Amy & IOne dinner. One take.

Yes, it was always meant to be a one-shot film. Around the time of On Air — a previous short of mine — we were at an award show at Pinewood Studios in London, and an actor from my film was nominated alongside Stephen Graham for Boiling Point, which was shot in one single take. From there something started brewing, and I thought, “It would be cool to do a film in a single take.”

The idea itself started when I was working on a previous film, talking to my producer in a café in the middle of Amsterdam. I saw a bartender in silhouette because the bar was lit up behind him, and I thought, “This would be a cool shot to make a film with.” But I didn’t know the story. It could have been a slice-of-life film, which I like, but for a very short film that could end up forgettable. We thought, “We need to spice it up a bit.”

It felt very much like the opening of Pulp Fiction. The next step was, “What if there’s a bag, and you can’t quite tell what’s in it?” From there we started working on the script and moulding it.

The first idea was to shoot in a skyline restaurant. We thought it would be easy, but it was around the time of Covid and a lot of restaurants were closed. The biggest things when you’re making a film are finding money, and then finding a good location you can shoot for free. We got to shoot ours for free, and when we arrived we thought, “This is fantastic.” It had the whole atmosphere — you don’t have to do much production design. It was such luck, and it changed the whole look of the film for the best.

Yeah, I think so. It’s also what I look for in horror right now. Take Weapons — if you remove the horror part, it’s a very good drama film on its own. There’s a lot in that movie where you go away from the horror for a long time, and it’s still good. I really like that. A long time ago I was critical of films that were just scares with empty characters. It has to stand on its own and pick up the drama.

You need to care — and in a short film you need to care in a very short time. It’s not only about scaring people with jump scares; those are fun, but I also want to make an impact. In the past I think people were mostly drawn to the entity in the film and not the character. If you make a film, make sure people care about the characters, and it should work even without the horror element. That’s what I tried to do.

All the films I make now are totally different from each other, but they all have this dark silver lining — this “there’s no hope” feeling that still makes you want to think about it.

For this film, I’m not sure exactly. I started watching certain one-shot films — there’s a German film called Victoria, a single two-hour take without cheating, and it’s great. It doesn’t look like my film, but I wanted to see how those films work. I’ve been influenced by so many different films. For my first film, On Air, I was very influenced by Talk Radio. Around then I saw Drive and liked the style — so everything is bits and pieces of homage to other filmmakers, but I think it works like that for everyone.

It started with Nicolas Winding Refn. And a film I’ve watched many times is Possession — Sam Neill is amazing in it; it’s sad to hear about him. I’m influenced by so many filmmakers, and Refn is one of them, though he has some films I don’t like too.

Have you seen the Pusher trilogy? It’s funny how his style changes — how he made films in Denmark and then in America. In Denmark everything looked so raw, and now it’s all so neon and stylistic. So different.

I started out acting, because I wanted to be an actor — but I found out I wasn’t very good at it. So I started making films, and found I liked that more. But I know what I want from actors. I talk with them a lot, and I’m very confident about what I want. The guy who played the boyfriend is a friend of mine, so he knows how my brain works — that’s very easy.

Actors are fine, but they can get too busy with what’s on the paper, sticking to exactly what the script says. I tell them: if you say a sentence a bit differently — whatever feels natural for that character — it doesn’t matter if you miss out a certain word.

You can’t really stop every take if a line’s wrong, so you have to rehearse a lot. Finding the location made me happy, but this was the next challenge. We rehearsed on three separate dates. I wanted to say as much as I could beforehand, because during shooting there’s no time to discuss everything — we had to do it all in one take, in one day, because there was no money.

With the location we had, we couldn’t practise with all the equipment first. We had to decide on the spot how we were going to film it, and the timing. Then we rehearsed and rehearsed, and started to record. We only had four whole takes, and the one we used was the final take. We had to do a lot in very little time. If things weren’t perfect — it is what it is.

It was stressful, but I had a lot of trust in the people I worked with. You don’t want people who say yes to everything; you want a bit of pushback from your crew — someone who says, “Actually, I think this is better.” I’m just an idiot with an idea. You want to find people who are very good at their jobs and as passionate about it as you are.

I’m working on a new short film with the writer of Heresy, and with the same actor from Amy & I and On Air. Hopefully we’ll shoot it this year. It’s going to be a bit of a David Lynch — a psychological horror film. It depends on landing a location and funding, but we already have most of the team.