Gimme Gore

Director Corin Hardy’s epic journey from teenage zombie-fests in East Sussex via an award-winning run of music videos has led him to work with Sam Raimi in Hollywood. The master illusionist talks to David Knight about his appetite for gore and keeping it real

Talking to one of your all-time heroes can be nerve-wracking. And sometimes, as Corin Hardy has discovered, it can leave you completely speechless. A few months ago he had a phone conversation with Sam Raimi, one of Hollywood’s biggest directors. It was an important call. “The first thing he said to me was: ‘Mr Corin Hardy – I’m a big fan of your work, sir’,” Hardy recounts. “What do you say to that?”

A greeting that would have floored many up-and-coming directors could hardly have been more meaningful for Hardy. He has been a huge Raimi fan since watching the cult classic Evil Dead 2 as a horror movie-obsessed youth in the late 80s. Not long afterwards, he was tramping around the picturesque countryside of East Sussex with his school pals making blood-spattered mini-zombie movies of his own. “Evil Dead 2 was my inspiration to pick up a film camera,” he declares.

Fast forward to the summer of 2009, and Hardy, now one of Britain’s most distinctive and highly regarded music video directors, is in Los Angeles to pitch ideas for a potential debut feature. He has a meeting at Ghost House Pictures, Raimi’s production company for genre horror projects. That leads to the subsequent phone call from Raimi himself. And it is not difficult to see why the legendary director is impressed by this 35-year-old Englishman.

Corin Hardy has been responsible for some of the most original and imaginative British music videos of the past few years – videos for the likes of The Prodigy, The Horrors, Paolo Nutini, The Guillemots, McFly, Fightstar and more. Realised with a combination of skilful versatility and awe-inspiring commitment, Hardy’s work is renowned for its in-camera special effects – invariably with highly entertaining horror-genre overtones too.

Take his 2007 video for The Horrors’ She is the New Thing, in which the band come under attack from a sharp-fanged she-devil and other creatures entirely created and animated in pen and ink. Limbs fly, blood spurts, and eventually the band are reduced to bloody heaps of flesh and bone. It is gruesome, but also highly enjoyable, and the video went on to scoop several international awards, including best video at Belgian animation festival Anima, and Korean film and animation festival Sicaf – where the cash prize was actually greater than the video’s budget.

Then last year came Hardy’s video for The Prodigy’s Warrior’s Dance, an outstanding work in which ordinary cigarette packets come alive, turn into fierce ciggy-packet men and, to the rejuvenated dance outfit’s techno stomp, cause Gremlin-like mayhem in a bar before interacting self-destructively with real fire. It’s another award-winner, picking up the best video prize at Rushes Soho Shorts festival in London last summer – with probably more to come.

And most recently he has directed the video for Paolo Nutini’s Pencil Full of Lead – quite simply the best claymation video since Aardman’s 80s classic for Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite. The Scottish singer is transformed into both a plasticine performer and rakish character, who’s over-friskiness with his live action band of girl musicians and dancers during a TV show leads him into big trouble. That looks a fair bet for further honours this year too.

In these videos Hardy has brilliantly fused animation and special effects with live action, but particularly in the cases of the Prodigy and Nutini videos, appearances can be deceptive. Is Warrior’s Dance stop-motion animation or something else? And surely the seamlessly claymated Nutini character was actually created in CGI?

“It’s about creating an illusion out of many different special effects,” Hardy explains, tellingly employing the terminology of a magician. “It’s sleight of hand.” He is enjoying a burger in a Soho diner while talking to shots, and has something of the magician, or artist, about him too: his black hair sprouting from the sides of a pork pie hat, extravagantly colourful shirt, white streak through his moustache.

He comes from a creative family – his father Noel was a TV drama director, his paternal grandfather Leo a notable painter and illustrator and also head of Southend School of Art. A talented artist and sculptor himself, Corin was already working on film, TV and theatre sets as a teenager.

He explains that his interest in special effects and monster-making arrived very early – probably even before he picked up a camera. At school he met David Lupton, now an illustrator, who became his prime collaborator on those early gore-fests, and with whom he still works. “We basically formulated loose stories around these elaborate special effects we’d planned. We had gore, we had smoke bombs and a pond that we could turn into a swamp. Then we’d pool our pocket money to buy film.”

