Ahead of its Manchester Premiere at the upcoming Manchester Film Festival, I sat down with Harry Sherriff and Laurence Tratalos, director and writer of Misper – a dark comedy about a missing person and how the employees of a fading seaside hotel are affected by her disappearance
Ahead of its Manchester Premiere at the upcoming Manchester Film Festival, I sat down with Harry Sherriff and Laurence Tratalos, director and writer of Misper.
“It’s a dark comedy about a missing person and how the employees of a fading seaside hotel are affected by her disappearance,” writer Laurence Tratalos tells me. “The idea came out in a number of different ways. Me and Harry had been developing a TV show called Pam and Leonard, which was about this sort of oddball duo who are working in like a Wilko store, and their colleague goes missing… [so] they decide to start investigating. And we kind of liked that, but when we were talking about doing it as a feature, we found we were more interested in how people were affected by this crime rather than what happened with the crime.”
“We were rallying against the trope of normal people turning into detectives overnight,” director Harry Sherriff adds, “We started talking about how silly and absurd that was.”
He also adds how his experience living and working in Manchester helped shape the idea: “I was working in the Arndale when the bomb went off at the arena at the Ariana Grande concert, and I was meant to be in work the next day and I didn’t go in. And then the weeks after that, it was really strange. You saw some people who were, thankfully, safe, who obviously needed some time to try and get over it, and then there were other people who dealt with it in a different way and trying to keep living their normal lives. We spoke a lot about that, about what that must be like.”
The film focuses tightly on the people who worked with Elle, the girl who goes missing. It chooses not to include the police work, or much of the media coverage. “We felt like that kind of story had been told a lot,” Tratalos says. “I don’t think the film’s a satire on true crime necessarily, but I think it has some points about that kind of thing.”
“When we were writing Misper and talking about it, we’d see so many of those Netflix true crime shows, you know, like ‘my stepmum killed my boyfriend’, and it just feels gratuitous. It feels manipulative and exploitative even when they’re true stories and we wanted to avoid that and purely focus on the characters and their mindstates.”
The film’s sense of setting is incredibly strong. The action largely takes place in a failing seaside hotel named ‘The Grand’. Tratalos tells me, “Before Misper, we had a different script idea that was set in a hotel. [For that film] [o]ur co-producer had found this amazing hotel… and we saw this photo, and thought this is amazing, but the script and the idea we’d worked on for that location wasn’t right.”
They then revisited the hotel when they shifted their attention to Misper. “The initial idea [for Misper] was it being in a shop because of Harry’s experience working in a shop. And we just felt like it was fun to do it that way. But then the more we thought about it, the more we realised that actually, if we had this story set in a hotel, it made it sadder almost. It kind of reflected the state of Britain and these sort of dying seaside hotels.”
“Laurence and I work a lot in a way that we’re very flexible,” Sherriff adds. “Laurence wrote quite a few drafts in this shop and then we got the news sort of, ‘Yeah, you’re not going to be able to do the shop because it’s just so expensive and difficult and complex’.”
“But then when The Grand came along, it was just so perfect. And it’s almost like finding the hotel became this other co-writer ’cause it was like, well, of course it’s got to be this hotel, it’s just so much better than having a shop. It gives you these wide open spaces for loneliness and gives you so much more to shoot.”
Sherriff and Tratalos tell me about how, along with the rest of the crew, they lived in The Grand while they shot the film. “It added something to the filming because we all got used to this place,” Tratalos says. “The top floors were apartments but lower down they were trying to make these rooms for Airbnb. So we were kind of the guinea pigs.”
“They were really nice, but there were issues. My room flooded at one point, so I had to go and stay with one of the residents of the apartment building, which was great because he was really nice. But yeah, it was a unique experience.”
A line early in the film references The Shining, perhaps the ultimate hotel movie, and I wanted to know if the film had been a visual influence on the film. “I love The Shining,” Sherriff says, “but I don’t think we were thinking about The Shining in terms of shots. For me, [the horror/dream sequences] is more Lynch, but even then, you can’t be David Lynch.”
