Writer & Director Howard J. Ford on how he made his Hi-Octane female-driven thriller, Never Let Go

‘Never Let go‘, was voted best independent feature of 2016 at the National Film Awards (Beating multi Oscar nominated Carol and Sean Penn’s The Gunman to the title) is a high octane female driven thriller. Garnering a reputation as Homeland meets Taken, it follows the story of Lisa Brennan, a single mother who, following the abduction of her newborn daughter whilst on vacation takes the law into her own hands to take back her child using any means possible.

indieactivity: Give a background of your personal experience with the story, writing, production and marketing
Howard: I nearly lost my own young son who had just turned three whilst I was on vacation. I thought he had been abducted from the busy bustling resort and whilst frantically looking all over for him, by chance I discovered he was actually at the bottom of the pool drowning. I very nearly lost him and was so shaken by the experience and the near-miss aspect that I literally couldn’t write anything else. I then wrote, directed, produced and wanted to be so hands on with the film that I also camera operated, Steadicam operated and edited the film. Plus, my surviving young son is actually in the film playing the child kidnapped from the young couple in the opening scene!

indieactivity: Did the writing start with a cast (You or any) in mind?
Howard: I felt the film had to be about a woman. It seems to me, most ‘kidnap’ stories show a male fighting to take back a child but as a man, however ready to do absolutely anything I was to get him back, I felt I only had half the story as I had not carried this child within my own body nurturing it for 9 months and painfully birthing it into the world! I really wanted to explore a mother’s instinct and the only actress I knew that had the acting ability intertwined with the physical attributes I felt would be required for such a role was a very capable but lesser know actress called Angela Dixon. It was a risk – going with an ‘unknown’ is precarious in an already precarious business but her performance has since been called ‘Oscar Worthy’ and ‘The most influential female performance of the cinematic year’ so I believe the gamble has paid off!

indieactivity: How long did it take to complete the script? (Do you have a writing process?)
Howard: This was the fastest script I have ever written. The story literally fell out of me and sometimes I could not write fast enough to keep up with it. Writing is a very strange experience. It’s like channelling – at least when it’s working well. I’m doing it right now. I have no idea what I’m going to say next but words are coming out in response to the questions you have asked. I wish I knew where it all came from, but characters did things and concealed things and revealed things I did not expect and my instinct told me to go with it. I wrote the script in about a month which is a lot faster than I normally do as I’m more a director than a writer.

Angela Dixon as Lisa Brennan on Morocco Roof

indieactivity: How did you develop ‘your film’?
Howard: I wasn’t messing around on this one and I felt I had to move fast on it to kind of ‘exorcize’ the guilt and angst I had been feeling after nearly being responsible for the loss of my child. I basically put my life savings into the film and paid for 90% of it myself! I wouldn’t recommend doing that but I just wanted to get on with it and I didn’t want to send the script to another living soul. I’m not pretending the story is perfect, no story is perfect, but I wanted to do my story without one word being subject to scrutiny by some exec in a film company wearing a suit.

I didn’t give a *** what they thought and I didn’t want to hear it. Money didn’t matter to me, I had my child and somehow I felt like I had been given a choice, to lose everything to have him, and retrospectively that’s what caused me to go with it. I wouldn’t self-finance a film again. Luckily I’ve been fairly successful as a director with a number one selling horror movie (‘The Dead’ 2012) which spawned a sequel ‘The Dead 2, India’ and also I have directed well over 200 TV commercials and in many respects I have the commercials to thank for giving me the ability to invest in a film!

indieactivity: Is there anything about the independent filmmaking business you still struggle with?
Howard: The film business is ridiculous in almost every respect. In a way, the ‘artist’ side of me would much rather be a painter and to be able to satisfy my art by stroking a brush with paint on it across a canvas, but I have no artistic ability in that respect. So instead, I have to have an army of people to make my picture and I’m my own worst enemy as I love the journey within a movie so in this case we shot in Morocco, 2 different parts of Spain (Palma and Valencia) and also part of the film is set in the US which we staged in the UK so plenty of challenges to be had on top of all the usual ones!

