Director Richard Hunter on Locarno First Feature Foul Evil Deeds: Not Picking Up Dog

Publish date: 2024-09-03

Richard Hunter’s feature “Foul Evil Deeds” is one of the more European of British first features, taking its inspiration from continental art house names rather than the more usual luminaries of U.K. social realism such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. 

It consists of interwoven stories of everyday wickedness, from the careless to the horrific: “The influences are people like Ulrich Seidel and Michael Haneke being a huge one, Roy Andersson being a big one, and peripherally looking at all of those,” Hunter told Variety. 

“The early Ruben Östlund as well. The Britishness, inherently, obviously comes out through me.”

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Hunter arrived at filmmaking from advertising. “I did documentary at university, and that led into music videos, and from there into commercials. And there I found my wet place in that world. I looked to the people that had done that transition like Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze, and I gravitated towards that path.” 

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The stories that make up the film were inspired by real life. “Every single one is based on a point of reality, something that happened that then has been adapted into what you see.” 

It also allowed for a loose structure: “I’ve always been drawn to those fragmented anthologies and ensemble casts, like “Short Cuts,” or again, if you’re looking at it with no interconnectivity, then Roy Andersson or “71 Fragments” by Haneke. That style allows you to not be so focused on plot, but you also still want to be able to hang the behavior of each character on that single idea. It’s not just the sprawling thing of anything can happen. These acts that exist in the human condition – from not picking up dog poo to killing your wife and everything in between. The ‘foul’ and the ‘deeds’ are a lightness to the ‘evil.’ There’s playfulness in there, but there’s also evilness in there as well.” 

It took a year to film with the vignettes filmed separately and the editing process ongoing. “It was almost a luxury,” Hunter says. “It’s all shot on mini-DV on a video camera from 1993 and then upscaled to DCP. It has this subconscious home-video aesthetic that plays into the voyeuristic feeling of the objective camera. 

“It was an interesting idea to take that handheld aesthetic, which is handheld and shaky, and lock it down. As far as what we’re seeing, I wanted an inevitableness to it, where it felt like this is always happening, and the camera just happens to be this little square showing you this bit and this bit,” he added. 

This creates a distancing effect with the viewer. “I wanted to objectively show these moments whether you’re taking the shopping from the car to the front door, or you’re taking the dead body of your wife from the car to the lake. It’s all the same. It’s all happening, and it’s all just information for us; almost like a neutral documentation. There’s no opinion. I could show those mundane, banal moments mixed in with something that was always going somewhere.” 

Hunter especially credits his casting director Ilenka Jelowicki and editor Matthew J Brady: “They were the tentpoles of the production.” The film is a Wayes Production and the producer is Federica Schiavello. This is her first feature and a sales agent has yet to be attached. 

Richard Hunter sees his next project as being related to “Foul Evil Deeds”: “I have many scripts in the drawer, but the next two that I want to do are a continuation.”

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