Exclusive interview: James Nunn on ‘Hungry’

James Nunn has spent close to a decade trying to convince people that hippos are terrifying. The problem, he discovered, was that most of them had already made up their minds.

“Every door I would knock on and go, ‘Hey, I’ve got this hippo movie,’ they’d go, ‘Hippo? Hippos are cute. Everyone loves hippos,’” Nunn recalls. “And I’d be like, ‘No, you have no idea.’”

Now audiences are about to find out.

Nunn’s Hungry brings one of nature’s most formidable animals into the creature-feature spotlight, stranding a group of holidaymakers deep in the Louisiana swamplands with a territorial hippo between them and safety. Following its US release earlier this summer, the British survival horror is heading home for its English Premiere at Tubi FrightFest, where it screens on the main screen later this month.

For Nunn, that makes the occasion particularly significant. FrightFest has been intertwined with his career since before he became a director, and his feature debut Tower Block closed the festival back in 2012.

“The festival means a lot to me in the sense that it was where I had my first big premiere,” he says. “I was going as a fan when I was younger, before I made movies.”

Nunn also attended with films while working as a first assistant director, giving him a relationship with FrightFest from both sides of the screen.

“There’s a really strong community there of horror fans and film fans,” he says. “It’s also a bit of a filmmakers’ festival for me. So yeah, I’m really excited about it.”

That homecoming arrives with perhaps the most unlikely monster of Nunn’s career. Having built a reputation for muscular action and thrillers including One Shot, One More Shot and Shark Bait, his fascination with creature features can be traced back to his work as second unit director on Johannes Roberts’ 47 Metres Down.

“I just got a real taste for two things,” he explains. “One, making a creature feature with an actual prop and having fun with that, and two, underwater filmmaking.”

Determined to develop a creature feature of his own, Nunn went searching for an animal that cinema had largely ignored.

“I literally Googled, ‘What are the world’s most deadly animals?’ And hippo ranks very high,” he says. “They’re not carnivorous. They do it territorially. They’re a very violent creature, very territorial.”

More importantly for a filmmaker looking for something fresh, he realised audiences had never really been given a full-blooded hippo horror movie.

“There’s an animal I’ve never seen in cinema,” he says. “That ticks a box for me because I could be the first one.”

The initial idea was born around nine or ten years ago as a project called The Bayou, with Nunn’s research eventually leading him to two remarkable pieces of history. One was Pablo Escobar’s infamous hippos, whose descendants established themselves in Colombia after his death. The other was an early 20th-century proposal to introduce hippos to the United States as livestock during a meat shortage.

“I found this true story about there being a Hippo Bill very nearly enacted in America in the 1910s, where due to the meat shortage, they were going to ranch hippos for food and feed them to the Americans as a sort of beef substitute,” Nunn explains. “I loved that fact. So I went with that, and that was the foundation for grounding my story.”

Despite the apparent shift from his recent action work, Nunn sees Hungry as something of a return to where he began. Tower Block, after all, was fundamentally a survival thriller about people trapped by an external threat.

“I’ve always seen myself as a thriller director first, and then thriller-action or thriller-horror,” he says. “This is sort of a grassroots return to actually movies that I started to make.”

There are even traces of One Shot in the way Hungry builds suspense. Nunn’s action film was constructed to appear as a single continuous take, and he carried some of what he learnt there into his encounter with a rather different adversary.

“There are a couple of moments in Hungry where we do run a long take because that does actually increase tension,” he explains. “The cut is the release. And if I don’t give you the cut, you don’t get that release.”

Crucially, however, Nunn never wanted the hippo to become a conventional horror villain. Its behaviour is rooted in territorial instinct rather than malice, with Jurassic Park providing a useful philosophical reference point.

“The dinosaurs in that movie, certainly the first one and the second one, they’re just going about their business,” he says. “That’s kind of the mantra with Hungry as well. These humans have been put in the hippo’s domain, and the hippo is just going to do what the hippo’s going to do.”

There was another challenge. Unlike many modern creature features, significant stretches of Hungry unfold in daylight, removing the convenient darkness in which filmmakers can conceal their monsters.

Here, Nunn realised that the very unfamiliarity that had made financiers wary of his idea could finally work in his favour.

“We do have that ability with Hungry because people haven’t seen a hippo movie before,” he says. “You think, ‘Oh, I know what a hippo is like.’ You actually haven’t watched a hippo movie.”

Rather than immediately revealing the creature, Nunn uses water, movement and carefully limited glimpses to build towards it.

“By the time you’ve seen the hippo, you’ve now seen the hippo, and it becomes less scary every time you see it,” he explains. “It became about doing the hippo stuff in the day, hiding it in the water to increase its stealth, hiding it a bit behind splashing, so that you didn’t fully see it.”

Getting the opportunity to put that approach into practice took years. The cuddly public image of the hippo repeatedly worked against the project until One Shot producer Ben Jacques and Signature Entertainment came looking for an original creature feature.

“He called me up and said, ‘Hey, we’re looking for a creature feature. We’re looking for an original animal. Have you still got your hippo movie?’” Nunn remembers. “And I was like, ‘Yes, I’ve still got it. I’m ready to make it.’ He was like, ‘Let’s make it.’”

After nearly a decade of waiting, Hungry finally has its monster loose in the world. And for its English Premiere, Nunn will be returning to the festival where his directing career first reached a major audience.

Hungry screens on the Main Screen at Tubi FrightFest on Friday 28 August at 10.55pm. Watch our full interview with James Nunn below to hear more about the film, his approach to creature horror and why cinema may have underestimated the hippo for far too long.

Hungry Interview with James Nunn