Straightheads Web Site
Posted at 1:48 PM (PST) on Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Lumina Films has a section on Straightheads.

From an interview with writer/director Dan Reed (September 2005):

How did Straightheads come about?

I spent fifteen years of my life being very frightened and coming into contact with people who use violence as the main force in their lives. I think it’s made me what we call slightly post-traumatic. I stopped dreaming and my nights were completely blank for many, many years and in fact Straightheads grew out of the first dream I had when I started dreaming again. Through writing the script it helped me to deal with things that I didn’t understand were happening to me. And it’s much cheaper than psychotherapy …

Straightheads is about two people who have everything that life can offer us here in the civilised world, its about a successful woman whose got money and power and success, and she meets this beautiful young man and they begin what seems like a beautiful one night adventure together. And then suddenly something happens and they’re attacked and they’re subjected to a terrible, terrible time, this forces them into a completely different world to the world they started out and the film takes you in a very different direction.

Straightheads is a journey from a place of safety to a place of danger. Straightheads is about how difficult it actually is to take revenge even when you’ve decided that violence is your best option. It’s about how, in the real world, when you use violence there is a price to be paid at every step, a consequence of every step. You might think it’s a simple matter of killing person A, but you don’t realise that person A might have a daughter or a son. I think it will mess with people’s heads a bit. It will satisfy people’s expectations of a thriller and that’s very important as basically Straightheads is a revenge thriller. It should be very vivid and I want to play with the audience, I want to use all the panoply of techniques that we all know from thriller and horror films, to lead them the right way, to lead them the wrong way, just to take the audience on a very exciting ride.

Who do you imagine as the audience for this film?

The audience for this film is going to be mainly young people in their twenties; it’s a thriller but not just a thriller for young men. I think women will find the Gillian Anderson character fascinating. She’s a powerful woman; there are not that many thrillers with really strong female lead. They will be fascinated by how she manages to overcome this terrible attack on her which is part of our worst nightmares. What happens when you’re removed from the zone of safety and you’re placed in a zone of danger. How it would be if violence came to your door and maybe one of the ways you dealt with it is if you actually resorted to violence yourself. The minute you resort to violence you become entangled in a series of moral conflicts that lead you to a place you have never been before and that’s what Straightheads is about.

What films or directors are your influences?

Visually I'm a great admirer of David Fincher (Panic Room, Fight Club). I'm a huge fan of Danny Boyle because he is a very dynamic director in that he picks you up at the beginning and you are not let go until the very end. 28 Days Later was a great example of that, really tense, really dynamic. Christopher Nolan: Memento was a brilliantly told story. I love that very sharp, very considered style and that's what I would like to emulate. Coming from documentary, people will tend to expect it to be loose, gritty and very realistic. It will have a feeling of reality to it, a heightened reality, very carefully judged, and deliberately created.

Why have you cast Gillian Anderson?

Gillian Anderson is sexy. She’s also very intelligent and has always portrayed very intelligent women. There is something slightly dangerous about her look, something slightly damaged maybe and yet she has tremendous confidence and she’s fantastic to watch. Gillian Anderson is Alice, for me the two are inseparable.

Why is it called Straightheads?

Straightheads came out of the time I spent with gangsters in Liverpool and it’s a term gang members used to use for anyone who wasn’t involved in crime. A straighthead is a person who is clean and this film is about Straightheads. Two people who have never been involved in violence, who have never suffered, who have never had to defend themselves. It’s also about how any one of us, however little we have been exposed to violence, however unprepared we think we are, actually inside all of us there is a capacity for dealing with violence. It’s a very moral film but when you’ve seen as much real violence as I have you are not going to be happy with a cheaply exploitative and gratuitously violent story. My experience as a witness to violence in war, in criminal situations made me more sophisticated about the way violence should be portrayed on film, both to make it more authentic and exciting and to make it more morally satisfying. Violence is not really well understood by a lot of writers and directors of film.

To read the entire interview, click here (Word Document).

Thanks, Oberon!