Interview with ‘Memento Mori’ director Paul O’Flanagan
A stormy night, an important task to complete and an unquiet cadaver all come together in Memento Mori, a thrilling gothic tale and wonderful new addition to the catalogue of animated films that dip into the eerie and unsettling. Directed and co-written by Paul O’Flanagan of Boulder Media in Ireland, the film pays homage to classic stories told on stormy nights that keep you awake into the wee hours. Part-classic Victorian ghost story, part-cautionary tale, the film follows an unforgettable evening in the life of a scientifically-minded post-mortem photographer and his newest ‘client’. Nuanced character performance is teamed with a bold graphic art style and the melodic voice talent of horror legend Mark Gatiss to create a film that is a true joy to watch. With Memento Mori currently online to watch in full via Screen Ireland, Skwigly were fortunate enough to catch some time with the delightful Paul O’Flanagan following the frightful film’s impressive global festival run.
Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)
The film centres around a post-mortem photographer, a Victorian-era practice that was both eerie and terribly sad. When/how did you come across this practice, and what made you make want to make a film that explored it?
I read an article years ago on post-mortem photography; as you say, it is very sad as well as being eerie from our modern perception. A lot of people couldn’t afford photography as it was a bit expensive at the time. So the one time they actually bit the bullet and said, “Okay, we’ll splash out” was actually at the end of a relative or a loved one’s life, just to remember them. So it wasn’t too unusual at the time, but kind of sad and, from our point of view, a little bit eerie. I thought it was a crazy kind of curiosity and I wanted to write a story from the point of view of the weird and unsettling, because that’s the audience that’s gonna get to see it.
I noticed on my rewatch today that you co-wrote it with Laura O’Flanagan, who also voiced the female character – can you tell me about that collaboration?
Laura is my wife. She is a guidance counsellor in a secondary school in Dublin, where she’s also doing a PhD in children’s literature. I was writing and we were getting a lot of support from Screen Ireland, who funded us in terms of the writing, and they were great. We were working on drafts and drafts and drafts and there is a lot of subtext and visual innuendo, contrasting what the voiceover is saying and what the visuals are on screen. But at a certain point, I was completely wrung dry. I had nothing left in the bank, and the script wasn’t finished. So she said “I can give you a hand, what are you trying to say?” So I’d say, “Okay, the visuals are going to be this but I want the subtext to be this, etc.” So I would give a bit of an overview and she actually started taking the laptop and giving me options. At one stage, I kind of stopped writing altogether and I would just be directing her as she wrote. We’re actually doing another one at the minute – very, very early stage, we’re still bashing around the idea. But it’s very female-focused, so I’m just giving her the laptop completely, she’s writing this new one 100%.
If it’s not too early to ask, is it in a similar vein to Memento Mori?
Yeah, it’ll be a similar tone. If Memento Mori is A Christmas Carol, then this new one is maybe like Saint Maud, or The Wicker Man or something like that.
Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)
Oh, all of my favourites! That’s very exciting. Could you tell me a little bit about how you found the time to produce Memento Mori around your commitments as director at Boulder Media?
We scrambled; it was very tough. As you know yourself, you’ve made short films and great ones at that, but it is an itch that you need to scratch. I’m very fulfilled in my day job, I get to work on some great primetime shows and kid’s shows, but there was still that part I wanted to try out. So it wasn’t like I had spare time but I just really wanted to do it. We applied to Screen Ireland and we were lucky enough to get a grant to make the film, and then it was trying to squeeze it in. But I remember when I was making it, I was watching one of those Oscar roundtables with all the current nominees and they would be asked “How did you make yours?” Be it DreamWorks, Disney, Pixar, it didn’t matter, it was still a scramble, however big your studio is, to get resources, because all those resources are paid for by other projects. So you’re trying to get someone that has a little bit of time in the evening, or who wants to do some work at the weekends, and they’re all on board, then when you get around to it in four months, they can’t do it anymore. So there’s a lot of people on the credits for the short, because people took little bits here and there and it was really “have you got an afternoon? Have you got a day? Would you like to work on the film?” It was just getting time wherever we could.
Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)
Can you tell me a little bit about the style of the film and what you were tapping into, visually?
I think here in the west, we feel that animation needs to have a purpose; there has to be a reason why we chose to tell the story in animation rather than live action. So it kind of leads to having a fantastical element to our work, which shouldn’t probably be the case – if you look at Japanese animation, it’s just a different medium that they choose to do. But even in my head, even though I want to subscribe to that way of thinking, I still have that in the back of my head. Why are we doing it in animation? So I had the story I wanted to tell but I said, “Okay, let’s visually give it a reason”. I love the work of Mike Mignola, or Patrick Reynolds, those graphic novelists and comic artists, so we were aiming to make it look like a graphic novel which I explained to our art director Piotr Bzdura. And it was great, there was very little development, there was just “Here’s what I’d love, here’s what I’d like to see”. We have worked with Piotr on some development work in Boulder Media as well, so we had a shorthand already. We knew each other artistically. And I guess even if I wasn’t able to articulate myself well, he understood what I was looking for. So right out the gate, he had a couple of images and said “Is this what you have in mind?” And that was it exactly. So it was great, very short development, but he hit the nail on the head with that kind of graphic novel look for the film. It really works well with the story. Memento Mori is probably most akin to a kind of gothic ghost story or the work of authors like M. R James.
