As always you can listen to an MP3 of the interview by clicking here.

Question: Where did the idea originate from? How did you get involved?

Christopher Smith: The original writer, James Moran, he came up with the idea. He was traveling home from work one day on the tube and there was a bunch of stockbrokers all around him drunk on a Friday night and he got home and he was on the tube and he said, ‘I’m gonna go home and kill me some yuppies.’ That’s what he said. He literally got home and started writing and he kinda came up with this whole thing about six months later. It was his first ever script actually and he immediately got picked up for it and he kind of thought, ‘Hey! This is easy. Just write a script and then people give you loads of money for it.’ He’s now having to forget like everyone else and kind of grasp so [laughs] he had a very lucky run there and then I read the script and I just loved the fact that it was kind of playful. I knew that it was something that I could push into a kind of political vibe which is something I wanted really to have a good go at and I thought I could do something fun and I wanted to get into comedy. I went to the meeting actually for the movie. They’d come to me because they had a funny script and they said they wanted to make it twisted and scary. I sat there and I came up with the idea on the spot. I came up with the idea. I was bored in the meeting. I was listening to them talk and I started to think about this Marie Antoinette idea that I’d had and I came up with this whole scene and I told them the scene. I said ‘I just came up with this idea actually.’ I told them this and the guy looked at me and thought ‘Alright, you’ve got the job.’ It was that easy and I made the film nine months later.

You said something shocking at the beginning of your story which is that English people like to drink.

Laura Harris: {Laughs] What?!

Christopher Smith: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s what I said.

That’s alarming to me. I’ve never heard that.

Christopher Smith: Yeah, we drink a lot. She came to my wedding in the summer and everyone would start drinking at 11.

Laura Harris: I couldn’t believe it.  I took a nap in the graveyard.

Christopher Smith: She had to sleep in the afternoon.We just drank all day. [to Laura Harris] Anyway, how did you get involved?

Laura Harris: [Laughs]  I just read the script and loved it. I loved so many things about it, the political side, although I just got asked a lot of hard questions about capitalism and stuff and I’m like Jesus, I’m an actress. I cannot answer these questions.

Christopher Smith: Did you pull the actor’s card.

Laura Harris: No, I wish I had actually. I was just trying to think about it. But I enjoyed that discussion and also the hookers really hooked me in at the end. I keep saying that but I just loved them so much and that they lived.

Christopher Smith: Laura’s was a strange casting for us because it was kind of the first person of any person we went to for the role. I’d watched her on ‘24’ and thought she was great and really loved the whole story line. I much preferred Season 2 to 1 because of that. And I go into the office and Bill who is the assistant to the office, you know he’s got a bit of a soft spot for Laura, he was at all the conventions, he does all the… he writes to her all the time, he’s a bit of a stalker, he’s really into debt like me, and he said, ‘She’d be great’ and I said ‘I think she’d be great’ and the casting agent said ‘The first name on the list for casting was Laura Harris,’ and that was it.

Laura Harris: It was lucky.

Christopher Smith: It was one of those lucky kind of things for both of us.

This film really knows its stuff about all the horror movie clichés from the 80s. How prevalent was that genre in England?

Christopher Smith: So much. So much. Not just for my kind of morbid taste but for a whole generation of kids that grew up in the early 80s going to parties which were video parties where this was before the video nasties bill was passed. So from about 80 to 83 when I was in the first three years of secondary school, we used to have parties at our school where we’d all go around someone’s house and you’d all get into a terrible, horrendous boys and girls and we’d all watch “I Spit on Your Grave” or “Nightmares in a Cabbage Brain” and stuff like that and then I would feed my habit by watching three more with my friends on a Saturday every day. It was a whole kind of thing where you’d all get drunk on a bottle of cider and it was a birthday party. So yeah, those movies from the 70’s were huge in England in that period, those kind of 70s and early 80s movies.

Why do you think no one before this ever thought let’s try it with adults?

