INTERVIEW: Director Mathieu Ratthe looks to the sky for ‘The Gracefield Incident’
The new sci-fi thriller The Gracefield Incident follows the hellish aftermath of a meteorite hitting the ground near a party of rowdy friends. All of the horror staples are present and accounted for, and the resulting film is truly terrifying.
The main character is Matthew Donovan, a video game editor who decides to place an iPhone camera in his prosthetic eye to document the party. What he finds on his mini camera will change the lives of each and every partygoer, if they are able to survive the alien onslaught.
The film comes from the mind of Mathieu Ratthe, who shot The Gracefield Incident on a limited budget in 13 days. His inspiration for the story was seeing an actual meteorite fall out of the sky.
“I saw a meteorite coming down with a friend of mine, and we went investigating to see if we could find anything,” Ratthe said in a recent phone interview. “We never found anything, and I always thought [about] what we would have found if we found what fell out of the sky. So that was the initial idea, and when I sat down and started writing this story, that’s really the first thing I wrote, the meteorite coming down. So that was the basis of the story.”
The concept of the iPhone camera in a prosthetic eye came much later in the writing process. That conceit helped Ratthe lens the movie in a quick, budget-minded manner. “I was just like, all right, I’ve got to forget about everything I know: camera setup and build up suspense from different angles,” he said. “We’ve got to put a camera on my shoulder, and then we’ll be acting at the same time as operating the camera.”
As with any movie project, there are typically three scripts, Ratthe said. There was the one he originally wrote. There was the one he filmed with the actors, and then there was the one he found in the editing room.
Helping him along the way was the ensemble, which includes Ratthe himself, plus Kimberly Laferriere, Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles, Juliette Gosselin, Alexandre Nachi and Laurence Dauphinais.
“It was great,” he said. “We became friends. What you see on screen was really the chemistry that we had during the shoot. These guys absolutely became friends because, as you know for this film, in this case, you really need to be friendly, to be natural. I remember I cast the three girls at the same time because they were just laughing their ass off in the waiting room just before the audition. They had so much fun, I was like, you know what, that’s exactly what I need. I need chemistry, and we shot this thing in 13 days. So they needed to go along with my pace, and it was tough. I mean, we had a blast. We had fun, but, yeah, they thought it was crazy for a while, in a good way I hope. It was fun, and I think they all did an amazing job in what they had to do. It was great.”
Ratthe would classify The Gracefield Incident as a sci-fi suspense movie, with a little bit of adventure thrown in for good measure.
“It’s not like a typical horror film,” he said. “It’s not a typical sci-fi movie. There’s emotion as well in there. I would describe it as, of course, my job was to scare the crap out of the audience, which I did. For genre, that’s what they’re expecting, but there’s something else that they’re going to have. They’re going to build something. They’re going to emote. They’re going to have emotion when they get out of the film. They’re going to be like, I’ve seen something else.”
Ever since growing up in the 1980s and watching E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Ratthe has been fascinated by alien films. That early cinematic love has now bled over into a directorial career.
“The unknown is fascinating,” he said, “and I did so much research as I was writing this film because you want to be accurate.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Gracefield Incident, written, directed and starring Mathieu Ratthe, is now playing in movie theaters and available on VOD and Digital HD. Click here for more information.
