Interview with Dead End II’s Bryan Larkin
Hey All,
We interviewed Bryan Larkin, the creator and leading man of the Dead End Series. Bryan Larkin, was the writer, director, producer of Dead End II, while also playing the lead character of The Contractor. Larkin has made an action franchise, which explores world issues and morality. Last year Dead End II was screened at Fighting Spirit Film Festival 2019 and had won Best Cinematography.
We talk to Bryan Larkin about Dead End II, the future of the Dead End Franchise and filmmaking.
Images Courtesy of Bryan Larkin
What have you been up to during this isolation period?
Well up until two weeks ago, I was training at the gym. I’m training for a film right now. I’m learning Korean and I’m writing the Dead End feature film, because we’ve had a lot of interest in it now that all three films have finished and people can see where the story is going. It’s not been an easy task trying to get anybody really interested in it because they haven’t been able to really see everything in it’s entirety with the way it is at the moment. At the moment there seems to be a bit of interest coming from America and Europe, and also a British executive producer is interested as well.
Nowadays you can’t just have a script. What you need is a proof of concept, something that people can look at and decide if it’s quality, has good production values, performances, story, character and how you put it together. After a lot of hard work and perseverance and not taking no for an answer, I have kind of got to the stage where I have to write the feature film script, or not write the script yet but sort of outline it for a feature film story
Back to work - I had a job cancelled in Sweden about two weeks ago so I was halfway through that, then they postponed everything and we don’t know when it was restart.
How do you create a proof of concept?
I think what you have to have is a very solid, well-thought out storyline, story arc, characters that are either in a form of an outline. Or it’s better to have a script that you can actually approach people with and ask whether or not they want to be involved with it.
Have as much information as possible, is the best answer I can give you. That includes a variety of things obviously, script if you have it, an outline for the actual concept itself, you need a fully story line in terms of whether it’s a television pilot. Say you want to pitch to networks, it would be advisable to try and have a full one hour episode either in a written form on a script, but you can also have an outline in terms of a synopsis.
With regards to Dead End, it was one of those things where I never set out to do a proof of concept. I set out to make just one short film cause I was in Hong Kong and had an opportunity to shoot something out there with some friends. It was all very new to me so I made a stand alone short film. That was it. It wasn’t until after the film was finished we thought there’s more in here. Now what seems to be the best way forward for me is to put all the three films together, as one film from beginning to end. I think that’s the best way for us to to fill in the gaps in the story. The final episode will become four chapters of one story, which is one movie.
Proof of concept, could be anything from a trailer to a full short film. It could even be a full one hour episode, it entirely depends on your budget, it depends on your resources and how much you think you need to show people. As I say the first film started with a trailer, then it became a short film, then we made two films, then we had two trailers, then we had three films and now we have three films and three trailers.
They (producers) want to see if it is sellable, what is the market, how we spent our time and money - obviously these films are made on entirely our own money and some favours from friends, and we’ve had a small amount of help from post-production houses who really liked what we had done and they had never really done any action films before. They wanted to become involved and help us out and give us a cheaper rate. Of course you have to abide by their rules because when you’re not paying people very much, they’re less inclined to be involved and they kind of have to do in their own time so there’s been a lot of waiting involved.
What are you most proud of working on Dead End II?
The fact that we actually to finished the film and nobody kind of got in our way because it was a very ambitious film, there’s big action sequences happening on the streets, there’s a lot of locations. It’s quite big in its scale. I’m most proud of the fact that we wanted to make a film that was bigger than the script and we managed. I mean the script was really what we shot, but in many ways the production value is bigger than what some people had anticipated it being, particularly like the drone shots flying over China at night, having a Muay Thai fight and being allowed to film in a place where there’s like a thousand people - on these kinds of things you sort of things you don’t normally get such high production value and such ambition. I’m really proud of the film and considering we only had five people on the set, it looks like a film that’s actually had more money than it actually has.
How would you describe your directorial style? Has it changed since the first film, has it evolved?
Being an actor myself, I’ve always tried to find when working with other directors how I can be at my best as to take good direction, and that’s a very subjective thing to say. What is good direction? I like to work with actors primarily. You don’t want to be watching a movie and have a bad performance. What I’ve always tried to do is talk to actors and the crew in such a way where we treat this as if it was really happening. Find the most interesting and challenging way in which you can portray a scene or character or shoot something. You know if this was the last movie you were ever gonna make, how would you do it and try to make every moment as important as the other. I like to spend time talking to actors about emotion. The skill I’ve developed the most I would say is my vocabulary and not to say too much to actors but to give them a very simple, very clear direction that makes it playable for them. You don’t want to tell them how to feel, you suggest what is at stake and you go straight for that conflict. Something for them to trap as it were, or a motivation. Because it goes back to that age old thing like what is my motivation. If you give an actor a strong enough motivation they will work very hard and diligently to try and obtain that. Actors are very grateful when you spend time with them and you make them feel important. Talk about things on a bigger scale - don’t just watch an actor act, always give them something to say and I would say that that’s true off the board. What is the character trying to say but can’t in words, then it becomes subtext.
