I’ve become very fond of Mayhem Film Festival, and it’s lovely to meet a filmmaker who feels the same. Recently, I had the pleasure of spending half an hour in the company of Marc Price, writer and director of The Arbiter, soon due to screen at this year’s Mayhem.

“We’ve had two films there,” Marc said. “We played Colin there, and that’s when I met Steve for the first time. He’s a friend now, but (I’ve not told him this) at the time, I was quite starstruck, because I loved Mum and Dad. Of course, I knew Chris’s film as well, but it was only afterwards that I realised I knew him as a filmmaker too. We had Nightshooters there a bit later, too. That was one of my favourite screenings of the film, because, well, let me tell you the way that went. We have our cast and crew screenings and that goes really good but of course everyone there was involved, they’re all friends, so there is a lot more goodwill; you can’t guarantee that when you screen it to a regular audience. We played it at Raindance and got exactly the same positive response, but I thought, ‘We know some people in the audience, they could be leading the crowd.’ Then we got to Nottingham (where Mayhem takes place) and we only knew one person in the audience, and I thought he cannot possibly lead the crowd, but the response was the same, so I started to accept and think well maybe it is alright, maybe it’s working.”

Mayhem is a great crowd for a film like Nightshooters, where anything could happen. Something I love about that event is that they sometimes show films that are not strictly part of their repertoire, but the organisers know what their crowd will like.

“I think I sent it to them within an hour that it was finished,” said Marc, “and by the weekend, they’d all seen it, and we were in the running for Mayhem: so I was ecstatic!”

Marc’s new film, The Arbiter, seems to be a significant size up from those in terms of cast numbers, and I wondered what it was like working with a much larger number of people. “Yeah, there are certainly more background characters and groups of people,” Marc said. “In Nightshooters, I play about a dozen different balaclava’d men, just because I was there, and I was like ‘hold this camera and stand over there’, and that’s just how we got things done. But in this one, we had a really good team of people, especially for the action scenes: all of our stunt guys were working on The Witcher at the same time; they’d do The Witcher Monday to Friday, then come and do a scene for us Saturday and Sunday, and then go back to The Witcher, which went on for a few weeks.

“It’s so fun, I’m always trying to get more people involved, and I really love doing big crowd scenes,” Marc went on. “And if there’s a big, crowded action scene, it’s a lot of fun trying to coordinate everything. The way I tend to do things is that everything is always organised, and safe, and everyone knows where they’re supposed to be; and then you throw in elements like explosions or an ice cream van has to speed through a crowd of people: all those things have to be carefully mapped out to create a sense of chaos. Then, when it all comes together, there are so many variables, like what direction will the smoke come from? And will the ice cream van kick up enough dirt so it looks really exciting? And all those punches need to connect, when you’ve got all those people there to just help, and not trained in action. So, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong, which makes it exciting to get right. Oh, and there are guys on fire, of course: we’ve got guys on fire running around, so there are safety concerns to keep in place, and only then making sure the shot is as good as it can be to tell the story.”

You’re in this career for a bit of fun, I teased. “Well, yes,” said Marc. “It’s strange, I’ve always been quite childish, and making films is like playing for a living. But people think it’s cool instead of saying to me, ‘Hey man, maybe you should grow up.’ So, I don’t know, making films is the best, and I’d recommend everyone give it a go. Don’t mortgage a house to do it, but on the other hand, you don’t need to these days: we’ve all got cameras on our phones.”

I’m sure there was more that drew Marc to making The Arbiter than just fun, mind you. “There’s a lot in the film, sure,” considered Marc. “One of the things I love about making genre films is how much personal baggage I can stuff into them, and no one necessarily knows. It’s like having a really healthy conversation with a therapist, but no one has to know, so all my baggage is kind of out there. There’s a lot of things in the film I wanted to touch upon about a sense of belonging, and who you are, about family and who you are; definitely a commentary about violence, particularly a thing of mine is that violence in movies can be a good time, but in real life, absolutely not. Weirdly, I have no stomach for real-life violence. I don’t know if you have any buddies who are make-up effects artists: they always have a file or a folder full of images of what can happen to a body, and I’m always like, ‘I don’t need to see those! Just describe it to me’, and when something sounds about right, I’ll say ‘that’s horrible, let’s have that in the film.’ It’s mostly research they do about the stresses bodies can go through: with rubber and latex, I can absolutely handle it, but not the real images. I can watch that dude from Robocop getting burst by a car every day of the week, that’s fine, but a tennis player spraining an ankle: no, can’t do that.”

