By Leo Collis.
Filmmaker Owen discusses gaining some momentum after a decade of grind.
A lot can happen in 11 years. In fact, the last five years alone feels like two lifetimes.
It was back in 2012, when I was a bright-eyed intern for Film International, that I first spoke to director Russell Owen. At the time, he was promoting his first feature film Welcome to Majority, an ethereal, purgatorial thriller contemplating life, death and religion.
Since then, Owen has directed two further feature-length films—including the critically acclaimed psychological thriller Shepherd starring Tom Hughes and Kate Dickie—in addition to three shorts, all while working on the commercial arm of his filmmaking career.
Owen got in touch to see what had changed in the last decade after spotting a copy of Film International at BFI Southbank in London. I had been watching his recent success from afar, so I jumped at the opportunity to catch up and find out what life has been like for a director and writer I had been fascinated by.
“I keep forgetting I made that film,” Owen says of Welcome to the Majority after I mention the last time we spoke. “As soon as I did it, it went out to festivals. It did quite well, it won a few awards, although it never got distribution. I started getting some corporate work after that, which then led to doing commercials.”
It might not have been his dream, but directing advertising campaigns for brands like American Express, L’Oreal and Armani paid the bills and allowed him to travel the world. In a cut-throat and financially draining filmmaking industry, sometimes you just have to take the jobs where you find them.
Between 2016 and 2019, though, an unexpected opportunity presented itself.
“I’d made a short film after Welcome to the Majority called Occam’s Razor. It was a really small but beautiful film written by artist Nihaarika Negi. The guy who produced that got in touch saying, ‘There’s a zombie film that needs a director. Do you want to do it?'”
That film would be Inmate Zero. “I’m not a big zombie or B-movie fan,” Owen says, “and it was a really, really bad script.” But with the film weeks from going into production and still without a cast, and Owen looking to get back into making feature films, there was a deal to be made.
“Someone told me, ‘You won’t have a career if you do this movie,’ but I said, ‘Well, I don’t have a career.’ So I offered to do the movie for free if the production company agreed that the next film they make is one that I have written.”
That movie would be 2021’s Shepherd, a sparse, palpitation-inducing psychological thriller set in the Scottish Highlands.
After Eric Black goes through a traumatic incident resulting in the death of his wife and unborn child, he essentially shuts himself off from the world, leading him to accept a job as a shepherd on a remote island. With his life falling apart and a mysterious threat from an ominous supernatural presence, Eric desperately tries to cling to his sanity in the face of crippling grief, guilt and terror.
It’s a film about a man who has got severe depression. The only way to illustrate that is to put him in a horror film.”
“It’s a film about a man who has got severe depression. The only way to illustrate that is to put him in a horror film. He’s living the horror film rather than it being a horror film. The set design is a little more theatrical, and the shots are more of a heightened reality. You largely see things from his perspective.”
“It’s an atmospheric psychological thriller. It’s made for the big screen, but if that’s not possible, you should watch it with an open mind, in a dark room, preferably alone.”
Shepherd was written by Owen way before Welcome to the Majority. But even after finally beginning his long-gestating project, it would soon be hit with further delays.
“The filming got broken up with the producers running out of money and COVID-19,” Owen says. “It was just really bitty and complicated. The producers wanted to just scrap it. Luckily my contract gave me the copyright. Again, I didn’t get paid. It was really difficult. I’ve lost about ten years of my life in stress with finishing it.”
But even with all that stress, Shepherd is a triumph. So much so that renowned film critic Mark Kermode named it his Film of the Week, and it was New York Times’ Critics’ Pick.
After gaining some momentum after a decade of grind, what does Owen expect to tell me should we catch up again in 11 years’ time?
“I first started working on Shepherd in 2003, and since then I’ve written another 12 films, one of which is hopefully going to go into production at the end of this year. So, I’m hoping, if we speak in another 11 years, I’ll have at least four or five actually done.”
In fact, progressive movements in the film industry in the last decade may have informed his first steps during the next.
“Funnily enough, a lot of the films I’ve written have got female leads. When I first went to Marché du Film in 2004 or 2005, I remember going around to pitch films and being told, ‘Oh, nobody watches films with women in the lead. They won’t sell.’
“And the characters are usually a bit older, so I was being asked, ‘Can you make them much younger? Could there be a guy involved? Is there a love interest?’ Whereas now, people are much more keen and much more open to films with female leads. I couldn’t believe back then the very blatant, in-your-face attitudes toward women. So hopefully a lot more of those films I’ll be able to make.”
As for the here and now, though, there is a new film in the pipeline. With the ongoing WGA writer’s strike, Owen can’t divulge a lot of the details, but an announcement should be on the way in the coming months. He is also launching Kindred Pictures—a new company focused on the marketing and distribution of other people’s films, as well as producing his own—with producer and marketer Clare Bateman-King.
Indeed, it’s an exciting time for Owen. And it seems the wait between passion projects will be a little bit shorter this time around.
Shepherd is available on Amazon, iTunes and most video-on-demand streaming services in the UK. U.S. audiences can catch it on Roku.
Leo Collis is a Film, Media and Journalism graduate from The University of Stirling.