Corin Hardy On Whistle: An Empire Podcast Interview Special

13:52Chris Hewitt:You talked about the opening death there. And you and I had spoken about this movie for the magazine. But I obviously knew that, I knew the basic concept. Yeah. but I didn't know how the deaths were going to manifest themselves. And I was going in, I was wondering, is this going to be Final Destination-y in a way? I was waiting for an elaborate Omen-style accident to befall Mason in that opening scene. And then when he burst into flames out of nowhere, I was stunned. I did not know what the hell was going on. And then, of course, you explain it later on. Can you talk about establishing the rules of N 'Choka and parsing it out through the film, leaving that air of mystery, I guess, as well.

14:38Corin Hardy:First of all, the thing which both struck me about the idea in the mythology of when you hear the whistle scream, your future death will hunt you down, which was a really exciting, sort of simple, elegant, scary mythology concept. But it's different to something like Final Destination in a subtle but important way, I think, In Final Destination, they cheat death and a form of death will find its way to get them in a really elaborate, exciting way, depending on where they are in the environment. It's almost like the environment is part of that. It's not tied into their personal fate that is sort of in Whistle.

15:25Corin Hardy:it's very specific as as Ivy Ramos says you know when you were born so is your death and this was something that Owen explained earlier on that made me get a little chill down my spine Owen Edgerton was the sort of deeper you know conversation about mortality and this idea that you know we are all going to die we don't know when and it could be in a week's time it could be in 90 years time But the idea that your death is out there waiting for you, and if you blow on in choker and you hear it scream, it pulls that death to come to face you in the next couple of days or tomorrow or tonight. That was kind of chilling.

16:08Corin Hardy:And then that determines the specificity of what your death is and how it's then going to materialize, which is great. But what is harder in a movie like this is you don't do the final destination thing where you show the situation that they all nearly died in. Yeah. And then they suddenly cheated it. And then, you know, death comes for them in a different way. So we had to effectively sort of set up this concept where you don't know exactly how these people die. and then sort of drip feed in through these visitations visually that these characters start to see almost like premonitions of what their future death will be.

16:51Corin Hardy:But we don't want to give it away. Yeah. We don't want to give it away, but we want to set it up. So my main concern was that we'd never be in a death sequence and not know what the hell's going on. Except maybe the first one, which is fine, because you don't know. And then they talk later. It's like, oh, they do some research and say, or he found out he was killed in a gas leak. So Mr. Craven, he died of stage four cancer, but that's sort of like, yeah, but like 10 or 15 years, but not yesterday, you know, like when it was fine. But he's obviously, so they all have hints, you know, Craven.

17:23Chris Hewitt:I like the air of mystery, and I like that it wasn't what I was expecting it to be, which was a series of unfortunate accidents for falling in these poor souls. And of course, each death scene as well, is accompanied by, and I really got this yesterday because I saw it on the big screen, by this crunching whistle, almost musical motif that accompanies it. Can you talk us through that?

17:51Corin Hardy:Yeah, I'd love to. I mean, again, tribute to Doomphonic, the composer, who's very classically trained in the John Williams school of thematic scoring and characters having themes. And we knew early on, inspired by the likes of Michael Myers' Halloween theme or Jaws theme or character themes within movies, that we definitely wanted the whistle itself to have its own. It's kind of almost like a victory theme of when it finally gets you, it takes your life, it gives you its death. and there is a repeating kind of motif in that, which is a bit like a ticking clock catching up to get you and then kind of like being.

18:37Corin Hardy:And it actually changed because in early cuts, we had a slower kind of quite bold. It was like a kind of boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like the whistle did it. And now it's got this kind of like...

18:59Corin Hardy:So it's a sort of an earworm. I mean, it's not quite as sort of musical that it's a jingle.

19:05Chris Hewitt:Yeah, no, no. But it is a death jingle, I guess.

19:08Corin Hardy:And I suppose I wanted to inject a certain energy into the overall movie that ties in with the sort of soundtrack of bands a bit and the influences on there and you hear some Prodigy in there and some of the electronic stuff that gives you, helps sort of the kinetic momentum of the experience of the movie in the cinema. So it kind of, it isn't a sort of slow paced, it has tension and mood and everything, but it's almost like there's a slight kind of celebration when the whistle achieves its next victim.

19:44Chris Hewitt:The tone of the movie is also really interesting because it is, I would say, 95 % seriousness. There's a lack of glib in the film, which I thought was really refreshing. Thanks. I love the Final Destination franchise, not to keep bringing that one up, but over time that became a comedy. Nightmare on Elm Street over that time became a comedy. But you go back to the original movies in those franchises and they are as serious as all get out and there's not a lot of humor or relief valves in a way. There's a couple of lines in this, I think, where people's fates are foretold. Grace at one point is told, if you keep doing that, you'll become a prune.

20:24Chris Hewitt:And there's another line later on about, it'll be the death of you, which of course it literally is. But even then, they're not played for laughs. So can you talk about the tone of this thing? Had you locked into the fact that this is a very serious subject, and I imagine very serious conversations were going on, and you reflected that in the film's tone. I think it's something which, personally, I really wanted to tell a story that was honest with itself and sort of serious, but it has levity in it,

20:57Corin Hardy:but also partly in the kind of absurdness of some of the situations the characters get into. but if you look at what I didn't want to do was an American high school movie that had that sort of cynical snarky edge where all the characters are just sort of like there to be fodder and so they're all kind of like hating each other or bitching each other and they're sort of just and you get some wise cracks in that but for the sometimes I feel like you get a laugh but it sort of is taking away from the end piece of the movie you know and i look at some of those films from a nightmare on elm street or or like you know john carpenter movies or the thing is always the one that come strikes out there's some great humor in the thing but it's no totally not comedy it's never like you never go it's a horror comedy but there's some amazing humor in it and again in the absurdity of it you know like get me off this couch or like you've got to kid me you know it makes you laugh because it is absurd that that thing is happening and I suppose it's a combination of that and wanting the characters to sort of not be they're set up as these types but they turn out not exactly to be the types you thought they were and there was more character stuff in the slightly longer cuts of the movie that gets cut down in favour of pacing and you know moving things forward where you found out a little bit more about some of those characters.

22:27Corin Hardy:So yeah, the tone was important, but I also was conscious I wanted it to be a sort of fun rollercoaster ride as well. So you're kind of, it's a balance of pacing and scoring and dialogue and character with the, you know, the elaborate set pieces around it to try and make a piece that, again, going back to those films, and I always mention Lost Boys and Nightmare on Elm Street and The Blob and The Breakfast Club and Fright Night and also Scream and Donnie Darko there's an experience there's an atmosphere in a world that the film inhabits that I want you to be sort of hanging out inside cinematically and I want to be able to be lost inside that so it's a sort of like combination of all those factors but the tone definitely wasn't, this is a horror comedy but it's a horror movie a non-cynical horror comedy a non-cynical horror movie with heart and humour

23:26Chris Hewitt:we're both big horror fans and we know that audiences can get really really wild about great kills and you deliver right from the off in this movie there are a couple of show stoppers shall we talk about them I'd love to yeah I mean I don't even know where to begin Dean's death. You mentioned Dean, so let's talk about Dean. Because that death is extraordinary. It is a car crash happening in someone's bedroom, but without a car. Perfectly explained.

24:04Corin Hardy:And that was, you know, when I read Owen's script, you know, once I understood the concept and I saw that there was a number of deaths and that I knew that I wanted to make them all a variety of them, almost different menu...

24:26Corin Hardy:Different dishes on the menu. Almost like they'd have different ingredients and different flavours to them and almost make them different sub-genres of horror if you want to really look into them. So that neither one repeated any of the other ones. And then whilst making a horror movie, we're trying to make particularly the payoffs and the deaths as different to other horror movies as possible whenever you can. So Dean's death on the page instantly did stick out as being like exactly said, it's a car crash in a bedroom with no car. That sounds a real challenge. I've never seen it before. I'm going to definitely nod towards a couple of sequences that I have seen before, Nightmare on Elm Street's Tina getting dragged up onto the scening and Glenn, Johnny Depp getting sucked into the bed.

