'Severance' Q&A

'Severance' is the best horror film to emanate from these shores in years, a survival horror comedy about a group of office workers who get picked off one by one while on a team-building trip to Eastern Europe. Time Out therefore thought it was about time we sat down and had a chin-wag with the film‘s director Christopher Smith and star Danny Dyer. This is what they had to say.

TO: Once the cast got together, did you have them do any bonding exercises like in the film?

CS: It just came naturally because we all had to go away to Hungary and we were all in this big chateau. It was kind of an odd five-star hotel that was like Castle Dracula, but with a bowling alley in the basement.

DD: And we decided to shoot the funny, light-hearted stuff first, when we were all onscreen together, which meant we bonded then, before it got to the dark stuff. It was important we did it like that because once it turns nasty, we all tail off into our own little stories and aren’t on set together anymore, so I’m glad we did it like that.

TO: Did everyone get on or did the cast squabble like the characters in the film once they were all together?

DD: On paper, you’d think me and Toby Stevens would hate each other. We’ve made such totally different films that you just wouldn’t think it would work, but there’s a lot of mutual respect there.

CS: We were laughing about the fact that the only way you could see those two together is if Toby was the landowner on horseback and Danny turns up as the postman or the gamekeeper. But it’s nice to picture them as equals.

DD: Everybody I looked at I thought was an amazing actor and that is very rare. I’ve never had that on a job. There’s always someone who’s a bit ropey but there wasn’t room for it here. They would have stuck out like a sore thumb!

TO: Once everyone was together did the script change at all?

CS: Some things changed after meeting the actors. The main part that changed was Laura Harris’s role, which was quite underwritten when we first sent it to her. She was looking at the action she’d have to do and pointed out that it wouldn’t really fit in with her character unless she wasn’t a bimbo and was a smart cookie from the start. So we back-pedalled through the script and made sure everything she said was right – ‘we should stick to the main road… this isn’t the right lodge… we should go and get a phone signal’ – she is always right but no one listens to her because she’s a woman and she’s blond. But she comes through in the end.

TO: How difficult is it getting the tone between horror and comedy right?

CS: When we were doing it I had a very clear sense that we play it straight and that no one has lines that are too funny. In the script, when all the bear traps go off and Danny’s character says ‘either there’s someone who really wants to catch a bear or there’s a fuck-load of bears to catch’. That’s like a James Bond line so we cut that out. We wanted to keep it straight and real, so no one who gets shot gets up – when they are shot, they’re dead. There’s none of those clichés, you believe everything that happens in the movie could happen in real life, and that’s what I wanted for the film.

'Severance' is out tomorrow.

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