Also I would say as an actor myself, when you talk about craft as being this thing that’s different from talent, I think it’s very true an actor can be very good as an actor but you need to be able to back that up with craft. What craft is for me is a step by step process; when you get a script, what is the first thing you that do? Look at that process and have a strategy of how you get to a point and also the other thing as well is when you’re first learning to act or you’re working with actors who’ve never acted before, that you can turn the performance from being something that’s quite, well, wooden, it’s almost like they’re talking to an audience. It’s a tiny adjustment that you can say something to them which can change them instantly into becoming not only a more believable actor, but also get a better performance out of them.
The last thing (an Interesting thing as well) is when you’re talking to actors and trying to explain to them the difference between what is good acting and what is a good performance, some of them think it’s just the same thing. For me it’s not, they say you can have a good actor but you can have a not great performance and what I mean by that is that performance is more about the nuance, it's more about the things they do or the things they appear to be doing and behaving on camera in a way which is varied and not cliche. Holding back on big big showy emotions until a certain point - these are the strands and fabric on which a performance all comes together. Everyone has the capability to act. Everyone can do it but what makes an actor or actress more interesting is that they don’t do the things that every other actor probably would do when you read the script.
I guess where my strengths lie are is I want to try do something quite different with action. It’s almost like an art film with action and performance and not to just do all the standard cliches of people beating each other up, or tough guys with guns and tough women with guns; I find that very boring. I wanted to do something which is more about what is not said and let the audiences make their own minds up about it. To observe a character struggle through a story like the young girl in Dead End II, Chloe. As a fifteen year old girl she has two lines of dialogue in the whole film and yet we’re very interested in watching her and following her through her struggle of being a young trafficked girl becoming empowered. (Empowerment) It’s a term that’s being used a lot more these days and I think for me empowerment is something when you take power, you’re not given it and empowerment comes from the fact that you have may been repressed or bullied, you don’t feel a sense of worth, or you don’t have the resources to get yourself out of a circumstance. I think empowerment comes taking power for yourself without hurting other people and for me that is what Dead End II is all about. A Justified kill is in this attempt to try and justify killing another person because they’re making the world a very very bad place and when Chloe let’s the human trafficker die, she’s really saving herself, and she’s empowering herself by stopping that evil man doing any more evil and getting on with her life.
How do you deal with difficult or sensitive topics like trafficking?
Well it depends on how you look at it. Is it difficult for me to talk about crime and things like that because I’m not a perpetrator of it? I’m someone who’s trying in some ways through a movie to draw attention to it and stop it. The act of making someone’s life more miserable is a crime and where our characters come in is we are the one’s who are trying to eliminate those wrongdoers - the people who sell women as prostitutes, people who sell organs, you know these kinds of things. That is a horrendous, horrible thing to do is to force someone into a situation where under false pretences will make your life better if you come here, that is where our characters try to come in. We’re basically instructed to make these people disappear and to stop that because if you think about human trafficking is worth what, $37 Billion a year? Who’s getting rich on this? Who’s the one that’s making the money deploying people all over the world for their own benefit and getting rich on enslavement, because it’s really human slavery and that is what Dead End the feature film gets into is eradicating human trafficking from at least one part of the world and to free these people and perhaps maybe give them an opportunity somewhere else. In some ways that’s what the Chloe character is really in a small, limited way.. She is perhaps living with someone who is a relative and she’s been forced to steal money and she feels as if her identity has been taken away from her and she frees herself from that. It's hinted at in Dead End II that she’s been trafficked and now she’s living with a guardian but there’s only so much you can do with a short film, you can’t tell the full story. But if we get the chance to make a feature film hopefully then we’ll shed some light on expanding that girl’s character into freeing herself from a life of poverty, freeing herself from human trafficking, finding her family again and getting out of the situation.
What can we expect from the third instalment of the Dead End series?
What can you expect? Well, this is the interesting thing because the first film and the second film, they weren't made to be a continuation but the second film and the third film are almost set a couple of weeks apart, so the story continues. Not all of the character’s stories are expanded, it particularly focuses on my character and the aftermath of what happens in Hong Kong with the unsuccessful execution of the human trafficker we’ve going after. The story continues into the weeks that follow that so there are repercussions to that happening, so what happened in Hong Kong basically continues follows my character back to London and dealing with the aftermath of it. We get more of an insight into who’s behind all of the human trafficking that’s been going on. We also get into my character’s back story a little bit, where he comes from, what motivates him and what he really wants to do with his life and we also get more into who am I really working for and why I’m working for them and what their goals are as well. So if you take Dead End II and Dead End III, it’s almost like one episode of a TV series.
Speed Round. Pick one film for each category.
What is the last film you watched?
The Handmaiden.
Your guilty pleasure film?
Die Hard.
Movie with the best soundtrack?
Inception.
Your favourite 80s film?
Karate Kid.
What film would you like to live in? Which cinematic universe would you love to live in?
Cinematic universe? I’m a big fan of South Korean thrillers, actually fortunately I’ve just been cast in one. I think that I’m very much looking forward to working on it, but I would say that they make the best thrillers in the world and I would like to work more there. I would like to experience more the pleasures of the universe of working more in South Korean movies. I guess that’s why I’m learning Korean as well, in the hope that it might happen. Either that or in the 80s. All the action movies from the 80s like Commando, and all the Stallone films like Cobra and all that stuff and Die Hard. Either one or the other would be fine for me.
Images courtesy of Bryan Larkin