25:15Corin Hardy:I think Nightmare on Elm Street, because of the mythology of your dreams will kill you, people being killed in strange ways that happen in the real world, but is sort of invisible, that has been done. But the idea of a car crash and trying to really zone in, I think what I said to everyone when we're putting them together is let's try and do these all with real detail and sort of almost a fascination, maybe a morbid fascination with trying to show how this might go combined with like looking at things like crash test dummy slow motion you know when they show those crash test dummies in cars kind of getting whipped around and so yeah it was a lot of storyboarding and working with all these different departments to try and almost tell a story and if you listen to the sound the sound is doing a lot of work as well in the idea of probably, we're assuming it's a drink-driving accident.

26:11Corin Hardy:He's gone out of control. He's losing control. There's something coming at him in the opposite direction. There's an impact that's going to send him forwards and jerk him like his head's going to go back and forward. He's going to be whipped up maybe. The windscreen's shattering. The glass is going to fly forwards, cutting him. His legs and arms are going to be compressed probably in different ways and his legs under the seat. and then as the car spins around with a lorry probably impacting it from another direction, it's going to crush the rest of him. So it was sort of, yeah, a lot to... We had a full bodysuit of how he ends up that is the thing that comes to visit him in the early part of the movie that you glimpse.

26:53Corin Hardy:Yeah. And you don't know how he gets like that and you don't see it clear enough to fully know what it is. Oh my God. In the bedroom. Yeah. And then there's getting to that point, which quite a lot of these deaths were so I was really just you know it was credit to all the different people who worked on it from storyboarding the practical effects guys this was Steve Newburn's brilliant effects department Justin Harding who was also doing second unit because we were shooting parts of Dean's death at the same time while they were shooting just over the other wall in the Hearn wherever we were at that point with Daphne and Sophie you know it was lots of creativity going on and you know the camera teams Jen Spence's production design props prosthetics and Hern Hill he did the visual effects as well so it's all overlapping and all those deaths you know maybe there's I think there's eight in the movie or maybe nine I can't remember have different looks and different aspects so I mean that was Dean's death I'd love to talk about two of the others just because I'm really glad that Dean's death seems to be getting a good reaction.

28:08Corin Hardy:And when I've been watching it, it gets... It's another one as well, because it's not a sort of punch-the-ceiling triumphant moment. No, it's not euphoric. Because it's a horrible thing. But there's a sense of, when we've watched it so far, everyone goes dead silent. The end moment comes when his parents rush in, which is also genuinely... I wanted everything to have an emotional reminder. it's not like this happens and you instantly cheer because he's dead or something. It's like it goes silent. And then in the next scene, when you get to it, it feels like there's a sort of decompression and everyone breathes again.

28:44Chris Hewitt:And then they start clapping and cheering because it's sort of like, you just did that, which is really nice. It's incredible. And just very, very quickly on the parents' point, if I remember rightly, that's a kind of nod to nightmare. If I remember rightly, Glenn's mom finds him, right? After he gets tucked into the bed. they're the only parents in the film that we see. That's correct. Were there more parents and parental figures at one point?

29:09Corin Hardy:There was in early. I mean, I was always going to do it a bit like one of those cartoons where you never see the parents fully, and you just see them in reflections or from the chin down. I can't remember what that cartoon was. There was a time when you saw Rel's mum when Chris moves in, and actually she is technically driving the car with Chris in it at the beginning of the movie. It would be Rel's mum moving.

29:30Chris Hewitt:All right, so Corrin, a week has passed since your last answer. Should we explain what happened?

29:37Corin Hardy:It's taken me that long to think of what the answer should be.

29:41Chris Hewitt:I asked Corrin a question. He went, um, and then it's just sat here for a solid week. So just to explain things, we recorded, this is now part two of our Whistle Sport special, almost exactly a week to the day since we did the first part. We didn't have as much time as I would have liked. we were running out of time and also crucially we were running out of storage space on my computer so I had to cut Corrin short when he was talking about Dean's death graciously Corrin has agreed to come back in because we've got so much shit to talk about still so much to talk about and we're now in a cozy two person studio this is lovely Corrin still has his tea so he's going to be slurping away

30:21Corin Hardy:continuity slurping sorry about that it is very very important

30:26Chris Hewitt:there are people like ASMR There are people who get off on this sort of shit.

30:30Corin Hardy:Who's ASMR?

30:31Chris Hewitt:ASMR, you know, the practice of people making soft noises, like they rub microphones and stuff in it.

30:37Corin Hardy:I've never heard of that.

30:39Chris Hewitt:It's a big thing. It's a big thing. Anyway, no one's going to be mistaking Whistle for ASMR because the sounds are harsh and abrasive and terrifying. The shriek, the cry. The shriek, the cry. So we were talking about a whole bunch of stuff. And we were about to get on the deaths. We discussed Dean's death, which is this audacious car crash in someone's bedroom and how you brought that to life. Before we get on to some of the other deaths in the film, how did you and Owen Edgerton, who wrote this screenplay, approach things like the rules? setting up the rules of the whistle, what it was capable of, and how it affected the order in which people die.

31:28Chris Hewitt:So in the swimming pool, everybody is there. Everyone is present. How did you decide who goes in which order and why? And in terms of deaths coming close, we see, for example, Grace's death comes close to her in the swimming pool, but then it's the next night when she actually dies.

31:49Corin Hardy:Yeah, you've been really breaking this down, haven't you?

31:53Chris Hewitt:It's my job, man. Well, it was established early on,

31:58Corin Hardy:this concept that was if you hear the whistle scream. So I guess you'd have to be an earshot. And I remember there was a little bit more detail around the specificity of who heard it around that pool. Because Craven blows it on his own. He's just in his room. No one else hears it.

32:17Chris Hewitt:He dies very quickly after that as well. Yes. So there could be something to do with the lonesome nature of how fast death comes.

32:28Corin Hardy:If Craven's on his own, he gets visited that night and then it's all over. Whereas when you're with a group, death's got to come around for all of you. and it's sort of, it's going to come and visit you in advance of connecting with you. I think when I read, Owen had laid out the mythology in the script and I did some work on it when you start to sort of come in and not only just visualize it but just like really try and tighten up the mythology when you can and like if there's anything that you're missing a trick with. because we knew that this group are then going to get sort of visitations.

33:10And I suppose I boiled it down to this idea that your death will visit you

33:18Corin Hardy:and it will almost start a bit further away physically, but when it actually connects with you and touches you, if you look at all of the deaths, the thing that they all have in common is a sort of when death actually connects with the human whose fate it is, that's when it passes over its death. So with Mason Horse Raymore at the beginning in a basketball, he sees it up in the stands. It's approaching him across the basketball court. Do you call it a court?

33:49Chris Hewitt:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

33:51Corin Hardy:And then it's in the shower cubicle when it suddenly appears and thrusts its arm sort of straight down its throat, almost igniting him from the inside. There is a sort of logic, you could say, or a reason behind even the physical connection.

