Mark Tonderai Interview

He’s been a DJ, an actor, a screenwriter and now he’s turned his hand to directing. Ex-Radio 1 DJ Mark Tonderai’s tense cat and mouse thriller, Hush, comes to DVD this week (see our DVD and Blu-ray reviews), in which Zakes has to try decide what to do after he sees a woman trapped in the back of a truck. It’s a great film, so we had a chat with Mark about the making of the film and what he’s got planned next.

So where did the idea for the film come from?
I used to do this job putting up posters [as the villain in the film does] and I had to drive along the M1 and I was thinking about this truck, and that’s where the first idea came from, but that’s not really what it’s all about. It’s about more than that, it’s about what you would do in that situation, there’s such grey areas now, and it’s about the lesser of two evils and whether you get involved. That’s what I thought would be quite interesting and that’s how it came about.

It is a fantastic hook, but was it difficult to spin that out into a full screenplay?
Not really, because I knew it how it would work as a character piece. It’s like Star Trek. If you took all the bells and whistles away it would still work as a character piece. I think that’s the mark of the quality of a film, and once you have those beats of the whole film, and how these characters will turn at different points in the film, once you have that throughline... And in a strange way it’s a sort of Road To Damascus film, and there’s even a scene where he’s crucified, although no one’s ever picked up on that, but when you know the arc’s going to work, even if it’s in a way the audience wouldn’t pick up, and shouldn’t pick up on, it comes together and it’s pretty easy, you know, if I’m honest. It’s putting those pieces together initially that’s the hard part. The third act was the one that did take a long time to get right, because it had to be bigger than everything else. Although now that I’m doing lots of other film, you realise how well thought out Hush was, and how the nuts and bolts of it really did work. I’m not saying it’s the greatest film in the world, don’t get me wrong, I know it has its flaws, but in terms of characterisation, I think we got it right. Even the phone, you could even write the film about the phone and what happens to it.

Yes, in fact that’s one of the things I thought was interesting about the film. Most films don’t seem to know what to do with mobile phones and just treat them as an annoyance, but Hush seemed to have it well thought out.
Yeah, although it’s one of the things one of the critics said that annoyed me. I don’t mind them being nasty, because that’s sort of their job in a way, but I don’t like it when they haven’t watched the film. One critic said, ‘Well, as per usual the car doesn’t start and the mobile phone battery goes dead.’ The mobile phone battery never goes dead, and also the car does start. The only time it doesn’t is right at the end, but we foreshadow it. Every time he tries to start it up it chokes, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere. That’s kind of frustrating when people don’t actually bother to watch it properly.

I think it’s probably to do with some people’s low expectations of this sort of genre, and if you go into this sort of film with an absolutely closed mind to it being anything more than that, you are going to have that reaction.
You’re absolutely right. One of the other things that came our way was that it was really unoriginal, and that got to me. There was an article the other week in the Guardian where Paul Schrader was talking about how our grandfathers by the age of 30 were exposed to around 15,000 of fiction, whereas now a 30-year-old man is exposed to 50,000 hours of fiction. And basically he was talking about, are we oversaturated with storylines? As soon as you say to someone, ‘This is a film about this’, they’ll say, ‘Well, that sounds a bit like that’, because really we’ve seen it all before. So you are going to see similarities between films, just by definition. But my point is that, yes there’s going to be similarities, yes there’ll be similar themes – like people say Hush is a little bit like Duel – well yes, but what makes it different is the characterisation and the people, and I’d never seen that before.

From the special features on the DVD, it sounds like the actual filming of Hush was more difficult than you’d expected.
Yeah, I had no idea. People tried to warn me, but you don’t get it. I had no idea. I’m going to be very careful about what I write from now on. Even something like putting the lights up, takes forever, and of course the time’s ticking. We shot it in August/September, so there was only about seven hours of night [the whole movie is set at night], so really after lighting, we only really had about four and a half hour of real shooting time. It was just an insane idea, really.

Was it difficult to find William Ash, who plays Zakes, because he’s got to carry such a lot of the film?
I think it was. And I feel really lucky with him. He’s great, well she’s great as well [Christine Bottomley, who plays Zakes’ girlfriend], but I got really lucky with him because he’s a really conscientious guy and he’s a really good guy. He’s a nice bloke, he works hard and he doesn’t have a lot of that crap that I think a lot of actors bring with them. It was hard finding the right guy, but I just knew, I just knew, and he went all the way, 100%.

Do you even think you’ll make a sequel to Hush?
No, no no. Did you see the deleted scenes?

Yes.
The original ending is in there. So the ending we have now shouldn’t have happened, it was just that when we saw the first cut, it wasn’t looking right, so I had to write something quickly. All I wanted with that was to make the point that evil reoccurs. I got that idea from this story about paedophiles in America, where they shut down this website called ‘God’, and six hours later in Britain it started up again, called ‘Son Of God’. I remember thinking this was horrific, and seemed to say something profound about evil, about how you stop something over there and it just pops up again somewhere else. But I wasn’t doing it as a sequel thing.

What’s likely to be next for you?
Well, that’s a good question. I’ve got about five films going at the moment, but I’m hoping it’s a film I’m doing with Pathe called Twelfth Prophet, set it New York. It’s about a cycle courier who wakes up one morning to deliver a whole load of packages, but then he gets a phone call saying, ‘Bring us the Twelfth Prophet or we’re going to detonates those packages, because they’re bombs’. So he thinks, ‘Jesus Christ, what are the Twelve Prophets?’, so he’s got work out what it is and who the bad guys are. That’s the one I’m hoping to do next. I’m on my third draft for that, with Pathe.

Thank you, Mark.

Hush is out to buy now on DVD and Blu-ray, through Optimum Releasing.