Beyond the hotel, the film takes place in an English seaside town, something Sherriff is very familiar with. “I grew up in Southport, so the seaside hotel struggling and being way past the glory days is very, very prominent for me.”
But, ultimately, the setting came down to how perfect of a fit The Grand was. The two are clearly enamoured by it, recalling many moments and stories they’d come across about the hotel – my favourite, Tratalos talking about a former owner who went to prison but had built cupboards inside cupboards all around the hotel to hide things. “We even talked about there being like a former hotel owner or manager or something that was stealing money or whatever. So it was just this weird thing of constantly we’d go there and we’d get influence from the location.”
Despite the subject matter, the film maintains a wry humour throughout. Tratalos explains why: “I think me and Harry always write stuff that has humour in it because I think that’s very reflective of real life. You know, personally for me and my family, growing up in the North, when things are really shit it’s when you laugh the most, it’s just how you cope.”
Finding the balance of the darkness inherent in the narrative and the comedy was very important for them both. “We talk about tone a lot, and sometimes it can be a really fun, sort of exciting conversation. And then sometimes it’s like, this is too much. It feels like ironing or something, you’re just trying to make it fit,” Sherriff says.
“And I think there was so much we could have done with this film, and we had to sort of not censor ourselves, but, it was a very low budget film and we shot a seventy-page script, which was on purpose. And so we always knew that we were going to make quite a short feature. The humour of the different characters was something we could have spent so much time on. And then you have to make sure there’s never any jokes that were too far, or at the wrong expense. I think the film could have been funnier but I don’t think that would have necessarily made it better. There would have been an imbalance and it might have veered towards a spoof, which we didn’t want to do.”
As Sherriff notes, the film is by design very short, only running for seventy-three minutes. “There was an early cut which was about ninety to 100 minutes,” Tratalos says – but ultimately, “Seventy/seventy-five minutes was the perfect length; the story is this snapshot, nothing longer.”
“I think we live in an age of, ‘yeah that was too long, wasn’t it’,” Sherriff adds. “My worst nightmare was making a film that you walk out and go ‘that was too long’. I think if people say Misper’s too long we’re in trouble.”
To stray away from these fears, Sherriff tells me he looks at “all those minimalist gems. I kept thinking of Aki Kaurismäki films, or, super pretentious alert: people like Robert Bresson, Pickpocket style with a very simple premise, and short and to the point.”
He also found that the short runtime helped with the feeling they wanted to convey. “A shorter film is often connected with something being set over a weekend or just a day. And with Misper, we have this sort of idea of not knowing how much time has passed. We tried to put in a feeling of unknowingness where you don’t quite know when this is taking place and where.”
Finally we touched on the film’s cast. Led by Samuel Blenkin (Black Mirror, Alien Earth, The French Dispatch), he speaks to the the film’s great roster of British talent.
Tratalos says, “Harry would often talk about this Ben Wheatley mantra.”
“Yeah, write it dark, cast it funny,” Sherriff completes. “So, yeah we wanted to cast people who could do the humour and capture the tone.”
The pair sings Blenkin’s praises: “He was incredible, he was just great to work with,” Tratalos gleefully says. Sherriff tells me that “Even from his headshot we were like, ‘oh, he’s going to be really good’. Sometimes when you see someone you just have this feeling that they can do what you’re after.”
“The good thing with such a great cast is you feel a bit of pressure and you really want to do right by them. No one wants to be part of a crap film, even if it’s fun to make. You want people to see it and say ‘you know what, we made the right decision’. It sounds so silly but I think those things because you want everyone to benefit because everyone is taking a chance on us to make our film.”
I sat down with director Elias Demetriou to talk about his film ‘Maricel’ which follows a Filipino domestic worker in Cyprus caring for an elderly couple who have a lot of unspoken family drama.