34:06Chris Hewitt:But there's not, for example, a sense of... For example, to cite another kind of horror franchise, Smile. You get a sense in Smile that the entity is pure evil. It's a genuine demon. Here, I don't get that sense that this thing is... calculating in that way it's not it's not necessarily i don't think it's there's a demonic presence necessarily in the in the death whistle it's just this is this is death yeah it's impassive it doesn't take pleasure uh in anyone's pain necessarily so it is it isn't putting the shits of people for want of a better better phrase there is i think there's the personality

34:52Corin Hardy:of your own self's death, your own perishment, your own fate, which is being kind of overseen by the death whistle that has allowed that to be called earlier. And there is, you know, if you think about the different deaths, for instance, Grace's death is her ancient self that is probably very senile, lost its mind, is crazy. So it behaves more crazily. It chases her down. It had a number of lines actually that Grace's death that were all kind of balmy lines that didn't make a lot of sense. They were there to show how crazy she was. But when her death and her death is literally sort of chasing her down through the maze and we see when it connects with her and it thrusts its thumbnail into her leg and starts to spread the aging and then it puts its fingers into her mouth and starts to spread the aging and then it sort of finally catches up with her and gives her like this sort of kiss of death yeah upside down spider-man kind of kiss moment which i again i the the sort of deeper part of me loved all these different connections because that was like kind of almost beautiful the sense that this this young girl was meeting her older self and having being given the kiss of death at that moment.

36:19Chris Hewitt:Yeah.

36:20Corin Hardy:And it was passing on all of that aging in that one moment. Chris's death, you know, appears first outside a window in a tree on the opposite side of the road, which we did for real. And that was real, felt really good to do that stunt for real and have a real double, stunt double of her actually standing on this huge tree over the road on wires. But I felt sorry for, I think it was Naomi who performed it in November. ice cold in a garment that had to be quite minimal and had to look wet because Chris's death was also sort of a dripping wet look from where she died. And then Dean's car crash actually reaches out and thrusts him forward into the motion of the car crash.

37:07Corin Hardy:Ellie's death is a seizure which sort of trembling fingers are reaching out to pass on a seizure. so there was different stages and we just sort of had to really analyse them to make sure that they all had a consistency in terms of who I think it's pretty potent that when Grace blows it they're all in a similar space

37:31Chris Hewitt:it's a proximity though because I guess you've blocked it so that Grace blows it and she's the first to go of that group so you know I guess it then fans outwards from them and Dean's right next to her.

37:46Corin Hardy:Yes, exactly.

37:47Chris Hewitt:That would make sense.

37:48Corin Hardy:Yes, I agree with you. I'm just double-checking the order of play. But I think it was partly like, yes, proximity. I was just remembering there was a bit in the script that I always really liked and part of me wishes that I had managed to do this. It was subtle but important. It was when they were around the pool, Chris goes to leave like she's had enough of the evening, she's not feeling it and she goes I think I'm just going to go and pack my bags in the script it was written that there was like a boundary which was like a glass door and she was going to go and if she you could get the sense if she managed to kind of open that door and leave before it was blown it wouldn't have she wouldn't have been cursed but it was one of those locations where the location was so great it had absolutely everything but it didn't quite have this it had a kind of door to the house but I couldn't what I wanted to have done is set up even more of a kind of you know almost like those sort of Dario Argento close ups of mechanisms and things where Chris's hand should have been reaching for the door you could have felt that like oh she's going to blow it but Chris is nearly out and then the door opens and she's about to go through and just before she goes through you hear the sound but I think for timing and scheduling and blocking and location we couldn't quite do that so you just get the sense that she's going to leave but um she is further away as well

39:12Chris Hewitt:at that point she's she's nearly at the door i thought at one point when i watched the movie for the first time that you were going to do something horrible to grace's younger brother timmy was that ever on the on the cards that he was maybe there sneaking a little listen and

39:26Corin Hardy:no but timmy was he was an important character to kind of have in there to be able to be set up that he's listening in on his older sister being told to get to bed and then I think when Grace just about encounters her crone, it's like it could be that Timmy was playing jokes all along, but he never heard it now, it would be awful that would have been awful, if we

39:53Chris Hewitt:didn't know he'd heard it and then you thought, oh it's all over and then all of a sudden this poor, what, nine year old kid gets horribly killed

40:01Corin Hardy:it's feasible to think we haven't talked about animals but you know when Grace blew it there's probably a bunch of woodland animals that may have also heard it that may have been that's a good point perishments in the forest

40:12Chris Hewitt:cockroaches squirrels owls

40:15Corin Hardy:we did have an animal conversation at some point of just sort of like would cats and dogs have it and we'd be like no we won't go into that at some point the myth on the gist

40:26Chris Hewitt:because their hearing is more acute than humans so what would they hear?

40:30Corin Hardy:maybe the dogs can't hear it I don't know it gets too

40:35Chris Hewitt:oh this is amazing alright see let's get back to the deaths Grace you talked about it a little bit there but in the script was it relatively the same thing where she's going into this maze and she's being pursued by the crone and I imagine if that is the case you looked at it and went oh hello haunted haunted house maze. Thank you very much indeed.

41:01Corin Hardy:I did. It was very much part of the sort of excitement and attraction for me. Once I'd got into this world, this high school world, I always want the environments in my storytelling to open up in different ways and present you with new places and new look and feel. And I'm a big fan of harvest festivals and Halloween and mazes and bonfire nights and things like that. so when it said they all go to the Harvest Festival it sort of started in a way the second half of the movie off in a way because Chris and Ellie have just sort of discovered what they have found out in the records room about the sort of basically proving that Ivy Raymore's theories are all correct and they need to kind of tell their friends and yeah have them all arriving and also all being in fancy dress it's like a costume change and And to have this environment of a kind of eclectic, you know, autumnal fair with this maze.

42:07Corin Hardy:But of course, then pulling that off is another matter. And so I was just really adamant that I wanted to try and do it as real as possible. So Jen Spence and I and Bjorn, the DP, we all visited a real, it wasn't a harvest festival, but it was a fairground just outside Toronto. And we were able to look at all the different sort of rides. And we didn't have an unlimited budget, but we could pick and choose what we would be able to kind of hire. And we built a scale model of the fairground and we had all these different little rides and miniatures and placing them to try and figure out how we could maximise the look and feel of the space for the scale and then build a sort of facade of the front of the maze.

42:55Corin Hardy:with this great big pumpkin, which I did a sketch in my sketchbook as just a sort of general guide. Like Jen liked something a little bit like this. And the next thing I knew she'd built it like exactly from the sketch. Huge. So yeah, we had the sort of outdoor exterior. We had two nights to do all of that. And then we had all of the stuff inside the maze, which was this multi... We built five sections of maze and the spiral in the center. Each section was 10 foot high straw bales in a studio. I mean, it was huge, and you'd get completely lost in it every time you went in it. I'd go in one section, and then you'd go and try and find the rest of the crew and get lost, and they're in a different section of maze in the studio, and it was all very hazy and real straw in the air and everything.

43:46Corin Hardy:But yeah, what a tantalizing sequence, because coming off Gangs of London as well, it was like maximizing action sequences and sort of like choreography and relentlessness and this was an opportunity to do that and I wanted it to be quite a long I think it's sort of like 10 to 14 minute sort of sequence that takes you into the fair and then gets in this chase and to have Grace's ancient crone in there whilst everyone else is in fancy dress and what that would be with the sound design and the music and the Halloween nature of it all. It was a lot of planning, a lot of storyboarding. I think I said at the beginning, it's like Ali Scobie, who plays Grace, she had different prosthetic makeups to have sort of half transformed and fully transformed.

44:41Corin Hardy:Then we had two different crones, Kaylee, who was like a dancer who could perform, and Toria, who was a contortionist. and so we'd have different shots in different parts of the maze and some involving upside down, backwards walking and coming down the bales and the tunnel sequence. It was a lot of components to put together.

45:03Chris Hewitt:Was it tough in terms of establishing the geography of the maze for the audience, not just the geography of the maze itself but where everyone else is, where Dean is in relation to Grace and how close he comes to saving her?