Christopher Smith: To put older people in the movie? I know it’s kind of… we realized that at the time. You know I said to someone the other day that these group of misfits are about as good looking a crowd as you can get out of England. That’s kind of like I remember I heard Ricky Gervais when he collected his award at the Grammy’s and you see all these oddballs all kind of stand there. You know that’s our six foot kind of healthy young guys. I knew straight away that we couldn’t play the cynical kind of … we couldn’t have everybody being super young in the movie because of what they’re supposed to do for a living. I say there not a bad looking bunch. We’ve managed to get a few lookers in there.

What made you think of Tim McInnerny? He’s the antithesis of most of his characters.

Christopher Smith: I love Tim. Why is he not in more stuff? I looked through the list. I didn’t remember his name. And then I went boom, done, that was it. He’s so good and I think Blackadder, he’s exceptional in Blackadder and I think that hopefully this will put him back into the kind of … because he was starting to do kind of more seriousy stuff and I think he’s so good when he’s got a tongue planted in his cheek. There’s no one better. And then the other characters, we tried to cast in an even way in a sense so that no actor was clearly the one who was going to make it. We wanted them all to be of a similar sort of level. The casting worked in a number of ways. I mean I think that they’re great on screen as a group. But you’ve also got the kind of… The politics that you seen on the screen amongst the characters slightly exists in real life in a way because you’ve got someone like Tim McInnerny who used to be doing Shakespeare and doing all that sort of stuff and then you have the next batch coming through which is Toby Stevens so those two have kind of got a kind of professional kind of thing amongst them which kind of fits in for their characters as well. Someone like Tim and Toby shouldn’t be with Danny Dyer ever. Now I think about it, I was going to have a line where he says, ‘I don’t even work for the company. I just put up the stands at the trade center.’ I was going to put that in because that’s what he’s supposed to do but then I thought I was being kind of judgmental in a class way. That’s kind of a classist thing because he’s come up from a poor area. He can’t have a job in a weapons company.

Laura, you must know that all of the movies have the girl who perseveres and triumphs in the end. How did you feel about taking on that sort of character?

Laura Harris: I was just glad not to be the bad person, you know, like to turn into the person…like to not be the terrorist or the alien or whatever. This seems to happen with me very commonly so it was nice to just sort of plow through and wake up still alive.

You got to be pretty kick ass there which is very different.

Laura Harris: Yeah, he [meaning Christopher Smith] let me. I don’t know, people put guns in my hands a lot but actually like physically fight was new.

Did you have to do any training, any extra training, workouts, anything like that?

Laura Harris: No, I should have but I didn’t.

This was a very physically demanding shoot.

Laura Harris: It was and I didn’t realize. Now I know for me anyway. I mean here they will maybe set up a trainer or something like that because you might have to have a certain physical …

Christopher Smith: [interrupting] It was our fault.

Laura Harris: No, I don’t mean it that way. I mean that you might have to live up to some sort of physical standard that you don’t … but there it’s just like do a good job. You know like whatever you come with you come with and I mean that as a compliment to your system. [Laughs]

Christopher Smith: Well it goes both ways. You might say just come as you are and you might get an actress who’s been eating those burgers. ‘Just get the trainer, get the trainer.’ [Laughs] ‘Someone tell her. I’m not going to tell her.’ So we were lucky. It was a lucky accident that you turned out okay.

How did you come to pick Ed Wild for your cinematographer? That was a shocker. He’s phenomenal.

Laura Harris: The mere mention of his wonderful fabulousness.

Christopher Smith: Did you like him? Oh good, oh good. Well we weirdly…what happened was we had another guy, a Polish DOP, whose wife died when we were in pre-production which was terrible so he pulled out. Then you get these guys who’ve done lots of horror and he’s kind of strange and they’re all kind of ‘I’ll do it my way, I’ll do it my way.’ I looked through some show reels and this guy did beautiful. He knows how to make people look pretty as well so I was kind of like…so I just said okay and we get him in and he walks in and he looks like a DOP. He’s kind of big and tall and handsome. He’s a rower. He used to be an Olympic rower.

