Beldham is a horror film about a young mother who must protect herself, her child and her sanity from an evil force. Brian Taylor sat down with Writer/Director Angela Gulner, and her star Katie Parker to discuss their latest film.
Brian Taylor: Okay, I don’t know if you can tell me where the idea for the story and the title came from.
Angela Gulner: So, it’s a hard one to talk about without ruining the ending, but the story came from an experience that was happening within my own family while I was just getting married. My husband [Mark Meir] and I are starting to talk about what it might mean to start a family and we were really experiencing sort of a generational changing of the guard within our family, everyone getting a little bit older, what it means to inhabit different roles. And so that’s where the nugget, it really started with the ending. The film started at the ending. And the monster came last. I wanted to play with a hag, a witch, a crone and the word beldham, it’s an archaic word; it’s not in our normal language anymore, but it means belle, dame, beautiful woman, or grandmother, or old woman, or witch, or hag, or crone. The word kind of shifted and changed over time. It used to be a word that was sort of interchangeable, like witch, like a beldham. So, that’s where that kind of came from. And it’s kind of fun, in Coraline, the other mother is a beldham, they use that kind of thing. And there’s a little bit of Baba Yaga in the beldham being this neither good nor bad figure, just kind of a meddler presence. So, that’s a long, winded answer. It was like a conglomeration of a lot of different ideas.
Brian: I like long, winded answers.
Katie Parker: It was so clever too, so intelligent.
Brian: So, I like horror like this, it kind of reminded me of Relic.
Angela: Yes, that was a big influence. I love that film.
Brian: Where it dealt with dementia, and like going inside a person’s mind, especially as they get older. So, I do love scares, I love gore, but I love movies that kind of get into a person’s mind and the human mind, more specifically. So, you’ve written a few screenplays before this, this is the first time behind the camera.
Angela: It is.
Brian: So, what made you want to direct this film in particular?
Angela: You know, I was scared of directing for a long time. I started as an actor, and then started sort of writing to write myself roles, and started producing the writing, because I learned, oh wait, you can’t just write something, you have to make it. But as I started that journey, I realized I really just loved writing and producing and making things. And during the pandemic, my husband and I were, you know, depressed and going nuts, like everyone was. And I was inspired by a friend of ours, actually named Nanea Miyata, who’s an amazing filmmaker in her own right. She did a little pandemic movie and asked me to be an actor in it. I went and we did a quarantined film in Oregon, and it saved my mental health during that time; it was so fun. It was really hard. We were shooting crazy hours, but I came back and I was like, “oh, we know everyone who can fill out positions on set, we’ve been in LA [Los Angeles] for a decade, we could do this.” So, we went to North Texas, where he’s from, and we kind of gathered the troops, and made a feature; he directed that first feature. And we had a lot of obstacles, we had a snowstorm, it was still covid, it was really hard to film, we had a very small budget on that one. And seeing him sort of overcome all of these obstacles, and seeing him kind of in the driver’s seat creatively, really inspired me. And I was like, I think after seeing him do it, I feel like I could do this. And now we’re here. It was really fun. I really liked directing.
Brian: So it sounds like this is not gonna be your last.
Angela: I hope not.
Brian: So, this was shot in one location. Can you talk about the benefits for that as both the writer and director?
Angela: I mean, I started writing, producing kind of simultaneously and I’ve only ever worked on pretty low budget scrappy things, except for when I’ve written things for other companies and they have more money, but stuff that I’ve made as a producer, it’s always been quite scrappy. So, I usually write with budget limitations in mind, but there’s something about that sort of when you put limitations on a story, you’re challenged to be more creative and more interesting with the way that you’re writing. And we got really lucky with the house that we were in, it was just so perfect for this film, it was four or five floors. It just had a lot of personality, it felt a little bit like a maze, it was weird and cool and creepy. It didn’t make it into the film, but in the basement sequence, when Katie is exploring with the flashlight, the floor has black tile and there are birds on the tile built into the house. When we saw that, when we were scouting, I was like, “well, this is the house. This has to be the house.”
Brian: It was meant to be.
Angela: I’d be curious, as an actor, what it felt like to only be in one location.
Katie: The best. Because the set is always another character when you’re filming. And because it was a really grounding feature for Harper and a traumatizing place for her as well, it just kind of fueled something for everybody. Even your crew, we had such an amazing set deck on that house.
Angela: O’Shay Brooks really killed it with the production design.