45:18Corin Hardy:Again, we built a scale model of all the parts of the maze and storyboarded it. But yeah, you get really kind of hung up on things which you, we certainly planned all of that geography and imagining where, even where the moon was and where the big wheel was and where Dean and co were coming. And all the parts of the maze, I had to design them so that there was actual, it was a problem maze and you would have dead ends and you would have junctions. You would have long sections for running away at top speed as well as a sort of arena area in the middle, this sort of spiral area, central spiral, trying to play with space and claustrophobia and know when it was like a public area of the maze, which was quite busy and have other people and all of it.

46:02Corin Hardy:It was also kind of inspired, do you remember the, which one is it, is it Moonraker? The Jane Bond movie where Bond gets pursued by Jaws.

46:10Chris Hewitt:Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

46:12Corin Hardy:and it's like a is it a Mexican day at a dead parade

46:15Chris Hewitt:is a spy who loved me I think might be a spy who loved me

46:18Corin Hardy:I remember it really scaring me because it happened in public and Bond was sort of like in my memory running through the crowd and Jaws was pursuing him but no one else really knew that this chase was happening so I wanted to kind of capture that a little bit with this idea that Grace is has she seen this old lady at first she doesn't I mean she's encountered her at the pool she's got a feeling but she doesn't know what's going on but this old lady is calling her name and she's in different places at the same time but no one else everyone else is in a Halloween maze having a great time and people are jumping out and scaring them I just thought that was a really nice idea because we've all been to now these sort of you know horror sort of Halloween scare nights where you have masked people jumping out with chainsaws and stuff

47:06Chris Hewitt:if it's someone only you can see then you're fucked yeah

47:10Corin Hardy:essentially But I did want it to start quite public and lots of different sounds. And then as if Grace has got into more of an isolated area that she's got lost in, it's got a bit darker, the sounds are more piercing, and you can still hear this old lady calling her name until she finally confronts her and then has a confrontation battle with her before she realizes that she inflicts a wound on herself effectively on this old crone and it shows up on her at the same time. So we learn that kind of new part of the mythology visually. Which comes in at the end as well with the gun. Yeah, with Noah.

47:50Chris Hewitt:That is, yeah, I mean, there's so much to talk about with Grace's death. It's a horrible death because, yeah, I think she'll be officially formally identified at some point. And Dean knows in his heart of hearts that that's her. I love that.

48:08Corin Hardy:I love that discovery, this idea that, you know, it's not a horror movie where someone turns up and their friend's body's been sort of hacked to pieces by the sort of slasher maniac. It's that when Dean arrives and he's been calling out to Grace, they've been sort of almost exchanging conversation on this phone. And she screams she's at the spiral. And when he gets there, what he comes across, he cannot explain. But it is Grace. She's dressed the same as Grace. Yeah. And he can't come to terms with it, so he denies it. And he's like, that wasn't her, this was an old woman. But that was the sort of central fascination quandary with all these different deaths that I found really interesting.

48:58Because Dean is also, we changed the cut a little bit

49:02Corin Hardy:because he was actually showing up at that fairground with the ring he's going to propose to her in the central place. He said when he turned up he had this ring in his hand and he was going to propose to her that night. You see it in the scene in the bedroom. But yeah, I think Jaleel's performance throughout the movie is incredible and particularly at that moment the look on his face of just sort of seeing his girlfriend, the lover of his life, that he just saw five minutes ago run into the maze and now he doesn't know what's going on at this point.

49:35Chris Hewitt:Having already seen what happened at the beginning of the movie, he was a witness to that as well. Of course. Yeah.

49:41Corin Hardy:So yeah, he's sort of haunted by this thing that he's in denial of having happened.

49:45Chris Hewitt:Is there a sense that the drink driving, which ultimately, I guess, gets him in the film, has that started with Horst's death, I guess?

49:53Corin Hardy:That's a nice idea.

49:55Chris Hewitt:Yeah.

49:55Corin Hardy:Yeah, it could well have. Maybe it's driven him to that. I'm not sure if... Yeah, maybe that's where it all started. He certainly has a habit of it. You hear Grace say early on, like, give me the keys, I want to get home in one piece. You know, these little, some subtle, some less subtle kind of foreshadowing of death.

50:21Chris Hewitt:So what I was saying about the entity doesn't feel like it's pure evil the way that some entities can be in movies.

50:27Corin Hardy:Yeah.

50:29Chris Hewitt:It's really interesting because at the same time, While it's not calculating and mocking, it does pick and choose its moments. It attacks people when they're on their own, for the most part, until, of course, it doesn't. Rel. Now, when I saw the movie for the first time, I sent you a text going, I can't believe you killed Rel, you bastard.

50:52Corin Hardy:Me too, I can't believe it. I wish I didn't have to.

50:55Chris Hewitt:Why did you have to?

50:56Corin Hardy:I had to because it was the right thing to do. no matter how much I loved Rel and especially when Sky Yang played Rel we all loved Rel and no one wanted it to happen so you know it's the right thing to happen in a movie it was also to just show that no one it doesn't feel sorry for someone and let them off just because they're nice so yeah it was a heartbreaking kind of thing it was heartbreaking on the night because it was also Sky's last day it was my birthday and Daphne Keane's birthday like either side of it Sky's last day and we were having to like tear apart

51:38Chris Hewitt:yeah what's that atmosphere like so you have cake waiting for yours

51:41Corin Hardy:well they did bring a cake actually it was bizarre we'd all lost our minds I don't remember which week of night shoots but I mean literally minus 15 or minus 19 we're in this place called The Hearn in Toronto, which is the coldest building I've ever been in. The floors are cement, they hold. It's basically a freezer that can never get warm. And everyone's covered in blood. But it was really genuinely quite emotional and sad to film it, but also really fun and covering everyone in blood and pulling off the effects and things.

52:22Chris Hewitt:How did you do it, first of all? I want to talk about the mechanics of it in terms of the story, but how did you do it? Because that, again, that's a showstopper.

52:31Corin Hardy:Yeah. Well, this was interesting. Every death presented its own question, you know, sort of logical thinking and visualization. And, you know, Dean's involved a lot of kind of contortion mixed with prosthetics and animatronics and puppetry and some visual effects. And Rel's death, being that it was an accident at the steel mill that he works in, and we've seen him being quite sort of amiable and clumsy and forgetful and he's forgetting his comic and he's spinning around every time he goes through doors, he bangs into things and falls over. And, you know, if you put two and two together, when he sees his visitation comes in a different way because his end, the end look of Rel's death, you know, when Ivy Ramer says, you will become what you would have been in your last breath, that is the end game right just before and Rels is a shower of blood because he's fallen into a grinder of some sort of steel shredder which mangles stuff up and if you google the sort of steel grinder you can watch it endlessly on YouTube these amazing you know churning grinding what do you call them it's like these two sort of barrels that anything you put in there they reduce it all to the same like mush you can put in cars you can put in all kinds of different things and so yeah and we had we went to a scrapyard and we looked and filmed them and everything like that so you don't see exactly how Raul sort of trips or falls or gets his hand caught yeah but had to visualise that and wanted to sort of maximise the experience of Raul getting steel shredded until he becomes basically blood rain so his visitation which was he's dressed as revenger sat on the roof um really um grief stricken about grace he's clutching the teddy bear he's looking out at the steel mill on the horizon and he's in the rain and his visitation comes in that sort of more abstract way that the the blood rain starts to fall on the white bear and turn it red and it sort of trickles down his face and this was a way of sort of probably the most abstract one of them all to try and sort of show the audience without giving it all away.

54:55Corin Hardy:And I put in a shot of sort of the hand getting pulled into the grinder. But to actually... Yeah, so, you know, I wanted to effectively reduce Rel in stages from his fingertips, sort of up his arm, through his shoulder, and then through his sort of head and upper torso before the rest of him is sort of like wrenched into this steel shredder. And that involved, you know, mixture, like all of these deaths, of sort of practical effects with visual effects. So we had these different rigs that you could move up his arm from his wrist to his elbow to his shoulder, which was spouting out blood in a shower.