Laura Harris: My heart is racing.

Christopher Smith: He comes up to Laura all day with his light meter and she’s like ‘ahhh’ you know. And I just thought, you know what, let’s just go for it because it was just an instinct that I liked his stuff and I think that he did a good job and he’s [inaudible] and he’s doing some other stuff next.

Can you talk about something that’s very important in a film like this: the kills? How close to the script was it? How much did you embellish?

Christopher Smith: Everything that was on the script was very much closely to what was on the script really. What’s on the page is what we had on the script but I kind of think little touches got added to it. I mean, for example, the leg trap scene. In the script was he gets his leg taken off by a trap and when I looked at it I thought that’s not going to take anyone’s leg off. So I just came up with a whole thing of clang, clang, clang, clang, clang and eventually it came off because I didn’t want the audience to not believe it came off. And we got one of the funniest scenes in the film because of it. And then obviously the two boulders sequences with Laura. She’s meant to kill someone. What I love is when I watch it with an audience, everyone claps, ‘Go girl! You’ve done it!’ And then she goes off and gets another big boulder and you get a second laugh and what you actually get is a third laugh because she then can’t pick it up. So that not being able to pick up the heavy one came from me watching Laura off set just seeing which boulder she could actually lift. And I went, ‘That’s f*cking awesome. What? What? What? You can’t pick one up so you pick another one up!’

So have you had to trim anything for the American release?

Christopher Smith: No, not at all, just the website, just where they cut the website. That’s all. The website didn’t get an ‘R’ rating because they said it was… it had all blood spurting off. [to Laura] Even your face has been gotten rid of all the blood on it on the website.

Laura Harris: You’re kidding?

Christopher Smith: It’s really strange because I know the internet and you can get a lot of dirty stuff on the internet. So it’s quite weird you can’t see her head coming off. [Laughs]

Laura Harris: That’s wild!

Christopher Smith: It’s really nuts, isn’t it?

You look very pristine on the film’s website.

Laura Harris: Really?

Christopher Smith: Yeah, you do.

Laura Harris: I haven’t seen it yet. [Laughs]

Christopher Smith: So no, not at all. See I didn’t see the funniest movie as violent. It’s weird because I don’t think it’s mean spirited violence. So that’s why I’m surprised when people find it really gory because I don’t really see it.

Laura Harris: I feel the same way. I’m shocked.

Christopher Smith: Yeah, I am too. ‘It’s really violent!’ ‘Is it?’

Would you describe it more as a horrific comedy or a comedic horror film?

Christopher Smith: Well I used to say that it’s right down the middle and I don’t think it is actually. The more I look at it and that’s how I intended it to be but when people hear comedy, they think of comedy and it’s not. It’s just a horror movie that’s got some really funny characters and some funny bits and I think that’s the way it’s best to say that it is. So I think that’s where it is really. It’s not right on the middle of the line. It’s very much a horror movie I think. So yeah, a horrific comedy. Someone said we should have called it ‘Scary Ha Ha.’ [Laugh] That would have just summed the whole movie up. No critic could’ve touched it. That’s it. That’s what it is. ‘Scary Ha Ha.’ [Laughs] Just throw it away.

How did you come up with the combo of Stephen Noble and Jan Sewell to do the costuming and the make-up? Jan is always exemplary.

Christopher Smith: I had Jan from before. I just came across Jan through a friend and we had her for “Creep” and I gave her much more time on this. You need more because her work is so good. And then Stephen was like Black Adder just a lucky accident and I’ll always stay with him there. I think he did a very simple but very good job of how they all look. Their clothes are never a caricature, always perfect. If you look up close, he’s got an Alsatian tie with all Alsatian dogs on it.

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