Brian: Oh, the production design was great. I’ve talked to a couple people when their first film came out and that one location or in the Robert Rodriguez school of thought, shooting what you have or where you’re at. Famously, he put the turtle in El Mariachi, that was his, you know. And you go back to Kevin Smith with Clerks, he worked at Quick Stop. So, I read that you have a theater background. So, how did that background influence your approach to making this particular movie?
Angela: I think it influenced it a lot. Katie also has a theater background, my husband has a theater background, our DP [Director of Photography] has a theater background. Actually, all of the actors have a theater background. So, it influenced a lot of it. We shot in 15 days, so they got two takes, three, maybe. I think the big thing that Mark and I learned on our first film, which had great actors there as well, is that if you’re gonna shoot fast and furious, you need theater actors. You need actors who come to set super prepared, and not that film actors don’t do this, this isn’t to denigrate that, but there’s a different sort of way in sometimes I think. There’s just a lived-iness quality that I think theater actors can kind of be excited about and want to explore. Ksusha [Genenfeld] and I designed the shot list and designed the cinematography. She’s brilliant and is very low coverage. Play everything in a master when we can and when it makes sense, it was all we wanted to box Katie in and to dirty the frame and make her feel watched and observed, and like her world, like with the paranoia, to feel the sense of paranoia and claustrophobia. Also, the actors are just so good and playing in masters in wider shots, just allows them to shine and to just really be in the relationships with them. So, that was a big part of it. I say this, and I hope it doesn’t sound pretentious, but I was lucky enough to have gone to grad school for acting. Part of my training was at the Moscow Art Theater School in Russia, and they do this thing called “Etudes”. And if you are a Russian student who’s training there, you don’t speak for the first year, it’s all being in the environment, exploring an environment, developing a character, something happens and you change, and they call it “Etudes”, that’s the maybe English translation. And I feel so much of Katie in my work, Harper’s alone in a room and…
Katie: Being the discovery of the energy shifting.
Angela: Yeah. And so I feel that helped me sort of understand what those moments needed to be. And she’s so fucking amazingly talented. You were just able to dive into that and explore that, and I can remember I said, “okay, we’re gonna do a theater school thing here.” (laughs)
Brian: I mean, being in that one location, I’m sure that helps a lot with the theater background, because it feels almost like a set, like a stage.
Katie: And as an actor, working in film, I find it rare when it’s about the acting. It’s usually about the camera and I feel like, now with our culture, we’re so visually focused, you go back and you look at scenes in movies from the sixties, seventies, and you might see a boom, but they’re really focused on performance and the energy between actors. Now, we’re really obsessed with shots because we have the technology. So, you get to set and you sometimes kind of feel like a puppet to play the scene out, but it’s really about that camera. So, it was really exciting, to be on a set where it was about performance, and that the DP was working for the actors.
Angela: You don’t always get that. Ksusha’s kind of mission statement as a cinematographer, because she started as an actor, is “if you notice the camera work, I have failed. My job is to be with the performance.” And so that’s something that she really values as well, which is really, oh, props to that.
Brian: I know, like your aspect ratio, I think it really helps to box in Katie’s character, so you feel like the walls and watch the walls closing in. Obviously, movies influence everything we do, both in acting and making movies. When it came to this film, I’m curious of both y’all’s takes, but what kind of a movie playlist, per se, that you had in a rotation that you were watching, both as your character, and to kind of put you in the mood of what you were aiming for in the atmosphere of this movie?
Katie: Usually when you work with the director, they might give you some influences, so Rosemary’s Baby, A Ghost Story, The Babadook. What else did I watch? Relic.
Angela: Portrait Of A Lady On Fire was one that Ksusha and I watched. It’s not horror, it doesn’t super apply to Harper, but that was sort of our when we were thinking about light and texture. Actually, you would love that movie. I actually think it does apply. It’s about women’s relationships, I should have told you to watch that. (All laugh)
Brian: Portrait Of A Lady On Fire is amazing.
Katie: I really get a lot out of pinterest pages where artists are like, this is it visually or music. I always feel like human beings have a sound to them, like you meet someone and it’s like they feel kind of like music to me. I have a Harper playlist that I would listen to, it was kind of twinkly, kind of dreamy.
Brian: I’ve kind of found that talking, that filmmakers and actors, they kind of get influenced, they kind of get themselves into a mood, per se, by watching something or listening to something that gets you into the kind of the spot that you wanna be at, or in your case, the movie you wanna make, the mood that you’re aiming for.
Katie: And atmosphere, just to throw back to the house, the house kind of creates an energy too. And that house we were in was scary, like I didn’t like being in there.
Angela: It was also really cold.
Katie: It was freezing. It was almost five stories. (all laughing)
Brian: Well this was great, thank you for your time.
