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Production Story
Director James P Weatherall and Producer Robert Fairhurst take us through their journey of the 5ive
How did you come up with the idea for the The Legend of The 5ive?
James P Weatherall: It started off with a simple “what if?” whilst watching a live ghost hunting show on late night TV. What if the stone the over excited host had throw into the darkness was suddenly and violently thrown back? What if it hit her? What if there really was a malevolent spirit with them? What would happen? Would she be injured? Die? Would the live show suddenly go off air? And what would happen if they kept the cameras rolling? Hmm...I thought, Ghost hunting, a live TV broadcast and Death. There must be a film in there somewhere and so the 5ive was born.
Lennah Seelig wrote the script with you how did she come on board?
James P Weatherall: I had just worked with Lennah on Room 36 and previously on the comedy Scrambled Eggs on toast and I knew then she’d be perfect for this project. Her writing is very tense and claustrophobic and her attention to enhancing the peculiarities of characters was great for the lighter comic moments in the script.
The writing process was quite intense as we had a tight deadline. After Robert had come on board in September we had set the shoot date for November and we needed to get the script finished so we could lock down the characters and start casting. It took a month of feverish writing (and a few disagreements) before we finally had a script, one that could be shot on location with a small crew and tight cast. Rob agreed, thankfully, and we set about pre‐production.
Robert what attracted you to this project?
Robert Fairhurst: I had just caught a screening of Room 36 at a festival. I had previously worked with James a few years earlier and I decided to get in touch to congratulate him. I was focused on developing feature concepts and breaking into the market; James knew this. We decided to meet up where he very kindly introduced me to Lennah and they pitched me their idea for a feature. Now I’ve always had a passion for well told ghost stories, especially ones that are based on reality. The entire idea of a live show, paranormal investigators cut off from the rest of their team, being pursued by the evil entity that they have unwittingly called forth. It really appealed to me.
Besides the story, I was very much attracted to the fact that they were both determined; old heads on young shoulders with a firm idea of how they could tell the story. These guys lived in the real world, they were talking my kind of language, they had great low budged concept that needed developing and I could easily pull the production resources together. So we started developing the film that very week and were in production two months later.
You describe your film as TV’s Most Haunted meets The Blair Witch, how does this work?
James P Weatherall: Our initial idea was to shoot the film as though it was a live webcast. Basing the film on the team of paranormal investigators seemed the obvious choice to me, especially bearing in mind the amount of TV ghost hunt emulators you come across in the current media climate. However as the story developed we found it was necessary to add the character of Julia marsh as an external documentary maker to be the voice of the audience. As she observed the paranormal team and the night’s events, so does the audience. This gave us a unique mixture of a live broadcast and documentary footage unfolding the horrifying events.
How did you bring your unique vision to the screen?
James P Weatherall: To add realism, we knew we had to shoot the film entirely handheld, but without the 
clichéd “shaky‐cam” so we ended up making a rig for the cameras that enabled us to walk and run and still get the smooth handheld shots we needed for the film. I also wanted to convey that this was all happening for real; we would not be able to rely on cutting back and forth, if there were cuts they would have to be planned out and hidden to maintain the illusion of a live broadcast.
This meant the actors were going to have to sustain their performance over long takes five, even ten minutes. Hit marks, dialogue cues, turn to meet the camera as it passed for their expression to be caught. We also had to make sure it was all choreographed to happen just right and every key point or character lit and filmed just at the right time. In many ways it was like a theatre play, once you were committed to the scene you had to keep going. To do this took a lot of planning.
Also I wanted to get away from the usual night vision cameras in their trademark green or black and white, mainly for the style of the piece but also night vision reveals a much wider shot, you become aware of the actors surroundings. I was keen to create a claustrophobic fear of the darkness. We adapted our hand‐held rig to incorporate a set of lights, that way you could only see where the lights pointed giving a real sense of a threat in the dark.
&I actually attended a number of paranormal investigations with established paranormal groups. We found the experience fascinating. In most cases we studied the characters, the dynamics of the group, their activities and reactions to what they considered to be tangible evidence or indeed lack of. On other occasions we shot footage of their activities as a practical exercise in the field.
What was the film like to shoot? Were there any challenges?
