Filmwire Spotlight: Charlie Dennis
Raised in Staffordshire, filmmaker Charlie Dennis turned heads with his 2021 short film Silent World, starring deaf rapper Signkid.
Dennis has just completed a new short entitled The Pigs Underneath, funded by writer-director Jordan Peele as part of an initiative between Universal and Peele’s production company Monkeypaw to support emerging filmmakers. Ahead of the film screening at the Midlands Arts Centre on Halloween night, we talked to Dennis about his wild ride over the past year, one that brought Druids Heath to Los Angeles.
Did you already have the idea for The Pigs Underneath before you heard about the Monkeypaw/Universal initiative?
Yeah, it was initially called The Pigs Of The South, and it was more about the disparity between the south of England and the Midlands. It came from my experience of moving out of the Midlands to go to university in Surrey, which was a huge cultural shock for me. That original idea didn’t have the more folklore horror elements the film now has. Then I saw the Monkeypaw initiative pop up, and the question they asked to inspire you was - ‘What monsters lurk in the deepest corners of your inner thoughts?’ That’s when I realised I could tweak my idea a bit so it’s more about the puppet masters in your life, when the rent is due and there are no second chances. It just evolved naturally.
Can you explain a little about the film’s story and set-up?
It’s set in a dystopian council estate and it follows a working class community who have to face a brutal quota just to survive. The Pigs Underneath is really about oppression and how that oppression comes creeping in through systemic exploitation of the class system. How the privileged few can control the many and discard them. It’s roughly based on Thatcherite Britain in the 80s, when you had this dissolution of industries in the Black Country and the Midlands, and how those communities were left to suffer. There was no retraining. They took everything and left nothing. But I also wanted to make sure we stayed away from poverty porn and ensure that the community I’m representing still felt full of life and levity and joy and spirit, because that’s what I know from back home. The people in the film are struggling, but they’re tenacious and they band together.
Where did you shoot it?
We filmed in Druids Heath and we shot it over three days. I wanted to shoot it in the Black Country, but Druids Heath ended up being perfect. The landscape felt very ‘Midlands’. When I was chatting to Monkeypaw I was trying to describe a council estate, and their reference points were shows like [Ashley Walters series] Top Boy and I was like, ‘It’s not like that. It’s very different.’ The Midlands has a very specific look. It’s not just inner city - there’s greenery, there’s agriculture, but you still have that estate life.
It’s interesting how they could only see a council estate through the lens of a London environment. That says a lot about the limited depictions of Britain we show the world in films and television shows made here.
Birmingham is huge and sprawling, and being from the outskirts of the Midlands myself, I’ve seen how the landscape very quickly changes in between Birmingham and the border to the north – from inner city to old industrial towns around the Black Country like Walsall and Cannock, where my family are from. It’s hard to relate that to anything in the media that Americans would have seen. The closest I came was maybe Ken Loach’s Kes or Andrea Arnold’s work, but when we’re telling a genre story, they’re not the right films to show Monkeypaw. Beautiful films, but not right for what we wanted. There’s a photographer named Robert Clayton who shot the Lion Farm Estate in Oldbury a while back, so we sent them those photos to show them life in Birmingham from the 1990s onwards, which was really useful. It just makes you realise there’s this huge underseen chunk of British life that isn’t London.
Did you speak to Druids Heath residents about the changes going on there at the moment?
There’s a lot of anger about how the government are going about regenerating the area, with residents upset that they’re going to be turfed out and have their homes torn down. They had pickets in their gardens saying things like ‘We are not for sale’. When we were scouting the location, we actually had a bunch of blokes approach us thinking we were developers, and when we told them what we were doing – making a film about exploitation – they were like, ‘Amazing, we want more of this!’
Is the horror genre something you’ve always been attracted to as a filmmaker?
I’ve never been drawn to those kinds of bleak kitchen sink dramas that we usually see from the Midlands. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve realised I don’t have to do that, and people like Jordan Peele have paved the way for telling stories with a social critique, but doing so with spectacle and entertainment. I realised the lens of genre gives you the ability to tell an important message but also not hit the audience over the head with it. To be scared and entertained, without forcing something down their throat. Jordan did that with Get Out. It was commenting on the different micro aggressions that Black people face in white communities, but it’s also a great horror film.
How involved were Monkeypaw throughout the production process?
They were consistently involved. Jordan was the brains behind the whole initiative, so he chose the scripts. There were five filmmakers chosen, and I was the only one from outside America. We each had different executives attached to the script who helped refine the script and sprinkle some of the Monkeypaw sensibilities into it, drawing out more of the horror aspects. We also put some things aside which we might like to save for a feature version. The short is really a proof of concept to kick start our feature film career and The Pigs Underneath is hopefully a stepping stone towards that.
How much interaction have you had with Jordan Peele?
We met Jordan quite a few times. They flew us out to LA for a big kick off thing before we started filming. It was insane! (laughs) We were at their Universal Studios offices overlooking the theme park, and we met the president of Universal Pictures, and we had this intensive week where Universal execs and departments fast tracked us through the studio system. And then we saw Jordan again when we premiered the film at Toronto International Film Festival in September. He was throwing compliments our way, which was amazing. I think he’s an inspiration for all of us.
Do you want The Pigs Underneath to inspire other Midlands filmmakers?
The fact that it’s a very niche story from the Midlands that has captured the eyes of Universal and Jordan Peele - that just feels really special for me and for the Midlands. Most of the crew were local and they were just buzzing that it’s a Monkeypaw film being shot here. I want to keep that gaze on us, to show we’ve got the talent here and that we have a lot more to say.
The Pigs Underneath screens this Halloween night at the Midlands Arts Centre as part of a special Monkeypaw double bill alongside new horror feature HIM.
This interview featured in the latest edition of Filmwire. Sign up for the Filmwire newsletter to stay in the loop on all the latest Midlands film happenings.