He's best known for his sleeper hit Bait which won a BAFTA and went on to become the most successful Cornish film ever. Now Mark Jenkin has started pre-production on his follow-up, Enys Men, an ecosophical horror film set in 1973. Enys Men is Cornish for 'stone island' and the film is being funded by Film4, Jenkin’s biggest collaborator to date.
Jenkin: It’s a word that Denzil, my producer, used to describe it after he first read the script, and I’ve adopted it. Ecosophy is the philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. It's a horror film about ecology I suppose.
The film is set in 1973 and it's about a woman living on an imagined island off the coast of Cornwall.
She's living alone on this island during the winter as a volunteer for the wildlife trust and she's observing a very rare flower that only grows in this one place.
She lives in the only habitable cottage, there's an abandoned old mineral mine that's surrounded by contaminated soil, which is where the flower grows, which may or may not be the reason why it grows there. She's there to observe the flower’s behaviour through the winter into spring.
The only other thing on the island is a standing stone at the highest point of the island, which gives it its name. She is very isolated and starts to think that the stone is slowly moving down the hillside towards her cottage.
It's about human intervention in the natural world and how very little things can knock things out of balance.
CL: All your feature films to date are in black and white, why did you decide to do Enys Men in colour?
Jenkin: It’s set in 1973, so I wanted it, at some level, to feel like it was made then.
It also relies on a certain colour code. It's about a flower that's a specific colour. Things need to be seen in the landscape and in the sea in a certain way that relies on colour.
In some ways it will be more conventional because it will be in colour, but there will be something going on that won't quite be right with it, some of that will be deliberate and some will be accidental in the shoot.
Post production will be quicker this time. I hand processed all of the film stock on Bait, frame by frame. This time, because it’s colour, the lab will be doing it.
It was indeed 30 minutes longer but it didn't have the Joker in it. Is there an upcoming even ultimater version?