This brought back to me a recollection of being in crowd scenes some years ago for Invasion Planet Earth, a locally made sci-fi film. I brought along my kid, then aged about seven, to run away from zombies (amongst other things), after which she said to me, “I don’t want to be an actor anymore, it’s too dangerous.”

“Actually,” Marc said, “I feel that every person has one zombie in them. The reason why it’s just one is that they’re all game at first, until they realise they’re just sticky for about eight hours, and then they go ‘yeah, that’s it, I’ve had my zombie fix,’ and they never want to do it again. So if you’re going to make a zombie film, the trick is to get your big scene shot first, and then you’ve only got the ones who are made of stern stuff, who will stick around and come back for more; that’s my experience.”

Marc was talking as someone whose first film was a zombie story; I hoped this didn’t mean he wasn’t going to make one again! “I’ve got a couple of zombie ideas,” he owned up. “I’ve even written a script for one, although I am sort of cannibalising that script, as there are some scenes I really like. I took a few scenes from that and stuck them in Nightshooters, took another few and stuck them in a script I’m working on now. So, yeah, I’ve got some zombie movies in my heart still, I think.”

Going back to The Arbiter, which was set in a big empty building with myriad corridors and stairways, I commented to Marc that the environment reminded me somewhat of Nightshooters, with its grey concrete. “Whenever I make a film, I always put my all into it,” Marc said. “Nightshooters was such a small-budget film that I always think of it as a pencil sketch of something I would want to do further down the line. The characters and the energy in The Arbiter were similar to Nightshooters, but that’s my humour anyway: I like putting real people in a situation that’s kind of cinematic, reacting like we would react in a crazy situation. We didn’t have a tall building to film in. For both of those films, we had a building that was just two floors. In this film, we shoot a scene, re-dress it, shoot the next scene. We had a very excellent art director on it, Anna Bychkova, who is a student of mine who said she’d be interested in the art department; and she’d done some excellent work on a film me and my producing partner [Michelle Parkyn] had been involved with a couple of years ago, so I asked her a few questions, and her response to it all was ‘yep, I’ll do whatever I can.’ She helped when I said I wanted a room completely yellow: she said she could make it ‘clean yellow or dirty yellow’ and I thought dirty yellow would be great. So we have this grimy, just-painted, shit-at-decorating layer to that character, which was quite fun. Actually, there’s a whole Wizard of Oz kind of look that we were leaning into as well, with the yellow brick road and that sort of thing.”

That made sense, considering the gangs each had fairly basic styles. “Yeah, there was a green one, like the wicked witch,” Marc agreed. “And there was a red room, with a key thing that kind of brings it all home: ruby slippers taking you home! Wicked! That felt fun. Oh, and the blue of Dorothy’s dress, which matched the ideal of daytime; there’s not much daytime in the film, but when it does occur, the colour is more white than blue. What our character is aspiring to for the whole film, a retirement from working with all these gangs; he’s looking forward to a day that won’t actually exist: a play on our own aspirations and whether we’ll really get there, if that makes sense! I don’t want to sound pretentious after making people explode!” Marc couldn’t help laughing, and I joined in.

Joking aside, The Arbiter really does have a blend of tones: deep, philosophical discussions alternate with almost comedy; sometimes deadpan, sometimes dark humour, and sometimes almost slapstick. I asked Marc how he navigates that blend as a writer. “I don’t actually think of myself much as a writer,” he said. “Because I think I know how to get to the end result, or at least try to get there, I can write this stuff knowing that my producing partner is confident in what we will end up with, based on some limitations. She trusts me by now, and when she’s not sure, she asks ‘does this really make sense?’ and I explain more about it, so she can see yes, it does make sense. Or at least she trusts that it will! I know the cast I’m bringing on board as well, and the way I work with actors is something I enjoy; I enjoy finding stuff with them. Characters like the one Alastair Kirton plays, and Georgina Leonidas, James Groom, and Ekow Quartey. The mouth that’s brought to the characters through those actors is very exciting to me, so I’m never too concerned with the tone: mainly what you need to do is make sure it doesn’t go too far one way or the other.”