55:38Corin Hardy:And I was kind of nodding to the gore in a Paul Verhoeven movie. He does it so well. It's sort of not completely accurate probably, but it's very sort of visual and looks that even the blood color is very specific. And, you know, whether it's Robocop or whatever, you sort of see the sort of gnarly bit of flesh where it is. And I just wanted to sort of show it. I feel like it's quite an abstract thing to show a person gradually disappearing from this invisible shredder. Because that was the other challenge with this mythology. It's not like he's going to repeat his death and fall into an actual real shredder that we're going to see in camera.

56:21Chris Hewitt:Yeah.

56:21Corin Hardy:It was sort of that abstract nature like Dean having a car crash in his bedroom without a car. So we had different blood rigs that went up his arm. We had done a sort of storyboards and pre-visualization of it. And then we cut away to different reactions and feet slipping on the ground and Noah Haggerty watching and passing out. and then there's a point when we sort of know that he's been pulled in we hear it off camera and we see it on Daphne's face and then I really wanted to sort of again show from her point of view the sort of quite outrageous quite absurd nature of what it might be for someone to be effectively like sort of head torso-less standing there staggering still to the last minute and then getting whipped up into the air so Dan Ioboni the stunt coordinator showed me some really nice tests they did where they did this kind of spiral that you get in a lot of I guess kind of like kung fu movies when people are sort of flying through the air doing spiral kicks kind of reminded me a bit of Big Trouble in Little China in a way like that sort of fight at the end but we did it so a stunt performer JJ did this great spiral stunt but he's dressed in a green hood green, you know, lycra hood, green arm Wow He's got prosthetics of the wound around his chest with the missing part Wow and his blood and he's having to do these last staggers and then pull and he gets flipped up and he does this spiral and he spiraled up into a space and then sort of just hung there We then shot all the elements for the blood as if he'd kind of spiraled into the steel shredder so we did all these sort of blood explosions as second plates and then we could quite quickly put them together on the monitors and see how it was going to go and then her and Hill did all this nice tidying up and animating things together because for me the Dean's one is getting a lot of response which I'm really happy about people talking about and I'm really pleased with that but the Role one there's something about it which I also haven't seen that someone being reduced in front of your eyes I want it to be quite drawn out and emotional because that is sort of our most beloved character and we're watching him.

58:42Corin Hardy:And the earlier cuts were even longer and sort of more heartbreaking. Oh my God.

58:49Chris Hewitt:Because it is interesting because we don't see... Because it's largely from the other character's point of view and you have Noah in there as well. Because he's like oblivious to what's really going on.

59:01Corin Hardy:He's not part of this. He's on the drugs of his own making. And he just thinks these kids are like deranged or Satanists or something.

59:09Chris Hewitt:Yeah. And then he sees this thing happening and he's like, oh my God, it must be demons.

59:13Corin Hardy:And he thinks he's being saved. Yeah. Because in a way, he's just been praying for his life. and suddenly the people who are attacking him are getting evaporated in front of his eyes.

59:25Chris Hewitt:I want to talk about Noah in a second, but with Rel, he is the only one, yes, we have the blood rain sequence when he's on the roof, but he's the only one who we don't see the phantom coming. Get a sense that he sees it coming, but because that sequence is largely from the others' POV, we don't see it. the audience doesn't see it were you tempted to put it in was there a personification for you with Rel did he see a figure coming towards him

59:55Corin Hardy:no but partly because you can't literally sort of show the same everyone getting just the same amount of screen time of the visitations or it becomes probably too repetitive so I wouldn't want to and I was conscious of there being two gory deaths closer to each other and I didn't want to like you know they're different but they're in different ways gory so I didn't want to confuse Dean's kind of call it the visitation of his mangled end self with a version of Rell's because it might have made it feel like

1:00:29Chris Hewitt:a kind of zombie movie and also as you say what would have been just a shower of blood I felt that Rell's

1:00:35Corin Hardy:blood was like a really interesting one because you don't really know what that symbolises until after Rell spirals and explodes in it I made a point of hanging that downfall of red blood in the warehouse to go on even longer, just to sort of hopefully let that sink in a bit. That is what his fate became. And the whistle is presiding over all this. And I guess the reason Will had to die is the whistle doesn't... It doesn't care how nice you are. It doesn't discriminate. It doesn't discriminate anyone.

1:01:13Chris Hewitt:Although even then, Rel, you push him morally as well, where he essentially kidnaps.

1:01:20Corin Hardy:Yeah, he's about to do the terrible thing that he's not really capable of. He kind of wants to be capable of because then it will actually save him. But he's a good person and he can't do that thing, which is to sacrifice someone else, even if it's a person who's potentially guilty of murder. When it comes to the crunch, he just can't do it. so that's also why it's sort of heartbreaking you think well maybe it will let him off because he's made the right choice but that's

1:01:50Chris Hewitt:not quite with Rel it's hard not to notice that yes he's dressed up as the revenger when he goes to the Halloween fair but people who have been following your career will know that you came so close to making a Crow movie and you're a huge fan of the Crow and there's a smidgen, I would say, a smidgen of the crow in the Revenger. So was that for you? Like, okay, I'm getting to sort of scratch that crow itch.

1:02:23Corin Hardy:It's a good, I'll tell you the story. So when I read the script originally, Rel was this sort of weirdo comic book, outsider-y type guy, which I really identified with, especially my sort of teenage self. I could feel really comfortable in this sort of Rel character and how to do it. But he initially was written as reading The Green Lantern. So when he forgot his comic book, it was a Green Lantern comic. And when he dressed up as his favorite character, it was The Green Lantern. And I immediately was a little bit like turned off because personally, I've not been into The Green Lantern. So I couldn't really identify.

1:02:58Corin Hardy:I suddenly like, hang on, this isn't the sort of Lurell I know. I knew him up until this point. Then also, we wouldn't have been able to clear The Green Lantern for the movie.

1:03:07Chris Hewitt:Yeah.

1:03:08Corin Hardy:but I was also really digging into it to Rel's story and Rel's arc and to me now we're on a spoiler special we can talk about it he's going to go from this lovable weirdo into a kind of like avenging dark character that's going to try and take the life of someone else to save his own and so for me it made a lot more sense that the character that he would idolise would be more of a sort of revenging character like the Punisher or the Crow. So that made sense, and I wanted to really create the look and the character and the comic book and everything. So then it was a process because we couldn't get Punisher cleared, and I thought it would be too on the nose to try and use an existing character like the Crow or the Punisher.

1:04:04Corin Hardy:so the opportunity came to create our own which was quite nice I worked with my storyboard concept artist, Freddy in Budapest who worked with me on The Crow and he worked with me on Gangs of London and we did the Gangs of London comic book together and I sort of challenged him with look, I want to design a comic book hero, fictional I wrote a list of 20 names and they were all like variations on sort of like Mr. Vengeance and the Revenger I couldn't believe it when we got the Revenger because it feels like too much of a character that should already exist apparently doesn't. Oh, yeah. You know, I had like the...

1:04:43Corin Hardy:I can't remember. I've got a list on my phone. So once we settled on the Revenger, the challenge was, look, I want them to... I want to design something that also this guy can feasibly make his own costume based on but look like a homemade costume.

1:04:58Chris Hewitt:Yeah.

