The Origin: an interview with Andrew Cumming

“A first time director, during a pandemic, with a new cast, it’s in a made up language, it’s set 45,000 years ago... need I go on?”

With The Origin, director Andrew Cumming has created a taut, ambitious horror set in the early dawn of humankind — and has earned a BIFA nomination for Best Debut Director in the process. 

Directors UK spoke to Andrew about creating a vivid, sensory experience, directing performance in a non-existent language, and filming on location in Scotland during COVID. Read the full interview below. 

Where did the idea for the film come from?  

Andrew: The spark, really, was in my last year at film school. I watched Andrew Marr’s History of the World. and there was a sequence involving early modern humans — it was a pretty basic re-enactment but I thought, ‘what an interesting thing that is…’ Someone at film school put me on to William Golding’s follow up to Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, and I was captivated by that period of our history and our evolution. I felt like ‘this is a sandpit that maybe could do with a bit of exploring cinematically!’ but I also felt, ‘I’m not going to do this as a debut. This will be the film I’ll make in twenty years’ time, if I ever have any clout whatsoever, I’ll pick something like this...’  

And then I met Oliver Kassman. This was before he produced Saint Maud, when he was working in development for Michael Kuhn at Qwerty Films. We had an hour-long general meeting, and at the very end he said, ‘Oh, and I’ve got this idea for a horror film about early modern humans.’ And I said, ‘Well, you’ve just described my dream project.’ So that was it, that was the spark.  

What happened next? 

A few weeks later, we met up again. He was setting up on his own, and he’d just optioned a spec script by Ruth Greenberg — still one of the best spec scripts I’ve ever read, especially from a first time writer. She was a really muscular world builder, her writing was so rich in character and detail, and was very cinematic. Oliver and I had written this three page outline, you know, ‘Character Alpha does this and character Beta does this,’ and we sent it to Ruth. Within that she found so many things she could engage with, which also fed into the things I was interested in exploring. It felt like it all overlapped, we just connected at the perfect time in our careers. We were all looking to make our first film, and that was that.   

We went on a recce before Ruth started her first draft. We visited a few locations round the north of Scotland and some of our mishaps and adventures made it into that first draft of the script. It was a very organic process that just started, like all these things, with a chance meeting and an ‘Oh, that’s a cool idea. Let’s try it!’  

That’s wonderful. We hear that so much, that chance connection...  

Andrew: You can try and force it. There’s a point out of film school where you’re almost afraid to say no, so you attach yourself to things that just aren’t the right fit. But then along comes the one, right? It’s like trying to find love, it just hits you out of the blue when you’re not looking for it.  

Can you tell me about your journey as a director? You’ve been to film school, you’ve made shorts, you’ve worked in TV… 

Andrew: If I’d tried to make The Origin straight out of film school with just some shorts under my belt, I think I would have had a breakdown.  

When you’re coming up with a feature idea and it’s like, ‘wouldn’t it be great if we’re in the forest for three weeks? Then we’re at the top of a mountain for a week?’… you just naively go in plotting it out. When it comes to actually doing it, you realise the physical exertion, the mental exertion, the crisis of confidence that you’ll have because you’re making something so batshit crazy, as well as trying to cheerlead and get everybody to the top of the mountain with you. There’s a lot that goes into it.  

That’s why shorts are fundamental for filmmakers. It’s your training ground and it’s your calling card. I found making shorts quite frustrating, because I always felt I was pushing at the boundaries too much. I didn’t realise this, but I think I’m a world builder; my shorts are all trying to build worlds within short film budgets and schedules. I just could never quite achieve what I wanted to, I could never quite see what I saw in my head actualised.  

Then I got a gig in TV, on Scottish soap opera River City. That was my first proper paid gig. On a good day, you would be shooting 15 pages a day. It’s crazy, but that’s when you learn to trust your gut. You have to be extremely, meticulously prepared, but also be open to what the actors are bringing.  

I always say that film school is like learning to drive, and then going into TV is like going on the motorway for the first time. You know the basics, but you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I’m out on my own here, and there’s nobody with their foot on the brake on the other side of the car!’.  

I then moved into High-end TV – where there’s a higher budget, higher stakes. Here I was working on 60 minute episodes, exploring how to play and pace scenes for the longer format.  

