![]() Those were the kind of films that influenced me.” He also cites Ted Kotcheff’s Ozploitation masterpiece Wake In Fright and Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort, in which some National Guardsmen get on the wrong side of backwater bayou trappers. “Like Deliverance, say it’s a genre movie but it’s also a drama and it’s also about something. “Those kinds of movies are a lot of fun, but it seems like the kind of genre movies that existed in the 70s, there’s not so much space for them anymore. “In the last decade or so, something has happened where genre movies have become kind of Genre Movies in capital letters, so you expect to go and you expect massive bloodshed and cars flying off cliffs and nuns having their heads chopped off, or whatever it is,” he explains. Palmer agrees that his film’s aesthetic and pacing is closer to a 70s movie. Calibre’s atmosphere, lived-in look and classical film grammer – all slow dissolves and crisp widescreen images – makes it feel like it could have been plucked from the same era of filmmaking, an era where horror films seemed less enthralled to rigid genre conventions. Palmer’s film doesn’t just share thematic DNA with Deliverance. Jack Lowden and Matt Palmer on the set of Calibre And so as I started writing the script, I had the sense that it was an opportunity to sort of do some revision of that dynamic.” “But there’s a sense in those films that the odds and the morality is stacked heavily in favour of the city people, which always felt counter-intuitive to me, because they’re the disruptive force, going in and causing trouble. “I love those films like Deliverance,” says Palmer. It goes without saying, then, that he knows his genre movies, and this means he’s also well aware of the cliches he wanted to avoid while making Calibre. Many local film fans will know him as the programmer behind Psychotronic Cinema, the late, great cult movie night at Filmhouse and GFT, and the much-loved All Night Horror Madness, the annual horror marathons he holds at the Cameo. Palmer may be making his feature debut, but he’s well-known in the Scottish film community. The world of the city is the world that’s around me, so it’s not very exciting to me, whereas out in the wild it’s much more unknown. “That was what was quite exciting to me, the idea of going up and getting a real sense of those kinds of isolated places. The rural setting also appealed because it would plunge the filmmaker into the unknown. And that opens up the possibility of stuff happening that just could not happen in the city.” “I think in some areas of the Highlands there’s sometimes three police for three villages in a 50 mile circumference. ![]() “It’s just the isolation you get up there,” he says. The Scottish Highlands seemed an obvious choice, and he had the sense that the setting would add to his film’s existential dread. The image concerned two men hunting in a woodland clearing, so whichever movie god zapped this scene into Palmer’s consciousness, it meant venturing out of the city. I’d sat around trying to think about possible stories and rationally come up with feature ideas, but this one it was literally channeled into me it just landed in my brain.” ![]() Where does he think the image came from? “I saw a Peter Strickland interview at the Edinburgh Film Festival a few years ago, and he was on stage talking about Berberian Sound Studio and he said, ‘With the good ideas, it feels like they’re sent down mysteriously out of the sky,’ and it really was like that. “From there, I very carefully built the film around that image,” he explains. Suffice it to say, it’s too spoilerific to reveal here. “I was sitting on the sofa one night with my eyes closed, almost half asleep,” he recalls, “and I just saw this image in my mind.” What he describes seeing is the central image of the film, and it's very much the fulcrum incident that turns this weekend of male bonding into a verdant, mud-speckled nightmare. ![]() Above the din, the Kidderminster-born, Edinburgh-based filmmaker describes the idea for Calibre coming to him like “a bolt of lightning.” We meet Palmer to discuss Calibre in the Traverse Theatre bar, with the incongruous sounds of children's laughter in the air as we appear to be discussing this bruising horror in the middle of a school trip to the theatre. John Boorman’s Deliverance is the obvious touchstone, and like that 1972 film, Palmer's picture utilises the wild, open landscape to menacing effect. Written and directed by Matt Palmer, Calibre belongs to a rich lineage of films concerning city slickers venturing into the wilds for a relaxing getaway, only to find violence and death. ![]()
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