Fragment has been busy attracting a following around the world after being chosen for Official Selection in a number of respected film festivals.
So far, it has featured at the Shanghai Film Festival, FrightFest 09 in London, the Semana International Film Festival in Spain and it is due to be screened at the Abertoir International Horror festival in Wales in November.
The story is about a character called Lloyd who becomes convinced that he has the power to resurrect the dead after a series of bizarre hallucinations.
Back in 1991, during The Persian Gulf War, Lloyd, who is a US military photographer at the time, captures the horrific effects of war on film just before being unexpectedly hit in the head by a small fragment of Depleted Uranium shrapnel.
Years on, a tumour has formed around the immovable fragment deep inside Lloyd’s brain and according to his doctor, he should already be dead.
His doctor also says these hallucinations are caused by the brain tumor that is slowly killing him. But when Lloyd discovers a grotesque snuff film featuring a beautiful naked woman being murdered, he is compelled to bring her back to life.
Enchanted, he resurrects her night after night. However, when it appears that he has also unleashed a dark malevolent force, Lloyd begins to fear for not only his own sanity but his life as well.
Director, Andrew Miles, said the inspiration behind the film started with a vision he had about breaking into someone’s apartment and finding a beautiful dead woman lying on the floor, naked, leaving him wandering who she was.
"This story idea then floated around in my head as a David Lynch type short story, involving a guy spending the afternoon with the dead woman,” adds Miles.
“In the story, sometimes she is alive and sometimes she is dead again. But the idea was basically about falling in love with a dead woman and finding out who she was when she was living.”
Miles was also going through the middle of a marriage separation at the time, so he admits that his fears about relationships and never falling in love again seeped into the script.
Although this is his first feature length film, he used to direct music videos and TV commercials. In the year leading up to the shoot for Fragment, he directed a short film with Ian McPhee, who is the villain in the movie.
"We were able to create a six minute short on 35mm film for about $3000. I was really pleased with it and thought: ‘Well, if I spent $30,000 I’d have a 60 minute film.’ It’s nonsensical thinking like that, but hey, reality takes a backseat when you start any feature.
“This film is a miracle. We started shooting about three months after I got off the phone!! I call it the 20 thousand dollar film that became a two million dollar film!!!”
It literally began with $20,000 of his parents’ money. A cameraman then introduced him to Kelvin Crumplin, who not only became the producer but he also had his own film laboratory and a 35mm camera rental company.
"I gave him a mock up DVD case of the film, which he slipped quickly into his bag to have a look at later,” recalls Miles.
“The only thing he found inside the DVD case was the disk that was meant to be there, with the words: ‘HELP ME FILL THIS SPACE.’"
Kelvin liked his enthusiasm and gathered together a group of film facility companies to form The Film Production Group, which got behind the project.
"I now had no excuse and had to make the film! Once the production got underway, Kelvin took over the financing side of things and essentially made the film happen. Maverick stuff.”
When Miles was planning the shoot, he said he did not want to race through a 25 day schedule and end up with a cheap looking film. "I read how Christopher Nolan shot Following over a year of weekends. David Lynch’s Eraserhead just went on as long as it needed. I figured that if we were all deferring and nobody was getting paid, we should do this right.
“So I rounded up a great group of actors and crew who said yes to a year of weekend filming. They actually had to be on call every weekend because I figured location problems and financial hiccups would blow out a 35 day schedule to 52. Everyone was very patient and the shoot went very smoothly.”
Miles says the film is meant to be both a psychological and visceral horror. “There are aspects of both in the film. It cuts loose when it has to. Bree for instance, is a walking rocharch test. She’s both attractive and repulsive at the same time – a naked woman wandering the apartment covered head to toe in cuts and blood.
“I wanted to engender some strange reactions in the audience. I wanted them to feel dirty watching the scene, then feel sorry for her and after that feel uneasy, and so on. There are multiple levels going on in this film. It was designed to be watched more than once. My benchmark for a great film is – wow, I need to own that film, so I can watch it again and again.”
The CGI work, including the green screen shots used for the opening Iraq Desert Storm sequence in the film, were carried out by Mat McCosker and Ian Watson, who had both previously worked for Animal Logic.
Due to the vast amount of visual effects needed throughout the film, Johan Earl, from ArmzFX, helped out as well.
Other companies that assisted in the production included: Multivision, Audioloc, Optical and Graphic (O&G), Movielab and the Connelly FX Team.