From there, everything just organically fed from one project to the next. In the background, The Origin was just ticking along. I was about to do a show for BBC One when lockdown hit, and a couple of months later Oliver called me up and said, ‘We’ve got the money for the film, we’re going to go.’ I called up the producer of that television show and said, ‘I don’t know when you’re going back, but I’m going to be out for the next year, because my baby’s going to be born’. They were very gracious and said, ‘Yes, go and do your thing.’ So that was that. 

There were periods of inactivity where I wasn’t working, and of course you’re stressing out because you need to put food on the table and pay your mortgage, but it just felt like this gradual process so by the time I got to The Origin, I was ready. There was very little that could faze me after a few years of doing television in that pressure cooker environment. Yes, I think I needed that. Otherwise, I don’t think I could have made The Origin.  

That process is you building your craft, you’re learning your trade…  

Andrew: Yes, that’s it, right? That’s the thing. Nobody comes out of nowhere. Nobody. It’s very rare. Everybody’s been grafting.  

What about the process of getting the film greenlit and off the ground?  

Andrew: It’s a miracle, quite honestly. There’s several good reasons not to make The Origin, and not to finance it. I’m a irst time director, during a pandemic, with a new cast, it’s in a made up language, it’s set 45,000 years ago... need I go on?  

Oliver came off the back of Saint Maud, Rose Glass’s film, and he was suddenly propelled into the spotlight and being taken seriously as a producer who’d corralled this really great, distinctive debut feature that was also in the genre space, so I think that opened a few doors.  

He gave the script to Sam Intili, who was at Animal Kingdom at the time. They loved it, and saw the potential. Then Sony Worldwide came on board. Screen Scotland were always willing to support me, because I was adamant the film be shot in Scotland, that we would work with a Scottish crew. Then the BFI came in, and off we went.  

Speaking of Scotland, how was it filming on location?  

Andrew: As you drive through that neck of the woods, it’s very primeval: huge mountains, epic, eerie forests, vast, peaty boglands. It’s not desolate, by any stretch, but there are areas there that you feel the history, it’s almost like it’s seeping out of the land. When Oliver, Ruth and I were working on the script, I always felt confident that everything we needed was in Scotland. 

When COVID hit, we thought, ‘How do we do this?’, and the answer was to set up a bubble. We hired out a hotel, put 75 cast and crew in it, and stayed there for the duration of the shoot. Everything has to be within a certain radius of the hotel for us to achieve our days. I was reticent to do that to start with, because I’d fallen in love with certain locations further away, but, you adapt. 

Sometimes those limits can be helpful. If you can just literally put your crew anywhere, where do you stop? If you have some parameters, it focuses the mind a bit and you have to make things work. You just get your hiking boots on and you go out and look at the map. You say ‘Well, there’s a forest there. Let’s go and see it. There’s a cave there, let’s hike to that,’ And you just chalk it off as you go.  

Our location manager, Morven McPherson, and her team were phenomenal. A lot of these places are so hard to get to because they’re so boggy - I’d never seen so much DuraDek! Her team were relentless in trying to service the locations that I was taking us to. And occasionally, you had to fold and say, ‘Okay, this needs to be by road, and we just won’t shoot that way, because I can see the road itself, and I can see the hydro dam, and I can see the pylons’. There’s 200 odd effect shots in the film that are invisible, because it’s just rubbing out pieces of modern life.  

The locations in the film are stunning and visceral, everything feels so ‘wet’. Could you talk a bit about your directorial vision for the film?  

Andrew: ‘How do you make people feel cold and wet and scared for 90 minutes?’ That was the vision. So every decision considered ‘How do you feel the elements? How do you depict that visually? Sonically?’  

When we went on the first recce, we went to the bothy from Under the Skin. We set a fire, sat round and noticed that when the light of the fire erodes and everything slips into darkness, you can’t see anything – at all. Noises are amplified, everything is. Every horror director ever has said this, right? But it feels like everything you carry in yourself that scares you is out there, somewhere.  

Working with natural materials and landscapes, a lot of the colours of the film mirror a natural palette. There is the question of how you find the colours — you don’t want the whole thing to be monotone. The blacks have to be pure black, picking out the orange of the fire, the green of the Aurora Borealis. We tried to give an oily blue tone to the skin of the actors. Myself, Ben Fordesman, our DoP, and Rob Pizzey, our fantastic grader, were trying to find vivid expressionistic colour wherever we could.  

Sonically, we wanted to see how we could make the audience feel cold at all times, feel that omnipotent, relentless wind. With the music, Adam Janota has created something primal, there’s an aura and an energy to it. With Paul Davies, our sound designer, and his team, we wanted to find a balance with the music: when are you with the characters, and when are you evoking some mythic presence? We played around a lot in the edit. 