Later on Hardy studied theatre design and special effects at Wimbledon College of Art, graduating with first class honours. But one of his teachers – a special effects tech on several big movies herself – urged him to set his sights higher, and return to making his own films. That was the motivation he needed to develop his final year project into Butterfly, a stop-frame animated short about an anguished man on the verge of suicide, who ultimately finds redemption. The hugely ambitious Butterfly took him an incredible five years to complete.

Supporting himself with paid commissions for artworks and sculptures while working on his film, Hardy also gained valuable experience of directing and editing on low-budget music videos, including directing two for his brother’s band Rachel Stamp. But it was Butterfly’s eventual completion in 2003, and its subsequent rapturous reception that provided his passage into a proper directing career. As well as winning several awards, it quickly led to him directing two videos for Keane just as they were hitting the big time, including a reworking of Butterfly as the promo for the band’s Bedshaped. Then when Liz Kessler – who commissioned Hardy to direct those Keane videos and a subsequent clip for McFly – became head of videos at Academy Films in 2005 one of her first moves was to sign him.

Hardy’s numerous videos since then have certainly not all been SFX or animation-heavy. The Feeling’s Without You is a single-shot account of singer Dan Gillespie Sells being fitted into a cosmonaut’s spacesuit to become the first man in space. And although his very best work has involved animation in some form, he remains doggedly resistant to a reliance on CGI.

“I consider good effects to be a combination of techniques – with as much in-camera stuff as possible,” he remarks. “What we can do with CGI is unbelievable. But that’s the problem – it’s unbelievable.”

With his video for The Horrors, he and David Lupton hand-drew all 1,300 frames of art themselves, at a rate of nearly 100 a day for three weeks – filming them as they went along. And Hardy used a pig’s heart, hanging in his kitchen dripping with blood, as inspiration.

The Prodigy video combined stop-motion animation with puppeteering, and the climax, where a wall of flame shoots across the bar, eventually engulfing the dancing cig-packet figures, was done for real. “There’s always a shot in a video that’s nearly impossible to achieve – in this case it was a real puppet with a real match that was puppeteered to bend down to light the fluid,” he explains. “Stu Bentley, my cameraman, was having his face licked with flames when he shot it.”

When it came to Paolo Nutini, he was initially reluctant to even script on the video. “Then I listened to the song, and it sounded like The Jungle Book. I grew to really like Paolo’s stuff, and the label said they didn’t want a usual animated video.” What Hardy came up with was something heartwarming and entertaining on the one hand, and extremely challenging on the other – a claymation Paolo who is actually a bit of a sex-pest, and who gets his comeuppance when the outraged girls end up squishing him.

“It was giving the character a personality that was at odds with what you expect, and then playing with the process,” he notes, confirming that the animation process was entirely traditional. This time he was supervising rather than actually animating himself, and working with two of the best stop-motion animators in the business – Mark Waring and Andy Gent – who had just finished working on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox.

“What we wanted was an innocent, oversexed young man who’s fun, but out of order – like a Tex Avery character. But it’s really tricky. You can’t see if he’s too seedy or too nice in front of you as he’s being animated. And there wasn’t time to have two takes.”

Ultimately it works beautifully, and if this latest success suggests he is now ready to move onto bigger challenges, it looks like he will get the chance sooner rather than later. Indeed, one of those projects he was discussing with Sam Raimi last summer is now a serious proposition.

For the past couple of years he has been working closely with writer Tom De Ville, to develop several of his longstanding movie projects ideas – for horror films, of course. “Tom and I started getting calls from American agents, and then quite suddenly an American team got me a trip to LA,” he explains. “So I went over in June, and I had five meetings a day for five days.” In fact, Ghost House Pictures was the first production company that Hardy met, and now they are developing Refuge, Hardy’s idea for a Yeti movie.

At the meeting he happened to mention his teenage filmmaking exploits to the assembled Ghost House executives, and they were intrigued. “I didn’t go all that way to show them my Super 8 films, but that’s what happened – and they loved them,” he explains. “I hadn’t realised that a lot of people get into horror now because it’s big business, they aren’t actually into horror movies at all. This showed them I was different.”

So the next step is for Hardy to make a 10-minute teaser-trailer of Refuge – closely followed, hopefully, by the full movie. And you can bet that the fake blood will be real.