INT: Genevieve Joliffe

Last Updated on July 28, 2021

The
Arrow interviews Genevieve Joliffe

I
was pleasantly surprised when viewing “Urban Ghost Story”
to find a gritty, intelligent, layered and poignant horror flick.
They don’t happen often. THANK YOU! I recently had the opportunity
to spar with writer, kool gal, producer and director of said film,
Genevieve Joliffe, and here’s what the lady had to say about herself
and the movie.

ARROW:
What’s your favorite horror movie?

Genevieve:
My favorite horror movie is The Shining.
Followed closely by The Exorcist, the original Robert Wise The
Haunting, The Fog and I’m a huge George Romero fan of The
Dead trilogy.

ARROW:
Having both written and directed thus far, which is for you the most
artistically fulfilling of the two processes?

Genevieve:
Directing has been the most fulfilling for me
because that’s when you see everything come to life off the page.
With writing you can see the movie over and over in your head but
once you’re actually making it, there are always elements that
occur on set that will make you look at the movie perhaps
differently to how you initially envisaged it – for instance your
actor gives a performance that enhances what you’ve written just
by adding a little tweak of their own. Being on set is where you can
collaborate with your team by putting your heads together with your
cinematographers, production designers, actors etc. and coming up
with the best way of putting this vision to screen. It’s much more
social too than sitting at home like a hermit just chatting away to
your computer!

ARROW:
Having enjoyed “Urban Ghost Story”, I must ask…what was
the creative spark that had you put thoughts on paper to write the
screenplay?

Genevieve:
I’ve always been a huge fan of horror since I saw a Dracula
horror double bill on TV when I was six. Also I think horror is in
my blood – my grandmother who lived with us was a medium and she
used to tell me stories every morning at the breakfast table about
the spirits that visited her that night. So I was very adamant that
I wanted to direct a horror. Chris Jones (my co-writer and producer
on the film) and I had both heard numerous stories of poltergeist
cases, one rather famous one which occurred in Enfield, North London
in the late seventies. There had been several movies made about the
phenomena, notably Poltergeist, which was a fantastic movie
– but none of these movies had really examined the phenomena
realistically.  I don’t know whether I’m in a minority
here, but I don’t know that many people who’ve had a gateway to
hell open up in their living room! The one thing in real poltergeist
cases that really did shine out to us was the fact that the horror
of the reality of being in this situation is actually far scarier
than the horror of the supernatural.

ARROW:
You co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Jones. How would you describe
your collaboration with the man?

Genevieve:
Chris and I have really grown up together in our
learning of film and we’ve had many crazy and unbelievable
experiences. I met Chris when we were in film school and we both
felt like we were on a different wavelength to other students at the
school. We were both very impatient and wanted more than anything to
get out there and make fun entertaining movies and gain experience.
Our film school at the time was very much into making social
commentary films – both of us weren’t mature enough or
interested enough at that time to make that type of film. We just
wanted to have fun and blow things up!  We therefore left the
school and within six months had made our first feature, Chris
directing and myself producing. The film really wasn’t that great
but was our hands on experience of filmmaking that we weren’t
learning from film school. It also happened to do very well in the
Far East for our executive producers. We didn’t receive any
support from the British film industry as we were making commercial
films and in England that was the terrible ‘c’ word as it
didn’t fit into ‘art darling’.

We battled
on with our next low budget movie, White Angel, a serial
killer thriller which again I produced and Chris directed (called Interview
with a Serial Killer in the US). This film screened as the
centerpiece film of the London Film Festival and we managed to get a
theatrical release in the UK, which was amazing considering we had
made this movie on practically nothing. This film was also our first
film that we collaborated on with writing the screenplay and we both
had a lot of fun doing a tremendous amount of research on serial
killers! Then due to an unfortunate incident after the release of White
Angel we began writing our book, The Guerilla Film Makers
Handbook. If you want to know what happened here, as well as the
rest of our crazy exploits, pick up a copy of our newest
All-American version. Look out for the yellow cover with a big bomb
on it!  The book became a best selling book on independent
filmmaking in the UK. We’re hoping the same will happen in the US!

ARROW: Do
you find it difficult to write with another person? How do you go
about overcoming the hurdle that are “creative
differences”?

Genevieve:
It can be difficult to write with another writer,
but it really depends if you can gel or not with each other. Are you
both coming from the same place? Are you both wanting the same goals
with the characters? Are you both following the same story?! 
If you find that you have many creative differences then you’re
probably not collaborating with the right person. If there’s
stubbornness or egos involved, then you really are writing with the
wrong person!  I co-write hugely with my fiancé nowadays and
that was something that I was super wary of initially because of the
obvious mixing work with relationship scenario, but it’s been a
dream! We’re very lucky. We completely gel with each other in our
writing and I have to say he’s the best writing partner I’ve
ever had!

ARROW: In
my opinion, one of Urban Ghost Story’s biggest strengths was its
stellar cast. How long and difficult was the casting process for the
picture?

