On the thriller starring Cillian Murphy, Jamie Bell
This writer sat down with writer-director Carl Tibbetts at the Highball in Austin, Texas during Fantastic Fest to discuss his directorial debut Retreat.
Cillian Murphy and Thandie Newton star as Martin and Kate, a couple who flee from personal tragedy to a remote island where they find danger in Jack (Jamie Bell). This soldier tells the couple that a plague is spreading and they must defend themselves at all costs to prevent infection. But is he crazy or telling the truth? (You can read more about the film in our review.)
Samuel Goldwyn Films picked up the thriller for limited release on October 21.
Shock Till You Drop: This is your first feature film, what was your background before this?
Carl Tibbetts: I was an editor. I came from a fine art background and while I was there I taught myself editor. I moved straight to London and became an editor. I eventually wanted to direct, but there are so many things stacked up against you. You have to find something people respond to. I wrote a script and it flew.
Shock: Clearly! Did you get an instantaneous reaction to the script for Retreat? Who responded to it?
Tibbetts: Yeah, it was producer Gary Sinyor who picked it up. There is a website, a forum, in the UK for independent filmmakers looking to hook up or find crew. So, I posted something that read “28 Days Later meets Dead Calm” â it’s a good hook but Retreat is neither of those films at the end of the day. Gary read the synopsis I posted, called me up, I went to meet him and he got it moving. He is largely known for comedies, I didn’t know how it was going to play out, but he liked it and loved the script. No one was jumping through a hoop to make it because it’s a difficult movie. It’s not a total slice of entertainment. It’s going to piss people off.
Shock: But they’ll respond to the “virus” element, I think, and this sort of Straw Dogs element I took from it.
Tibbetts: Absolutely. Sam Peckinpah was a huge influence for me. He’s an amazing a director. But it was sort of taking a few ideas from Cul-de-sac and Knife in the Water, to a certain degree, Straw Dogs and Dead Calm. Someone was asking me if I ever thought of playing on the fantasy element of The Tenant, but the fantasy with Jack, I didn’t want to go down that road. People told me they didn’t think Jack was real the first half of the movie. It’s amazing the interpretations this movie gets.
Shock: Given the material, did you get a sense that Cillian had apprehensions about doing the film?
Tibbetts: He didn’t, really. He was happy to play a part he said he doesn’t get a chance to play which is an every day guy. He worked on that part and turned it into what it was. The two characters deal with the situation in very different ways. Jack is very physical, Martin was always going to be internal, thinking his way out of the situation. He doesn’t do very wellâ¦
Shock: I was going to say, he’s a little flawed when it comes to that.
Tibbetts: [laughs] He should have gone for the physical. What I really wanted to do was to take genuine people, as a couple, facing an otherworldly thing. How prepared are they for it? Everyone thinks they’re going to spring into action and start attacking people. You’d be surprised how you would genuinely react. I wanted to make them as real as possible. They don’t know hand-to-hand combat.
Shock: In some respects, given the contained nature of the story, you could play this on the stage…
Tibbetts: Sure.
Shock: …it’s a story that places a lot of emphasis on the actors. What was the intensity like working with the three of them to keep the energy going?
Tibbetts: I really liked working with Jamie on the part of Jack, because in the script he’s a slightly more older soldier and bigger. I was always interested in casting it in a not so obvious way. Even though he’s a bad guy, he needed to have a level of vulnerability at the end. I didn’t think some of the obvious choices would be able to do that. I saw a picture of Jamie in The Eagle and he was buffed up, it was interesting. Again, for him, he was attracted to it because it’s not necessarily a role he would be offered. Thandie did her role brilliantly. The shifting dynamic between who’s in charge, Thandie is winding her way through it.
I was trying to put short films together and that takes a while. So, I wanted to shoot something on a budget of $100-150k. I was looking at things that influenced me, like Polanski. The germ of the idea just came from the idea of wanting to do something small. Something big on a small scale. A pandemic film where you didn’t see the apocalypse, you saw one group of people dealing with it. I was going to these East End script classes where you bring some pages to a work shop and the actors read them out. There was one exercise where it was four people in a room and I said to one guy, “You have to stop these people from getting out of the room. Tell them anything.” That germ, all of those things came into being.
Shock: What’s on the horizon for you?
Tibbetts: I’m reading a lot of stuff, I’m writing another screenplay for a company I can’t talk about it. It’s a London-based action thriller and I’m writing a supernatural thriller, too.
Source: Ryan Turek, Managing Editor
