Entering the Triangle

Using an old temporal trick borrowed from sci-fi scribe Robert Heinlein, Triangle places its Final Girl – the excellent Melissa George – in a nasty little loop somewhere along the space-time continuum. (Imagine The Shining meets Groundhog Day and you’re almost there.) The desperate mother of an autistic boy, Ms. George is increasingly distressed when a pleasure sail somewhere north of the Bermuda Triangle goes terribly wrong. A cruise liner comes to the rescue, but when our heroine and her chums find nobody else onboard, she soon realises that all is not well.
Fiendishly entertaining, you’ll never guess the killer twists. We caught up with the director to find out just how he pulled it off...
HP – How much of the film was inspired by the Robert Heinlein shorts, By His Bootstraps and All You Zombies?
CS – Well, it’s strange. I hadn’t read either of those stories. I was mainly thinking about Dead of Night. It was only after I had written the script somebody pointed out the similarities. I had seen an episode of The Twilight Zone based on one of them. And that had stuck in my head. So I came to that material in a roundabout way.
HP – When you’re making a film wherein you see the same scene over, but through different perspectives, I imagine it takes a lot of time to ensure it all fits together. How long did that process take?
CS – Ages! The initial idea seemed so simple. It was that classic Twilight Zone thing of running into yourself. But when I started to write it, it got very complicated. When a movie presents you with a puzzle, you want it to remain a puzzle until the end. But you don’t want people sitting there wondering what it going on. Getting that balance right was tricky. You don’t want everything to be about the twist. You need some progression and some sort of emotional satisfaction as well.
HP – Without giving too much away, there’s a lot of buzz about one particular shot with corpses and seagulls. How pleased were you with yourself over that one?
CS – Oh very. It was one of those things you think of and you immediately phone someone to tell them about it. What if she walks onto the deck and sees this? I couldn’t wait to shoot it.
HP – Not that we’re dumping on Creep or Severance, but is this your first grown-up horror?
CS – Definitely. This is certainly the most psychological film I’ve done. I kept coming back to The Shining as a model. I mean, the construction of that film is extraordinary. All the small things like the sound of the tricycle turned up in the mix, are the things that make The Shining so effective. So this film is not about gore or jumping out of your seat. It’s more about the things that are going on in your head.
HP – Would we be right in saying you spent your formative years around video stores?
CS – Absolutely right. Before the British press got really hysterical that was how teenagers spent their time. Until all that stuff about video nasties kicked off and ruined things for everybody, I was there watching everything I could get my hands on. I even worked in a video store in New York for a while. I was so happy there I nearly stayed on even though I had just made Creep at the time.
HP – Tell us a little about your next film, Black Death, which sounds fantastic.
CS – It was great to work on. It’s Sean Bean and a group of knights riding into a medieval English village to find out why they have not been touched by the bubonic plague. I’ve made features before but you never really feel like a real director until you turn up for work and you’re surrounded by maggoty peasants and boils.
- Triangle is released October 16th –