In 2005, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society released The Call of Cthulhu, the first film truly faithful to both the spirit and the letter of Lovecraft’s works (see review here). In honor of the Halloween spirit, Cinema Strikes Back correspondent David Austin conducted this interview with screenwriter and producer Sean Branney about the making of the film, the difficulties of shooting Lovecraft, and future projects.

• How did the Call of Cthulhu project get started?

My esteemed colleague Andrew Leman and I had done A Shoggoth on the Roof (our Lovecraftian Broadway musical) and some other humorous mythos projects. We wanted to do a project that was serious and we thought the time was ripe for a good HPL film.

• What draws you to Lovecraft in particular?

It’s great writing combined with a genuinely frightening view of mankind’s place in the universe. We’re also big fans of the era: the 20s and 30s.

• Why did you pick this particular story to adapt, and did you consider any other stories?

We picked The Call of Cthulhu because it is among the more cinematic stories HPL wrote. We liked the fact that it had never been done on film before and in general it seemed like it could be a good movie.

• What are your backgrounds in film or the theater? How did you decide who would direct and who would write?

Leman and I met doing a play together in Denver in 1982. We’re both theatre guys, both of us have Masters degrees in acting. My wife and I currently run a small professional theatre in the Los Angeles area. I wanted to do the adaptation of the screenplay. Because of Andrew’s superb design background and because the look of this film is strongly tied to its design elements, we thought he’d be best suited to direct. We were both on set for the entire shoot, the editing, pretty much all of it.

• What is the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society? What’s your mission, how were you founded, and who are the members?

Back in the 1980s we used to play Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu role playing game. After a while we got the idea to try staging a live version of a game, using props and real locations. The game was a huge success that led us and our friends to put on more of them. After a while we formed the HPLHS to chronicle what we were doing; we even published a small fanzine called Strange Eons for a few years. Nowadays, we’re a web based organization. We don’t have a formal membership anymore, but we have hundreds of visitors to our site every day.

• How did you fund the film, how long did it take to complete, and where did you shoot it?

We paid for the movie out of sales of our t-shirts and things from our website. We spent around $50,000 on it. Most of it was shot in and around Los Angeles. We traveled to Providence, RI to shoot one short sequence. From start to finish it took around 18 months. We shot for about 13 months.

• Why did you make it black and white, and a silent film? Did you plan to do it that from the beginning?

Yes. We thought there were many advantages to shooting as a silent film. Chief among them was that a silent film wouldn’t need to clutter HPL’s story with dialogue and chit-chat. There’s virtually no dialogue in the original and we didn’t want to add it in.

• Were you at all influenced by any other makers of modern day silent films, like the works of Guy Maddin? Did you go back to look at the classic works of the German silent filmmakers like Murnau and Lang?

No, we took inspiration from the original silent movies.

• How did you handle the need for elaborate special effects and sets?

We built them. Part of why it took so long to make the movie was that we would have to build miniature sets one at a time. There were some very complicated miniatures, so we’d often spend 6 weeks building a set and then shoot on it for a day or two, tear it down and build the next one.

• What did you do with the great models that appear in the film, like the idols of Cthulhu?

We sell casts of the idols from the film on our website (helping us fund the next HPLHS production – clever, eh?). Many of the bigger items such as the miniature sets we simply threw out because they were too big to keep.

• How did you approach the challenge of filming a creature whose very sight is supposed to cause insanity?

We both went insane. After that it was pretty easy. I think the trickiest question was “how much Cthulhu do you show?” Too much and he stops being scary, but not enough seems like a cop-out.

• You represented Cthulhu through stop motion animation. What do you think is a better medium for Lovecraft, traditional animation and practical effects, or well-done CGI?

It was for our film. We wanted the look of a King Kong-sort of stop motion. No doubt a great CGI Cthulhu could be done, but it would have looked wrong in the world of this movie.

• Where did you find the actors to appear in the film?

Being involved in the LA theatre scene we know lots of excellent professional actors who are our friends. Maybe half of the cast are people who came in to audition for us. The larger roles though were filled with actors we knew and had worked with previously.

• I saw that each of you made cameo appearances in the finished film. The start of a tradition?

It seemed like a fun idea at the time. Look for us in the next movie.

• What has the reaction been like to the film, from critics and audiences?

It’s very much exceeded our expectations. We made the movie for ourselves and figured some other people would like it. We didn’t expect it to show all over the world to such an outpouring of positive responses. I’m in Spain at the moment and we just had a great screening the other night at the Sitges film festival with Lovecraft fans in the audience shouting “Iä, Iä”. Who knew?

• A lot of people have tried to commit Lovecraft’s work to film before, with varying degrees of success. Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and From Beyond have probably been the most successful, as stand-alone works if not as adaptations, and Brian Yuzna’s Dagon is a comparatively close adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth. What do you think of those films, and of Lovecraftian films in general?

I think a lot of HPL films miss the mark for me. They either tend to be so close to the original Lovecraft as to be very literary and boring, or they chuck Lovecraft out the window and are so broadly adapted as not to be Lovecraftian at all.

• I always thought At the Mountains of Madness would work as a film, but many of my other favorites, like The Colour Out of Space, seem impossible to film. What other Lovecraft stories do you think have the potential to make good adaptations?

Next year we’ll start shooting our adaptation of The Whisperer in the Darkness. We think it has the potential to be an excellent film. But it’s true, there are some HPL stories that not even the HPLHS would try to make into a movie. I think The Shadow Over Innsmouth would make a grand film, but it would require some substantial resources to do it right.

• How do you get around the fundamentally un-filmable nature of creatures like the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep or shape-changing Shoggoths?

There’s a couple of approaches. Money. With more resources, some things like that could be filmed. On the whole those are challenges well suited to CGI technologies. In the end though, creativity can often find a way to solve even the “unsolvable” cinematic challenge. And of course, everyone knows that it’s scariest when you don’t see the monster; when you worry about it and imagine it, that’s where fear really kicks in.

• The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath was filmed as a series of animated comic book stills. Does animation make sense to you as a way around the demanding requirements of that story, and Lovecraft’s work in general?

I think animation is an excellent solution for the dream-world stories. We’re talking about doing an animated version of Dream-Quest some time after Whisperer.

• I understand you put on Lovecraft-based theatrical productions. Could you tell us a little about those?

We were very much involved in the strange story of A Shoggoth on the Roof after bringing it to light in our 2002 documentary film. Last year this most improbable production was actually staged in Stockholm, Sweden by the aptly named Teater Tentakel. Strange but true – we were there. Neither of us personally has ever staged a Lovecraftian theatre production though.

• What’s next for you? Any more film-work in your future?

Immediately I open a new Irish play at Theatre Banshee in Los Angeles. We’re working on a secret project which the HPLHS will release in November. Then we’ll push ahead with pre-production for The Whisperer in the Darkness. Then I’ll direct a Shakespeare play in early 2007 and then we’ll start shooting Whisperer.

Thanks to Sean Branney for taking the time for this interview. We’ll be looking forward to seeing The Whisperer in the Darkness. In the meantime, I encourage everyone to check out the Cthulhu Lives website (www.cthulhulives.org).

© David Austin

The Call of Cthulhu may be purchased here.