Isolation is far from being a typical horror film. Writer/director Billy O'Brien and actor John Lynch talk to Lir Mac Cárthaigh about shooting for eight weeks on a freezing cold farm, flinging a fake cow over a wall, and singing to an audience of 900 hardcore Belgian horror fans.

Lir: Why did you choose to make a horror film – is it a genre that interests you both?

Billy: I am, though I'm more interested in science fiction and fantasy. It was because I grew up on a farm and I had all these memories, when I'd say to friends in pubs and that about helping my dad with calving, they were all horrified with it. So I realised that in this sort of modern urban life, people know all about the lions and David Attenborough and so on, but don't know a lot about where our food comes from - farms and all that. So people were really horrified, but I didn't know what to do with it. So then I had the idea that there's a difficult birth, and the reason for it is that there's a monster in the calf. It sort of came from that. And John, for you, I don't know if you've a big horror thing?

John: Yeah, I mean I remember when we met, we both liked the great horror films, the classic seventies horror films. And when I read Billy's script I was just so taken by how different it was for an Irish script, because you know the number of films I've done about the troubles, about the North, about the political situation. It was wonderful to see a filmmaker from Ireland trying something that was completely different, something that was really, really daring. And it was a great part, as well. It was a great psychological study. I'm from rural Ireland, in the North on the border, and I remember the importance of cattle. They were almost like a part of the family. So we connected on that level, and I just really liked Billy – we got on very, very well. And I liked the fact that there were so few characters, you know, that it was literally isolated, bleak, cold – very Irish. No money in sight!

You mentioned the classic horror films of the seventies. I always found the beginning of The Exorcist most disturbing, the scientific tests they carry out on Regan. And Isolation gave me that kind of clinical feeling throughout.

Billy: I think the subject matter is what dictated that. Because I grew up on a farm it was always going to have a documentary tinge to the whole farming side of it, because I was going to make it as close to my memories as possible. There were actually a couple of funny things because of that. Both John and Essie Davis spent a day with a vet, and the vet very handily updated them on modern veterinary practices, because what I had written in the script was taken from back in the seventies and eighties! That was quite funny. And with the cameraman, Robbie Ryan, we constantly tried to give it a kind of an autopsy feel, like a clinical close-up. The camera doesn't shy away from what they're doing when they're cutting up the calves. It gives it that kind of 'you're locked into it' feeling. There's a question with a horror film, because at some point you leave the science and the reality and you go into science fiction, into horror. And if you don't do that very well you'll have an audience that roars laughing at the film and at the concepts, because, after all, we're dealing with cows – not the world's most feared predators!

You mentioned Robbie Ryan, who was the DOP on The Tale of the Rat that Wrote; Isolation features a number of other crew members you've worked with before, such as production designer Paul Inglis – how important is it for you to work with the same crew?

Billy: It is very important to me. It's sort of evolved in that I was in college with Robbie in Dún Laoghaire, and we did commercials together in London, so I've constantly worked with him, he'd always be my first choice. And therefore there's a communication thing that I think John even noticed. Robbie was doing a shot of John pulling a lever, and John said 'you're just doing a close-up?'. Robbie said 'yeah, I am', and then, when they go for the take, Robbie says 'let's see what John's doing' and pulls out. So John said it's 'total football' with Robbie.

John: It is total football with Billy and Robbie in terms of camera: Where it's going to be, how close… But I love that.

Billy: It has an organic feel, and there's a communication there because we've worked for so long together. And Paul is similar; Paul's worked with Robbie for years now. I met him at the Royal College in London, and he's just great. As a designer he thinks very cinematically. You find on shoots that the designer and cinematographer clash a bit, because they've both got quite powerful jobs and so on. But on this one they knew exactly what they needed, which just made it a much easier process.

It's great design, everything looks so lived in - like Dan's kitchen.

Billy: Paul calls it our 'clutter style'. [To John] I remember bringing you around that kitchen on a dark night.

John: Billy took me around the whole farm at night before we started to get a sense of the atmosphere. And it was freezing! I just remember thinking: 'seven weeks, eight weeks – it's going to be cold!'

Billy: I asked Paul to get his art department guys out of the farm, and I think we turned off all the lights – we had torches. John and the whole cast and myself were walking along and joking, and we go into the first shed, and then the second one, and by the end there was this dead silence. I think we'd all just realised that it would be eight weeks in this environment.

There are five characters in basically one location, but there's a great feeling of back-story; you don't feel like the characters have just been 'born' at the beginning of the script.

Billy: It was very important for Dan to have roots and to have background, John and I discussed this. And I personally love films where they don't answer all the questions, where you're in the pub afterwards thinking 'I wonder what that person did before', because otherwise it feels like you're creating something artificial. So the whole back-story hinted at with Dan and Orla - it was very subtle, and a lot of it was just in John's eyes. You could see the pain, and that was great. I wanted the people to be real people, because in the horror genre – let's be honest – it's not known for its rounded characters, it's quite cardboard a lot of it. I felt that this had to work. Because you've got five people, it means they're on the screen for the whole film, and you have to be interested in them. You don't necessarily have to like everybody, but you have to be interested in them, because they're going to sustain you through the film.

John: We worked very hard on that; [to Billy] you were very tenacious about that, which I adored. When we met you said 'I want these characters to be real', and in the very first scene between Orla and Dan, it's almost like the camera just happens to be there.

