FilmShaft Exclusive: Stephen Volk Interview

Published on May 24, 2010 by Martyn Conterio · View Comments

Stephen Volk has written for television and film for over twenty years. His debut script formed the basis of Gothic, a typically outré work from Ken Russell and based upon the infamous night at the Villa Diodati where Byron, John Polidori, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley entertained each other with ghost stories. In 1989, Volk went off to Hollywood and worked with William Friedkin on The Guardian.

However it was 1992’s television drama, Ghostwatch, which cemented his reputation and entered history as one of the legendary moments of British television. The BBC drama was presented as a live broadcast and featured several high profile t.v. presenters including Michael Parkinson and Sarah Greene. Based on the famous case of the Enfield Poltergeist, the public reaction was vitriolic (to say the least), with many believing the show to be real and that presenter Sarah Greene had really been attacked and locked in a cellar with an malicious spirit.

Ghostwatch has never been shown on television since that famous night on Halloween 1992. A few years ago, the BFI released the drama on DVD and features an excellent commentary by Volk and the show’s producers. It is well worth checking out. You can also check out reactions to the programme on Youtube with old footage courtesy of the BBC’s Points Of View (the fashion back then was truly terrifying).

More recently he’s been working on television series Afterlife and his latest film script, The Awakening, goes into production next month with Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton starring.

The Awakening is going to into production next month, what can you tell me about it?

First of all I’m delighted with the casting of Rebecca Hall and Dominic West (from The Wire) and Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake): this is dream casting for the roles, believe me, and Nick Murphy is one of the hottest directors around after doing Occupation, which I thought was the best thing on British TV last year. It’s his first feature film and will be a real tour de force, I’m sure. It is shooting from June 2010 in Scotland.

The story is set in the year 1921, quite soon after World War I, when England is still suffering from the grief and trauma of huge casualties. Florence Cathcart (played by Rebecca Hall) is a young, sceptical woman scientist who is convinced that ghosts and so-called spirit manifestations can all be explained away as either deliberate fraud or down to fevered imaginations. But when she is called to investigate an alleged haunting at a boys’ boarding school deep in the English countryside, she finds her beliefs – all her beliefs – shaken to the core. Finally she realises her rationality gives her no place to hide.

I think BBC Films is always immaculate at period drama and for years I’ve wanted them to make a good ghost movie that isn’t an adaptation of an old book. Since this one was created by me, I’m very pleased about that.

A lot of horror is blood and gore these days, will The Awakening be taking a more classical, atmospheric approach?

Yes, definitely. I would be surprised if the director, Nick Murphy, takes it in that direction. It’s certainly not in the script. It began as the kind of piece Henry James wrote, akin to The Innocents based on his ghost novella The Turn of the Screw, but other influences have intruded, which is good, so it is less so. I suppose now it is more in the genre of The Others or The Devil’s Backbone or The Orphanage in style.

What inspired it? When I read about it I thought of Borley Rectory, was a case like that an inspiration?

A female Harry Price? I suppose. Or Sherlock Holmes, really. Mainly the idea of a woman ghost hunter in a repressed era, and – something I’ve often returned to – the rational scientist shaken up by supernatural events they can’t explain. In my British TV series Afterlife, there were two characters, the one who didn’t believe in ghosts and the one who saw them: this is both those things in one character. I love stories about psychical research because it is where science meets the unexplained, a real clash to start with, and the psychology of that I find interesting. I’m also a member of the SPR (Society of Psychical Research) myself and I like reading about real experiments and explorations over the years and have even investigated one or two things in my time. And yes, there was a natural explanation in each case.

Has it been a project a long time in the making or more recent?

I think I started having the idea about 1997. Treatments, lots. Then trying it out on various producers, then Joe Oppenheimer and David Thompson, who was them also at BBC Films, put it in development. Did a few drafts, then it is the long haul of trying to find the right director. Then it is all about timing and who is reading stuff. Some nice comments along the way but a lot say they are writing their own scripts, damn them! And most directors are just terrible writers. Nick Murphy is the complete exception. He’s fantastic.

Where does your interest, indeed passion, for horror come from?

From Famous Monsters of Filmland, Aurora kits, Hammer movies, Pan books of horror stories, Poe and Lovecraft: the usual suspects, I guess. Also the BBC would always have a Ghost Story for Christmas on TV on Christmas Eve and these were terrific adaptations of Dickens or M.R. James stories, really well done. Those were a big influence. And an ITV series called Mystery and Imagination, which adapted all the classic horror books in the mid 1960s – before I was old enough to sneak into the movie house to see real horror.

