Interview: Sean Ellis on ‘Eight for Silver’
“I don’t find anything too cinematic about films set in the present day,” says director and screenwriter Sean Ellis, whose latest film Eight for Silver is making its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. With its gorgeous cinematography and haunting atmosphere, Eight for Silver is the definition of cinematic, the natural fog of the small commune in France where it was filmed lending it an air of gothic authenticity that Guillermo del Toro would kill to have in one of his movies.
Set in the 1800s, Eight for Silver centers on a remote country village that is rattled by a series of gruesome, vicious attacks by what witnesses describe as a mysterious creature, the likes of which they have never seen before. The townspeople end up recruiting John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), who has become somewhat of a legend for his handling of similar cases across the country, to investigate these attacks. “It felt like it needed to be a journey back in time,” says Ellis of his decision to set the film in the 1800s. “The film does jump around a little bit with its time setting. It starts about 35 years before the actual events [of the movie] and then it goes back to tell a story. I liked the idea that it was set around that time. I liked the idea that it was a period horror. I thought [that specific time period] lends itself to the genre and I thought it could be quite stylish in regards to the clothing, the costumes and the production design. I just don’t think it would have had the same effect [if it was set in the present time] with people running around with mobile phones, so it was set back in time where communities were a lot less interconnected and were sort of left a little bit to their own devices without being able to communicate with the outside world.”
Eight for Silver also examines the tragic effects of colonialism, with the characters in the film – headed by Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) – brutally stealing the land of a Romani tribe and taking over without any care or regard for the people who called that place their home. “That idea also weirdly mirrors my feeling of where we’ve gone as a society,” elaborates Ellis. “I don’t think phones and technology has made us more connected with people. I think it’s almost made us less connected. I also think it’s kind of interesting that we’ve become more xenophobic in a way and less tolerant of other people’s problems. People are driven out of their countries [because of war] and they have to go to places where there isn’t a war going on and then they’re faced with xenophobic attitudes, ‘They’re not from here and they’re not our people.’ So I think in those terms, it felt like the story, even though it was set in the 1800s, reflected a lot of today’s attitudes.”
For the characters in the film, Ellis managed to assemble a fantastic cast who manage to deliver sublime performances that touch on the film’s themes of helplessness and isolation, including local British talent such as Eden Lake star Kelly Reilly, Sex Education star Alistair Petrie, Bodyguard star Stuart Bowman, relative newcomer Amelia Crouch and, surprisingly, American actor Boyd Holbrook, who delivers the best performance in the film, drawing on his character’s shadowy past to turn in a layered performance that will stay with audiences far after the movie ends. “Boyd was the first [actor] on board,” reveals Ellis. “What I like about Boyd is that people don’t necessarily know who he is by name, but then you say what he was in and they go all, ‘Oh yeah!’ You tell them he’s the blond guy in Narcos and they go, ‘Oh, yeah, I love that!’ You tell them he was the bad guy in Logan and they’re like, ‘I loved him in that!’ He told us in the beginning, ‘I look for projects where I can lose myself in the role. I’m not necessarily coming to a project as Boyd Holbrook.’ He likes the role to take over and he becomes sort of invisible behind the role. So much so, that these roles are better known than him.”
Although Ellis was enthusiastic about casting Holbrook in the project, he had his reservations when it came to the character’s English accent, an element he refers to as “the elephant in the room”. “Boyd said, ‘I know you’ve written it as English. Can I send you a tape of myself [speaking in an English accent]?’ So he recorded himself speaking with an English accent and for me, it was very close. I thought, ‘I think this guy can do it. I think he can do it.’ And when I said yes, he just said to me, ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to work really, really hard. That was just a quick taping, but for the next three months, I’m gonna be all over the accents.’ So I think by the time he turned up on set, he was so well-prepared and it was kind of strange because he almost didn’t break accent the whole time we were working together. So even when we weren’t shooting, he was basically mirroring my accent back to me as we were talking. He was in constant practice.”
One element of Eight for Silver that is sure to get the audience talking is the mysterious creature’s unique character design, which, according to Ellis, was inspired by Ridley Scott’s Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing and An American Werewolf in London, but ends up looking like something we have never seen on-screen before. “When I hear the word werewolf, the cliche comes to mind immediately; the fur, the fangs, all of that,” he explains. “So the biggest hurdle for me was, ‘How do I present a wolf or a werewolf in a way that we’ve never seen before?’ We wanted to execute a brand new take on a werewolf, which was difficult, because while I was writing the script, every time I’d mention the word werewolf, I’d hit a mental block because I kept seeing a typical werewolf. It was when I started to think about the original Wolfman and the fact that the original Wolfman was actually written as a metaphor for the Jewish experience prior to the 1940s that I was able to think outside of the box.”
The werewolf in Eight for Silver is particularly vicious and unforgiving, brutalizing its victims and consuming them almost from the inside out. It is an approach that Ellis says was inspired by the concept of addiction. “I thought, ‘What is the modern-day version of prosecution within our society? What is the thing that plagues us?’ and I started to think about addiction, whether it’s to drugs or our phones or unhealthy relationships. and I started to think of the wolf in terms of an addiction,” he says. “How you can end up being a prisoner to your addictions like it’s a dark voice inside that leads you astray. I thought, ‘This is interesting,’ because if I approach it like this, we can comment on what addiction does to families and communities, but also the person who is under the affliction of the addiction, who is a prisoner to their addiction.” In the case of Eight for Silver, the townspeople are all prisoners to the actions and crimes of their fathers and forefathers, who committed acts of atrocities without any guilt or remorse. It’s an interesting concept, one that Ellis says he hopes “will resonate with the audience”. “We thought about it in terms of, ‘What if you were a prisoner of this wolf?’ What would happen If you were actually a prisoner to the actions of your ancestors as well?”
Eight for Silver will have its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 30, 2021.