Bloodshot eye

Having won acclaim for his debut feature House Of America on the festival circuit back in 1997, the Cardiff-born director Marc Evans was to court controversy with his follow-up feature Resurrection Man, a notorious Tarantino-inspired take on the Shankill Butcher killings. Since then, he has worked predominantly in television, most notably on a documentary about the Manic Street Preachers entitled Libraries Gave Us Power, and on the first ever Welsh language sci-fi comedy Ymadawiad Arthur.

Hotpress caught up with Evans on the eve of the release of his latest cinematic venture My Little Eye, a bloodcurdling Big Brother-inspired horror flick which sees five young people holed up in an isolated house in pursuit of fame and a $1million reward for the last one standing. It soon transpires that some of the contestants are willing to go to greater lengths than others, and thus begins a series of mind-bendingly horrific and sadistic actions. Gratuitous and unpleasant, then, but My Little Eye certainly delivers on the fear-factor scale.
Evans denies that Big Brother directly influenced the genesis of My Little Eye.

“Big Brother, at the time the thing was being written, didn’t exist yet as a huge phenomenon. The plans for it were well underway and we were aware of it, and by the time we were trying to sell [our film] as an idea, Big Brother was already huge news. So it had a parallel existence, definitely, though it didn’t directly influence the film at all.”

What’s his attitude to reality TV?

“I haven’t got a big axe to grind with it, it’s a pretty straightforward deal between the companies who run it, the people who compete and the audience, we’re all complicit in it. I hit a stage where I’d watched the whole Big Brother series and became very drawn into it, but I didn’t bother to vote so I could claim I wasn’t getting involved. I had a smoking-but-not-inhaling attitude towards it. I just think that with reality TV, unlike most dramas, you really don’t know what’s going to happen, and although sometimes it’s like watching paint dry, there’s a real excitement and allure about watching people in a real situation. And the phenomenon has, subtly, become increasingly cruel. People want more, they want blood. We knew when we were making the film that we were tapping into something that already existed.”

Evans denies any intent to shock:

“We just wanted to scare people, to be honest. Resurrection Man got a lot of flak for the violence in it, and I think it wasn’t so much the content or the narrative, it was the tone. There isn’t even all that much blood on display. I know for a fact that if it starts making money, then there’ll be a demand for My Little Eye 2, though I won’t be making it.”

How did he respond to the fallout over Resurrection Man?

“It was funny, most of it. Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard went nuts, hated the film. We had to distance ourselves from the real events ’cause it wasn’t a documentary about the Shankill Butchers, but we still got criticism for being complicit in the phenomenon, everything short of being accessories to the murders in the first place. I think it was a very responsible film, but the reaction got a bit out of control, we got a bit of a kicking. We were aware of the pitfalls and I thought we avoided them, but that’s for others to judge. Alexander Walker – fuckin’ hell – said it was a pro-IRA film, his reasoning being that it showed such a degree of violence on the loyalist side that it would encourage you to support the nationalist side. The usual dazzling unionist logic. He’s a posh Prod, which probably explains it. Some of the criticism was hilarious when I look back– it was only a film. What was unreal was that a small piece appeared in the Guardian about the outrage in loyalist circles, some of the boys apparently were really upset that there was any suggestion that Lenny Murphy might have taken drugs or had any sexual ambiguities at all. Sure enough, three articles later, one of your tabloids here had the headline ‘LENNY WAS GAY, SAYS NEW FILM’. Beyond the whole idea that somehow being gay was a slur on a fucking mass murderer, it was also very incendiary and could have led to a lot of trouble.”