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FANTASIA 2021

Ruth Platt • Director of Martyrs Lane

“I find it interesting when people say they don’t like horror; I need it!”

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- In the British filmmaker’s third feature, you need not worry about what’s out in the woods, as chances are, what’s inside of your house is much worse

Ruth Platt • Director of Martyrs Lane

With the help of some skilled child performers (Kiera Thompson and Sienna Sayer) and some childhood memories of her own, British filmmaker Ruth Platt delivers her third feature, Martyrs Lane [+see also:
film review
interview: Ruth Platt
film profile
]
, proving that what people should really be afraid of isn’t ghosts – it’s the all-consuming grief. The film is now showing at the Fantasia Film Festival.

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Cineuropa: There is something old-fashioned about Martyrs Lane, in the best sense of the word. It brought to mind things that go bump in the night and all those strange whispers you hear as a child.
Ruth Platt: It’s not an autobiographical story, but its energy is very much filtered through my own childhood. The films that influenced me were The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
and The Others, and there is this slight retro quality to them. When you have a story with the point of view of a child, you can’t help but use your own memories. And I used to have terrible, terrible nightmares. Ghosts are a little bit like children, really – they want to be seen and to get your attention.

Which probably makes them scarier, as you can’t really predict their behaviour.
And you can’t reason with them! There is something primal there, too, in the emotions that adults learn to suppress or hide, or control. Ghosts don’t do that – they are the opposite of that. Children are, too, at least at the beginning. This “nightly visitor” is sort of a projection of our protagonist – our little girl Leah’s imagination. I thought it was important to suggest that it’s not such a sweet little cherub after all. There is something more sinister going on psychologically, something unravelling.

I was also born into a big, busy vicarage. My siblings were much older, and my parents were older parents. I felt very alone. There were people coming in with all sorts of problems, and sure enough, I would be listening. And then sent upstairs. There were always things I wanted to investigate, and children have a vivid imagination, so you start to fill in the blanks yourself. Memory is such a weird thing because some things you forget and others are still like a snapshot, crystal-clear. Cinema is a bit like that, too. You can use those snapshots to create something very evocative and very atmospheric.

I jumped a few times watching your film. But jump scares can be so predictable – there is always some pesky cat, coming out of nowhere.
There are no cats in Martyrs Lane! Just a really big rabbit [laughs]. It was really tough, actually. Some were there from the very beginning and had to do more with this dynamic between the mother and the daughter. It’s quite scary when you don’t feel secure or confident in such a pivotal relationship. Others we had to insert later, and I was a bit nervous about that. I just tried to ground them in these relationships.

These little girls are both very impressive. How do you get a performance like that out of a child? Is it something you had to learn, or did it come more easily because you also know how to act?
I work quite closely with actors; it’s quite collaborative. I want them to feel guided, but you have to be very careful – for some, it can be quite an intense process. I love working with children because they can be so instinctive. If you strip away this pressure to perform, there is nothing they have to do. They just think the thought and react. They have this incredible emotional range, which so often they are being told to suppress. “If you are frightened, be strong. If you are nervous, put a brave face on.” In acting, you want to strip all of that away. You don’t want them to hide any more.

What Kiera does here is still very subtle, however. It’s her mother (Denise Gough) who is much more emotional.
I wanted her to feel slightly invisible in this big, old, rattling house. That’s why we put her in dark clothes against dark walls – it’s as if she was camouflaged, melting into them. If a child is picking up on an adult’s heaviness, it can make you quite tentative. She feels that she can’t provoke anything. That’s why she is so quiet in her reactions, but it comes out, of course – in her nightmares and in these encounters. Everything comes out at night.

The thing about horror is that it addresses our greatest fears. I find it interesting when people say they don’t like horror; I need it! It’s like therapy – a way of exorcising your fears, putting them out there. My mother was born into a family with a bereavement, and I know that she carried that pressure. Suppressing stuff was a way to function, even though I didn’t think it was right. Looking at things through a child’s eyes makes you see them anew. I guess that’s what all of those Romantic poets used to talk about. When you do that, you can see where you went wrong, where you suppressed something. Or where you lied to yourself.

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