Richard Hunter’s feature „Full Evil Deeds” was one of the first European features to be British, drawing inspiration from continental art house names rather than the usual luminaries of UK social reality such as Ken Loach and Mike Lee.
It includes intertwining stories of everyday wickedness, from the careless to the horrifying: „People like Ulrich Seidel and Michael Haneke being great, Roy Anderson being great, and looking at it all objectively,” Hunter said. Variety.
“Early Ruben Ostlund. Britishness, naturally, comes out through me.
Hunter came to filmmaking from advertising. „I did documentaries in university and that led to music videos and from there to commercials. That’s where I found my wet spot in that world. I saw people who made that transition, like Michael Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze, and I gravitated towards that path.
The stories that make up the film are inspired by real life. „Each one is based on a point of reality, something that happened, modified to what you see.”
It also allowed for a looser structure: “I’ve always been drawn to those fragmented sets and ensemble casts like “short cuts”” by Haneke. That style allows you to not focus on the plot, but you still want to hang each character’s behavior on that single idea. It’s not just a broad thing where anything can happen. These actions on the human condition – from not picking up the puppy to killing your wife and everything in between. 'Wrong’ and 'deeds’ are a slang for 'evil’. There is playfulness, but also malice.
It took a year to shoot with individually shot vignettes and the editing process is ongoing. „It was almost a luxury,” Hunter says. „It was all shot on mini-TV in 1993 on a video camera, then upscaled to DCP. It has this transcendental home-video aesthetic that plays on the voyeuristic feel of the objective camera.
„It was an interesting idea to take that handheld aesthetic of being handheld and shaking and locking it in. I wanted it to have an inevitability in terms of what we were seeing, where it felt like it was always happening, and the camera would show you this bit and this as this little square,” he said. He added.
It creates a distant effect on the viewer. „I wanted to objectify these moments, whether you’re carrying the shopping from the car to the front door or your wife’s dead body from the car to the lake. It’s all the same. It’s all happening, and to us it’s all just information; almost like a neutral document. There’s no comment. That mundane, You can mix and match mundane moments with something that’s always going somewhere.”
Hunter especially credits her casting director, Ilenka Jelovicki, and editor, Matthew J. Brady: „They were the tentacles of the production.” The film is a Weiss Production and produced by Federica Schiavello. This is his first feature and a sales agent is yet to be attached.
Richard Hunter sees his next project as related to „Foul Evil Deeds”: „I have several scripts in the drawer, but the next two I want to do are sequels.”
„Totalny pionier w sieci. Specjalista od piwa niezależny. Ewangelista popkultury. Miłośnik muzyki. Nieprzepraszający przedsiębiorca”.