It was a pleasure to drink tea and talk with Rob Savage during the London Film Festival about his upcoming movie Dashcam. We share a passion for The Blair Witch Project, and I was honored to interview him and talk about this computer screen horror film. The story revolves around a woman who travels to the United Kingdom to escape COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States.
How did you start your career as a director? How did you go from directing short films to Host and Dashcam?
I was seventeen when I shot my first movie. I grew up in the middle of the countryside; I have never been to London. I didn't know anyone from the film industry. I was the art kid doing comic books, and then I watched Akira and Ghost in the Shell and some of the great animated manga movies.
In that period, I decided that creating movies was what I was actually going to do. Doing films is more sociable than drawing comics; you get to meet many new people, and I tried to make slashy catch-up movies with my friends.
I started this career when I was seventeen because I had never seen a short film, I didn't know any or how to shoot a short. I just decided: "Yeah, I am going to make a feature film at some point," and I have a handful of friends who raised 3000 pounds with me to shoot a movie. It played in many film festivals, London Film Festival included, and it ended up getting a bit of a boost because a lot of HD cameras were coming out. People managed to make professional movies with those. We became part of a conversation.
When I was nineteen, I moved to London, and I have just been doing features, shorts, and TV. For almost ten years, I have been making a living with these activities and with commercials. When I was shooting Host, the production shut down, I got bored, and I played a prank on my friends and screened it. I pretended that a zombie had eaten me and I ended up going viral, and suddenly I got this opportunity to make this movie (Dashcam). I was able to say: this is the movie I want to make.
Host is the backbone of Dashcam. Like we did with Host, we improvised with a few pages of script and an outline. It was a very collaborative thing; the film was written by all of us—even the stunt and special effects team were checking the story. I was asking, "What's the coolest thing you can do with our budget?" We wanted to make the most impressive film possible.
Three or four weeks after Host came out, we started pre-production on Dashcam, and it was the same thing. We knew we would be shooting about a month and a half from the start day with no script and just with the cast members of the film based on. It is just a lovely way of working. It was eye-opening, and we ended up working with the best that everyone could do and also, we had a bigger budget than Host, but people were surprised by how we used that money.
Your movie was compared to The Blair Witch Project. Do you feel like it is an appropriate comparison? Did that type of horror movie influence you?
I feel like it was one of these horror movies that you can not avoid being influenced by. Movies like Halloween, The Blair Witch Project are iconic, and fundamentally they created a language. This movie is meant to be a live stream recorded, in the same way as The Blair Witch Project, where you have tapes that are cut and combined into a movie. We looked at it a lot for its editing language. It is a great movie to analyze and to watch how the characters were developed and combined with great scary moments.
I watched The Blair Witch Project, along with Evans's short film for the VHS anthology called Safe Haven. It is a crazy cult demonic possession movie. It is a ten minute-film, and we took a lot from his approach. Dashcam is as much influenced by Garret Evans as by The Blair Witch Project.
How much of the experience of the pandemic is part of the movie?
There is a strong political discourse in this movie. Host was a lot about isolation and the weirdness of being inside and communicating via Zoom and so on. Dashcam was shot when the US election was heating up. We were trying to take the temperature from that. The main character is American, and there is a clear perspective about the US. It is not so much about the pandemic, but about people's opinions on lockdown life and restrictions and how people live this experience.
What about your next project?
I have a few things I am working on. We have an idea for the next one, but I can not say much. It might have an element similar to Host and Dashcam. It will be set in whatever weirdness we are living in.