Human Cargo (2019)

Director: Rory Joscelyne

Writer: Rory Joscelyne

Stars: Samantha Anderson, Lewis Cartwright, Alice Ryan, Susie Brown, Drew Gosling-Stiller

Set in a future where Britain has a system in place to regulate the birthrate, Joanna and Greg are police officers assigned to collect women who breach this law and take them into custody for emergency procedures.

The Southend-on-Sea Film Festival will be returning for its 11th year from 23rd May to 27th May. In preparation for the event I got an opportunity to ask writer-director Rory Joscelyne a few questions about what we can expect from his new film Human Cargo which has been selected to play at the festival.

Q. Human Cargo has been selected to play at The Southend-on-Sea Film Festival. What can we expect from the film? 

Human Cargo is a dark, slightly futuristic drama that questions the morality of restricting childbirth to a privileged group. It is a challenging film to watch, but one that ultimately is designed to leave an audience questioning the subject from multiple angles. In fact, in its short runtime, Human Cargo poses reasons for and against restricting freedom of choice from financial, ideological, moral and personal reasons. It is an emotional rollercoaster first and foremost as, regardless of the message, the film focuses on the human cost of the law.

Q. What were your inspirations for the story when writing the script?

As a male writer it is often easier to write for characters of my gender, but I felt it was a worthwhile challenge to try and build a story that required me to focus on female lead characters without simply placing women into an archetypical male story. Human Cargo wound up being a story that can’t be told with a male lead, but still allowed me the artistic freedom to build a dark and believable world with a powerful meaning behind it. While the lines are my own, I worked closely with Alice Ryan who served as both Producer and played the role of Diana in the film, to ensure the characters and dialogue came across as authentic. She’s been an absolute rock in this process.

As for inspirations in other media, The Hours was a female-led drama that really got to the core of interpersonal relationships in a heart-wrenching way. The script has also been compared favourably to the series Black Mirror, which follows the theme of an independent story showing how futuristic technology could be used to horrific effect.

Q. What were your influences for the look and style?

When I sat down with Dan Keeble, who served as Director of Photography on this film, the primary influences I had for the film were Terminator 2 (1991), Blade Runner (1982) and Demolition Man (1993)- films that used lighting shot through smoke or haze to create a colourful and gritty image. I learnt a few cinematography terms and tried to learn more about lenses, forms of lighting and how light interacts with haze to build a shorthand with Dan. As we only had 3 days to film the entire movie, we couldn’t afford to waste time, so this shorthand became a necessity.

Q. Did you experience any issues or challenges whilst making the film? 

The film was made on a tiny budget of £2000, and in order to pay the actors and crew we could only afford to film for 3 days. Thankfully the team really pulled out all the stops in order to help bring as much to the table as possible, as well as working some very long days. The final shoot was at the Kursaal Estate, and the exteriors were the last thing we shot – this was a very late January night and it was freezing. An after-shoot drink at the pub helped warm our bones afterwards.

I think the most surprising set was the hospital, as we couldn’t afford to film in anywhere resembling a clinic. That shoot was done in a venue within Victoria Plaza, with the costly set decorations and lighting having to carry the scene. Dan did a fantastic job and we picked our camera angles well to disguise this. The creepy part of all that was I bought genuine surgical tools for less than £1 each from a site online, which my girlfriend was very uncomfortable with finding in our lounge.

Q. What were some of your favourite moments during filming?

We had a lot of laughs during the filming of Human Cargo, but some highlights for me came from the moments where we would start rolling and the actors would just make magic happen. When we set up the hospital, it was a very ambitious and nerve-wracking scene as we didn’t have a genuine location and the emotion of that sequence sets the heartache of the film. When we began filming Alice Ryan (as Diana) being dragged into surgery, her screams hit with an impact that was far more powerful than I had expected. It makes the scene, as does her post-surgery breakdown, and really elevated the script to something in your face. Likewise, the realism and reactions of Sam Anderson (as Joanna) and Lewis Cartwright (as Greg) during their heated debate of the law, it’s powerful watching great actors take your script and perform it beyond your initial envisioning of the scene.

A more fun moment was the drone sequence, as the noise heard in the film is the real sound from the drone! Steve McCartney, who was our sound engineer, really kept the audio balance tight as the machine seemed much louder to the naked ear. We had all the kids down the street watching what we were doing from the neighbouring windows. Mix that with the smoke billowing out from the haze machine and they must have wondered what was going on.

Q. Did you make any changes from the original script during filming? 

I originally wrote Human Cargo as a novel in 2010, which I then lost due to a hard drive crash. My parents then found a very incomplete copy of the first few chapters in 2018 while I was off sick from work with a broken leg, and I felt that the story fit as an impactful short. The original story had several changes when converted into a script, the health scans were done by built-in shower scanners and each home had an NHS dispensary built into them.

These were changed to scans via a Fitbit style smartwatch and drone-delivered medication as technology has moved forward quickly since 2010. The script during filming wasn’t really altered, with only a word to so changed or cut to suit an actor’s style of speech. The actors were amazingly honest to the script.

Q. What do you hope people will get from the film?

Something thought provoking, a discussion or emotional reaction. The film doesn’t tell you what’s right or wrong, and the subject is very layered so people can question each other on their take from the movie. Many of my favourite films leave an audience discussing the nuances of a character, a subject or theme with varied opinions leading to strong conversational debate. But my first and foremost reaction I hope people will have to the film is to cry, regardless of a person’s individual view on the subject matter, the human cost shown in the film is tragic and I’m hoping people can really empathise with that.

Q. Do you have any new projects which you are working on?

I’ve got a few on the go, which I’m hoping to get professional funding for using Human Cargo to prove what I can do. There’s a feature length version of Human Cargo in the works, which will pick up where the short leaves off. I also have a feature length film called Codec Seven in the writing that has a similar atmosphere, but centres around a man who builds an android based on his dying wife – his company is then bought by a corporation and the prototype unit is put into mass production and sold as an animatronic sex doll.

Finally, I have a science fiction trilogy called Imperial Nova, with the first script already complete, which is set in a heavily Nationalist future with a spaceship full of criminals from each superpower winding up as the last resort for peace. All these concepts are actually shown (and quite a lot of work is done on Imperial Nova) on my website www.roryjoscelyne.co.uk

Q. If someone is looking to direct their own film, what advice would you give them?

Know your genre, and the meaning of the story, then make your job that of the audience watching the film and direct the cast to hit you with the emotion you want the audience to feel. If you’re not feeling the emotional punch of a scene, it’s likely the audience won’t feel it either, so step back, analyse the scene again and figure out what the missing element is that would complete the sequence. For me it was a godsend learning just a bit about cinematography so that I could more accurately and quickly broadcast my ideas to Dan Keeble, so just take an afternoon to look up each profession you’re working with and learn some basics about their crafts, you can only improve your film and ease the experience by doing this. 

The Southend-on-Sea Film Festival runs from Thursday 23rd May to Monday 27th May. You can find out more about the event and purchase tickets on the website https://www.southendfilmfestival.com

Philip Rogers

Published in various websites, Philip is a reviewer who is best known for his interviews and media coverage of independent projects including; films, books, theatre and live events. Always on the lookout for something different to cover!