Alice Lowe on budget movies, gore effects, David Lynch and Rogue Trooper

Alice Lowe is one of the key auteur filmmakers working in the UK today. You just might not have clocked that immediately after seeing her murderous psychopath comedies.

Sightseers (2012) and Prevenge (2016) are a couple of brilliant low-budget films she wrote, directed and starred in. This isn’t ponderous awards-bait stuff — with a hilariously maniacal streak, you can’t mistake her movies for anyone else's.

Lowe is back with something lighter in Timestalker, a reincarnation comedy that recently landed on NOW TV. But this being an Alice Lowe film, heads are going to roll and there’s still a lot of darkness and substance behind the bright costumes.

The lead character Agnes, played by Lowe, is a stalker, for instance — one we get to see reborn throughout history to continually make the same mistakes.

UK comedy legends Nick Frost and Kate Dickie also star, alongside Aneurin Barnard. He’s the lead in Duncan Jones’s upcoming adaptation of 2000AD's Rogue Trooper comic, supposedly still due some time later this year.

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We had a chance to talk to Lowe in the wake of Timestalker’s streaming release, which is also delightfully snappy at around 90 minutes. Here’s what she said...

Shortlist: How would you get someone scrolling through NOW TV to pick Timestalker over, say, Bad Boys: Ride or Die?

Alice Lowe: It’s a new year, it’s time for something new. Don’t watch Bad Boys, watch this.

It’s colourful. It’s got funny people in it who are good actors. It’s just something different, a palate cleanser. After Christmas, you get saturated with Christmas films and big movies releases. And I think from what I've heard, people really enjoy watching it at home.

You watch it more than once as well, because it's about reincarnation. So you can go back to the beginning. You can watch it backwards, if you like.

SL: In other interviews you’ve compared it to Back to the Future…

AL: Well, I’m blowing my own trumpet a little bit there, but that’s the aim.

SL: But Timestalker has a bit more of a challenging structure than some might guess.

AL: My whole thing is people are so savvy with stuff now. They know film structure back to front, and people's attention hops around. And in a way, this is a sort of ADHD film. It hops around in time. I don't think it is that hard to follow the story once you know it's about reincarnation. It's more about just going on that ride.

It seems high concept.

I mean, if you explain Back to the Future to someone — it’s about this guy who goes back in time and his mum falls in love with him, or whatever. Hearing that you'd be like, wow, that sounds pretty heavy. But it's not. It's done with a light touch. And I think that was what I wanted.

I missed those sort of high-concept, but Sunday afternoon, movies that are pleasurable. They've got a high concept, but they're done with a light touch, so they're enjoyable and just fun.

SL: Your films, while funny, feature darkness, sadness, some horror and a splash of blood. Is that something you know is going to be in there from day one?

AL: It’s always a challenge of how to you put all these tones together. It’s something in TV, having worked in TV, you're told you can't do. You can't mix tones. And I think it was something I wanted to do with Sightseers. And once we'd pulled that off, it kind of felt like proof of concept.

The death of David Lynch reminded me of a lot of this stuff. How many people manage to put comedy, tragedy, melancholy, fear, violence — all of those things into one film or into one piece? And to me, that is life. That's human life and human experience.

I don't ever try and excise one of those emotions or one of those tones, because I think it's the human experience. The challenge is trying to sell that to someone and proving that it can work, and that audiences can accept those tonal shifts. So I can't ever see myself not doing it.

Life is funny and awful and serious and not serious at the same time.

SL: Would you consider David Lynch a horror-adjacent inspiration for your own works then?

AL:I guess so. I've thought about his work a lot since his death, which is like one of those weird things where you take something for granted until it's gone. And I'm obviously massively influenced by his work. But after looking at his approach to being an artist, I think being an artist — or film as an art form — is under threat. In the sense of: is it even allowed to be an art form anymore? Is it? Are we allowed to have auteurship?

Does stuff have to be made by several people now? Is that what we're looking at?

And I think it just reminded me of why you do it in the first place. [Timestalker] was a little bit about being a filmmaker and how crazy it is to try to be a filmmaker. Why are you doing it? The industry is quite beleaguered for various different reasons, and it's hard to keep pursuing it. And why do you pursue this sort of crazy love affair that is sort of quite damaging to you?

And I think [David Lynch] had such clear principles about film as an art form, which I think is really healthy and good to be reminded of, basically because you can get caught up in — it's got to please this many people, it's got to make this much money. And all of that is great, but it’s sad if you forget what you're doing in the first place.

