Credo Interview.

As you could probably tell from our recent review, we liked Credo – it was the best British horror film that we had seen for a while.

And so it made sense to unleash one of our hideous, monsterous interviewers unto the outside world and allow them to  chat to director, Toni Harman. The goal: to find out more about the movie without devouring her or damaging her mentally.

Zombie1 was allowed out of the office for a limited amount of time to conduct the interview.

How did you get into directing?

I went to the London International Film School (now called the London Film School) in Covent Garden and specialised in directing. After graduating, I worked as a  Producer / Director on documentaries and factual programming and also made my own short films. The short films did quite well and were distributed internationally and broadcast in over 40 countries.

The next step was to make a feature film. Together with my writer / producer partner Alex Wakeford, we formed a production company, Alto Films, and wrote a few feature scripts. We came close to getting a bigger budget feature off the ground but the finance fell apart at the last moment.

So we thought ok, let’s just make a low-budget feature film using whatever resources we could lay our hands on. To be honest, we had nothing to lose and everything to gain!

How did the idea of Credo come about?

Credo started with the locations.

We knew we wanted to make a low budget “haunted house” style horror film and we were on the lookout for a suitable location.

We already had a relationship with a London property company as we had shot a short film in one of their empty properties. It just so happened that at the time we were looking to make our feature, this property company had two huge derelict buildings that were about to be renovated and they agreed to lend them to us to make a film!

So we had the locations, we had a time-frame in that we had to be out of the buildings in four months before renovations began, now all we needed was a story.

We kicked around some ideas and very quickly, we had the gem of a story.

Then things moved very quickly. Alex wrote a very rough draft of the script, we found crew, we did a deal with a company to supply HD cameras and online post-production and we even found the finance – all within about 3 weeks. Whilst I started casting, Alex worked on the script.

Meanwhile, architects were drawing up plans to turn the derelict buildings into luxury apartments and we were drawing up plans to shoot in them.

It was a race to see who got there first.  I remember one day in the middle of the shoot, surveyors turned up in hard hats and after every take, they’d start writing in chalk on the walls. As soon as they’d move on to the next room, we’d wipe the chalk off and go for another take! I often wonder now if the new luxury apartments aren’t quite as luxury as they’re supposed to be because of us!

That sounds pretty intense, so how did you go about casting for the various roles?

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