upfront Mike Mort: Wales’ Stop Motion Maverick Goes Feature Length
The Bridgend animator who gave prehistoric 90s S4C animation Gogs its BAFTA-scooping look has made his latest protagonist, ass-kicking OTT action cop Chuck Steel, into a full- length stop-motion movie. Mike Mort outlines the trials and tribulations of getting Chuck
Chuck Steel is a character I came up aged 15 – I used to draw him in my English books. I made a couple of short films with that character, experimenting with automation in college in Newport – 16-year-old Super 8 films. Then I went into the industry and did Gogs and a bunch of commercials. But directing commercials is a short-lived thing. I thought I’d have one more go at getting Chuck off the ground and do a short film in my basement.
I built these models and did all the voices – I didn’t have any funding when it started, or any partners. It turned out OK – and then I met Rupert Lywood, who invests in a lot of businesses, is a big animation fan, and loved Chuck. He founded this company, Animortal Studio, for the short film, which took us 18 months to shoot in my basement with a crew of about six people, and that played a bunch of festivals.
I wanted to go straight into making a film – I’d written a script for a feature film back in 2001! While we were shooting Chuck Steel: Night Of The Trampires, Trump became president… I was like, how is this film going to be received? It’s such a long process making stop-motion, and you can’t reshoot scenes very easily. In 2018 we took it around festivals for six months and it did really well.
Some people don’t like it: we started to see like an 80/20 split on people who love it or hate it.
Even though it wasn’t cheap to make, we had nowhere near a normal movie budget. All the money we had is on the screen. At the start we discussed getting some famous people in to do the voices, and in order to get a proper big star involved, you’re talking $3 million – we haven’t got that money. I would love to have had Sylvester Stallone and Carl Weathers, but it just didn’t come together in the end.
There was a bit in the middle where we lost half the crew – people were leaving for Aardman and Wes Anderson movies. I’m quite hands on with stuff anyway, sculpting the models and things, so that was useful. We had about 300 people at maximum, then more like 90 for the smaller period, and then it sort of trickled off as we finished it, in 2018.
After the festival run, we were also talking to big studios in America. Each one of these potential deals to sell it to a studio would take six months to go nowhere. They’re all scared of the humour, and eventually back out of it. One big studio who were really keen on it said, “oh sorry,
we can’t have white cop heroes anymore because of the George Floyd [killing].”
We reached the point where we went, right we’re just going to release it ourselves. We showed it to the four cinema chains, and they loved it and agreed to book it in a number of cinemas. We spoke to smaller distributors as well, but with smaller distributors you have to just hope you get your money back, which my backers can’t risk. At least people can go and see it. Hopefully they find it funny. I’m sure some people will be upset by some jokes: times change and social media has changed a lot of things. But this film is, to me, a bit of fun – 86 minutes of lunacy. Some people look at the film and think Chuck’s a Republican. I’ve never attached anything like that to it.
When I first wrote the script, the psychologist [Dr Alex Cular, voiced by Jennifer Saunders] wasn’t a woman, it was a man. I talked to a colleague at the film agency who said, you need a strong female character. This introduced a whole battle-of-the-sexes element: she’s very feminist, and trying to emasculate the police – there’s pushback, a clash. If I left that character as a man, it wouldn’t have stood out as much, so I’m glad we did that.
It’s not 1985 anymore… it’s 1986, and Chuck Steel is “the best God damn cop on the force” according to his long-suffering boss, Captain Jack Schitt. But even this maverick, renegade, loose cannon, lone wolf, cop on the edge, who doesn’t play by the rules has his work cut out when the Governor of LA decides to reduce the licensing hours for clubs and bars triggering a sudden, inexplicable spate of high-profile disappearances in the city. The disappearances all have the same thing in common, a crime scene covered in blood but with no sign of the victim. The police are perplexed until they get a break in the case when one of the victims manages to escape. Chuck goes to interview the victim at the hospital but is confronted by a crazed old man who introduces himself as Abraham Van Rental. He warns a disbelieving Chuck that an evil scourge is about to descend on the city of Los Angeles: the scourge of the Trampires – a mutated hybrid of vampire and tramp.
CHUCK STEEL: NIGHT OF THE TRAMPIRES is out now in cinemas.
chucksteelthemovie.co.uk
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