indieactivity: How long was your pre-production?
Howard: I took one ‘recce’ to Morocco and I booked all the flights for the crew that I wanted before I even asked them if they wanted to be involved in the film. That’s 11 people including the lead actress and then I gathered them all together over dinner and said ‘I’ve booked you on a flight to morocco and to Spain, these are the Riad’s and B&B’s we’re staying in, these are the dates, this is my idea for the film, who’s in’. Every single person was! Lets put it this way, it was far faster than any other film I had made and I had shot and edited the film within a year of deciding to do it. That’s fairly fast!. I think the prep was 2-3 months.

indieactivity: What was your rehearsal process and period?
Howard: Sadly there was very little time for rehearsal and given the extremely low budget and how fast we had to move between the many locations rehearsals were scarce. Luckily Angela and I had discussed the character a lot so we had a shorthand way of communicating. At best I’d get to whisper something or mumble something or shout across a crowded street and trust that Angela was feeling it, and that I was feeling it cinematically – it became a kind of dance and hopefully we get away with it! I would never have been able to do that without Angela in the role of Lisa, I honestly think almost any other actress would have quit or walked off, but I knew she had what it took. She is a one of a kind.

indieactivity: You shot the film in days. How long were your days?
Howard: We had a total of 26 shooting days (4 of which were in the UK) and sometimes the days were crazily long, sometimes they got cut short for all sorts of alarming reasons. Frustratingly, when we got to Morocco to film, beautiful though it was, our permit didn’t cover all the areas I wanted to film so we had threats of arrest and also a couple of times we were threatened with our cameras and us to be stoned and I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean gently passing a joint! These things didn’t make the shoot any easier and a number of the cast and crew quite understandably didn’t want to go to jail therefore would not leave the accommodation to film, so we had to pick up a lot of the scenes in Palma and we had all sorts of catching up to do and matching scenes on arrival there on top of everything else.

indieactivity: Did the tight shooting schedule make it harder or easier? How did it affect performances?
Howard: I was ok with the amount of days but it was definitely hindered spectacularly by the threats and the fact that sometimes we would have to smuggle equipment out of the Riad’s whilst pretending to be tourists then sneak off a few shots here and there rather than having a full shooting day with adequate support. Those that witnessed the production situation then flew home before the shoot was over were absolutely amazed that we had a finished film at all.

It was a real uphill battle and whilst I’m extremely pleased on the performance side, for all the hard work and risks the cast and crew were under, I’d say I only got 60-65% of what I hoped cinematically speaking and some of those shots I had in my head that I truly believe would have further impacted our audience will remain either in my head or perhaps I’ll squeeze them into another film! I have to ‘Let Go’ Ironically 🙂

indieactivity: How much did you go over budget? How did you manage it?
Howard: Believe it or not I didn’t go over budget at all. I wanted to spend more on the shoot, I really tried to! What was frustrating, in fact quite maddening was that I couldn’t get cash fast enough into the country – both Morocco and Spain. Once the cash I had carried with me ran out, I had about 6 credit cards and debit cards and every day I would go to ATM’s in town and max all of my cards out by drawing out the limit in cash. That’s how the daily food/travel and local cast/crew were paid for.

Then 2 of the cards were taken by the bank through fear of fraud so I was down to 4 and I probably spent an hour each day on very expensive calls back to the UK to reassure my bank I had not gone completely bonkers or I had not been kidnapped or was under any threat or duress (Well apart from the threat of arrest or being stoned to death but that was a separate matter). There were times when the cast and crew were around the corner in a restaurant and I had to call Laura the co-producer or Juan the local Production manager to say if I could get enough cash out for dinner or to pay for the locations for the shoot the next day!

