Our short film this week from the FilmQuest Film Festival and GeekTyrant team up is the medieval revenge film Villain, which comes from writer and director Sparky Tehnsuko.
We are sharing these short films with you to promote the officially selected films of FilmQuest filmmakers and their work.
Today’s short film follows an orphaned girl who seeks revenge on the enormous creature that destroyed her home, but discovers more in its lair than she bargained for.
The movie stars The Last of Us actress Bella Ramsey and Isla Gie. We hope you enjoy it!
I’ve also included a Q&A with the filmmaker behind Villain.
Without spoilers, tell us what your film is about, its characters, and its themes. Is it a proof of concept, or a standalone story?
The film is about the cyclical nature of revenge and victimhood, portrayed through the actions of a young medieval woman seeking to kill a dragon who has destroyed her home and killed her mother. Her mission meets difficulty when she comes across a small, scaly child living within the dragon’s lair. The short works as a standalone story, but is also effectively a prologue for a larger story featuring the characters that I’m currently writing.
What was the inspiration for your film? How did you come up with the idea?
It’s a loose retelling of a real-life incident within my family, shrouded in fantasy metaphor because the aesthetic fit the emotions and interactions I was focusing the story toward. It’s inspired by a lot of films depicting violent futility such as The Witch, You Were Never Really Here and Come And See (among others).
Tell us about yourself. What is your background? How long have you been a filmmaker?
I’ve been writing short stories about trauma since before I was a teenager, and found that eventually worked in my favour when I came to study film at university and was frequently tasked with writing screenplays for classmates. I graduated in 2010 and began to balance a life as an industry crew member (usually an Assistant Director or a Production IT Manager) and part-time filmmaker; I started out shooting badly-made films on DSLRs with friends, and slowly moved up to working with professional casts and crews over roughly a decade. Outside of screenplays, I still write short stories about trauma.
What inspires you to work within genre cinema and tell these kind of stories?
The general plots of most genre cinema could be told as kitchen-sink dramas with all fantastical beings or events stripped back to their real-life emotional inspirations, and the story would still fascinate but wouldn’t give audiences the same escapism they may seek on the screen.
What was your favorite part of the filmmaking process for this project?
Learning how to do things I’d never attempted before. This short was my first real foray into proper casting (Bella Ramsey!), special effects (lots and LOTS of fire!), visual effects (a dragon!), stunts (jumping and falling into flames!), prosthetics (humans with scales!) and from-scratch production design (huts and caves!). I loved every second of figuring it out and collaborating with other creatives to make it all so.
What are you most proud of with this film?
There’s not a lot about Villain that doesn’t fill me with pride, but I’m particularly proud that my producer and I utilised the time spent at home in 2020’s lockdown not to stagnate but to greatly further our filmmaking. If not for the availability, generosity and creative boredom of our industry friends during that specific period, this film wouldn’t be able to exist.
What is a favorite story or moment from the making of the film you’d like to share?
The gaffer, without warning, decided to pack up all of his lights as the entire rest of the crew set up to shoot the film’s final scene, leaving the whole shoot in absolute darkness. That scene is instead lit entirely by fire from a single torch, which was conceived and created in a few minutes by our special effects team, and somehow works all the better for it.
What was your most challenging moment or experience you had while making your film?
The lights disappearing before our last scene is definitely up there! But otherwise, during editing, I realised we had shot next to nothing in terms of B-roll, which made transitions and cuts frequently more difficult than they otherwise could have been. Our Editor made some impressive choices to eloquently tell the story without missing anything from the storyboards.
If it did, how did your film change or differ from its original concept during pre-production, production, and/or post-production? How has this changed how you’ll approach future projects as a result?
A huge amount changed or evolved during development – in particular, our expectations of VFX. The final film shows FAR fewer shots of the dragon than we’d anticipated, purely because of the cost, so we had to be very precise in figuring out what we could and couldn’t cut to make the story continue to function. Economical editing of the script and storyboards will come a lot earlier in the process next time!
Who were some of your collaborators and actors on the film? How did you start working with each other?
My producer (Sej Davé) and I have each worked in freelance crew roles within the film industry for many years, so a great number of our collaborators were people we’d met working on huge Hollywood movies – who just so happened to be creatively bored during the pandemic and willing to work for mates’ rates! My last short (They Call Me the Kid) was my first collaboration with DoP Andreas Neo, and we worked incredibly well together so I was all too glad to invite him to the project. Our composer, the extraordinarily talented Jo Quail, is actually a musician I’m just a personal fan of and reached out to over Instagram when I realised that she was based in London. I was overjoyed when she agreed to score the film! Some other mentions: Catriona Dickie, our Casting Director, had worked with Sej on a Netflix show, and she got our script to Bella Ramsey, who was eager to take on the role. The incredible Charmaine Fuller, another former colleague, arranged our makeup teams; and James Yeoman, whom we’d only recently met, ingratiated us to the world of VFX with patience and grace. To name but a few.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received as a filmmaker and what would you like to say to new filmmakers?
Where at all possible, don’t do EVERYTHING. Focus your attentions directly towards the specific thing you’d like to do (i.e. directing, camera, production management) and you’ll do that thing MUCH better than if you were spread thinly across a multitude of roles.
What are your plans for your career and what do you hope this film does for it? What kind of stories would you like to tell moving forward?
I kinda hope that this film is my last short and paves the way for investors and producers to trust that I know how to make a film. I also hope that, within a few years, I can pay my bills by writing and directing films, and no longer need to hurry any actors through makeup or fix remote server connections for the accounting department to put food on my table. I’d like to continue telling fantastical stories about damaged people coming to realisations in order to stop hurting the people they love. Like therapy, but with moving pictures!
What is your next project and when can we expect to see it?
I’m knee-deep in writing my first feature, which I hope to be shooting in 2025 if all goes well. It’s either gonna be a continuation of the story and world of Villain, or it’ll be a contemporary drama about a care worker whose unidentified, catatonic patient becomes briefly world-famous when it’s discovered that he’s a virtuoso pianist.
Where can we find more of your work and where can interested parties contact you?
My personal handle on basically everything is just “tehnsuko”, and I spend more time on Instagram and Letterboxd than anywhere else. Otherwise: www.cowboyfunfair.co.uk is my company’s website, and you can see my work on youtube.com/cowboyfunfair and vimeo.com/cowboyfunfair
Bonus Question #1: What is your all-time favorite film?
This will change in five minutes, but right this second it’s Children of Men.
Bonus Question #2: What is the film that most inspired you to become a filmmaker and/or had the most influence on your work?
Requiem for a Dream. It’s just so many impressive technical innovations and story forms crammed into one film that screamed creative fearlessness. The subject matter, too, left me staring in wide-eyed silence at the credits, which later got me thinking “I want to be able to do that to people”.
