Front page	From the Event Guide archive! This article refers to an event which took place on, or until, 26 October 2006 Film Interview – Billy O’Brien / ‘Isolation’ Home-Grown Horror Story Declan Cashin speaks to Billy O’Brien, writer and director of a new Irish horror movie, ‘Isolation’. ‘Isolation’ may well go-down in history as the least glamorous movie-shoot of all time. There’s relentless rain, actors knee-deep in muck and swill, graphic calving sequences and more than one instance of cast members sticking their hands up cows’ bums. “We actually shot it on a soundstage in the Caribbean,” writer-director Billy O’Brien jokes. “In reality, we filmed near Manor Kilbride in Wicklow for eight weeks. It was a very hard shoot for John (Lynch) and the others in particular. It’s a very physical film with a lot of blood effects and lots of cold water. John spent a whole day sitting and lying in freezing cold water in December or January. I was not pleasant at all, but it does focus the mind to get it finished quickly!” ‘Isolation’ is an Irish horror movie, set on a remote farm where haunted-looking farmer Dan (John Lynch) tends to a cow that’s the subject of genetic experiments by sinister scientist John (Marcel Iures). Dan’s only company is his vet ex-girlfriend Orla (Essie Davis) and two itinerant runaways, Jamie (Sean Harris) and Mary (the ubiquitous Ruth Negga), who are hiding out in a dilapidated trailer on Dan’s road. When one of the cows gives birth to an abnormal foetus, Dan realises that the experiments have gone terribly awry, and soon everyone involved is battling to survive when the full extent of John’s bad science becomes apparent. It’s an unsettling film in many respects, and one that stays with you long after the credits roll. ‘Isolation’ is shot in a very spare, raw visual style, accompanied by a musical score that channels the best of 1970s horror. O’Brien acknowledges the influence that the archetypal genre classics of Tobe Hooper and others had on the making of ‘Isolation’. “Any horror director would say that ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974), for instance, is a touch point. You can look fondly back on most of the horror movies from the ‘70s. ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ is unique though. I still take a deep breath before I put it in my DVD player, even today. For that reason, every director will look at it. I think John Carpenter’s films and John Boorman’s ‘Deliverance’ (1972) also really inspired me.” The 36-year-old O’Brien has been steadily building on the success of his breakthrough feature, the animated short film ‘The Tale of the Rat That Wrote’, for which he was nominated for a BAFTA in 2000 along with producer Ruth Kenley-Letts, who returned for ‘Isolation’. It’s a long way from his childhood in Cork but the experiences of his time working with his farmer father permeate nearly every scene in the new film. There’s one extraordinary sequence that every critic has commented upon, where Dan grabs the newborn calf and swings it over his head in order to get its heartbeat going. “That’s one of the strongest memories from my childhood,” O’Brien reveals. “I was 11 and was helping my father with a cow that was giving birth. The calf was quite small so he literally knocked me back and grabbed it and swung it over his head. It was the only time I’d seen it, but at 11 you’re going to remember something like that.” O’Brien is clearly interested in agricultural methods and rituals, and seems to delight in taking this central image of the Irish rural landscape – the traditional farm – and turning it on its head. ‘Isolation’ is a gory, bloody film like the best of them, but O’Brien uses the film to communicate relevant messages too. “The obvious topical reference is mad cow disease,” he explains. “But the spectre of foot and mouth haunts the film too. My father told me about a foot and mouth outbreak he remembered from the ’60s that made the scare here in 2001 look like a picnic. He did a lot of work with horses in Wales at that time and he remembered looking out the window and seeing bonfires dotting the Welsh landscape burning cows and horses. I wanted to include that imagery in this story because for those of us growing up on farms in the 1970s and 1980s, we had two primal fears: the wider fear of the nuclear bomb and localised fear of foot and mouth.” But ‘Isolation’ preys on farther-reaching – and more thoroughly modern – fears than that. In the film, one of the disastrous side effects of the genetic experimentation is that it appears to contaminate water and food supplies and that the consequences of it all will only be visible in the children of the next generation. For O’Brien, whose previous short film concerned animal testing, our prevailing concern about genetically modified food is a deliberate subtext in ‘Isolation’. “I think there are private companies racing head without any government legislation to control them regarding GM food,” he states. “It’s a fascinating science fiction topic that asks a very real, very basic question like ‘what are we ending up eating?’ For horror to be successful, you need to exploit simple fears. If you do that properly, it should create uneasiness the whole way through viewing the film.” ‘Isolation’ is only opening in Ireland now, but it has had a very successful run in other European countries. “We’ve been and gone in France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg,” O’Brien says. “I’d be very surprised if we got an American release. It costs about $20million to get any film of any level out that wide in the US. We might get a niche-type release in New York and LA. It’s coming out in the UK in January too. The movie has been really well-received everywhere so far so we have high hopes.” O’Brien is currently working on his next project. Well, trying to, anyway. “I’m at that tearing-your-hair stage of writing,” he explains. “I’m working on two films at the moment: one’s a horror and the other is an historical piece about a clash of families 400 years ago on the Scottish-English border. That’s going to be quite a big project, so I have a lot of work to do.” As for ‘Isolation’, I ask O’Brien if every Irish interviewer has given his movie the high-concept pitch of ‘Glenroe’ meets ‘Alien’ as I just did. “There actually was one French producer who gave it a tag-line along those lines,” he laughs. “It was ‘In the shed, no-one can hear you scream’”. ‘Isolation’ was released at selected screens on Friday 29th September, certified 16. www.isolationthefilm.com