Iranian-born director Ramin Niami’s latest movie is the horror thriller Eye Without a Face, following Henry, an agoraphobic who uses his computer to hack the laptops of the girls locally to him. But sometimes you see more than you expect… Niami chatted with Paul Simpson about the movie…

 

Where did the idea for Eye Without a Face come from?

I think it was partly because I started reading some articles about hackers and one of them was somebody who had hacked a female student and it ended up with the FBI. This guy was hacking all the female students who weren’t going out with him. They refused to date him so he was taking pictures of them and putting them all over the internet and they found him.

I read some very disturbing ones some years ago and they stayed with me – I have two daughters. One was a student in Santa Barbara who murdered six young female students so you start thinking about it and you see how technology can be used in the wrong way. So I said ‘Well, how about something like that?’

I love classics like Rear Window, Peeping Tom – Repulsion also because of sexual deprivation and frustration. Those are classics, and I like some of the new ones like Unfriended, movies that use technology. I thought, “What about a hacker who starts seeing something strange going on?”

Nowadays people are, in a way, much lonelier than they used to be. People can just sit in their apartment and can just look at their phone so I wanted to show that.

That’s taken on another edge now because of COVID and lockdowns which has given it that extra little twist to it.

Absolutely.

Peeping Tom at the time of course was hugely controversial. When you’re dealing with a subject like this, do you have a built-in line beyond which you won’t go? Or do you feel that the story of the characters may push you into areas that you personally would feel uncomfortable going into?

Well, it’s a good question because I was very aware, because of the male gaze, I didn’t want it to be a sleazy film. I intentionally did not show extreme violence or nudity. I just thought it’s much more effective if I make it psychological, rather than like a slasher movie or something with shocks and jumps.

I wanted to balance it, so my daughter, Tara Violet, was very helpful. She’s the cinematographer, and having a female point of view was very important for me  in how to show women in their apartments and how to treat the male gaze. How much do I show? I didn’t just want guys to look at it and look at naked pretty girls running around! I was very aware of not going there and to make it much more psychological. So, it’s not that I was afraid to go there but I just think I didn’t need to.

At what stage did your daughter become involved in it? Was she involved during the scripting or just purely for the shooting?

After I wrote the first draft I brought her in – I wanted to have her input, especially about the six young women. Because she knows a lot more about their lifestyle and this generation, it was a collaboration. I involved her in production but production wasn’t just shooting. A film like this we really storyboarded everything. We looked at all the classics, and we looked at some of the new films: I love Red Road, the Andrea Arnold movie, and It Follows and Don’t Breathe. Then we created a storyboard and shot list,

She was also involved in post. We were lucky to have Charlie Clouser doing the score, he did the Saw movies, but my daughter had an input about what music these young women would play in their apartments.

One of the things I really liked about the movie was the extent to which you were limited by what the webcam could see. When you were storyboarding were you almost working backwards – the camera had to be in a particular place in order to see stuff as opposed to where you would naturally have a laptop?

I really thought about it because you’re hacking somebody’s laptop or computer and most young people have laptops and not desktops, so the angle is sometimes awkward. They’re in bed or lying down so that was the idea of really what the camera sees. It’s funny, because some people said ‘Was it the lack of budget that made you show more?’ and I said, ‘No, because the whole film is about what he sees, which is limited to his camera angle’

Of course that limits what he sees, so he starts thinking about what’s going on offscreen. For example it’s interesting because he’s worried about why these guys have come to the woman’s apartment, but they never leave. In fact, the location where we were shooting had an entrance and an exit so people were at the back door and when this woman was sending them home she was always sending them from the back door – but we don’t see that. So we use the imagination of the person who’s watching and that was very intentional.

The other thing was I don’t like to ask the actor to interact with green screen so we actually shot all that footage first so the actors were reacting to that which makes it much more interesting. Also it made it technically difficult because we wanted to capture it in their eye and you see it in the eyes. Due to COVID we couldn’t do a theatrical release but you do see the reflection of everything going on in their eyes. The actors had not seen that footage so the audience really was seeing their point of view.

The lead character Henry needs to be sympathetic and he’s not necessarily, given his hobby, the most sympathetic of characters. Was that a difficulty in scripting to try to get that balance? Or were there things that came out in the playing that helped you create that?

Well, even the James Stewart character in Rear Window, what he does is objectionable:  he takes a telephoto lens and is looking into people’s apartments. He’s the hero but he has this fault.

I wanted everybody in the film not to be good or bad in that way. Whether you’re a hero or a villain you have your weaknesses. So I wanted it to be a much more complex character than the villains that you see in movies.

The same goes with the lodger Eric because he’s funny and all of that, but the way he talks about women is, obviously, objectionable – but you also see he’s not a ‘bad guy’. I wanted everyone to have those three dimensions in their character rather than just being good or bad.

Did anything change during the filming in terms of the characters once you had them cast?

One thing I changed was the character of Eric. It was written for a British actor. I wanted somebody who just arrived in L.A. and wanted to get a job and when we were casting, I saw Luke Cook, the actor and thought, ‘Wow, he’s really funny’, so let’s make Eric Australian. I let Luke improvise his lines and every take was different. The crew were trying to hold their laughter in because he is a funny guy.

But that’s something else that was in Repulsion – that has really big elements of comedy. I didn’t want this to be just a dark drama, I wanted it to be fun. That was one thing that we had to work around and let him have the space to move around.

After that, obviously, some things change in the editing but not much. We had to rely on the storyboard. I don’t know if you noticed but Repulsion was one film that really guided us in terms of how to use lenses, becoming wider and wider and wider, as the mental breakdown reflects the way we shot it. So we couldn’t really change it much. If you cut it out of order the audience would have sensed that something’s not right. So it also limited us because we had to go by that rule that we established.

You go from a quite kinetic sequence at the start into a slow build for the next seventy five minutes until about a quarter of an hour before the end the shit hits the fan…

We always had that in mind. I wanted, without giving away the ending, to have certain things in the audience’s mind when they are watching because we establish certain things in the first shot. Even though you can’t remember all the details, it’s there. So that was always intentional, people are waiting to get there but when and how? That was part of the script. It was very intentional.

What did you find the biggest challenge of making it?

Well, as an independent filmmaker the first thing is to find money, and when you find it is limited to find the talent.

I was lucky to get really good people, really experienced people to come and help. Bryce Perrin who did the set has done a lot of big films and the guys who did the sound, Reza Narimizadeh and Hussein Mahdavi, Reza has done the sound in the two Farhadi movies that won an Academy Award, then Charlie Clouser doing the score… Getting these people together is a challenge.

In terms of making it, we created this fabulous set but then it was very hard for the cinematographer to shoot it. There was very little space to shoot. I think the space was putting a lot of pressure on us, trying to get what we want, but that limitation was also part of the story. You feel like you’re trapped! I created something that I became a victim of myself!

After that, the editing went very smoothly. Of course when the film was finished, this COVID business just created a lot of problems for us because all of our distribution plans, we had to change everything. We had to start from the beginning. The people we were dealing with weren’t working anymore.

The plan was to open it in L.A. in some art house theatres. I’m sorry we couldn’t do that but people are watching it at home. We have really good surround sound and picture quality is high, we did the colour correction at one of the top places in L.A. Even though it’s not in the theatre it will be a home theatre.

Eye Without A Face is out now on digital platforms

Click here to read our review