Genevieve:
Thank
you! Our main concern was casting the right girl to play our 12-year
old lead Lizzie Fisher. She had to carry the movie so there was a
lot of responsibility on the head of a young actress. We were based
at Ealing Film Studios in London at the time and I went up to
Glasgow to look for our Lizzie. Heather Ann Foster was actually the
seventh girl I saw out of 100 and I knew as soon as she entered the
door that she was perfect for the part. Heather has an intensity
behind her eyes that made her very wise for her years.  Jason
Connery who plays the newspaper tabloid hack is an actor who is
extremely popular in England due to his role of Robin Hood in Robin
of Sherwood. As soon as Jason came in for his audition, again, it
was obvious that he was perfect as our ruffian who turns good. The
same goes for Stephanie Buttle who plays Lizzie’s mom. Stephanie
had a beauty and toughness to her that made her perfect as the young
single mom battling with doing the right thing for her children in
horrendous circumstances. Choosing the other actors was either
through auditions or gut instincts like with Billy Boyd, who many
will know as Pippin in Lord of The Rings. I knew just from meeting
Billy that he had the intensity and flexibility to play our loan
shark who’s role is pivotal for showing the oppression of the
environment that this family live in. He’s not the sweet innocent
Hobbit here!

ARROW:
Being that the flick was shot on a budget, looking back, what was
the more arduous of obstacles during the shoot?

Genevieve:
Staying awake!  Seriously,
that is one of the most difficult things to do on a low budget
shoot. We made sure that everyone worked only 12 hours days but as a
director you don’t get any sleep! Once you’ve wrapped for the
day, you’re in the editing room checking the dailies from the day
before and seeing what your editor has cut together. Then you’re
working out the shoot for the next day and then hopefully catch a
few Z’s before you’re up at 6 AM!

ARROW:
That amazing car crash must have been quite the task in staging and
shooting. How did you pull that off?

Genevieve:
We had a great friend Terry Forrestal who was our stunt co-ordinator.
Terry had worked with us on our first film and had become a good
mate to us. Although he had worked on numerous Hollywood movies, he
wanted to help new filmmakers as much as he could and would offer
his services whenever he could. Initially we were going to have a
very basic sequence with the car crash but Terry read the script and
then suggested numerous ways of spiking up the shot…”you could
have the car hit a ramp, twist over in the air several times,
slamming down on to the road, a passenger exploding from the
windscreen and the car sliding down the street, eventually settling
to a stop and then – Kaboom!…but not just one explosion, two!
Three!…” Terry was amazing! I have to say though he had my heart
pumping several times waiting for his cheeky grin to appear either
from the crashed car or water when he did a 100ft high fall for us
in our first movie!  Unfortunately Terry was killed when he was
on holiday doing base jumps in Norway and he never got to see the
finished film.

ARROW:
Running at 82 minutes, I felt the film was a tad too short for all
of the “meat” it was addressing. Was there an initial, longer
cut?

Genevieve:
You’re right. There was a much
longer cut, which was then cut, re-cut and then cut again. There are
a lot of issues in the movie that we could mention but not all of
them could we focus on. We did have a further scene that focused
more on the oppression of the tower block but this had to be removed
for a test screening audience became confused about Billy Boyd’s
character – despite having nothing to do with the scene in
question! It’s very odd, but that’s why having test screenings
are a good idea so you can check that your plumbing works! Something
that makes complete sense on the page, for whatever reason might not
work when seen visually. We also cut more supernatural elements that
were occurring to Lizzie as they didn’t work with the flow of the
story. Again, something that seemed to make complete sense in the
screenplay detracted from the overall story. We show some of the
deleted scenes on the DVD.

ARROW:
What’s on the horizon in terms of future directorial efforts?

Genevieve:
I’m working on several horror
projects at the moment and a sci-fi. It’s been interesting for me
moving from the UK to the US. It’s very much a business here,
which I actually love because there’s no pretentious value added
to a movie. You don’t have to be part of a clique to get a film
made and it truly is the American Dream – anyone can break into
the industry! It’s tough but if you persevere, you never
know….So we’ll see! I’m hoping the next movie you see from me
will be a horror that will make you scream, laugh and cry!

ARROW:
Once the shoot for “Urban Ghost Story” wrapped, how did
the cast and crew celebrate?

Genevieve:
With a massive party! That same
night that we wrapped, we had great fun all mucking in and pulling
apart the set in the studio and then watching a blooper reel that
had been put together by our fabulous editor. Then I had a curry!

I’d
like to thank the
lovely Genevieve
for her time. Any girl with a mug-shot and directing to her credit
is a “class act” in my book! Keep up the good fight, Gen!
I’m looking forward to seeing your future cinematic dishes. Now go
rent “Urban Ghost Story” my fellow genre fans…or I’ll
kill you all…just kidding, guys…or am I? DANG!

VISIT
GEN’S COMPANY WEBSITE HERE