At the tender age of 24, Jamie Flatters is building a formidable body of work.
He followed up his pivotal role in the blockbuster sequel Avatar: The Way of Water by taking the lead in the acclaimed indie film Black Dog, which Flatters also wrote with his friend George Jaques. Major roles in horror film I'm Your Host and a lavish TV adaptation of The Forsyth Sage loom on the horizon.
Acting is only part of his portfolio. He performs music under the pseudonym sandy crow and frequently uploads poems to his Instagram. Oh, and he's just directed his debut feature film Shoulders.
The trailer promises a weird and woozy exploration of the human psyche as eight soldiers stranded in rural Scotland gradually lose their collective minds. It will showcase on 27 November at the Clapham International Film Festival – get your tickets here.
We'll be running a full profile of Flatters early next year but first enjoy our chat on what to expect from Shoulders.
How would you describe Shoulders?
It's a war film. It is about eight young soldiers who are taken to a northern post in Scotland. They're basically told that they’re on the lookout for an enemy invasion but they’re not going to be the soldiers themselves. They're not going to be the frontline.
But when their lieutenant goes missing and they don't have any weapons, they're forced to train and conspire between themselves in a sort of Lord of the Flies manner about what this invasion could possibly be.
Through it being an all male, all boys unit, they delude each other into thinking that there's some sort of attack. So yeah, it's a weird, timeless war film.
The trailer looks great…
Thank you. Some people would say it's easier to make a film look good as a trailer instead of a whole hundred minutes!
Did anything particularly inspire it?
I always wanted to make a debut feature film out of this specific script, and I pitched it to multiple producers and nobody really wanted it. They were saying that the script was a bit too weird. And I thought, well, this is the most normal thing I've ever written. So I wrote something quite aggressively and angrily – alright, if you think that is weird, have this. Shoulders came out of that two-week writing process of me trying to push to the boundaries a bit.
We made it with a group of 14, including eight of the actors. The budget was literally the smallest micro budget you could imagine – to the point that when actors weren't in scenes, they were making lunch for the rest of the cast and crew. We shot in rural Invergarry, which was a place that had no electricity or running water. It was a struggle for everybody being there for 14 days. But the whole process, through the struggle and the suffering that occurred, it made the actors buy into their characters more. It was definitely a hard filming process.
Were you all friends at the end of it?
We were! We go to the pub on weekends. It's brought people closer together but there were definitely some testing events that happened in the middle of nowhere.
Shoulders
Are there any directors that you were inspired by?
Definitely. I mean, this is a very film school answer – I hope it doesn't come across as pretentious but it will. [Laughs.] But Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky are two directors that people still love to homage, and they definitely capture this more philosophical sensibility within a very character-led piece. I always wanted to try and do that.
The camera style is almost trying to mimic the formality of Wes Anderson, but then run away from that rigidity – to the point that when we are breaking down into conspiracy and losing ourselves, we go more handheld. It's also very inspired by the new American wave of horror filmmakers like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, all their work in ideas of myth.
How can people watch the film?
People can see this on the opening night of Clapham International Film Festival. Screen one on November 27th. There will be a Q&A with me as well. That's a warning, not an invitation! [Laughs.] Run away as soon as the film's done.
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