It was ridiculous and very stressful to bear all this weight and also try and remain as creative as possible. The exec producer Amir (Who is also my accountant) tried to get some money into the country via western union or bank transfer but I had to be there in person and wait many hours at the bank sometimes while the crew waited for me on location and on those days even when the money did not arrive, I had to be so far away from the location we were shooting that we then only had a short amount of light left in which to film so we had lost huge parts of the day. It was horrible and in fact I’m getting very stressed just remembering these moments – I never want to do things this way again! 🙂 Funnily enough, a lot of people think Never Let Go is a multi million dollar production with all sorts of luxuries but I think you’re getting the idea now that it didn’t come about that way!

indieactivity: How important is marketing? Do you think a project can make any dent without it these days?
Howard: Marketing is hugely important. Sadly with most indie movies, just getting them shot is the extent of where the budget is at plus everyone is so exhausted by that time that there is very little money or spirit left to do the essentials so films can sit around without any distribution. Festivals are very important, particularly if you have no ‘famous names’. Winning awards helps to get noticed. It’s hard for any film to make a dent these days, especially with internet movie piracy.

Please can we stop downloading movies for free. It will kill them forever then we will have nothing left to download. It’s why TV has picked up so much more momentum these days. It’s extremely sad. I love movies and I don’t want them to die, but they will die if they continue to be stolen by so many people who download movies for free, or upload them for others to do so. Don’t be a killer! When you pay to watch a movie, you are giving life to the future of film and I personally thank you with all my heart for that.

indieactivity: What was the experience like of working with such a small shooting crew (?)?
Howard: I much prefer working with a small crew. You can move fast and there is a dynamic of shared responsibility. When the crew is so large that everyone has a specific job it’s quite a tangled web and sluggish and there is a lack of dynamism. I decided on Never Let Go to not only camera operate, but also do Steadicam and self focus-pull (I can’t tell you how exhausting it was trying to keep up with Angela running around the streets and alleyways of Morocco in the searing heat with a full camera rig- I recall dripping with so much sweat after every shot that it was like I’d taken a shower!)

It was draining beyond belief and sometimes there was so much sweat in my eyes I couldn’t see the monitor to see if any given shot was even ok. If it wasn’t for my right hand man Dan Rickard who was there for me on every single shot, even when the threats of arrest or violence were on hand there is absolutely no way I could have got this in the can. Or well, um, the drive as it is most of the time now.

indieactivity: The film is stunning. How did you get such a good look when shooting so fast?
Howard: Thank you. I’m so happy to hear you felt that. I really did want this film to have a beauty to contrast with the darkness of the situation. We really did work fast and in many difficult situations but I think my commercial experience as a director that has been so varied and always needs to aim towards be slick shots to ‘sell the product’ in a nicely framed package that even when you have just a few seconds to place the camera or set a frame I have a grab-bag of visual tricks in my head that I can resort to, to at least make it look palatable.

I remember we were shooting one of the end fight/action sequences and we had about five minutes (no exaggeration) to do what I’d hoped to have the whole afternoon to shoot and we scrabbled around probably taking about 60 seconds to set up each shot and on the mini bus on the way back to the accommodation feeling all battered from the compromises. Someone was giving me condolences for the disaster that had unfolded when I leaned round and showed them the monitor.

They were like: When the hell did you shoot that? ‘Just now’ ‘WTF, no way, that’s like all artistic n stuff’.. If I got a nice reaction like that from watching the rushes it helped to feel we still had a chance of getting to the finish line and having something watchable! The 4 days we shot in the UK were so much easier, it was like being on vacation compared and was a nice way to end the shoot. Then winning best independent film at the national film awards was a gob smacking moment I shall never forget. Such a gift.

indieactivity: What else have you got in the works?
Howard: I’m attached as a director to a gripping (quite literally) female driven climbing thriller called The Ledge which we are currently casting for and hopefully we will be shooting in Italy in the next couple of months. Luckily this time I am just focussed on directing so I’m hoping there will be no trip to the ATM to keep us up the mountain! I also have a supernatural thriller that I have written called Indelible and I am attached to another film that is due to shoot next year in the US.

I have my ‘O1’ Visa now for the States so I might end up becoming a cliché as a Brit who sails over to America to keep his film dream alive! I’m very grateful to the support from Sony Pictures who are putting out Never Let Go across so many platforms in the US, it now really has a chance to find the audience I always hoped for. I thank everyone who watches Never Let Go for their support and also to your good self for taking the time to put my story out there!