INTERVIEW: MATT STOKOE + SOPHIE RUNDLE (ROSE

I N T E RV I E W MATTSTOKOE & SOPHIE RUNDLE

ON THEIR FRESH APPROACH TO THE VAMPIRE GENRE, THE CHALLENGES OF SHOOTING AN INDEPENDENT BRITISH FILM AND WHAT THEYʼVE BEEN WATCHING DURING LOCKDOWN.

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INTERVIEWED BY NICOLA AUSTIN

Rose (formerly known as Rose: A Love Story) is a chilling, deeply moving and cri�cally acclaimed horror thriller starring Sophie Rundle (Peaky Blinders, Jamestown, Bodyguard) and Ma� Stokoe (Cursed, Jamestown, Misfits). Gripped by a violent, terrifying illness, Rose lives in seclusion with her husband, but the arrival of a stranger sha�ers the fragile refuge they have built. We sat down with writer/star Ma� Stokoe and star Sophie Rundle for a chat about their latest project, which premiered at last year’s virtual London Film Fes�val.

Ma�, where did the idea come from for the fresh and moving take on vampire mythology? There's such a brilliant emphasis on the warm and central rela�onship, along with the lengths Sam will go for Rose.

MS: I've always really loved horror films, I was brought up on a diet of them. Just before I started wri�ng, I'd seen a couple of films in that period which dealt with the vampire mythos and I just didn't like the way that they were done. It felt quite schlocky and sensa�onalist. So I thought, all the most interes�ng horror films are the ones that are, you know, not necessarily high concept, they're all quite stripped back down. It's about the human interac�on with the thing. So then I just started focusing on a couple because I thought that was quite a nice way to anchor it, and then going through basically all the tropes and all the characteris�cs, the iconography of vampire movies, then thinking: "Okay, well, what's an interes�ng way to subvert that one, and what's a way to kind of tell that B in a way that I've not seen before, and what's interes�ng to me visually?" And, and slowly but surely, just working outwards. Then when I reached a point where I had what I thought was a decent narra�ve and kind of a world that I built, that's when I approached Sophie to be in it. She also brought her crea�ve mind on board and helped flesh it out and made sure that the rela�onship side was, you know, water�ght and that's that's where your involvement came isn't it Sophie.

Sophie, what was it about the script and project which appealed to you?

SR: Well everything that Ma�'s really just said! I thought it was such a clever take on what is such an enjoyable genre, and one that we're all so familiar with. But it's that thing, everything that we are culturally frightened of, all our ghost stories are all based in something real, aren't they? And I thought, what a clever idea to frame it, that she's got this illness, this thing that's ea�ng her up and taking over her, and what would you do if it was your loved one? I thought that central rela�onship was so ins�nc�vely, beau�fully drawn by Ma�, it got me really excited as an actor to jump on board. I mean, what a lovely gi� when you get a script, and you're like, "yes! I have this thought, and I have this thought in my head" Plus me and Ma� have always really enjoyed working together. It was such an exci�ng prospect to be involved in ground floor of the crea�ve process and be able to discuss and mould it into shape because so o�en, when you're on the bigger jobs, they're great, but you come in right at the last second, and you're basically told sort of what to wear and what to say, and 100 decisions have been made before you get on set. And with this, it was just so enjoyable to be really in the roots of it and really, you know, have an opinion and let it grow?

It was quite a stripped back produc�on with not many people in the cast, so how did you prepare for your roles? Especially with the transforma�on scenes.

SR: I don't know, I sort of forgot about the ac�ng �ll quite last minute! MS: We never originally planned to be in it.

Oh, wow!

