Interview: Nicholas Ashe Bateman on ‘The Wanting Mare’
The behind-the-scenes documentary that accompanies the digital release of The Wanting Mare, the directorial debut of Nicholas Ashe Bateman, is subtitled “The Making of a Small Epic”. As viewers will come to find out throughout the course of the documentary, which depicts the painstaking process in which the film was shot in a single warehouse and other similar locations throughout the course of several years, the production value behind The Wanting Mare may have been small – but the final product is anything but.
A generation-spanning, genre-defying epic, The Wanting Mare takes place in the fictional world of Anmaere, more specifically the city of Whithren, a grimy, rundown place suffering from an eternal and unrelenting heatwave. Across from Whithren lies Levithen, a continent that is opposingly in a constant state of winter. Horses are Whithren’s most valuable export so the citizens of Whithren spend a bulk of their year attempting to hunt down these horses and subsequently sell and ship them to Levithen, a trip that only happens once year. The people of Whithren, desperate to escape the terrible conditions of the city, attempt to track down an elusive and highly coveted ticket for the trip in search of a better life.
The Wanting Mare follows Moira (played across decades by Ashleigh Nutt, Jordan Monaghan and Christine Kellogg-Darrin), a young woman, whose mother passed away during childbirth, relentlessly searching for a ticket to Levithen in the hopes of leaving her uneventful life behind. Despondent and dejected by her current situation, Moira also finds herself haunted by a recurring dream, one that her mother and her ascendants also experienced prior to her birth. A chance encounter with a mysterious figure, who Moira believes may be her only chance at getting a ticket to Levithen, changes the course of her life forever, causing a ripple effect that will affect the lives of her descendants as well. Easily navigating through different themes, tones and genres without confusing or disorienting the audience, The Wanting Mare is a towering achievement in filmmaking, one that will undoubtedly stay with viewers far after the credits roll.
When asked about the inspiration behind the film, Bateman names a wide range of influences, pointing at everything from Lord of the Rings to Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia to, surprisingly, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. “It sort of came from two separate minds,” he explains. “One of them is my younger self wanting to create fantasy places in different worlds, and the second one is me getting older and falling in love with film in a different way, with different filmmakers, different areas of film such as neorealism. I think there’s a part of my brain that is deeply obsessed with neorealism and 90’s French extremism. All these great, wonderful, austere filmmakers. There’s that part of my brain which has been going since I discovered Paul Thomas Anderson in high school and then the other part of my brain is Lord of the Rings and these fantastical places, Wuthering Heights and different things like that. I don’t know if I had a conscious thought that early that I wanted to try to figure out a way to do both but I was dissatisfied with only doing half of either so I started writing variations of these influences in my early 20s. I actually had a version of [The Wanting Mare] that was pretty different and through the process of spending years writing it, working for other people and trying to learn how to eventually make a movie, these things coalesced into me wanting to do one single thing and all of my larger, longer ideas of made up worlds are kind of happening in the process of me making this movie so it’s a bunch of things. All of my strange influences created this weird world, I guess.”
And what a world it is. Glorious, spellbinding and visually stunning, the world of Anmaere may have surreal and whimsical elements but unlike the planets of the Star Wars universe, it undoubtedly resembles our world, albeit a more fantastical version that is just slightly out of reach. The genesis of Anmaere has a surprising origin. When he was 12 years old, Bateman relays, he had the discovery that Middle-earth, the continent in which J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is set, was not a real place. “I was deeply upset for days,” he says. “I was grieving the idea that this wasn’t real, that someone had shown me a life that I could have and then took it away, and my brain wasn’t like, ‘I want to make movies’ or ‘Who are these actors?’ or ‘Who’s Peter Jackson?’ My brain was like, ‘You’re really telling me I can’t go to this place!’ So I think, in a way, as I’ve gotten older and psychoanalyzed myself a bunch, I think I’m trying to create a place where I can do a bit of both; I can accommodate for everything that upsets me and moves me, but also have this be a fictional place, an escapism to our own world.”
For Bateman, The Wanting Mare has been a long time coming; he has been working on the project for roughly eight years now. Asked if it feels like a weight off of his shoulders for the film to finally get a release date, Bateman responds in the affirmative but he says he has “no idea” how to deal with audience expectations. “I never know what the perception is,” he reveals. “I’m someone who didn’t go to film school, didn’t know anybody who made movies. I taught myself how to do stuff through YouTube, through reading blogs and watching interviews with directors, just devouring everything I could find. So even having a movie is just surreal and wonderful to me. The fact that people are going to see it, that people even know about it and think about it like it’s an actual movie is so weird to me because there was a long period time of time where I thought I was going to upload it to YouTube. I was like, ‘No one’s gonna watch this!’ And the people who were gonna watch it were gonna be like, ‘I don’t have any idea what you’re showing me. Are you making a Harry Potter film? What is this? Is it serious? Is it not serious?’ So it’s just incredibly surreal.”
While The Wanting Mare was filmed entirely in front of blue screens, a process Bateman says he and his team were “in no way prepared for” due to the painstaking efforts involved, with the backdrops later composited by Bateman in Photoshop, there has a noticeable shift towards virtual sets, which are essentially LED screens that display pre-made backgrounds instead of a green or blue screen. “I think there’s a fascinating conversation to be had about this,” he says. “Because it’s been conflated with marketing to a point where it’s become somewhat meaningless. For example, when people are saying, ‘This is the future of green screen technology, green screens are dead’, they mention The Mandalorian. They make a point to say that this where the technology is going, how one of three post houses in the visual effects world are now rushing to build LED stages. That’s all well and good, and people are like, ‘This is so much better because it’s all on camera, which is great and amazing in terms of lighting, reflective surfaces and all this other stuff. But people don’t seem to talk about how this more expensive than going the traditional visual effects route. It’s really challenging, both financially and crew-wise. All that stuff has to be built beforehand, you have to film things beforehand so it’s definitely not a more analog process like it’s been marketed to be. But I’m generally interested in what this is going to do to the industry in a larger sense. I also think the pandemic has done so much for visual effects companies. We’re just going to keep seeing more and more people make different stuff that probably you wouldn’t have seen before, which is wonderful.”
Next up for Bateman is a project set in the world of Anmaere, of which details are largely being kept under wraps for the moment. “I have no desire to do anything outside of Anmaere,” he says of his decision to revisit the world he created in The Wanting Mare. “I’m interested in trying to begin the long work of [world building], like, ‘This is how it works. Here’s its history,’ which is going to take years and years. So that’s what I’m doing now. I have two things that are finished that I’m hoping to do soon.” He says he wants to explore different genres in this unique setting, including horror and a potential war drama, instead of strictly sticking to one. “The possibilities are endless,” he says.
In the meantime, however, he has been contributing in the visual effects department to David Lowery’s highly anticipated project, The Green Knight, which stars Dev Patel and is currently dated for a July 30, 2021 release. While he was originally brought on to work on two specific shots for the film, the pandemic allowed for a longer post-production process which saw him working on the project up until October of last year. Asked what fans can expect from the project, which was originally set to premiere at the 2020 edition of SXSW before the pandemic curtailed it, Bateman has nothing but praise for Lowery and the film itself. “It’s amazing,” he gushes. “It was a dream come true for me. I learned so much watching David work at that scale. I was astounded by how he manages to work. He would send me pictures of a Lego castle and be like, ‘I think this is what we could do with this shot,’ and we would play around with that. I can’t wait for people to see it. I’m so excited.”
The Wanting Mare is out now on VOD.