An Interview with Film Director, Sam Clemens

Writer/director Sam Clemens is the son of Brian Clemens, the late, acclaimed writer director who worked on The Avengers, and co-created The New Avengers and The Professionals. Sam talks to Roger Crow about his new film, The Drowned.

Sam, tell us about The Drowned. How easy or difficult was it to get that off the ground?
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do because it was born out of a desire to make a feature film, and I felt like me and my brother for a long time… my brother George, who I have a company with, Take the Shot Films, along with my business partner, Agam Jain and Fernando Ruiz as cinematographer, Edward White, the composer. I really wanted to make a feature and I got tired of waiting around for it to kind of materialise and, you know, waiting for the perfect time or the right budget or whatever.

And we were starting pre-production for the film that I’m about to do next, On the Edge of Darkness. We were starting to look at that because that was something we were reccing up and down the country because we thought… because it’s actually set in Provence, but at the time it was a COVID problem where we couldn’t… we thought, well, we’re never going to be able to leave the UK. So let’s see if we can do it here and maybe we’ll change it from Provence to Northern France and, you know, it might look a bit like Northern France here.

We went up and down the country and it just… we couldn’t find what we wanted and then we started getting places and it kind of basically, it fell apart. I booked off a lot of time to try and make it. And I’d said ‘no’ to other work because of it. And suddenly I was left with this huge gaping sort of work hole, and ‘What am I going to do?’

Thankfully Sam’s partner, and The Drowned star Lara Lemon, suggested he should write something else.
And I was like, yeah, ‘I’ll just write something else’. It’s not like it took me the whole of COVID to do; to adapt that film On the Edge of Darkness. And I did another film which we’re going to make after this. But I just thought, ‘Do you know what? You’re waiting for the perfect time and everything. And an idea hit me. I thought, ‘Well, if we do something in the sort of thriller horror genre, that would probably be pretty good. We had made a quite successful short film, horror short film called Surgery, which did very well on the festival circuit. And I’m very proud of Surgery. It’s a very rough film in terms of it’s a hard watch. There’s a payoff to it, but it’s a hard watch.

And I think that’s why it did well, because it’s got a good twist and all those things. And it was dad’s last idea before he passed away. So we were honouring him to do that. But I didn’t really want to be known for that level of gratuity or violence, even though it’s in your head more than when we see it. But I just thought I wanted to move away, maybe more into a sort of thrillery place possibly and not so gratuitous. I don’t know if that’s a long-winded answer, but the idea really hit me when I was like, ‘Well, let’s work a bit like how dad used to work when he started with the Danziger brothers, where they used to buy sets from old movies. He’d have the Old Bailey, a Victorian street and a pub, and he’d have to write a movie around those three locations. I just thought, ‘Well, if I can do that, then I know how I’m going to shoot it. I can probably control the budget a little more.

One of the solutions to the key location was provided by The Drowned actor Dominic Vulliamy
His family owned a part of this house, and he explained to us socially that it frightened him. Being a kid being at his house, he thought it was terrifying and creepy, and I was like, ‘Great, where is it? Let’s go and have a look’.

I had the kernels of an idea of what it could start with, and I literally called up the person that owned the house, and I went and reccied it the next day in Suffolk. Just because I thought, ‘Well, we haven’t got time to wait around’. I went and looked at it, and then I came back and I had the idea, and I started writing the film around the location, and actually, we just booked it because it was to shoot, and we only had a seven-day window to shoot it, which is extraordinarily difficult.

I knew that we were going to be doing over probably 12-hour days on some days, because just the sheer time to do it in. So I needed people that knew that, understood that, and were okay to jump into the trenches together for that short period of time.

‘The Drowned’ is out now on all major streaming platforms.
To hear the full interview, go to shows.acast.com

Roger Crow( Writer )

Adopted Yorkshireman Roger Crow developed a passion for film and TV in the 1970s and 1980s. He has been a published film and TV reviewer since the 1990s; a world travel and restaurant critic since the noughties, and for the past decade has assessed the pros and cons of live gigs and theatre productions around the UK. His ideal day would involve reviewing a performance of Bat Out of Hell, followed by a Pad Thai while being serenaded by Texas on a cruise around Europe.
crowsfeat.com; nostalgiahhh film podcast

You do not have any posts.