SL: What sort of state is the UK film industry in these days?

AL: If you talk to money people about the film industry, they just go, "there is no film industry in the UK." And that no one will tell you that, no one will admit it. But I think that's ignoring the wealth of talent we have here, because there's no lack of intention or talent or ability. There's no lack of human beings who can make film, but it's just how much you can go on goodwill.

I sort of adhere to a kind of punk aesthetic, where I think people could just be going out and doing it themselves. I think that is a very British aesthetic as well, for people to just go and do it.

We haven't got as much money as America, well, we'll do it in our own way, and it won't look like an American film. But that's not something to be ashamed of. That's something to be proud of.

And go look at the imagination and creativity within that actually sets it apart. I think that was the ethos of Timestalker. And all of my films really. Prevenge was made on a shoestring, Timestalker was made in 22 days.

You know, some people say to me, 'Oh, you got more money to make this one'. We did, but we still did everything on a shoestring. We had to literally make it out of cardboard and string.

SL: How much did Timestalker cost to make in the end?

AL: It’s hard to say, because once you’ve done a bit of post production and stuff, I don't actually know what the current state of affairs is. But initially it was supposed to be about £2 million, which is like a tenth of what they would make one episode of Bridgerton for, or something. I don't know, I might be getting the numbers wrong on that, but it's just nothing. It's just nothing.

It's funny, because I met Mike Leigh, and he was talking about how hard it was to make Hard Truths on the budget he had. And they had nearly three times the budget we had. And that's to make something set in a flat, set in the modern day with no horses, as far as I know. They might have edited some horses out of it, I don't know.

So what we were doing was a big ask, and it was very ambitious. But I think with a bit of lateral thinking and a bit of theatricality… I really like these filmmakers like Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway and Sally Potter, who were sort of making things theatrically with the sense of imagination to them.

So we don't have a real thing, so we'll make it, you know? And I think that's how we could pursue the film industry here, if there was a bit more faith in that kind of style of filmmaking.

SL: How did you manage to make it look pretty lavish when you’re working with peanuts?

AL: This is why there is actually a point in being a writer, director, star, apart from, you know, vanity stuff and egomania. I can make decisions all the time. I'm sort of editing in my head as I'm filming. So I'm like, we don't need that shot. We can do it with this, and we can do it with this. And I storyboard everything in my head.

This is part of the way that we showed the lives [in Timestalker] very economically. You don't show her being born and going to school in each of the lives, you just go straight and plunge into the sort of quintessential cliche of what that era is and how it's shown filmically, a ball or a dinner party or, you know, being in a New York flat or whatever.

And so I'm editing it heavily already, and that makes it very economical to shoot.

SL: And what about gore, chopping off heads on a budget, are there any secrets to that? Did you use quite old-school techniques?

AL: We did. We had an incredible makeup designer, Nik Buck, who works a lot on Marvel films and other massive things. And she came and worked with us. She’s an absolute genius.

She had a special axe built that fitted to the curvature of my head, with a pipe in it. And we had one take where she had to press a syringe and blood had to come out. [Timestalker spoiler: this refers to one of the first scenes in the film]

It looks great. It's funny, because you do those old-school practical effects, and they always look best. Some of it we did with CGI. You start to think, Oh, we couldn't afford to do it with practical effects, because prosthetics cost money and stuff. But afterwards, you're like, it's not as fun as the actual practical effect.

I can see myself sort of wanting to pursue that more and more. In something like The Substance, you know, you watch their making-of video, and it's all practical effects. It's just astonishing. It's such a masterful kind of work.

[Here's that making-of feature:]

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SL: Are you working on a horror project at the moment, or any future plans?

AL: I am. Actually, I've got two different film ideas that I'm currently working on, and they're both horror to a degree. One of them is more psychological, and the other one is sort of a bit more like a new take on a classic, basically.

SL: In the more recent future Timestalker star Aneurin Barnard is going to be Rogue Trooper, and you’re in it as well I believe?

AL: Yeah, I am. I have no idea what the latest is on that, you probably know more about when it's finished.

SL: I haven’t seen much news about it recently, but could you tell us anything about the experience?

AL: I’m not sure I'm supposed to. But I mean, it's a motion capture [film], so it's very surreal sort of experience where it doesn't take long to film. And then the majority of the work is all post production, because it's like making an animation, but with people's faces and facial expressions.

So, yeah, you know, I think that's going to take them, like, two years or something. So I don't know. I don't have no information about what is coming out or anything!

Timestalker is available to stream now at NOW