With Creep and Severance, British director Christopher Smith built quite a reputation for himself making interesting horror movies, but with his latest film, Triangle, he’s tried something a bit more ambitious – a movie that’s as much a riddle as a thriller. With the film hitting DVD on Monday (read our review here), we spoke to Christopher about the movie, and the complexities of its time-looping puzzles.
NOTE: Because Triangle is a bit of riddle, it’s best to watch it without knowing too much, however if you saw it at the cinema or have just watched the DVD, you may well be looking for ways to unlock the movies’ puzzles (I certainly was after watching the film), so we’ve included a few spoilery bits, but highlighted those in a different colour, so you know what to avoid if you don’t want to know too much about the film.
It is slightly difficult to talk about Triangle without giving too much away, so how would you describe the movie to someone who hasn’t seen it?
I would say that... well, look at the Shining. Is The Shining about a man having a mental breakdown, or is it about a haunted hotel? Similarly, Triangle is both a haunted house movie and about a character going crazy. I’d also say it’s a Groundhog Day purgatory. That’s what I would call it.
There’s been a lot of debate, particularly on the internet, with people having different ideas about what's actually going on in the movie and why, and how everything actually fits together. Was that the reaction you were hoping for?
Absolutely. We literally planned it that way. Well, we didn’t do it cynically. I had the original idea, which was what would it be like if the person looking over the bow of a ship is you, and you’re looking at yourself as you arrive on the ship. Then from that I built the whole story with a group of characters, the central one was a mother, but is she a good mum or a bad mum? Is her child autistic, or is it in his mind or her mind because she has a sort of Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy? There were all these mad ideas I had, but then there was the idea of what happens if there isn’t really a beginning and an end and we keep her trapped in this kind of circle.
So what is that circle? Is it some sort of purgatory because she’s a bad mum? Is it guilt, because if you’ve done something wrong you can’t escape from it and can’t escape from yourself? Or is it just a kind of ghost ship movie? Or a psychosis movie? There were all these layers, and I wanted to have all of them. Even when we shot the movie, we had three endings. They were all at the same point, post-car crash, so it was does she have amnesia there or the other alternative is that she proactively goes back into the circle. So the question then is why would she choose to go back into it all again?
So everything you’ve seen on the net, every question that’s been raised, I’ve raised myself and thought about before making the film. I’ve not seen one yet that I didn’t. Some people have seen it and then said, “Well, that’s wrong”, but if they actually watched the movie again, they’d find that every one of those questions is answered. So I ended up creating a riddle that people everywhere are going to go mad trying to work out.
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How did you actually keep track of everything, as with so much going on in different places on the boat at the same time... did you have like a giant wallchart?
We did do that for a bit. But the charts were very strange. It’s going to be difficult to describe this without giving too much away, but it’ll become apparent once people have seen the film. The problem with the flowcharts was that you could only follow the Jess you’re with because of the time looping effect. While you’re looking at the Jess we’re following, there’s also a Jess running around in loop 2. So on the charts you have to have a Jess, a Jess+1 and Jess-1, because you have the one who’s ahead of you and the one who’s behind you on the loop.
So it’s not even easy to do the flowchart, because you have to know where every character is on the boat at any one time, and there are different versions of them at different points in the loop.
When you were making Triangle, was it difficult to know what clues to give out about what’s going on and why. Is there a craft to that, or do you just have to let the story tell itself?
There’s a couple of things on the DVD actually. We couldn’t make the film like you do with most films, where you say after you’ve filmed it, ‘well, let’s put that scene first’ and move things about. You can’t really do that. It’s kind of locked in. But there was a moment in the script and we shot it, but then pulled away from it, where after Jess pulls the gun on herself and there’s the kind of Matrix shot. When the Jess who has the gun on her runs away, for a while we ran with her. We showed what happened, and that resolved the question of what happened to the bleeding Jess. We didn’t put it in the movie, because sometimes in the film we’re ahead of you and sometimes we let you know what’s coming, and the skill of the editing is that sometimes an audience likes to feel smart and sometimes they like to be surprised. However if you make them feel stupid for too long, they’ll just tune out. And that was always the trick with this movie – are we too far ahead of you or are we not far enough?
How come you ended up filming in Australia, with an all Australian cast?
It was just a money thing. It was supposed to be an American cast but filmed in Australia, because it was largely Australian money. Originally we were looking at American actresses for the lead role but we were going to use an Australian crew, but then what happened was that the Writers Strike was on and the Actors Strike was on, so actually by sheer luck I was virtually the only person who was making a movie at that point, so that was why we ended up with all the Australian actors.
Was it a difficult shoot for Melissa George, as the script asks quite a lot of her, as her character has quite a difficult emotional journey and there’s also several versions of her running around?
