Director Richard Hunter on Locarno First Feature ‘Foul Evil Deeds’: “Not Picking up Dog Poo to Killing Your Wife and Everything in Between’
variety.comJohn Bleasdale Guest Contributor 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.” 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.” 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.
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