Prevenge's Alice Lowe interview: 'It was originally a jokey title but it stuck'
The director and writer of British comedy slasher film, 'Prevenge', decided to make a film about a mum-to-be whose foetus is encouraging her to kill people, when she found out she was pregnant
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Your support makes all the difference.“I didn’t sort of go I’m going to get pregnant and make a movie!” says Prevenge director Alice Lowe. “It was more coincidental than that.”
Nonetheless, falling pregnant spurred the comedian into action. As like many others, she wondered if having a child would put a comma in her career.
Lowe had just finished a five-day shoot for Black Mountain Poets when director Jamie Adams said he’d enjoyed the experience so much that they should make another film. To which the actress replied, “I can’t, I’m pregnant.”
“I went away and I had a think about it and I thought, 'I should do this because I’m terrified of being out of work',” remembers the 39-year-old. “As a freelancer, having a baby, you feel like you will never work again. There is no support network really. As an actress you feel like you will never work again.”
The fear of being forgotten is a result of the years that the Coventry born actress had spent on TV and film sets and heard actresses being talked of for roles, only for the blunt reply, ‘Oh, but she’s just had a baby.’ “And I’m like, three years ago!”
Looking at the bigger picture, Lowe, who wrote and starred in the hysterical Ben Wheatley directed serial killer film Sightseers, says, “I think there has to be a reason as to why there is a drop off in female directors, because there are so many women making shorts and there are a lot of women at film school too.”
“Obviously a child is a 24/7 thing, and so is a film, really. It’s just one of those careers. But what I would say is why can’t you shoot in a way that suits you? What is wrong with making a project that is tailor made to what your needs are? That is what is great about being a director of this project, I could say, no, I’m not going to do that and I’m not going to push myself beyond this.”
Then beyond the shoot she planned the post-production process so that she could have her baby daughter with her in the edit suite. Even during our interview the baby is not far away. I’m introduced to her partner, a storyboard artist, and daughter just before conducting the interview. And Lowe is quick to point out that family time in the film industry is as much a problem for fathers as it is mothers.
“There are plenty of fathers in the film industry who don’t get to see their kids or their partners enough,” she adds. “I think it would benefit everyone in the film industry if there were a bit more protection of your rights.”
Lowe has no confidence that actors will band together in the United Kingdom to improve the situation. She was envious of the unified front that actors showed in Hollywood when they went on strike in 2000: “As soon as you said I’m on strike in the UK, there would be 20 others actors saying, ‘I’ll do it.’ You just don’t trust it, there is, sort of, this fear.”
So in trying to show that pregnancy doesn’t mean the end of an actress’s career, she began writing a script at a frantic pace, completing the first draft in a couple of weeks.
Lowe also knew that she had to write something that was quick to film as she would be seven-and-a-half months pregnant when “action” would be screamed on set. She penned a film that could be shot over 11 days, and contained many two-hander scenes. There was also a concern that her bump would grow so fast that it would mess with continuity. Although in the edit she just thought, “People don’t really notice continuity, it’s only continuity people or film buffs that do.”
Lowe is so amenable and friendly in person that it seems paradoxical that she writes such macabre tales. Her career began in experimental theatre and she was a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe. In 2000 she was nominated for a Perrier Comedy Award alongside her Cambridge University colleagues Richard Ayoade and Matt Holness. In 2005 she took up her own show, MoonJourney, a sci-fi themed Kate Bush spoof.
“When I first went up to Edinburgh with this show called Garth Marenghi's Fright Knight, there were really not a lot of women. There were people like Jenny Eclair, who won the Perrier Award a few years before, but it would be fairly unusual to have sell-out female shows. I felt kind of alone. There were not many women to hang out with at the festival, whereas now it’s kind of different.”
On Television she’s worked on Horrible Histories, The Mighty Boosh, IT Crowd, and This is Jinsy and her feature film output has included roles in Hot Fuzz, Paddington and Adult Life Skills.
She is also one of Britain’s finest comedy writers; her credits include Sightseers and the TV series Beehive before that.
Prevenge is the Branjelina style amalgamation of the words pregnancy and revenge. She says of the title, “It just popped out. I seriously just went it should be a pregnancy revenge thriller. And I just went Prevenge and for a while it is a bit of a jokey title. We didn’t think we would actually use it, but it just stuck.”
The film has a lot in common with Sightseers. Lowe plays single-mum-to-be Ruth, who rebukes all the fluffiness surrounding pregnancy and sees it for the traumatic reality it is. When people tell her wonderful it is to be pregnant, she sees sleepless nights, crying and stress. Her mood is not helped by the fact that her foetus seems to be encouraging her to kill people, advice she starts acting upon in bizarre and humorous fashion.
“It wasn’t really conscious,” she says of the fact that she’s written another character that sees her murdering people on screen. “ For me this film is part of the revenge genre, which is different from Sightseers, and I’ve not explored a revenge narrative before. If you use the polar opposite of a stereotype, it makes it more exciting, creating tension on screen. So here you have a pregnant character in a film about vengeance and punishment.”
Lowe adds, “There is an added dimension to the character because the character is pregnant. You don’t even have to make it part of the dialogue, it’s just an aspect of real life which just adds texture to the narrative and the story.”
But it’s a sentiment that Lowe has discovered isn’t shared by other screenwriters, who seem petrified about writing about women, let alone pregnant ladies.
“Often I’ve suggested to scriptwriters who’ve given me a script that they change the main part to be female. Often I don’t really want to play the female character on offer– as she’s usually a bit rubbish – but when I say I want to play this other character, they retort, ‘oh that’s a man’. And when I say, change it to a woman. ‘But I don’t have time to do a rewrite’ is the common response. I say you don’t need to rewrite it, just change the gender people are pretty much the same. It will make it more interesting.”
'Prevenge' is out 10 February
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