French Frights: Mathieu Turi’s Hostile
Since Mathieu Turi just released his second film, we might as well speak of the creation of his first one.
Last week was the end of the second French confinement, it saw the reopening of theaters and yours truly was able to go and see Meanders, Mathieu Turi’s second film. A Cube-like scifi indie film definitely worth a watch. What’s more a friend of mine was Assistant director on it for a week, what do you want me to do? But am getting ahead of myself once again. let’s go back to the beginning.
Mathieu Turi was born in Cannes, and believe it or not but when he was a teenager, he once infiltrated the festival to shake Georges Lucas’ hand. A mission in which he succeeded before being evicted from the event. Growing up, Turi would go on to study at EICAR ( a famous private movie school). It is there, coincidentally that Turi says he got his big break. Turi had gotten a call to work on a movie but couldn’t make it, because of this he advised the caller to take a friend of his. A month later, this friend tried to repay Turi by giving him a job offer. Little did this friend know, this job was to work on G.I Joe. Although he started by simply blocking gates and peeps and streets, Turi admits he harassed the production company once he had worked with them, only to be able to work on every American blockbuster that would shoot in Paris. This is how he worked with Tarantino, Ritchie, and some other famous names.
But Mathieu Turi wanted to direct. In 2010, with 3000€ he made his first real short film Sons of Chaos, a small post-apocalyptic movie about a hunter hunting a mutant. This movie got selected in a few festivals, like Sitges! You’ll often hear that if Xavier Gens produced Hostile it was because he was a friend of Turi’s. What’s interesting is, their moms were friend, and Turi’s mom seeing her boy was trying to make it in the industry suddenly recalled one of her friend’s son was already a filmmaker. Imagine Turi’s surprise when he discovered said son was none other thant Xavier Gens, the guy behind Frontiers. It is Gens who asked Turi to make a second short film. See, in Turi’s first, there was no real direction for the three actors wore masks and one of them was Turi himself for his lead quit on him the day of the shoot.
It appears that, at this time, Turi had already wrote four screenplays centered around the idea of huis-clos for he knew he would have no budget on his debut feature. In 2013, the young director put them all in a cupboard and directed Broken. A romantic comedy set in an elevator and centered around two characters not speaking the same language. This convinced Gens.
Gens seemed to have some plan to make movies with Sean Bean with budget which should be less than one million. He asked Turi if he would be interested. Turi showed the scripts, one of which got Gens’ attention. It was the story of a man in a post-apocalyptic world having to defend himself against a monster that would roam the darkness. To me, this conveniently sounds like A24’s The Monster, but we’re in 2013, remember?
In this early draft, which was then called Rising, the lead was a male and there existed no flashbacks. Well, sort of. The man reminiscing his life before shit went down would have been made through audio cues in order to preserve the budget. Everything I’m saying here makes sense when you’ll know that Turi’s favourite book is Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Several times, I’ve seen him state that he re-read it yearly.
It’s also during this time that Turi saw Mama featuring Javier Botet and searched the web until he found the actor’s mail on a blog post. He then send his script to Javier, saying he didn’t have any producer but he had a script he thought Javier would be great in. Javier accepted right away, seeing the interview of him present on the DVD, it appears that he liked the fact that he not only would be playing a monster but would be a humane monster, having to convey emotion other than fear despite his physics. Javier stated he wanted to make the movie and asked Turi to keep him update on the finance prospects.
The Sean Bean projet fell through and Turi turned his movie from a male-centric piece to a female centric one. At first, it appears he centered his flashback around his main character having lost her child, before it dawned on him he could have a stalker monster, that could be linked to a stalker lover the woman had once had in her life. Turi claims this was a late night epiphany. One that’s refreshing to me, for in my first viewing I genuinely wondered if Turi had known about his male character’s toxicity.
Gens then took him to meet FullTime Pictures, a French production company who whould go on to produce Night Fare, who were crazy enough to invest in the movie. What’s more, according to Turi, it was them who said they would shoot the flashbacks in New-York. The director thought of Canada because he wanted his flashback to feature verticality to oppose the horizontality of the wasteland.
Here was the deal. The movie would be shot on 24 days. First 5 days in New-York, then 5 in Paris and 14 in the Moroccan desert. For the cast, it was once again Gens who asked Turi to meet Brittany Ashworth. It seems Turi already knew of Fitoussi. Just like his previous short, Turi wanted the movie to be shot in English. In fact, the idea was that Hostile would never have a French release and would only open in foreign countries.
Turi says this was the hardest part of the movie, to have to adapt to the rhythm of each country on a tight schedule. Watching the making of, it’s not uncommon to have Turi says he shot some stuff alone with his D.O.P behind his teams’ back so as not to upset union rules. Disclaimer: if you were to look at my imdb page, you’d notice I once was a gaffer for Vincent Vieillard-Baron, the Director of Photography on Hostile. That being said, I didn’t know he worked on Hostile before I saw the flick and this series is aimed at me writing a paper on every French genre film so it was bound to happen.
Nonetheless, Turi loved shooting in New-York. According to him, he met both Sofia Coppola and Steveng Spielber during the production, in the streets of New-York. Still, it appears the camera broke on New-York’s last day, and shooting had to cease for four hours (sometime around 2AM on the last day), while the crew had to get on a plane at 8AM. The sets shot in New-York were the streets, the break-up car scene, a scene in Times Square that got deleted by Turi’s editor and the scene in the Fitoussi’s flat.
In France, they shot the scenes in the house, Ashworth’s flat, the gallery and some street. In Morocco all the post apocalyptic scenes were shot. What’s funny is, when I went to Paris to see Meanders, I also went to see a French film called Le Dernier Voyage de Thomas W.R. This film also featured the gas station that was in Hostile. Truth is, this gas stations was the one built for Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes.
If we except the camera shutting down in New-York, the two main problems the production had was the car crash which was impossible to shoot for the car would not turn. It was too suqare, too slow to actually jump the ramp and crash on its roof which forced the team to actually use cable on the vehicle and edit the whole thing to look like a crash. The second was a tempest that befell on the set during the only day off the crew had. According to Turi the team cleaned everything before he even went on set.
It appears the movie was made for around a million. The producers put their own wages in it, and Turicut some of his wage in order to make it. Still, it would release in more than 50 country and according to Turi, a Korean remake is now in the work.
A funny story I stumbled upon was this, Turi is a big videogame geek, although he admits filmmaking prevent him from playing as much as he did. When the movie had to be released in Japan, the distributor there asked him to whom he wanted to send copies of the movie to get blurbs on the poster. Being an action-geek, Turi instantly said “Hideo Kojima!” and to his bewilderment the distributor agreed. A moth or so later, the young filmmaker heard back from the Japanese game guru. According to Turi, Kojima wrote him an entire essay on the thematic of the movie, an analysis and ended this letter with: “Of Course I’ll write you a blurb!”
And this, for a first film, is probably a geek’s biggest achievement.
Next week we’ll talk about Sarcophage!
