I’ve been on long drives before, but I don’t remember them looking as beautiful as the one in Locke does.
Steven Knight: We enhanced it a bit with Haris (Zambarloukos), who is the DP. We rediscovered sort of this reflector thing. Haris knows more about it, but it’s something that hasn’t been used since the 50’s apparently. It enhances reflection so that we see more reflection in the windows than we normally would.
Throughout the shoot, did you have to change the angles from which you shot and did you need to find different ways of shooting to get the story more interesting on a visual level?
Steven Knight: Yeah, we were helped again by circumstance. Because the RED is a memory card that lasts 30 minutes, every 27 minutes we had to pull over. When we did that, we also changed the lenses and the angles so that we always had a lot of variety in what we could cut to what we got into the edit. When we change the memory card we might as well do this, and every night we put the cameras in different places, and then the last two nights we put the cameras in the back of the vehicle. We took out the seats so that we had the angle going forward.
We learn that Locke had a troublesome relationship with his dad, and you see him talking to himself as if his dad is in the car. I was wondering if Locke was hallucinating that his dad was in the back or was he really just talking to himself?
Steven Knight: It’s sort of a reflection of being on your own in a particular way. Especially if you’re going on a long journey, you think about the future, you think you thing about the past, you think about things you’ve done and things people have said, because your body is driving and you are free to think. It’s sort of a reflection of that. Sometimes you hear the words and his lips don’t move because it is pretty much an internal dialogue, but I wanted to dramatize it in a way that he’s in the rearview mirror. In other words, he’s in the past.
Was it your intention to leave that relationship ambiguous for the audience?
Steven Knight: Yeah. Throughout this I’ve invited the audience to do a lot of work, and one of the best things people say (about the movie) is that they forget that they haven’t seen the other characters. They feel that they know them because they’ve made them up themselves. I think that in the backstory with the dad, there’s a lot of clues.
That concludes our interview, but we’d like to thank Steven very much for his time. Be sure to catch Locke when it rolls into theatres this Friday.