Would you consider yourself a horror fan in general? And what is your personal favourite kind of horror?
I love horror with more meat on it. I think it’s a great genre. I think it’s the best genre, I think there’s so much you can do with horror. You can tell things kind of superficially. Of all the Oscar-nominated movies and all the stuff that’s out at the moment, the best movie I’ve seen in ages was M3GAN, which I thought was just great fun. You can enjoy something just nice and fluffy like that, or you can layer it and have another layer of storytelling underneath. You can have such meaty subtext and when you realise the film isn’t about one thing but it’s about another, movies like The Innocents or The Exorcist – when you realise what the story is actually about, you get to enjoy it on a whole other level. So those are the horrors I love. I’m more into film horror, I listened to a few audiobooks of M.R. James and E.F. Benson. It was actually an E.F. Benson book I was listening to narrated by Mark Gatiss when I realised that was who we needed for this short. I think I was listening to him telling E.F. Benson’s The Room in the Tower while I actually was in a tower room in a castle in Cork, and there was lightning outside. I thought it was a perfect scenario.
Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)
How did you approach Mark about making the film? And what was his response when he saw it?
He loved the story. When we were writing, I could kind of hear the narration and I was like, “Who’s that voice?” Then when I realised it was Mark Gatiss, I was like “For God’s sake, we’re not gonna get Mark Gatiss!” We had a list of people that we would have loved, really great artists we were going to reach out to, but I knew that if I didn’t reach out to Mark Gatiss, I’d always wonder what he would have said. So I said “Come on, let’s just send it out and wait a couple of weeks, and then move on”. So our producer, Louise Ní Chonchúir, got in touch with his agent with the script. Weeks passed, nothing, we were ready to move on and he got back saying yep, he’d love to do it, which was crazy! So he recorded it in Soho Studios in London, it was in the middle of the pandemic. He was great and he really loved the story, which was very, very flattering. I’ve said it a million times but for me, he, literally, is the voice of horror. He has such knowledge of centuries of horror stories and they are kind of channelling through him. When we were doing the recording, I was saying “So, in this next bit, what the character is thinking is this, but what he means is this, in this kind of way…” and he’d refer back to some 19th-century short story and say “You mean like this?” He just knows it all.
Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)
He’s like UK Horror royalty.
Yeah, it’s not even just the films or TV shows or the books he reads. It’s also documentaries. I love his documentaries and he has such an infectious love for horror. It’s fantastic.
Definitely. In a similar vein, do you believe animation can be scary?
I do. I think it’s very hard. Some people think Memento Mori is scary and others don’t. It’s a little subjective that way. Sometimes it’s great when you’re in the cinema with maybe a hundred people and you hear a couple of screams. But it’s quite rare. I think it’s tricky when you’re doing something like animation, because the audience is inherently separated; they’re not seeing themselves on screen, they’re seeing these kinds of avatars. It’s different, so it’s very hard, but when you look at something like Perfect Blue then yes, animation can be terrifying. It’s quite tricky, I think, but something like Perfect Blue is just unreal and is one of the best horrors ever made, regardless of medium.
Memento Mori (Dir. Paul O’Flanagan, ©Boulder Media)
So, can you tell me a little bit about some of the more unique festivals the film has screened at?
We premiered in Galway in 2021 in July, with very, very limited access because of COVID, but in a beautiful outdoor space. Then we went to Grimm Fest in Manchester, and again we didn’t know how it was going to go, if people were going to come into the cinema, but loads of people went. It was lovely seeing the rise of the film festival again, because coming out of COVID we didn’t know if people were going to come back to the cinema or certainly festivals. From July 21st, six months after that, we went to a bunch of festivals, and you could see them getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it was really great. So we got to experience some really big festivals on a tiny scale because it was mostly online. That was quite interesting, but we’ve had such a great ride with it. We went to Rome twice for Irish Film Festa and we won an award and we were flown back. They had a big outdoor screen in the blazing heat on a Rome summer’s evening. We’ve gone to tiny festivals that are in a room above a pub. Crystal Palace was a massive festival, it was beautiful to see so many people there. There was one beautiful one we went to in Massachusetts called Woods Hole Film Festival, that was a stunning location and the organisers were great, they got all the filmmakers together to talk. That’s what we loved about the film festivals, when organisers would use it to pull all these talented people together and meet them and have a great time. Those are really special ones, I feel.
Fantastic. And the film’s won several awards now. What does that mean, in terms of short films for Boulder? You mentioned you’re working on a new film, but is that something you’re going to continue doing in general?
I think so, because, for Boulder Media, we’ve been producing shows going back 23 years, for Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Disney, Netflix, now we’re producing shows for Fox. Through it all you need to try things technologically as well as aesthetically, and you don’t have much room when you’re producing a show, you can’t charge them money to try things out. So, in that way, I think that short films are really important for the company, to have something where you try out lots of different techniques and looks so that we can make art in that context, but also bring what we’ve learned to our day job.
Memento Mori is currently available to watch online in full at shorts.screenireland.ie
You can keep track of the film and any updates on the website. You can also follow Paul O’Flanagan on Instagram @pauloflanaganart and see more of the work of Boulder Media on their website.
For more on the making of Memento Mori, listen back to our filmmaker Q&A as part of 2022 edition of the Cardiff Animation Festival (stream below or direct download):