I suppose people who are horror fans find horror exciting at a young age and it never goes away. Yes I like Westerns, Thrillers, SF, but Horror means more to me because I suppose I’m a frightened person at heart and that’s how I see the world – being afraid! So I like writing about characters who try to control and explain that very primal fear of things unknown. Mind you, they always come unstuck – I wonder why?

I’d say my passion is also for works of the imagination. I’ve never seen much exciting about a play or film which is about three students sharing an apartment or two people falling in love. If one of them is dead, or an alien, then it’s interesting. It’s just instinctive, and what appeals to you. Best not to analyse it too much, I suspect.

Are you a believer in the supernatural or does it simply allow you to write imaginative stories?

I don’t believe in any of that stuff. Refreshingly, a lot of horror writers don’t and it’s something a lot of people find perplexing, but I don’t. Walt Disney didn’t believe that mice wore pants and piloted paddle steamers: he just thought that was fun and cool as an idea and it amused him to play with that. Stories are play in a sense, even though they reveal a lot about us personally, especially if we don’t mean them to. I like the metaphor and themes given me by ghost hunters and spiritualists, by telepathy experiments, by séances, by troubled mediums and tragic psychologists. I just love that realm of the uncertain.

Gothic was your collaboration with Ken Russell. It’s a mad film, what are your memories of working with an iconoclast like Russell?

Is it mad? I don’t think it’s that mad. It became a bit mad in Ken’s hands. It all made perfect sense to me on the page. It’s certainly about maddish people: but they were on certain substances. What do you expect? It was my homage to Hammer. A true story done like a Hammer film, was the idea. I wrote it on spec in the early 80s. Never thought who was going to direct it, then Virgin Films phoned up and said Ken Russell. I was like – Oh. Ken’s reputation wasn’t high at the time, yet The Devils was (and is) one of my favourite films, bar none, so I had a mix of feelings. But Ken was never less that a sweetie and didn’t railroad the script at all compared to a lot of stupid tyro so-called wunderkind directors I’ve worked with since. Ken has more talent in his little finger than most of them, and not many directors couldn’t have done Gothic justice. He just went for it. Once he was shooting of course he ran will the ball and introduced the belly dancers and dwarfs. To be expected. My regret was he cut my prologue and epilogue which had Mary Shelley on her death bed telling the story: it put the film in parenthesis, saying this could all be in her mind or memory, but Ken didn’t want to do that – like, this isn’t Mary’s dream, it’s Ken Russell’s!

You wrote The Guardian for William Friedkin too. Is he the tyrant books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls make out?

Well, first of all, I wrote the script of The Nanny (based on Dan Greenberg’s book of the same name) for Sam Raimi. The whole point was to work with Sam and do something that was both “Omen-esque” and tongue-in-cheek at the same time. Scary but fun. Then Sam went off to to Darkman and the producer brought in Billy, not a director to whose work the word “fun” generally applies! So I flew out and we got to work together in a room.

The first week was deliriously happy, energizing and great. I loved it. Then the darkness came as I gradually realized that working with him meant writing until he had the ideas, and then writing his ideas. He is a great director and film maker. Brilliant at his very best. But as a writer working for him, well, he ran me into the ground. I lost it. I had a kind of breakdown because I didn’t know what he wanted from one day to the next, in the end. I was burned out and Billy took over and wrote what he wanted the film to be. By then I had no idea what thatbwas any more. My fault as much as his. I was young in those days, I shouldn’t have worked so hard and got frazzled thousands of miles from home.. I killed myself. For a film that wasn’t fantastic in the end, sadly. But you can’t go back and do it over again differently. That’s it.

What inspired the live t.v. set-up for Ghostwatch?

Two inspirations.

One: to write a really good ghost story for TV. Period! Which I hadn’t seen for about twenty years — since they cancelled the aforementioned Ghost Stories for Christmas, in fact. I was banging my head against a brick wall trying to get supernatural stuff on British TV and nobody wanted to know. It was soul destroying. Anyway that’s another story…

Two: What emerged was that Ghostwatch was equally a vehicle to satirize television itself. How television reduced the most deep philosophical questions (“do we survive death?”) to crass entertainment. And how the audience – absolutely evident today – is complicit in the material the TV generates and vomits out there. TV gives us what we want and need, be it vicarious emotion, surrogate family bonds, or ghosts.