James P Weatherall: It was tough, tiring but exhilarating. We had a lot of things working against us the weather was one of the major factors. We originally chose November to shoot in because it tends to be a more stable month in England but unfortunately we shot in the wettest, windiest, coldest (temperatures got as low as minus six degrees Celsius) November on record since they began in 1914. One minute it would be raining the next it wasn’t. Then the wind would pick up sweeping through the trees making it sound like waves on a beach in the middle of a force ten gale. The problem for us was the story takes place over one night and so it became quite a challenge hiding the vastly changing weather from the camera and making it look like it was a natural flow over the course of one night.
Robert Fairhurst: And there were the dogs, cow and horses! It was a working farm and invariably the sound of an animal would cut through a scene and we would have to start again but the horses, it became a real battle of man and beast.
I think it started when we were shooting one of the earlier scenes quite close to their stable and as horses do, being curious creatures, they crept close to see what was happening. I don’t think they appreciated the intrusion of low budget film makers on their territory especially as we hadn’t even had the courtesy of offering them a part. I believe they saw their own chance to star in a film and began taking things into their own hoofs. An actor would be giving it their all and all of a sudden, out of the darkness, a horse’s head would appear in the frame. These horses were surprisingly stealthy; they’d suddenly just be there. So horse watch patrols were set up around scenes and clearly they took offence. We found our carefully preserved locations were stomped to pieces, hoof m
arks would mysteriously appear on back plates. Lights would cut out during takes and every time we traced the cable back, there it was! The trademark bite of an evil horse. Seriously it got so bad I even considered calling Robert Redford for help. It all came to a head one night when we were filming in the barn and we came out to find a script removed from one of our rucksacks, pages chewed, others stomped on and some rewritten... actually a couple of the suggestions weren’t too bad.
The Legend of The 5ive was a low budget film, did it affect the way you shot it?
Robert Fairhurst: The film was conceived from the get go to require minimal production requirements and this we worked to our advantage. We were stripped of all luxuries, we lived, worked and rested as a small, fast moving production unit and it did demand more from everyone involved. Cast and crew where living their characters, adopting the roles and this reality certainly enhance performance. It became personal to everyone involved.
You have a witch in your film Anne Foster? Is she based on a real life character?
James P Weatherall: Anne foster is the presence, the unseen threat of the movie. In the best tradition of horror and suspense, for me anyway, it’s always been the implied unseen that’s the scariest thing, rather than an actor in a mask or make‐up, it invokes the most powerful effect of all, the audience’s imagination.
Anne Foster is inspired by a real life character, the last woman to be convicted and hung as a witch in 1674 Northamptonshire, England where our film is set. She had made an enemy of a local farmer and was said to have cursed his land, killing his sheep by sorcery, breaking their bones in their skins. We took on this same motive when killing our five characters; their bones are broken, snapped and crushed. One really interesting fact! When she was being carried off to be hanged, she was heard screaming to anyone who would listen that she should be burnt rather than hung because if she wasn’t burnt she would come back.
Robert Fairhurst: It was really intriguing the effect that Anne Foster, being a real historical character, had on the cast. The owner of the farm had already told me on a recce that the land had been the sight of an ancient Anglo Saxon battle and burial site. One of our Make‐up artists, a practising medium, then picked up on this history and spiritual activity in the area. Upon Googling an aerial map of the farm we discovered in the photograph the shape of a number five etched into one of the main fields by a line of ancient trees.
We were a little freaked and it did seem a little more than a coincidences. Some of the actors, being superstitious types, were wary that we may be tempting fate; and yet here we were asking them to stand alone in the darkness summoning the presence of a convicted and executed witch..... Any gush of wind, any twig that snapped in the darkness became to them the very, very real presence of Anne herself. />
What was your cast like to work with?
James P Weatherall: They were great. We worked with them all to build strong interesting characters for the screen. After all it is a film of talking heads set against the black night and therefore integral that the personality of the cast holds the audience’s attention. We threw a lot at them, it was very tiring, and we covered a lot of ground running every night. Then there were long waits for the weather to clear and then they’d have to go out and perform often long scenes through bitter cold, windy weather but it was a real team effort, everybody bonded, and everybody went above and beyond what we asked of them. They supported the shoot all the way and I was happy to let characters live the moment, to be inspired and go off the script. I think if you have a good story everyone can see its potential and want to work hard to bring it to the screen.