Every part of the story dictates what the style is. It wasn’t me necessarily imposing my will upon it, it’s just that eventually, the story tells you what it needs, and you go with that.  

Of course it’s my taste, it’s how I think a story should be constructed and put together for an audience, but you’re always taking your cues from the story and the characters and what they’re trying to do, and what you’re trying to make the audience feel through them.  

How do you approach working with actors as a director?  

Andrew: You cast good people. I came into filmmaking from a technical side. Actors didn’t scare me, but they were a mystery. ‘How do you do it? How do you speak to them? How do you elicit these things from them?’ The more you work with actors, the more you realise that you’re not trying to get blood from stone. These people make themselves vulnerable for a director, because directors hopefully are going to push them to places that are going to evoke things that tell the story, right? Emotions or feelings or untapped memories. So it’s about trust, first of all.  

And then it’s about casting the right person in the right part. You’re tapping into what they’re bringing, and hopefully you get the chemistry right between everybody, and then they’re like instruments that you’re conducting.  

So, once you’ve got that down, it’s a case of getting in the room to do your read through. Then I did one-on-one rehearsals with each of the actors, just to talk through the characters, their backstories. You try and keep it simple: What do they want? What do they want over the course of the story, what do they want from each scene? How do they go about getting what they want? What’s stopping them? What are their relationships with each other? 

We worked with a made up language, Tola. The great thing with that is that you’re looking past the lines, you’re not thinking about the dialogue. You’re just thinking ‘What is the intent? What are they trying to change in the other person?’ and considering ‘Do I believe it? Do I believe what it is you’re trying to project?’. People have said to me, ‘God, how the fuck did you direct a film in a made up language? That must have been crazy!’… No, it was the most freeing thing I’ve ever done.   

Let’s move on to the edit. How was that process for you? 

Andrew: Paulo Pandolpho, the editor, and I went to film school together. He edited my graduation film, he’s done loads of High-end TV now, and he’s very good. I trust him implicitly and vice-vera — I think!  

He was cutting as we were shooting, which is very helpful because you’d get a text saying, ‘Oh, hey, man, I think you might need to pick up this thing’ — like a detail or a close up. It’s great when the editor is there with you and is the safety net just to say, ‘before we go back to civilisation, we might need this, this and this’. 

We edited in London for a good six months. The first cut of the film was 2.5 hours long. It was this big ensemble piece, following the journey of six characters. We gave them all a lot of character moments to fill out their backstories and understand each of their plights. But there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on getting the right balance of the stories. Then on top of that, you need to remember it needs to be scary! So you’ve got certain rhythms and tones that you need to hit, whilst balancing all of these characters… it was a lot to juggle.  

Going back to my short films, I always start wide and then I’ve got to try and ‘come in’. I knew I’d achieved the wide, but it was a constant process of honing and refining, until you’ve got the 90 minutes you see today. That process takes time – you just have to get through it, bang your head against the wall then put every scene up on that wall and move things around until it fits. 

So there’s an hour’s worth of beautiful material, amazing character work and performances, that is just gone... but it’s all for the greater good. We’ve created something that’s lean and muscular and has that tension. It never lets up for a second.  

How does it feel to be nominated for the BIFA award for Best Debut Director — and what does it mean to you as a director?  

Andrew: I saw an article recently where Danny Boyle was talking about British cinema and said effectively, ‘We’ve never been very good at it.’ Really?! David Lean? Powell and Pressburger? Danny Boyle?! Lynne Ramsey? To name five off the top of my head… Now, you’re looking at Georgia Oakley and Charlotte Wells and Thomas Hardiman and Frances O’Connor nominated for Best Debut Director — not to mention the people that are nominated for the ‘grown-up’ director prize!  

I just feel like it’s just amazing to be included in this year’s line-up, the work is so strong. I think it’s fair to say that, actually, the UK is brimming with talent and a diversity of voices. We’re all telling very different stories, and there’s a space for it all.  

Yes, it’s hard out there for independent cinema, trying to raise the money and make it work is tough. Maybe it’s harder for films that are a little bit different, and that challenge people’s expectations of what British cinema is, to punch through… but when it does, when it’s supported and given time, when it’s nurtured, you get an amazing breadth of work. I feel really humbled and excited just to be a part of that.