1:04:58Corin Hardy:And so the character can't be sort of impossible and we're going to need him to be wearing this for the middle part of the movie. So yes, I knew there was going to be some face paint and a sort of homemade look and a jacket and a kind of gothic look to him. So when we came up with the look of the Revenger and finally saw Skye in it and know that he's going to sit in the rain on the edge of a building with blood cascading down his face, it was definitely a kind of little part of me that was very comfortable and satisfied feeling with how that looked and a little nod to the crow

1:05:37Chris Hewitt:yeah absolutely and did you look at Sky and think oh yeah Sky's incredible I could cast at Sky one day

1:05:44Corin Hardy:he's such a good actor and he's so flexible and his performance is I think just you can kind of you can really kind of fall in love with him but he can do anything and when he was in Revenger costume and he was at the fairground and he was sitting on the building and it was yeah he just has such a such a strong look and his performance I definitely want to do more with Sky

1:06:20Chris Hewitt:Is the crow completely gone for you do you think? well you know what they say don't they you know

1:06:26Corin Hardy:what do they say

1:06:28Chris Hewitt:the crow never dies

1:06:30Corin Hardy:it's just always going to be something that's absolutely beloved to me and you know I said that the original movie and James O 'Barr's graphic novel and actually when Sky came on board when he was getting into his character I did talk to him and he went and bought the graphic novel of The Crow because I talked about my teenage self and what I was into and he just managed to sort of psychically consume a lot of even just looking at that graphic novel he understood sort of where the character would be coming from and it's just such a potent part of my teenage life so yeah it's not like The Crow's ever going to go anywhere we've still got an amazing movie and we've still got the graphic novel

1:07:21Chris Hewitt:Absolutely. Well, more power to your elbow. May it happen one day. But towards the end of the film,

1:07:30Corin Hardy:Sorrel has gone in a shower of blood.

1:07:35Chris Hewitt:Genuinely, you're absolutely right. The car crash in the bedroom thing. Never seen that before. Never seen that before either. Never seen what happens to Sorrel before either. Then you have something really interesting in that Noah becomes, in a way, the antagonist of the movie. He's been simmering beneath the surface for the entire film. I noticed, by the way, there was one of the TV reports from the scene of Grace's murder. You can see him in the background.

1:08:00Corin Hardy:No one spots that because it's hard to know what you're looking at there. But he's there with a bandage on his nose and he's like,

1:08:07Chris Hewitt:he's heading off to... He's stewing. He's stewing in his own rage. And again, does that go back to the idea of the fact that the entity, for want of a better word

1:08:18Corin Hardy:I keep thinking of Mission Impossible I know, I know

1:08:23Chris Hewitt:what do you call it? Inchoka, let's just say Inchoka Inchoka isn't necessarily quote unquote evil and yes there is a personification of it of course and you know Chris literally has to fight the personification of her future death in order to stay alive but did you also need a human antagonist in a way

1:08:48Corin Hardy:you know what again reading the script I was sort of impressed that at each turn it would just when you sort of started to sort of feel comfortable with where the story was heading Owen had put something else in that would sort of spice it up in a way that you know it made sense because if you do just track Noah's story and the Rell's theories about him of what may have happened in the past selling drugs to children and someone dying if you just see the movie from Noah's point of view he's sort of probably not a good person with some dark secrets and then he's turned up and seen this new group of kids and he's got into a confrontation with them with a knife you know like bullied them and then and the next thing you know you know they Rel turns up at his church and or in fact you know come to the fairground and Chris this girl that he tried to sell drugs to suddenly attacks him with his own knife and slits his nostril next thing you know is Rel this guy turns up with a gun in his church and starts threatening him and kidnaps him and brings him into the you know into the situation where suddenly he's tied up and he's cutting this guy's cutting himself and he's going to put blood on him.

1:10:13Corin Hardy:I like that Noah is never a part of the mythology of the death whistle. He doesn't know it even exists until he sees it and wonders what it is. So him, the fact that he is most likely a murderer in the first place,

1:10:37Corin Hardy:his own story gets entwined in such a way that when the girls are trying to save each other by dying and getting resuscitated the chaos of Noah coming in at that point becomes the ultimate threat he's going to mess it all up just when they're hopefully solving it but in a way his involvement ultimately saves them all because he, by shooting Sophie Nellis' Ellie, releasing her blood and then him kind of going to sort of...

1:11:12Chris Hewitt:Anoint himself, I guess. Yeah, exactly.

1:11:16Corin Hardy:So to me, that's sort of also part of this weird fate. And, you know, like we don't reveal exactly what Noah's fate is to be, but it is a sort of bloated looking, probably drowned version of himself. And there was times when I was going to explain that more. I mean, there was a time when it took place in a hospital and there was some medics that showed up and went, there's a dead body in the corridor. He looks like he was drowned in a river or something. And in this case, there was no one to over explain it. And I didn't feel you needed to at that point because it's almost like guaranteed that that kind of character of Noah is going to have some kind of nasty, violent fate at some point because of the actions of his own doing.

1:12:02Corin Hardy:Whether it's other drug dealers he's ripped off or whether it's even like the parents of children that might have died under his sort of group that he runs. So yeah, I wanted it to be a death that you could have a conversation about and wonder what had happened to him.

1:12:23Chris Hewitt:So at this point, the whistle has claimed the lives of Mr. Craven, Grace, Dean, Rel, and now Mr. Craven, Grace, Dean, Rel, and now Noah Five.

1:12:37Corin Hardy:And Mason at the beginning. And Mason at the beginning, of course. And then it claims the lives of Ellie and Chris, but they managed to sort of outsmart it in that moment.

1:12:50Chris Hewitt:so there's eight so the movie for anyone who leaves before the mid-credits scene

1:12:58Corin Hardy:some people have done that

1:13:00Chris Hewitt:the movie has a happy ending which is rare which is rare

1:13:04Corin Hardy:well that wasn't the case originally I haven't even really talked about this I think Owen has people have asked what things I changed from Owen's script and one of them in Owen's original script and I always loved this kind of sort of quasi Romeo and Julia ending where they finally sort of, you know, met each other and seen each other and openly in love with each other. And yet this death curse has forced them into this position where they're having to kind of kill each other in order to survive. And in Owen's original ending, I think,

1:13:45Corin Hardy:Chris, yeah, Chris sort of went into the bath and died and was resuscitated but when she came up she saw Ellie's death but it was older and it had a tattoo of chrysanthemum on its wrist and Ellie had died and the end of the movie was that Chris survived but Ellie died and I don't think Noah was part of the end ending but it was really tragic and it was so it was heartbreaking breaking but after so much sort of battling i found it to be so negative and downbeat i couldn't sort of did you shoot it no no we didn't shoot it it was something which i sort of worked through i was like hell he has to survive like for me it was just too much of a downer after like after so much sort of pain and and struggling so i i sort of reworked it and brought noah into that ending to sort of allow them actually to survive with the blood sacrifice because it was like we'd set up this idea of the passing the curse on with the touch of blood but it never transpired at the end so this is just sort of again from my memory but yeah it was I felt really strongly that it needed to be actually like a quite happy ending maybe because I always ultimately want hope and sort of characters to prevail

1:15:17Corin Hardy:so yeah but then at the same time there was this like end coda that was written which originally was in the canteen and I think originally it was just like Chris is there with Ellie they're happy or Chris was there on her own and then she looked over and through the sort of canteen kind of movement she saw someone taking out this urn from their school bag and it was like hinted at that it hadn't been destroyed and I also felt quite strongly that if we're going to do that kind of like final little scare we should do it on a bigger scale and we'd used the auditorium earlier in the movie and I was like it should be like the first day back at term and take place in that auditorium as a sort of you know final twist suggestion of what could happen next.

1:16:14Chris Hewitt:Which is very, very twisted and horrible. Because the way you set it up, because as you say, some people will have left, you know, they won't necessarily be expecting a mid-credit thing. So for those people, it all ends happily ever after for Chris and Ellie. They're heading off, and then this new girl who comes in.

1:16:35Corin Hardy:Asha.

1:16:36Chris Hewitt:Yeah. Horrible. horrible things are in her future and then she blows it in front of what 200, 300 people? 400 in there 400 people

1:16:45Corin Hardy:well I mean in that big budget version the whole end credits would then have been like these incredible death sequences just spiraling out of control in the auditorium

1:16:57Chris Hewitt:so then Chris and Ellie what are there did they just have like a did they have a room in the school where they kill people and then bring them back and then just next please and then they kill and bring it back.

