Westrup Opens The Gate

Matt Westrup's new short film, The Gate, has been a long time coming but is well worth the wait. It's a brillianly written, expertly executed and, frankly, heart-in-your-mouth scary tale of what the future might look like if certain, unregulated drugs were continually abused and how they might effect certain people. And if you needed a hint, the outcome aint good.

Above, you can see an extended clip of the film while below, Westrup, signed to London's Joyrider Films, talks us through the project and how it came together.

Where did the idea for The Gate come from?

I wanted to make a thriller/sci-fi film that didn’t follow a familiar formula of the genre and that felt very realistic. To sell the reality of any story that had creature effects in it, I decided that I needed something ‘real world’ to give the idea some level of credence. I saw an item on the news that talked about the huge increase in the numbers of drugs that were being sold through unregulated websites. There were, and still are, some really nasty chemicals being passed off as genuine pharmaceutical products. It seemed that there were plenty of people willing to buy from these sites too, which almost read like a work of fiction itself.

I then got to thinking that what if, a few years down the line, this problem had actually got worse and had become very sophisticated. What could it do to the body? That seemed like a good starting point and it had socio-political overtones which would add some realism to the film.

How long did it take for everything to fall into place and for you to start shooting?

It was a slow start because I wanted to write the story as well as direct it. I hadn’t written anything of a dramatic nature before, so it took a while to get something that I was happy with. We had the tiniest budget too, so it took a while to track down affordable locations and find crew that were willing to jump in for free. It probably took around 18 months just to get to the shooting date.

Why did you want to make this film?

Well, initially I wanted to make an unrestricted showpiece as a way to gain a wider range of commercial work. As I got into it, more ideas came to me and it wasn’t looking like 30 second commercial anymore, but a lot more like a short film. So in addition to attracting more commercial work I decided that I would also look to using it as a springboard into features. The experience has certainly been a worthwhile one in terms of honing my filmmaking skills in combining believable performances with high end VFX. I am very pleased with the way the filmed has turned out and already there has been a lot of interest and a few projects come in from agencies.

With the end information, it almost comes across as a commercial for drug legislation; was that a conscious decision?

Not at all actually. The idea behind the information cards at the end was just to add another dimension of reality to the film. Interestingly, lots of people have commented that its comes across as a public service announcement which didn’t even occur to me. Someone even thought it had been sponsored by a legitimate drugs company! In actual fact the information is either partly or completely made up. I can see how the film could come across as a moral crusade against illegal drug use but the truth is that all of the plot devices were there just to make the sci-fi elements more believable.

You did the effects yourself; is that where your background lays?
 
Yes, I’ve been doing visual effects for about 10 years now. I’m not sure the film would have got made if I’d had to get the VFX done by a house or freelancers. It would have been prohibitively expensive.

How did you come up with the design for the transformation and the eventual look of the ‘monsters’?
 
From the outset I wanted to make sure that the designs were not overtly ‘monster’ like. The film would have had a very different tone and would start to break the illusion of reality. I would even hesitate to call them ‘monsters’ in some ways because ultimately they are just hideously deformed human beings. For me, there is something disturbing about a human being that is visually a little ‘out of whack’. With both the transformation scenes and the final stage creatures I tried to imagine how the body might behave if the natural growth process of a human being went haywire and occurred within a matter of minutes rather than years.

There would be all sorts of resultant physical ‘errors’ in that process. Also, human beings all look very different and all have different genetic traits and it made sense to echo that with the designs which is why they each have a different look. This also meant that the audience didn’t keep seeing the same creature over and over again. There was, of course, a huge amount of creative license taken as well, but I hope I struck the right balance to make the designs plausible.

What was the hardest part of the project?
 
There were a few things that caused some problems. I also have a background in character design and so the creature design went pretty smoothly but the hardware design in the film proved to be a little more tricky. For the most part I had an strong notion of how things should look, but when I came to build it in the computer it didn’t always translate off the page as I would have liked and it meant that I was refining the design on the fly as I built it. That took a lot of time to bridge that gap.

Luckily I was able to enlist my brother for part of the design process. He has a strong background in architecture and he helped design the ‘clean room’ in the film, refining some of the details that helped cut down the time on the build.

The other tough part of the project was getting the right locations for the right price and getting the cast and crew to work for almost nothing at the same time. They had all kindly agreed to do the film on the condition that paid work didn’t come up for them and it took several attempts before we were in a position to shoot. They all did a great job and I wouldn’t have been able to do the film without them. My producer Spencer [Friend, at Joyrider] also worked his magic pulling in a lot of favours to bring this together. The film would have been nigh on impossible to make without Joyrider’s input.

What festivals are you entering The Gate into?

Most of the big ones. I’m hoping that it will win some festivals and be eligible for the short film category of the Oscars.

What are you working on next?

I hope some commercials as well as The Gate feature film. Our LA management has been showing the film around the Hollywood studios and the response has been unbelievable. So I’m hoping that we’ll be in production of the feature length version in the not too distant future.