Robert Pratten is a TRUE Independent Filmmaker. Surrounded and supported by his wife, and several friends from film school, he has created the festival circuit darling “London Voodoo” (2004), and the current “Mindflesh” (2008). I was lucky enough to catch up with Mr. Pratten this week, while he was on a brief break from the arduous grind of promoting his latest psychological horror film.

Some film directors resent being called “horror film directors”. Does that bother you at all?

Pratten: No, not really. I’ve made two psychological horror films so I guess the label is fair. Of course, there’s always a problem in labeling something because few things, and certainly not people, fit just a single tag description.

You did a lot of research for your 1st movie “London Voodoo”, tell us about “Mindflesh”, and was there a similar amount of investigation involved?

Pratten: Yes but not on the same scale. With London Voodoo my wife and I travelled around the globe but with MindFlesh the journey was primarily internal.

Pratten: MindFlesh is based on a Buddhist horror novel (White Light written by William Scheinman). To really get to the heart of Bill’s characters and the story I took up a 10 week meditation course at the Buddhist centre in Bethnal Green, east London and read up more on Buddhism. I did know a little about Buddhism and that’s what attracted me to Bill’s writing in the first place but I needed some refreshing.

Pratten: Of course, although I adapted the book alone, Bill and I have developed a good friendship over the course of the project – about 2 or 3 years – and so he was always on hand to ask a question or give me some feedback on the script.

“Mindflesh is currently featured in the horror themed festival in SF called “Another Hole in the Head”. It next plays at the Roxie theater on June 17th. Do you have to diligently submit movies to these festivals, or after the success of “London Voodoo” on a similar circuit a few years back, do the festivals come calling on you?

Pratten: I’ve had to diligently submit my movie. Of course in some cases we’ve had a little inside track if the programmer had played London Voodoo but MindFlesh is quite a different film so it’s tended not be suitable to those previous festivals. London Voodoo has a typical narrative structure with few special effects while MindFlesh takes more risks with the narrative structure and offers some quite shocking imagery and bad language.

You’ve been quoted as saying you admired the early psychological horror films of Roman Polanski. “The Tenant” is one of my favorites too. “London Voodoo” was mostly a psychological, cerebral type of horror. I haven’t seen more than the trailers from “Mindflesh”, but it appears to be based in a different playing field. Was this due to being afforded a bigger budget, or did the story just lend itself to more blood, special effects, etc?

Pratten: Well it was more through personal choice actually. I wanted to do something more avant-garde, something that really had never been seen before. In way, I saw myself trying to bookend my work with London Voodoo as traditional, old school at one end and MindFlesh as avant-garde, surreal at the other end. My future works will most probably be somewhere on a sliding scale between the two films.

You came to film-making at a much later age than most. What’s the story behind that?

Pratten: I left the corporate world in 1999 at the age of 35. It was before the first Internet bubble burst and I was a member of the board for a small in terms of number of employees but hugely successful telecoms consultancy firm. I was very happy there but I’ve always been a musician and artist and I felt like I needed to do something different with my life. My wife Helen was and continues to be amazingly supportive and with her encouragement I handed in my notice and started at the London Film School in Covent Garden, London.

Pratten: No not yet, it’s still early days. It’s quite a complicated process now because of Internet piracy. I know lots of people illegally download films as torrents and think ah what the heck, Mel Gibson or the big studios can afford it. Or maybe they don’t think at all. But it’s seriously harming independent filmmakers because smaller DVD distributors and specialist retailers are going bust and the bigger distributors are taking fewer risks.

Pratten: For me it means too that we have to be careful about the timing of our DVD deals because, for example, we might sign a deal for Australia or the UK and we know that as soon as the DVD comes out anywhere in the world someone will rip it and upload it – potentially destroying all the English language markets, including the largest, the US. There’s actually a strong possibility that we made sidestep territorial DVD deals and go straight to global pay-to-view downloads via an online retailer/film download portal. But as I said, it’s early days yet – let’s wait and see.

Did the au pair in “London Voodoo” step on a LIVE snail?

Pratten: No. I would never kill an animal for entertainment. The art dept got some empty snail shells from somewhere and then filled it with a paste that would look like mashed up snail. It smelled pretty bad!

Pratten: I’m quite serious about compassion towards animals because I think it makes us, humans, better people and more compassionate towards each other.

A ten week course at a Buddhist retreat? That’s tantamount to DeNiro gaining 58 pounds for “Raging Bull” in my book. You really do throw yourself into your projects. Do you practice Buddhism?

Pratten: I wouldn’t say that I practiced it as such but it is a philosophy that I use to guide me at times. I like the fact that Buddhism is not a blind faith in some greater God but the development of an inquiring mind. One of things I’ve benefited from is an understand that there is no absolute “truth” about anything – it completely depends on your perspective and the more perspectives you take, and the deeper your questioning, the more truths you will find. The various “truths” may seem contradictory to, let’s say, the non-Buddhist mind, but they are all false and true at the same time. It’s a bit like the electron’s wave-particle duality. And this is the mind you need when watching MindFlesh!

If you’re in the SF Bay Area, you can catch “Mindflesh”, at the Roxie on June 17th.

“London Voodoo” is available for purchase at www.amazon.com

Tags | London Voodoo, Mindflesh, Robert Pratten