1:17:13Corin Hardy:We've got some thoughts, Owen and I. We've had a lot of nice conversations over the time making this about if we ever got the chance to do more stories in the world of Whistle with this mythology. We've got lots of ideas that make us excited.

1:17:33Chris Hewitt:So there's that lovely contradiction that you want these characters to prevail and then three minutes later you condemn them to potential death again.

1:17:43Corin Hardy:Yeah, potential. But there is some... I can't talk about it now.

1:17:47Chris Hewitt:Okay.

1:17:48Corin Hardy:This part of the spoiler special would be a spoiler if there was ever any more sequels. But yeah, we've...

1:17:55Chris Hewitt:Well, it's... They have knowledge. They have foreknowledge. Exactly. They know what they're getting into this time around.

1:18:00Corin Hardy:If you think about... Yeah, I shouldn't say anymore.

1:18:02Chris Hewitt:Okay.

1:18:02Corin Hardy:But yeah, I still... For me, it's still a happy ending for them too, anyway.

1:18:08Chris Hewitt:Yeah, okay. All right. Interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. So at the moment, what is the plan? I mean, are you waiting to see how Whistle goes down? I know it's going to be hitting Shudder soon as well, so are you waiting to see what happens?

1:18:23Corin Hardy:Yeah, I mean, I guess it's in the hands of, out of my hands, it's in the hands of the world.

1:18:28Chris Hewitt:Yeah.

1:18:28Corin Hardy:But, you know, certainly if that was something that came up, we'd be armed and ready.

1:18:33Chris Hewitt:you're ready to rock and roll yeah ready to rock and roll amazing it's interesting we talked about it last time as well we hit upon this we touched upon this last time in terms of the tone of the movie

1:18:45Corin Hardy:yeah

1:18:46Chris Hewitt:is not glib it's quite serious you're dealing with death you're dealing with with very you know great big weighty subjects you know and I know that the film is dedicated to amongst other people your brother yeah Robin who passed away yeah Is that something that was on your mind as you were making this movie?

1:19:07Corin Hardy:Yeah, and it was. And it is strange. It's strange sometimes to be making a horror movie, especially at this time in history in the world when there's a lot of real horror going on. And you finally get to release your horror movie and there's all kinds of stuff that for me is much more troubling and scary than a, you know, death whistle. Yeah. And at the same time, my brother had been ill and during the making of this movie, and he passed away a year and a half ago, sort of in the process of it. But he was such an influential person in my life, particularly through music. He was a drummer, got me into heavy metal

1:19:58Chris Hewitt:when I was very young. Your drum was in the movie, right?

1:20:02Corin Hardy:Yeah, his drums are in the movie, both on the Rachel Stamp track, Witches of Anglehome, which I always wanted to get some of their music in, in my film. And also in the recording of The Fairground, which is made up of my band Conspirators all playing. And we had some of one of my brother's final recordings. And also my cousin Poppy, at the end I thanked and dedicated the movie to my brother Robin, my cousin Poppy, and some other members of the crew, Tony Ianni, who was the art director, who also very sadly, after the film was made, passed away. But death was such a, you know, this film is all about death, not just the sort of the horror aspects, but the sort of the other part that really drew me into the script, which is the underlying story of Whistle and the sort of mortality aspect and how long have we got left and, you know, live your life to the fullest.

1:21:09Corin Hardy:And so it was, you know, being of a certain age, making this movie, more people around me growing older or passing away. and then the kind of movie that I was making which was sort of a throwback to a lot of the movies that we grew up on you know of those sort of American high school and horror movies and the music in them and the music in the film it was all very tied into my brother and when I was sort of you know about between 11 and 14, 15 watching those movies listening to the bands that we loved, a lot of rock music you know bands like Iron Maiden that Robin had got me into so it was it's hard to explain because it was sort of it was happening to him but I obviously see it completely separately the real life of what's going on and making the movie about it but it was also tied in all I know is when I read the script I was really drawn to the fact that it's constantly dealing with grief and death and having a sort of conversation about it and although the movie is a you know wanted it to be a roller coaster ride and entertaining horror movie there is this kind of undercurrent in there of of um you know this feelings of of mortality and grief and coping and

1:22:31Chris Hewitt:things like that that's what really struck me as well and i don't want to pry into your your private grief but it it just felt to me that that was something that absolutely informed

1:22:39Corin Hardy:the tone of the film you were making yeah and it was really important i said that's great like first conversations i had with the producers was what i think special about this aside from the we haven't seen a death whistle movie and haven't seen this particular mythology, is that the emotional angle and the sort of teenage angstness and the kind of dealing with death. And it was actually, you know, Owen said, you know, he's a similar age and he sort of said he's got family and he's got his own children and that he suddenly woke up like realizing he was absolutely terrified of dying. and that kind of inspired him to write this story because it was sort of facing your future and it sounds kind of morbid but if you contemplate that memento mori which means remember that you will die there's a good positive drive in that too which is sort of, you know, does inspire me as well.

1:23:38Corin Hardy:I did get this message from a friend of mine yesterday who watched it, I'm going to quickly read it just because he said

1:23:48Corin Hardy:all of that aside I was driving home it affected me in a way I didn't expect which has made me really appreciate this film all the more the villain in the movie is a villain that we all have to meet in real life that's so incredibly clever it made me think how we all have death chasing us and what are the things we do to help it along to bring it closer each character ignores the consequences of their actions that lead to their real death how much do I do that constantly I don't want to give death any advantage to meet me sooner and those we love the look on the parents faces as they have to see their son as a car crash victim I don't think I've ever experienced a horror movie where not only have I rooted for the characters to live but left the cinema wanting me to live too you've made an existential horror movie about the nature of death itself and that feels pretty profound but also fun

1:24:38Chris Hewitt:I was really happy

1:24:40Corin Hardy:this is a friend of mine and it's sort of like that is all there in the movie without it being hopefully sort of heavy over over explained but that was what made me want to make the movie

1:24:55Chris Hewitt:it's get busy living get busy dying in a way it's that idea of

1:24:59Corin Hardy:Shawshank yeah

1:25:01Chris Hewitt:I'll group our Shawshank into any conversation but

1:25:04Corin Hardy:Ivy Ramos says it and I'll see if I can remember my own line where she says death is inevitable but living that's up to you and that was a really there's some nice Owen wrote some really beautiful lines in there that I think are little ones to remember

1:25:22Chris Hewitt:yeah absolutely and you know did you have conversations on set with your cast about future deaths and what your you know in an ideal world what would your future death be

1:25:33Corin Hardy:I've been asked this a few times and it's sort of it's obviously not a lovely thing to talk about so I've conjured up I love skiing in the middle of a podcast yeah

1:25:43Chris Hewitt:something

1:25:44Corin Hardy:I guess yeah well it's I guess if you think about it in the context of the movie not just don't just think about what it might be but think it's got to be really an interesting visual one to see on screen as well so because that was such a big part of visualizing these sequences so I don't know I guess it would be doing something I love doing so I love going skiing and although I don't want this to happen I guess if I sort of skied off the edge of a mountain or something like that or maybe if I was hand gliding jumping out of a helicopter which is not really something I'm going to do so maybe that's okay and you come the parachute doesn't open or something like that and you end up

1:26:30Chris Hewitt:you want to be quick and clean well if you did that then the death would be me talking to you

1:26:34Corin Hardy:and then suddenly just going like vertically

1:26:38Chris Hewitt:I can't describe what's just happened is just accordioned into a geyser of blood. It's a hell of a way to end a podcast, it has to be said.

1:26:48Corin Hardy:You can tell me what yours might be.

