Landis, Pegg and Serkis on the macabre new film
It might be one of the last days of shooting (the 38th of 39 in fact), but March 18, 2010, was a very good day indeed to be on the set of John Landis’ new comedy horror movie Burke & Hare . For a start, three of the total seventeen murders carried out by the infamous corpse sellers William Burke and William Hare in Scotland between 1827-28 are being filmed at the Luton Hoo location, and one of those is actually the ‘Burking’ explanation death. Burke was so proud of purposely smothering his victim’s mouth while compressing their chest that the Edinburgh-based gruesome twosome conceitedly named the killing method after him. Then there’s the reason why practically all the headline cast has arrived at the Bedfordshire country estate set in a state of real excitement even though they aren’t scheduled to work. Because today is when legendary genre icon Christopher Lee shoots his cameo performance as Old Joseph and everyone wants to witness this moment in history.
As usual, you can hear director Landis long before you see him. His booming voice echoes across the tiny set, constructed in an old barn to resemble Hare’s frugal lodging house. In this instance King Kong and Gollum star Andy Serkis, playing Hare, is asking his director if he can shoot another take suffocating Lee’s character. Landis grumblingly yells, “It had better be f**king brilliant then.” Once more the cast and crew laugh at yet another Landis’ forthright comment, and again when Serkis puts another comic spin on the action and the director roars, “That was horribleâ¦but in a good way!”
“John really is a force of nature,” remarks Serkis when his director is out of earshot tucking in to his favorite British snack, ginger nut biscuits. He continues, “Everybody working on Burke & Hare is having an absolute ball. No one has a bad word to say about John. His constant stream of movie business anecdotes has kept us entertained throughout an arduous shoot. And his encyclopedic knowledge of film is astonishing. If he asks me if I’ve seen yet another film I haven’t, it’ll be embarrassing. He keeps on providing me with lists of must-see movies! I’ll tell you this though, John is one of the hardest workers I’ve come across – his stamina is amazing. He really was a great choice to direct Burke & Hare.”
That directing opportunity arose for John Landis when he trawled London two years ago looking for an interesting project as he explains. “I hadn’t made a film in England since Spies Like Us in 1985 so I met up with loads of independent producers because I wanted to see what was out there away from the Hollywood mainstream which is making such crap these days. I was on the lookout for something interesting, unusual. Okay, I was still given a lot of bad scripts, but then I met Ealing Studios’ producer Barnaby Thompson through my friend Gurinder Chadha [director of It’s a Wonderful Afterlife and Bride & Prejudice] who has an office there. Barnaby asked me what I wanted to do and normally when you reply âsomething of quality’, producers are usually at a loss because they want you to say a rom-com, a monster movie, etc. I didn’t care what the genre was as long as it was good and I could do something interesting. So he gave me a couple of scripts to read and one was Burke & Hare by writers Nick Moorcroft and Piers Ashworth.”
Long in development Ashworh and Moorcroft’s spec script had virtually acted as an audition piece. It got them the writing assignments on Ealing Studio’s two massive UK hits St. Trinian’s (2007) and its sequel St. Trinian’s 2: The Secret of Fritton’s Gold (2009). “It was the first screenplay we worked on together,” recalls Ashworth. “We were both fans of the classic Ealing comedies like The Lavender Hill Mob, The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts & Coronets and wanted to write something in that vein. Then we went on a Ghost Tour and heard the Burke and Hare story, which we thought was amazing. It was macabre and gruesome but in the typical Ealing style where black comedy could easily be perceived in a basically unpleasant idea,” Moorcroft adds. “Not only that they lived in a seminal time with the birth of everything that is familiar to us today – trains, photography, policing, capitalism, medicine, the media. This was ripe with possibilities for us to explore. And although everyone thinks they know the Burke and Hare story, they don’t usually know the real facts above they were Irish drunks who murdered people inadvertently helping medical history. What we thought was funny was the pair were never really body snatchers; it was way too cold and dark to lurk around graveyards, far better to go straight to the source and kill unwilling victims. Who was ever going to miss the villains they murdered? The fact they killed in order to save lives thanks to the advances in the medical profession they laid the ground for was the deliciously witty moral conundrum.”
“I thought it was a smart, twisted view on capitalism when the script arrived on my desk six years ago,” remembers Barnaby Thompson, producer of the recent Dorian Gray. “Two unlikely guys who fell into a new supply and demand business model for procuring dead bodies. I rarely get that excited about stuff we haven’t developed from scratch, but Burke & Hare was a sheer delight. I knew the subject vaguely because of studying Dylan Thomas’ play âThe Doctor and the Devils’ at school and it fitted the classic Ealing ethos of finding the humor in a grim subject. I hadn’t thought of John Landis as the director of the piece. But when we first met up Ealing had just made Easy Virtue, a quintessentially English play by Noel Coward given an original twist by Australian Priscilla, Queen of the Desert director Stephan Elliott. John made two of the best comedies of all time National Lampoon’s Animal House and The Blues Brothers and the landmark comedy horror An American Werewolf in London. So when the guy who directed those movies walks into your office and says, what have you got, you offer him something tonally similar and hope he’ll also give it an original slant.”
For John Landis the comedy range in Burke & Hare goes from subtly understated to overdone slapstick and it was this broad spectrum that got his creative juices flowing. “I actually didn’t see it scary and funny in the American Werewolf tradition,” Landis points out. “It was just flat out funny in my estimation. Sure, it does have grisly things in it, we cut open bodies â it is about vivisection after all â but it is in essence an evil Laurel and Hardy black comedy. It’s a very fine line we’re skirting and a Hollywood studio would never make this movie in a million years. It’s a comedy about homicidal maniacs, psychopathic killers, with the real villain of the piece being Doctor Robert Knox, the lecturer at Edinburgh Medical College, who purchased the corpses because of his thirst for anatomical knowledge and the greater good.”
Landis already knew many of the films based on the infamous West Port murders. “But I’ve now found a total of sixteen films,” he says. “Robert Louis Stevenson famously wrote âThe Body Snatcher’, director Robert Wise’s first movie in 1941, with a terrific Boris Karloff. The Flesh and the Fiends (1959) was a great British version in black and white cinemascope, and Peter Cushing was a wonderful Dr. Knox. Freddie Francis’ The Doctor and the Devils (1985) was a big mistake. The 1971 Burke and Hare was a truly appalling tits and ass version. Christopher Lee played in Corridors of Blood – my point being, and the great irony, is all the versions were essentially horror, yet ours being the most accurate is a comedy.”
It’s also the only version in the right period setting too. Landis adds, “Every version to date uses a Victorian atmosphere. But the time frame really makes it Edwardian. All period movies are expensive to make, the reason why the previous versions opted for the easier to find Regency buildings. The West Point ghetto in Edinburgh where most of the story takes place was torn down after the last world war and is now a parking lot. We did shoot on three Edinburgh streets because the architecture was authentic, but we mostly had to recreate the look and feel with set builds. Playing in an area that isn’t shown often also had the advantage of making the story feel fresher. The challenge came in the less readily available costumes. My wife, [costume designer] Deborah [Nadoolman], had to source the hats and shoes from Italy and some of the main outfits from Los Angeles. People are going to be surprised by how expensive the movie looks for its modest budget.”
Source: Alan Jones