MS: Especially me. SR: Well, we were just cheap weren't we? MS: I had to convince Sophie to be in it, and then as we started developing it, she was like, "Look, I don't want to commit to being in it, I want to produce it and I want to develop it, but we don't know." So we took it further and further down that vein. Then you know, the reali�es of first �me filmmakers and low budget filmmaking in par�cular, is the fact that it's not enough to just waltz into people's offices and be like, yeah we'll get some huge names. There are people always going, but what can you take away and keep the thing that we like? And what else can you take away to keep the thing that we like? But we really care about the story and we really care about the characters because we've spent hundreds of hours talking about it. So it would almost be like, you know, sending your kid off with somebody else if two other actors were to come on board. So I thought Sophie and I can do that and we'll do a good job, that will work. So we kind of made that decision and then put that somewhere in the back of our minds and carried on talking in like a pre�y serious capacity and then as you say, apart from me growing a beard suddenly like the day before we went to Wales and we were like oh my god! SR: God yeah, we said we'd do the ac�ng. Luckily that's the day job so we were like that's fine spend the money on the leeches!

Were they real leeches?!

SR: Yeah, they were and one of them bit you, didn't it?! MS: Well Sophie didn't eat any real meat. SR: Yeah, I ate prunes in like some Japanese sauce, so that was fine. MS: They were real leeches that when I put them on my leg, they gave me a silicon shield to protect my leg, but it didn't work - they were latching onto me in those shots of the leeches on my leg. SR: He was very calm about it! MS: I just had to be like, man up and film it for five minutes, because then I'm going to stand up and rip them all off my legs. Yeah, they were definitely real. They weren't harmed, but they were definitely real. SR: We all became sort of quite fascinated with them, didn't we? All those shots where we sit and look at them.

What was it like shoo�ng the film? The loca�on in Wales and the cinematography were just stunning, but it's just so remote and the cabin is so dark!

SR: It really, really was. I mean, that was such a coup, that loca�on, but we were in deepest, darkest Wales. There was no phone signal, it really was sort of grassroots. There was nothing! Yeah, it really was a bit of a shock MS: We had to drive like 20 minutes to a Tesco car park and then the phone signal finally came through to get messages and then drive back onto the loca�on. SR: I think I'd just been on some nice shiny job really taking for granted my lovely hotel room. Then I landed in Wales and I'm like I'm sorry, there's no Instagram?! Thank God though because, like you said, the loca�on really lent to the story - we got so much for free that we could never have afforded. MS: It just so happened to snow. Which was brilliant because we never wanted to specify where the story took place. So we had this idea that the film itself is a bit of a fairy tale in that no one ever goes once upon a �me in Brixton. So the aesthe�c of the snow really lent it this kind of like Scandi vibe that we were clapping our hands as soon as we got it. The way that we shot it as well, it's obviously nonlinear a film shoot, it just so happened to be that we got all the exterior stuff and then the snow started mel�ng when we were filming inside. SR: I think there was like a day where people did some very clever rejigging at the last second that we re-shoot quickly, and if we did this, we could pretend and if we did that we can film it to look like snow. We were just really lucky, really lucky.

Definitely, I thought it was Canada so I was blown away when I discovered it was Wales.

SR: It really makes you realise what you have on your doorstep, doesn't it? Especially the past year, a lot of people realised what beau�ful places we've got in this country. Scotland, Wales and Ireland right on our doorstep. When we got there, we couldn't believe that we'd only driven a couple of hours, you know? MS: The wildlife and everything was so unbelievable .

Did you ever consider leaning into more of the horror elements? Or was it always first and foremost a love story for you?

MS: I think that's the kind of age old tug of war that's happened to the film started because there's obviously voices when you make a

film or TV show. There's always a huge, big cacophony of voices with different opinions on what should happen. Some people are much more interested in a hardline horror. You know, chuck people read meat and they'll enjoy it, and then the other side are more interested in really leaning into the nuances. And I think that if you go too far in either direc�on, you end up with something over simplis�c and a bit patronising. And it's that that grey area, that �ght rope, that tension in the middle, that's the interes�ng bit to walk down. So I think that eventually, as we started developing it, whenever we felt anything moving too far one way we'd said no, let's take a degree off and try and wrench it back. Because you don't want just two hours of people crying and you don't want two hours of, you know, blood spla�er - we've seen those before. I always think the most interes�ng pieces of art, when you sell somebody one thing and then when they open it, it's something else that they weren't expec�ng, and that's what we were trying to achieve. I think we could really easily have made it more of a horror film or easily have dampened down the horror, but the soul of the pieces that �ght rope down the middle, it just worked.

