she can be in a Renaissance painting. She looks like she can be very working class, but beautiful. At the same time, she can also be very, very elegant. She looks like she can be so many different things, which I really enjoyed. Is she a wallflower? Does she make friends? Is she awkward with people? And she carries the humor in it. Like when she discovers, “I’m a vet.” I was laughing hysterically, clearly it was a joke in there, but just her being able to sway between those moods. And there were times where, I swear to God, it looked like her clothes were wearing her. She just wasn’t comfortable in certain clothes, which is difficult to convey without being obvious.
Barb’s costumes communicate so much about her character.
In my photographic work, there are a lot of costumes as well. A lot of women wear this slightly hokey, slightly cheesy girly stuff where you don’t really know … is it nineties? Is it eighties? Is it seventies? And this was really an extension of that, this cheap femininity. Not that she’s cheap, but these are clothes that don’t cost a lot. But that was the idea. It’s almost like she’s trying on these outfits and they’re really girly and they’re badly fitting. She’s not just not feeling quite herself. I really like these overly girly costumes. They’re slightly ridiculous, but at the same time they speak so much.
KRYPTIC Director Kourtney Roy
How did you approach a female-centric film that was written by a man?
I think Paul is interested in human stories. He’s been a writer for a long time. This is the first film he’s produced. He’s a gay man, but he doesn’t necessarily write work about being gay. It’s not a focal point or an angle that he goes in with. He’s interested in what human beings are doing and relationships, and how people are interacting with the world. I think you take it from that point of view, like just from a human perspective. You can probably write from a female perspective or a male perspective. I don’t think you have to be that gender, though there are obviously certain things that are culturally, racially, economically, whatever … where you do need that experience to write about it. But we’re writing about a generic suburban woman. He comes from a working-class background. Me too. It wasn’t anything that we ever thought about. I was never, “You wouldn’t understand how this is” or anything. There was never anything like that. I never thought, “You’re not getting it ’cause you’re not a woman.” It’s more like, “Oh, you’re not Canadian, so I better rewrite that dialogue because nobody says it’s gonna line up in the queue.” That would be where there was a cultural gap that we had to get through.
Have you had a chance to watch the film with the audience yet?
Yeah.
How’d it go?
This is my fourth festival, so I’ve seen it a few times. I’ve preferred it with an audience because watching it by myself is really boring. [Laughs]
Some directors I’ve talked with never like to watch it with an audience.
Oh, I really enjoy it. I enjoy this more because I hear the reaction so I can put myself in their fresh eyes to see it new. It makes it fresher for me. And they found things funny – things that I didn’t realize were funny. Paul and I do have a very specific sense of humor and we’re glad that it comes across. But we weren’t trying to make a funny film; we wanted to make a dark film with funniness in it. We don’t wanna take ourselves too seriously
What did Chloe bring to the role to shape it?
I wasn’t there molding her. Obviously, I had things to say or push it in a slightly different direction, but she definitely had all of this worked out before she came on set. The whole world, the choices, all this stuff. She did her homework.
Did you build the character together?
No. I saw it already when I saw her self-tape. I’m not an expert. This is my first feature film. If I wanted her to shift or to modify something or approach it differently, I knew I had about three words to say before she’d tell me to get away [Laughs], but in a nice way. She’s very lovely. And she actually liked a lot of direction, which is terrible directing. Do you want me to cry harder? Do you want me to run faster? Do you want me happier? And I was like, okay, just do that: cry harder, run faster.
So, you developed a shorthand?
Yeah. She’s like, “I want that.” Okay. I learned that all actors are different.
For a first feature film there was a lot to cast.
There were a lot of these situations: hanging out, going to working class Northern Ontario, going to a trailer park party. They’re obviously caricatures in a way, but I hope they’re not over the top or like buffoons, either. They are these fun characters. We wanted to be quirky. We wanted to be interesting, surreal, completely out there, but at the same time without going into caricature. I didn’t realize it was such a big cast.
So often first films are two characters in a single location.
That’s my next film, for sure. No continuity, no clocks, no watches. Because we hadn’t ever made a film before, so in our mind a road movie? That’ll be easy. Just drive around and shoot stuff, not imagining there’s gonna be 70 people to move around. The short films I’ve done before were ninja events with a cameraman, myself and a sound guy. That’s the nice thing about it, because Paul and I never made a film. We weren’t thinking about the constraints of all these things. We approached it really with open freedom to do whatever we want and whatever we imagined. We didn’t even know what would be the hurdles to get across to try to do any of it.
Can I ask a bit about the Sooka creature in the film?
We made it up. It’s a fictional cryptid. I specifically wanted a fictional cryptid. I didn’t want it to come with all the baggage of other cryptids.
Had you considered using a traditional cryptid and its mythology?
No. I think from the get-go, we wanted it to be something that just made up completely. We did pick and choose from a wide variety of cryptids and got inspired by different aspects of the mythology of different cryptids.
What scares you?
Deep water. Not like I’m scared of drowning, but that vast deepness, a void. You don’t know what’s in there. That’s pretty creepy.