Did it take any other forms or was it always envisaged as a pseudo-live experience?

No it wasn’t, at all… Around 1987 my agent thought the BBC might be in the mood for a dark, spooky series so I got together with an in-house BBC producer, Ruth Baumgarten and pitched the idea for a six-part series about a psychical investigator (or as we say nowadays, parapsychologist) who gets involved with an investigative TV film crew. The story, with many strands and characters, including a research scientist, stretched over six hours but the final hour was the idea of a live broadcast from a haunted house. Ruth said the BBC wouldn’t buy a whole supernatural series: could we do it as a one-off 90-minute show? Which was when I said – rather that the whole six hours reduced to 90 minutes – what if we did the whole thing as a pretend live broadcast. And she went white and said: Oh my God! it could be like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds! Do you think we can do it? And I said: Well, let’s try.

Looking back, what are your thoughts on the subsequent mass panic? Do you look back and laugh or annoyed with the over-reaction?

Of course we wanted a reaction, but not that kind of reaction! It was real anger. Anger at the thought that we had made a mug of them, the viewers. They thought we’d conned them. Abused them in a way – when in fact it was supposed to be fun, like a Hallowe’en trick. It was Hallowe’en after all! But all the publicity was this “Shouldn’t have been allowed!” “Heads must roll!” shtick. Very little of the coverage actually discussed the content of the drama as a programme that had been written and made with a lot of care. It wasn’t like it was a joke we made up as we went along. But people really wanted us up against the wall so that they could shake their fists. Of course some people were really, really scared, which is nice but I hadn’t really anticipated. I meet people now who were young kids who were really scared by it, and it’s interesting to hear their stories.

I’ve got the DVD released from the BFI and it’s still an unsettling viewing experience to this day. Do you think the BBC will ever show it again?

No. There are certain reasons why not that I don’t want to go into here. And in some ways, from their point of view, they’re right. I was just really glad to be able to put a writer/director/producer commentary on the BFI DVD release so we could all put our intentions out there and everyone can now at least know exactly what we were trying to do, and why. That it wasn’t just a “hoax” but there was a reason we wanted to do it, as a piece of drama.

The great thing is that lately Ghostwatch seems to be having a renaissance. A lot of people want to show it at screenings and the “Ghostwatch Behind the Curtains” blog is always posting new information and keeping the flag flying. Rich is a great supporter and probably our number one fan (but not in that Kathy Bates way, I hope!).

You’ve written scripts for film and television, do you have a particular preference in terms of medium?

I’ve never had a feature film come out that I’m totally happy with, to be honest. That’s the curse of being paid well for movies (sometimes). It just inevitably becomes the vision of the director. Even if you’ve spent fifteen years on it and he/she’s spent seven months. It’s the way the industry is designed – you get kicked off, you lick your wounds. The writer is infinitely dispensable. And always on the lowest rung of the ladder, power-wise.

However in TV (British TV anyway) it’s a much more level playing field. The director comes in late so the script is nailed down by me and the producer so we don’t want a real big “vision” at that stage, just a good director. And the TV directors I’ve worked with are quite frankly as good as, if not better than, the movie directors I’ve worked with, for that reason – they don’t rewrite, they don’t fret about their “vision” or ownership, they don’t stop you from talking to the actors: they just do it. With the result my series Afterlife is, scene by scene, line by line, exactly (or nearly exactly) as I wrote it and wanted it. So that’s the thing, finished-product-wise, I’m happiest with.

Have you any other scripts or ideas you’re working on at present?

Yes, quite a few, always. You have to. I’ve just done a few short stories, which I love doing too, for various anthologies: The End of The Line for Solaris and 7th Black Book of Horror. I’m also doing rewrites on the pilot for a new paranormal drama series for BBCTV. I really hope that’ll be given the go ahead soon. Then there’s a few spec screenplays: one about a store detective who loses his mind, and one which is a romantic comedy about a necrophiliac. I think that’s quite a good thought to leave you with. Coming soon to a movie theatre near you. One day, I hope. Watch this space. And thanks for asking.

For more info on Stephen Volk and his awesome work go to: stephenvolk.net