About casting, you've assembled a great cast, can you tell us about that process?
Yeah, Imogen [Poots] was always kind of top of the list...we did a Skype call and that was it, she was pretty much there and that was brilliant. And then we had Shaheen Baig casting it, who's fantastic. She put me in touch with Craig [Roberts] and she put me in touch with Josef Altin ["Game of Thrones"] who played Clegg brilliantly. He's an amazing find. And then I was just really super lucky. Tim [Spall] is in a crowd of actors who get a lot of scripts and don't need to do stuff. So that's bad news for little films like mine. Really bad news because they have their stripes and they don’t need to do this stuff. And I got this brilliant phone call, Tim was on his boat, he travels around the country with his wife on this boat, making this documentary. And I had this lovely phone call where he rang up and said, "Yeah, yeah, I really like this, let's do it." Kevin [McKidd] kind of needed convincing but liked the script and we talked about it a lot. He slummed it, he came over and lived in a little flat in London and did it. So I was really lucky.
Kevin's is one of the trickier roles, I'd imagine, to cast and also to write?
Well you've definitely hit upon a truth there, which is that he was the character that I developed the most, with Kevin. He's the threat. So it was interesting to build a character who is just ostensibly a black character. There's no real light shining from this guy, he killed people, he's happy killing people, whatever. But as this thing develops ...something’s got inside of him, some of the light got through this chink in the armor and so does the girl.
read the full interview here
Yeah, Imogen [Poots] was always kind of top of the list...we did a Skype call and that was it, she was pretty much there and that was brilliant. And then we had Shaheen Baig casting it, who's fantastic. She put me in touch with Craig [Roberts] and she put me in touch with Josef Altin ["Game of Thrones"] who played Clegg brilliantly. He's an amazing find. And then I was just really super lucky. Tim [Spall] is in a crowd of actors who get a lot of scripts and don't need to do stuff. So that's bad news for little films like mine. Really bad news because they have their stripes and they don’t need to do this stuff. And I got this brilliant phone call, Tim was on his boat, he travels around the country with his wife on this boat, making this documentary. And I had this lovely phone call where he rang up and said, "Yeah, yeah, I really like this, let's do it." Kevin [McKidd] kind of needed convincing but liked the script and we talked about it a lot. He slummed it, he came over and lived in a little flat in London and did it. So I was really lucky.
Kevin's is one of the trickier roles, I'd imagine, to cast and also to write?
Well you've definitely hit upon a truth there, which is that he was the character that I developed the most, with Kevin. He's the threat. So it was interesting to build a character who is just ostensibly a black character. There's no real light shining from this guy, he killed people, he's happy killing people, whatever. But as this thing develops ...something’s got inside of him, some of the light got through this chink in the armor and so does the girl.
read the full interview here