It was difficult, for exactly those reasons. Actors like to have an arc of the character and the story, so that they can leave themselves somewhere to go with the performance. You wouldn’t at the very first moment want to be at level 10 scared, when you’ve got a long way to go yet. However the problem with this story is that you’re at level 10 a few minutes in, and then that level resets itself and you start again, so it was quite difficult to get Melissa to realise that she’s got to be at level 10, because someone’s chasing her with a shotgun, but then she’s got to go into loop 2, and you’re a sort of shocked, bewildered Jess and then in loop 3 you’re the walking dead. That’s how we tried to not make it a screamfest, because she goes through an exhaustion as she goes through the loops. It was very tough for her though, and I like her performance a lot.
 Melissa George gets stalked in Triangle |
I understand you had to build half an ocean liner as one of your sets. Did you try and find a real ship?
We tried. I don’t think we tried enough. I think we should have tried a whole lot more. What we found almost immediately is what a weird industry shipping is. There are no ships just hanging around. A ship might begin its life in New York and then be on the seas for 120 years, ending up in some third world place, but still working as a passenger ferry. So they’re all working, and then you try and find them and it’s just insurmountable.
But building a ship took such a big part of our budget that I’m not sure whether that was the best idea either. We got there in the end!
But even if it wasn’t a real ship, it’s still very effective.
We went on the Titanic model of how they did it. So we built it on a jetty out in the sea, so the ocean that you’re seeing really is the ocean, and you had that around 260-degrees of the set, which is great. It meant we could really run with and move the camera and we’d always see the sea.
You mentioned earlier The Shining earlier. Are there any other movies that inspired you with Triangle?
Yes, it wasn’t just The Shining. I’ve always been interested in the idea of doppelgangers. The end of 2001, that sequence for example. La Jetee was also a huge influence, 12 Monkeys, that kind of thing – the idea of being outside of yourself looking back on yourself. And how do you resolve that twist? I’m still thinking about Triangle even now. I’m still caught up in the riddle of it.
I was actually told though by a psychologist, that without studying it I’d organically made a movie about psychosis. It begins with feelings of anxiety – am I being watched? – to eventually being the person that’s watching you. I didn’t realise! It’s kind of got this weird sort of paranoid schizophrenic vibe to the film.
You say you’re caught up in the riddle as well. So is there locked up in vault somewhere your definitive version ‘this is exactly what’s going on and why’?
There is that, but I’ve encouraged the multiple readings of it. If you’d asked Kubrick what his reading of The Shining is, if he said to you it’s just a psychosis movie, would that that stop you feeling it’s a ghost story film? So I like the idea you have deliberate multi-layered approaches to it. Not that I’m trying to be coy. I think there are often two things happening at the same time in films, and in this movie there are three things happening.
If I say it’s a purgatory film, about a mother who dies in a crash, the taxi driver is the ferryman taking her to the afterlife, but she leaves him, tells him a lie, and as a result she gets cast into purgatory. That works in the film. However that relies on you believing in an afterlife. So the other idea is that a mother gets sick of her child and just goes out sailing for the day, leaving him the outside the school or whatever, and the guilt of what she’s done haunts her, until she eventually is looking back in on herself, philosophically, going ‘Am I a bad mum? What can I do to change that?’ We could go on and on, and they all work. I like a little bit of all of them, but I think the way I laid out the Sisyphus story [the looping purgatory of a never-ending task] gives it, at least on one level, the M. Night Shyamalan model, but I’ve left it deliberately blurry round the edges, so that a number of things work.
To me it’s a story about the return of memory as well. If she has amnesia, but she’s gradually remembering. What’s happening on the boat is she’s realising all the time that it’s her who’s the bad one, and at the end she sees it. She gets the chance to look outside herself and see herself from another’s viewpoint. If we could do that, would we go, ‘Wow, I’m a great guy!’, or would we go, ‘I’m a real asshole.’ So there’s a lot of that going on in the film as well.
Is there a particular significance to the seagulls, as they seem to be around all the time, watching what’s going on?
Yes, partly from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. That whole poem has significance to the story, which is that if you kill a seagull before you go sailing, that brings you bad luck. We forced that in. And anyway I love The Birds, which is almost like Kubrick Hitchcock film.
Your next film is Black Death, which I believe is out in a couple of months...
Yes, it’s out in May. That’s a very dark, sort of guys on a mission movie. Again it’s very emotionally strange. When you watch the film, you see this character with a beautiful, peaceful Christian heart get peeled away into a monster. It’s a very dark medieval story, about the corrupting influence of religion, and how in the wrong hands it can go bad.
I also saw you’re working on a movie called Cherub, which you described as a mix of This Is England and The Goonies. How does that work?
Well, basically it’s, what would it be like if there was a spy school that used council estate kids and chavs and makes them work for the government? So the reason they’re vandalising things is because they’re part of a mission. It’s kind of a Nikita type story. It’d be on the borderline of a 12 certificate, so kids can go see it, but it’s right on the line of acceptability to the parents.
Thank you, Christopher.
Triangle is out now on DVD and Blu-ray.