I recalled a scene in the film when two of the gang members ask themselves something along the lines of “what’s the point of all this?” and I suggested it must be tricky to make sure such a sudden moment of profundity doesn’t jar against what could be seen as a low-brow shoot-em-up. “It’s kind of there,” said Marc, “drip-feeding that perspective throughout. Then, when you get to the point where – not to spoil the story – not many people have made it to the end, and those left have a moment of realisation about where they are, where they have come from; growth in their perspective and the perspective of the audience. I think there’s room for that in any film.”

On the subject of the ending (and I promised to avoid spoilers), I was intrigued about how a writer decides what “foreshadowing” clues to leave, as opposed to making the resolution a complete surprise. “Everyone has a writing process of their own, and maybe mine is kind of boring. But for me, I have rough ideas of where I want to go, and then I’ll sit and write. My goal is ten pages a day. On day one, I was happyish; day two, I was not happy at all. On day three, I felt it was interesting, not sure where it was going. Day four, I knew exactly where it was going. I’m on day five today, so let’s see! Every day, I’m left with an idea of where it’s going to end up after it’s written, and I’m quite strict, and then I’m aching to go back to it the next day. But I don’t let myself go and tweak it: no, you’ve got to remember that for tomorrow, write a note. I get to experience that story unfolding like an audience, and once I get to the end, I will hate it. I think as a writer it’s OK to hate your work: it’s a piece of shit, you’re a shit writer, put it in a drawer and then ignore it for about four days. Then come back to it with the intent of tidying it up enough to send it to a close friend who is only going to tell you they like it, because you’ll need that mental support. And when you go through it, what will happen is you’ll see it with some perspective: ‘that bit’s not bad, that’s pretty good,’ and so on. Because what you do when you just write is you have your tastes and your instincts, but the process of writing is a different process to reading and to tidying the work. When you do that, you start to realise that the things that are personal to you, the themes, are already there; you just have to bring them to the surface a little bit. So that’s what I tend to do.”

I couldn’t help shaking my head: Marc said earlier he didn’t think of himself as a writer! “Well, it’s a little sketch thing that gets me to the next thing, the film. I couldn’t write anything with the cleverness of, say, a good scam scene in Better Call Saul. There’s something there that I’m able to do, but maybe it’s just because I have accepted the self-loathing part: if I didn’t, I’d just sit there and not produce anything, and hate myself for not doing any work. I’d forget that if I’m watching a film, I’m working, because I’m observing the stuff that’s being put through to me. In The Arbiter, there’s a date scene early on in the film, and that was a late addition to the script: I put it in because I needed a goal for Verril [the titular arbiter, played by Craig Russell], something he would aspire to, and it was this ideal of a ‘normal’ life. This person, in his mind, represented that. So that became a really important scene for me, and it ties in towards the end, but it’s also the scariest scene for me, because after that eight-minute montage, which is all energy and violence, we cut to what could be seen as a rom-com, and I was so scared I’d fucked it up. But then you see it with an audience and see their responses, and feel like ‘OK, maybe I did get away with it,’ especially as it’s a scene people have talked to me about afterwards. Sorry about the tangent, but that is one of the most exciting parts of making a film: it’s like bungee-jumping, I guess, that thrill of oh-my-god is it going to work? Then to watch it land, it’s terrifying and exhilarating. With every screening so far, I want to run out of the cinema after that scene.”

Mayhem is a friendly crowd. I really don’t think there will be any need to run out.

Marc has made more films than just the ones we’ve touched on so far. I asked him if he would suggest one for me to track down and watch. “We’ve talked about the ones I’d recommend,” he said. “But there is one other, actually: a sci-fi called Dune Drifter. It came out during the pandemic, so it was a streaming-only one. A weird thing happened with that one, though: the wrong version was released. There was an edited version for Christian streaming networks in middle America or something, and for some reason, that was the one that was released, not my version of the film. Lots of swearing was cut (there wasn’t much violence) and some major plot points early on!”

So what’s Marc working on next? “I’m not sure what’s next, really,” Marc said. “It’s based on the budget that my producing partner can get; there’s a budget we want and a project we want to do, but we’ve also been offered a smaller budget, so I’m writing the plot for that right now. It’s kind of a fairy-tale horror, a sad movie. I made a movie called Magpie a few years ago, and it taps into that vein more than anything else. I’ve been told that’s on Prime, but I don’t really look for where my stuff is now. I’ve got a western that’s apparently on Netflix, too. That was actually a sketch for what I hoped would be a series of westerns, but then they said ‘that’s great, can we have a sci-fi now?’ So I said ‘Sure!’ and made a sci-fi. We always wanted to come back to westerns, so I’ll probably do that next.”