BEN STEINER TALKS MATRIARCH
"Looked for another way to create images"
Daniel John
In ‘Matriarch’, a woman returns to her childhood village after mysteriously surviving a coke infused overdose just to discover her personal demons might go deeper, and darker, as the film slowly brings her, and the audience, into a feverish nightmare. To some degree based on your 2018 short ‘Urn’ how did it come about to turn it into a feature?
By the time I made 'Urn', I’d been writing and directing short films for nearly twenty years. The shorts were an end in themselves, but my dream was to one day make a feature. 'Urn' was commissioned by the US streaming platform Hulu, and when they asked me if I could adapt it into a feature, of course I said "Yes!" immediately. Then I had to think about what that feature might actually be.
Who would’ve expected to find a film like this on Disney Plus. Here’s hoping parental control is on. With that, of course, it’s now reaching a massive audience all over the world. Having an audience also means facing opinions, opinions about something you created. What is that like. Is it purely a delight, or a little terrifying, to think about people discussing your work?
'Matriarch' is getting responses right across the spectrum from best horror film of the year to worst film I’ve ever seen and everything in between. My own opinion of the film is somewhere in the middle! There have been enough positive reactions that I can ignore or laugh about the negative ones, but actually the opinions that have had a real impact on the film were the ones belonging to the studio and channel executives who had input from script development all the way through to editing. 'Matriarch' is a studio film, so while I wrote and directed it and had a lot of control I did not have total control. We also had a few issues on set. Overall, I’m really pleased with how it turned out and how it’s doing, but it’s about seventy-five to eighty percent the film I wanted to make. In a way, knowing I didn’t have total control makes it easier to take negative response. But overall I’m just absolutely fucking delighted to have made a feature film at last!
What issues were those?
We did have to find VFX and or editing-solutions to quite a few things that did not go as planned during the shoot. I’m not going to get into specifics only because I don’t want to draw anyone’s attention to any aspects of the film that didn’t turn out as I’d originally envisaged them.
Even so you never really compromise on the darkness. It does get dark, graphical and deeply unsettling?
I didn’t want 'Matriarch' to be a horror comedy. There are jokes and there’s dark stuff and I wanted them to exist side by side without blurring into, and potentially compromising, each other. I love pure horror films like 'The Shining' and 'Ringu', but with my movie I was thinking about films like 'The Wicker Man' and 'The Devils'. Which are much more eccentric and less easily-classifiable. 'The Devils' is really transgressive and harrowing at times. But it also has Oliver Reed and a plague doctor having a sword fight using stuffed crocodiles!
The goddess we see in the film originally started out as more of a demonic father figure, a monster which you drew out of your own imagination already in the mid-nineties, the Wormeater. At what point did the monster change to the monster we see in the film?
The gender swap happened early on in script development. 'Urn' was about a toxic mother and daughter relationship, and the feature that grew out of it was always going to be female-centric. The film is full of subtle and not so subtle vagina, birth, rebirth imagery and the pervasive wetness of the landscape is also part of that set of themes. A drawing of the original Wormeater hangs on a wall in my house so he’s never far from my mind and he just sort of inveigled his way into the film. I was also inspired by Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of filth, and she and the Wormeater sort of melded into the goddess that you see in the film.
Jemima Rooper and Kate Dickie do a wonderful job at their respective sides of the mother and daughter relationship. What made you look to them in particular for these roles. Many of course have a relation to Kate through Lysa Arryn in ‘Game of Thrones’ was that one performance of hers that you had also seen?
I’d seen Kate in 'Red Road' when it first came out and then again in 'The Witch', but not 'Game of Thrones' which I came to very belatedly after I’d made 'Matriarch'. From the moment Rob Kelly the casting-director suggested her I was praying that she’d accept, but when she did I was suddenly extremely nervous about having to direct someone of her calibre. Luckily, she’s as lovely as she is talented. Same with Jemima who was suggested by Rob and I was incredibly lucky to get. I think is absolutely phenomenal in a really tricky role. With both Jemima and Kate, they are both just very charismatic performers. They grab your attention and hold it. And you believe them. That’s what I was looking for and I got it by the truckload!
What was your entrypoint to creating and telling stories on film?
Throughout my childhood and up until my early twenties I used to draw a lot, when I hit the upper limits of my ability, I looked for another way to create images. I was extremely fortunate to have friends who could help me. My friend Adam had studied film and could work a camera and my friend Eli had studied drama and was a great actor. Together we made a short film about a cannibal human meat salesman called 'Man with a Fork' which was much too long and appeared in one UK festival. Several short films later I made my short film 'The Stomach' with my friend Simon Meacock in the lead role and that was much more successful and ultimately led to 'Urn' and then 'Matriarch'. I made a film with Eli in the lead quite recently, a mockumentary called 'Clanker Man' which was based on an idea of Eli’s and a departure from my usual horror work.
This having begun as a short film are there any other short films of yours you’d like to turn into a feature-film?
I've written a feature version of 'The Stomach' and am currently looking for finance for that. There might be something in 'Clanker Man' that could be expanded into a show. But I have lots of new ideas too and a list of novels and short stories that I’d love to adapt.