Definitely, it worked so well and really reminded me of Relic.

MS: We haven't watched that, but that was doing the rounds wasn't it? I've been meaning to watch that, I try and convince Sophie to watch horror films all the �me, but she wouldn't have it! SR: I get freaked out watching them!

So what would you say your highlights were from working on the project? I imagine screening it at London Film Fes�val last year was a big one.

MS: Yeah, that that was unbelievable, because for us it's like I showed Sophie the script for the first �me and then we blinked and then suddenly it's on at the London Film Fes�val. But there was something that was really profound about being out in the middle of the woods in the rain, and then Olive, who played amber, was lying on a gym mat with a fake bone s�cking out of her leg and blood everywhere. It was absolutely hammering it down with rain, and everybody's s�ll trying to figure out how to set the light up and I remember standing in the woods in the rain and thinking, this is so cool. This is so cool, as I remember this in my head when I wrote it. So every day was very rewarding in the respect that you see these things come to life, not necessarily how you envisage them. But you know, this the soul of the thing being the same. That was really rewarding. SR: Like you say, having someone like Olive or Nathan McMullen in it. Because it's very easy for us as we were always going to do it. We were always going to be in it for those reasons. But when you've got someone like Olive coming on set, and she's talking about the script and the character and what she thinks and you're like, "Oh, wow!" MS: Yeah. Nathan and I had known each other for years and I said to him, can you just please do me a massive favour and come and be in this film that we made? And I was sure he was going to say "absolutely not - no way!" But he was like yup and he hadn't even read the script first. He was just like, absolutely, whatever you need. And he came and just treated it so seriously, he really respected the piece and what we were trying to do. You know, a lot of actors, you'd have brought them onto a low budget film and then they would have looked down the nose at the whole thing and complained that the standards weren't the same as some big shiny produc�on. Nate and Olive, they are so professional and so wonderful to work with. It's so much easier to do your job when you're surrounded by wonderful people.

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Is this a world you'd poten�ally like to explore further at all, because there was sort of a cli�anger!

MS: Yeah. One of the things I said really early on is I've got an idea if we had a chance to tell the next part of that story I've definitely got an idea of where it will go. I think that if you write a cli�anger ending, and you've got no concept of what will happen next, then it's just dreadful. You've got to think well, if the camera didn't stop, what would happen next? And I came up with that idea fairly early on, but I can't say what it is because it would undermine the film. But yeah, there's definitely scope to kind of keep that world �cking over.

So are there any films you've been watching during lockdown at all?

MS: Sophie, despite her demeanor, has this real morbid fascina�on with like, horrifically violent crime sagas! SR: I didn't expect it, but I've got this real bloodlust for like mafia gangsters MS: Yeah it's really off brand. SR: So we're right in the middle of Gomorrah, the Italian crime drama, we just finished 000. MS: And I introduced her to the Sopranos. SR: That's where it started. And now we're in the Gomorrah and I'm deeply obsessed. I've really spiralled, and I've really taken it to heart to the point that I'm like, ordering the killings of characters. MS: In episode one she's like, "Oh, god, that's horrible." Then by like episode five, she's like, "he's got to go, he's a rat!" SR: Oh, yeah, I'm obsessed. MS: It's terrifying.

So what are you two working on next?

MS: I mean, staying alive! I mean, our thing is, you know, we set up Bone Garden, because we wanted to start telling stories that we just wish we could sit back and watch on the TV that existed already. So we're developing a couple of different things. And we've got a TV thing on the go and a film that we're developing. And then we're both obviously, working as actors to pay the bills. So we're just hoping to grow Bone Garden really, and keep pu�ng interes�ng spins on stories that will put bums in seats and people enjoy.