1:26:50Chris Hewitt:Well, do you know the old great Bob Monkhouse joke?

1:26:54Corin Hardy:Probably not. Go on.

1:26:55Chris Hewitt:Which is, I want to die like my father, peacefully in his sleep, not screaming in terror like his passengers. So,

1:27:04Corin Hardy:that's what I like,

1:27:06Chris Hewitt:ideally. I'll be late to go in a second but you were talking about Memento Mori which is a phrase completely by coincidence is also used in 28 Years Later which is also about that have you seen the Bone Temple yet?

1:27:22Corin Hardy:yeah yeah yeah

1:27:23Chris Hewitt:Bone Temple very heavy on Iron Maiden the Bone Temple itself is

1:27:26Corin Hardy:I know incredible I mean you know Iron Maiden is in the Bone Temple with Number of the Beast it's in Stranger Things with the Trooper and now it's in Whistle with the Killers they're having the time the year of their lives

1:27:37Chris Hewitt:was that always how you went out in a way?

1:27:41Corin Hardy:With the Maiden song?

1:27:42Chris Hewitt:Yeah

1:27:42Corin Hardy:I mean I had a number of songs that I wanted to kind of happen at the end in the credits and I knew I wanted Maiden in the movie there was a few opportunities where it would have been earlier like when they sort of tool up and start in the garage frantically kind of executing the plan but I was very happy to be able to have Killers play at the end of my movie.

1:28:09Chris Hewitt:I did want something to inject you with a bit of like, hey, here we go. Do you have any problems clearing that stuff or are you tied with the band?

1:28:17Corin Hardy:Well, I've got to know Iron Maiden over the years, but through Robin, my brother, who went on tour with Bruce Dickinson, played around Europe and played in Greek amphitheaters and all sorts in the time when Bruce had left Maiden and then separately I've got to know them and they've been very supportive I got to have also the Duelists in Gangs of London for anyone who's eagle-eared listening and a lot of the band maybe half of the soundtrack of the music I've worked with personally or knew personally bands like The Prodigy getting Omen in the soundtrack was really important Gunship I've done videos for when they were also members of Fight Star.

1:29:08Corin Hardy:I did a horror-themed music video for Fight Star that you can't actually watch because it got banned because it was too scary for MTV. Shit. It's out there somewhere.

1:29:20Corin Hardy:And Rachel Stamp, obviously, and others. But I'd written into the script at some point. I was just adamant of like, right, this one. Music's so important. I want to just I'm going to put it in the script and just really try hard to get it and I must say I got like 90 % of everything I wanted in there I really wanted Concrete Blonde, Joey and there were songs that I'd made I'd made playlists I've just put my playlist on online Publix called Death Lives and that's a sort of 145 track playlist of put together when creating the world of Whistle shared it with cast and crew and everyone who would like to hear it, or I forced them to hear it.

1:30:06Chris Hewitt:And it's on Spotify? What is that?

1:30:09Corin Hardy:Yeah, it's on Spotify.

1:30:11Chris Hewitt:It's on Spotify? Yeah, Death Lives.

1:30:13Corin Hardy:So yeah, it was really, it was important to me to get the music to house the vibe of the movie and also the Doomphonic score, which was being worked on for a long time throughout pre-production and production to try and create a sort of retro feeling synth score but with orchestra and it would tie in and out with the songs and everything so really hopefully completes a sort of world around the visuals and the combination of sort of retro stylings and current Amazing, alright go ahead you go

1:30:55Chris Hewitt:but just real quick I want to run through the easter eggs and nods to other directors that I spotted, and I'm sure I've missed some.

1:31:04Corin Hardy:If there's anyone that can nail most of these, it's going to be you.

1:31:08Chris Hewitt:All right. Well, number one, the high school itself and the town itself is called Pellington. Is that a deliberate reference to Mark Pellington, or is that just accidental?

1:31:16Corin Hardy:I'm going to say yes, it is.

1:31:17Chris Hewitt:Because of the Mothman prophecies, of course. Yes, exactly.

1:31:20Corin Hardy:I like that. There's a tie-in with that sort of doom-laden prophecy element.

1:31:25Chris Hewitt:Yeah, absolutely. Ingrid Cold, Enchoka, there's something going on there. the what's the word I'm looking for the workshop that they're in at the end steel mill steel mill is carpenter

1:31:38Corin Hardy:oh so the auto repair shop is carpenter

1:31:41Chris Hewitt:auto repair auto repair shop is carpenter

1:31:42Corin Hardy:yeah well done

1:31:43Chris Hewitt:alright there is Muschietti cigars yep for Hovind Steelworks absolutely there is Cronenberg cigarettes

1:31:52Corin Hardy:yes there is

1:31:54Chris Hewitt:I thought there was at one point the camera moved too quickly for me to see it but when they're in the pool you linger on a can of drink. Yeah. And I thought I saw the word woo. Wook. Wook.

1:32:08Corin Hardy:Park Chan Wook. Yeah. It's Wook juice. We've got the Wook juice going on.

1:32:14Chris Hewitt:Have I missed anything? I mean, I would... I'm Craven, Mr. Craven.

1:32:17Corin Hardy:Yeah. I mean, look, there's a lot more. Actually, if you look at the beer that Dean is drinking...

1:32:21Chris Hewitt:Right.

1:32:23Corin Hardy:It's a friend of ours. It's E. Wright.

1:32:26Chris Hewitt:Oh, my God.

1:32:29Corin Hardy:there's loads more than that but there's only so much you see if you really like got your finger on the pause button when Craven puts his cigarette out in the ash tray in his drawer and you look to the right of the screen you'll see the matchbook that's in there which is Del Toro's matches and then all of the fizzy drinks throughout the movie were named after different directors and special effects artists so there's Gillis water for Alec Gillis there's Shostrum beer for Mark Shostrum. There's one you didn't spot, which is when they go to visit Irie Raymore and the camera pans down outside the house the second time.

1:33:07Corin Hardy:Right. The medical, there's like a medical white van outside, which is called Jaeger Supplies. That's Kevin Jaeger who did the original Nightmare on Elm Street 2, 3, 4, Freddie Makeup. Did that Chucky as well, right?

1:33:20Chris Hewitt:Yeah.

1:33:21Corin Hardy:Yeah. And there's lots of special effects artists. Now the entire basketball team are named after horror directors, heroes and heroines. So there's Hicks, Hudson, Ripley. There's characters out of American Werewolf. I mean, I've got photos. At some point, I'll put them on. You can see there's hundreds.

1:33:40Chris Hewitt:I was quite proud of myself having spotted seven. You did, yeah. I've missed about 70.

1:33:45Corin Hardy:I mean, there's literally every single one. No, you've got some of the more obscure ones. Yeah, I'll show you some pictures in a minute. All right, okay.

1:33:55Chris Hewitt:Okay, well, listen, I think that's a good note on which to end before either of us meet our future death. Karin, thanks for coming in.

1:34:02Corin Hardy:Thanks for having me. I hope everyone has a lovely rest of their lives.

1:34:07Chris Hewitt:However long that may be.

1:34:08Corin Hardy:Yeah. Cheers. Cheers, Ben.

1:34:11Chris Hewitt:Okay, that was Karin Hardy on Whistle, folks. Pretty exhaustive, I'm sure you'll agree. I particularly enjoyed that he's making up words, perishments, as someone who coined the word fitty blogger, so I can absolutely relate. Anyway, that's it for this spoiler special interview. I hope you guys enjoyed it as ever. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for supporting us. And please do spread the word. Our spoiler specials are oft imitated, but never beaten in my humble opinion. And you can get the mother load right here, nearly 500 specials and counting. Right, that's enough for me. I'm off to meet my future death.

1:34:44Chris Hewitt:Oh, for a lovely cup of coffee. He's a really nice guy once you get to know him. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Bye bye.

1:34:56You