Billy: It had a real… history. Their silence had a real history.

How important was the Irish setting? It's set on a farm, and obviously there are farms in other countries…

Billy: Oh yeah. I got asked by the financers early on if we could do this in Montana. A good question! Even as a more practical thing, because I live in England my producers did say 'is there any chance you'd think about doing it in the Isle of Man?' Because it is a financial business, and it's hard to raise the money. But, having lived in England, English towns and farms are completely different from Irish farms and towns. Everything is different, from the architecture to the people themselves. So I just felt that I would then be making a generic horror film that would mean nothing, because I'd have lost the feel for it. [In a Synge voice] 'I've lost the feel for the land!' I never thought I'd say that about Isolation!

The film is so dark, did that make life difficult on set?

Billy: I think the location brought the tone down in a good way – helped it – because it was a bitterly cold, smelly, sharp-edged place that we went back to day after day; stumbling around on the rocky floor, picking up breakfast in the dark, half six in the morning… sorry John, I'm bringing it all back to you. But that was a strength of it.

John: We were all in it together, that was a strong feeling – crew and cast.

Billy: Definitely. The crew worked so hard on it. You have a lot of people whose job is to wait around for things to go wrong, and for them it must have been absolute misery because to sit around in the freezing cold all day is not good. We did three days in Ardmore, in the studio, for the underground drainage scene. There was actually a drainage system on the farm, but we couldn't use it because of gas and so on. And when I was directing Ruth, we both realised that we were both enjoying the heat and everything so much that she was almost crawling through the drains with a big smile on her face. That just made me realise how good the location had been; you walked onto it and you were in the film.

John: Absolutely, it was another character. That farm you found was extraordinary.

In general, low-budget Irish films don't have a great track record of international success. Do you think the fact that it's a horror film will help?

Billy: It does help. Our battles with the financiers were that fact that - with a few notable exceptions -there's not a lot of Irish horror. But I think horror fans like horror films, and they don't really care where they're from. And we've had great reactions from them. What I've learned, and I think what any low-budget Irish director or UK director will find, is that it costs so much money to distribute a film. To put Isolation wide in the USA is probably about $20 million P&A, you know, that's crazy money! With horror at least you know that it will find its audience, whereas unfortunately other films that might not be in a genre won't find their audience. It's quite a tricky one.

I suppose it benefits more from word of mouth.

Billy: Horror fans are incredibly loyal – I've been to a lot of the horror festivals, and they're great fun. Everyone's so interested in the film, and in how you do everything, you know. They love it all. So they have their message boards and their websites and it bounces around the world that way, and it's great. And horror fans will track a film down; they will hunt you if they want to see it!

In terms of the technology – you're using animatronics, not digital. Does that make the performance easier?

Billy: My experience on The Tale of the Rat… was that for actors to interact with something – if you can see it, and it's in front of you, even if it's only a bit of fur - it helps everybody. It helps the camera and it helps myself, hopefully it helps the actors as well [John agrees]. Whereas, on a low budget when you're trying to do something digitally it's a huge risk because you've got to leave it until after the shoot, and you can never go back to the shoot. And I've seen low-budget films who go to effects houses. The effects houses have Mission Impossible 3 to deal with, so they're going to push the little film out because there's no money. So I didn't want to risk any of that. And I've used animatronics for years, I'm very comfortable with them… I mean, they never work! [All laugh] I think when the cow went over the wall, we'd about half an hour to get half that scene, and the cow is lying on its back. And it looks like a toy plastic cow that you've turned upside down, because it just wasn't designed to lie on its back. There were problems. And, whichever way you looked, the set was filled with cows that didn't look real! That was a nightmare.

John: And then you threw it at us, didn't you?

Billy: Yeah, we threw it over the wall. About ten people chucking a cow over a wall! That was one of the highlights.

We used real animals up to a point. In the calving scene, for example: When the cow is running around you can have a real cow, but obviously when the calf is coming out, because the real birth would be over in an hour, and it took us three days to shoot that scene. But I didn't know when we got to the editing whether it would look like a rubber cow or not. And the problem with that is that it doesn't matter what how good a performance John gives, if he's acting deadly serious about this, and it looks like a rubber cow, it's going to be laughable. My horror was worrying about that.

Because you know that the audience won't be looking at your performance, they'll be looking at the rubber cow.

Billy: Well, one of the great strengths is that people ask me how we did the monsters and all that, but nobody mentions about the cows, and I take that as a huge approval, because you would have asked about it if you'd noticed that they weren't real.

So have you had a positive response at the festivals?

Billy: Yeah. We went on general release in France in June; the critical response was just overwhelming. The French really took it to their hearts, and that was great. And all of the horror and fantasy festivals have just been wonderful. There's a big one in Brussels, and you get quite hardcore audiences. They go and see twenty films in a week, and all year long they're blogging and messaging about the upcoming films, so we were very nervous about it. And they make the directors sing when they introduce their film. We were panicking, because we only found out about this an hour before the screening - 900 Belgian horror fans screaming at you to sing! Apparently one director just stuffed his pockets full of sweets and chucked them at the audience. Luckily I brought Paul and my editor Justinian along, and Paul thought of that lovely lullaby in Jaws, Show Me the Way to Go Home. So we sang that and they cheered. And for the next two days, long-haired, bearded Belgian guys wearing death metal t-shirts were coming up to us going 'Jaws!'

Isolation is released on 29th September 2006.
See review here.