The Spooky Phenom: a talk with teen filmmaker Nathan Ambrosioni about his feature Therapy

You might not have heard of French filmmaker Nathan Ambrosioni yet, but don’t worry. You’ll have plenty of time to catch up with him over the coming years.

A lover of genre cinema, Ambrosioni’s second feature effort, Therapy, has just premiered in Canada exclusively on the horror streaming service Shudder, owned by AMC. A unique melding of found footage horror and a police procedural, Therapy tells the story of an unlucky group of campers who stumble upon a decrepit and abandoned mental hospital (including Ambrosioni as the resident cameraman of the bunch), in what seems like a set up for a pretty classically mounted chiller. The plight of these young men and women who went out for a relaxing holiday and mysteriously disappeared is told via the footage they left behind, which has been recovered by a pair of police detectives working frantically against the clock to repair the damaged footage in hopes of tracking down any of them who might be alive.

Bouncing between found footage and a slickly produced thriller would be a challenge for any filmmaker, but for Ambrosioni it’s even more ambitious. Although it’s his second feature, Ambrosioni has a handful of shorts under his belt. But the twist ending to this filmmaker’s spooky filmography is the real kicker: he’s only sixteen years old. Despite a handful of credits under his belt and acclaimed efforts on the festival circuit, Ambrosioni is still only in high school.

We caught up with the humble rising young talent over the phone – literally at the end of his school day and giving one of his first English language interviews – to talk about what scares him and the challenges of his latest feature.

What kind of horror films made you want to make these types of movies and which ones scare you the most?

Nathan Ambrosioni: For me, films like The Conjuring or The Blair Witch Project or The Witch are most scary for me; films where you can’t actually see what’s so scary, but you know that something scary is happening. When you can’t explain something, for me, that’s always scary. I’m not really scared of horror films, but I love them. I love them, but I’m always more interested by them than scared by most of them.

How long did it take you to come up with the story for Therapy?

Nathan Ambrosioni: It took me one month to write the script. I wrote it a lot in the forest while I was planning it to help me with the atmosphere for the film. After, I worked on the script with my dad for another two months. Then I worked with the actors on the dialogue for a bit. I wanted the actors to really feel like a group that would go into the forest together, so I wanted them to have some input into what they were going to say and do, especially early in the film when we just see them camping. I really just filmed their words there. They weren’t so much acting there as they were playing, but they kept it within the story.

Where did you find this abandoned building that you use for the primary location in Therapy?

Nathan Ambrosoni: It’s actually near my hometown here in the south of France. We always passed by it on the highway, and it was just this large, old building in the middle of the forest, and my family and I would pass by it every day. When I thought of a location for Therapy, I finally decided to go there to look around and saw that it had a lot of character. When I decided that I wanted to make Therapy there, I called the owner of the property to ask if he would like to let us shoot there. And at first, he really didn’t want us to, and I could understand why because it was a huge point of curiosity, but eventually he allowed us a short amount of time when we could.

Nathan Ambrosioni (centre) meets with cast and crew while working on Therapy

One of the things that you do with the found footage component of Therapy is that you show how dark it was in the woods around this building by only lighting part of the frame where the people can see with a headlamp. It really makes it known how little light there is out there, but what’s it like trying to shoot a film in a location that dark without using additional lighting?

Nathan Ambrosioni: Oh my, it’s hard. (laughs) And thank you for saying that. It was very, very dark. We couldn’t see anything without those camera lights. The building had no power, and it was so late at night that we were able to shoot that we couldn’t see anything. The cameras were our only lights for the shoot, so we had to make sure they always worked or not only could we not film, but we couldn’t see where we were going. There was also too little moonlight there to really see anything after dark. It was even tougher when I went to cut the film. I always wanted an atmosphere that was dark, but as I was in the edit of the film, the frame looked exactly as it did on the set. And when I was on the set, I would often play with the image to make the light lighter and the dark darker, and that effect made the editing more of a challenge. (laughs) There were some time in the editing of the film where it was so dark that I couldn’t make out the image of what I had been filming, so like the detectives in the film I had to figure out my own footage at times.

What helped with figuring all that out was getting a sense of the place before we shot. We went there for a week of preparation with the actors when it was sunny out, and stayed until nightfall so we could find our way around in the dark in a place where we knew everything was. The actors were scared once it got dark, so that was very natural. It was a place where we could only get so comfortable because it really was a scary place. The reactions were very normal, and the actors knew the dialogue, and I knew where that dialogue was delivered in what place. They really kept to the script and sense of place, which made things very easy.

Which was more of a challenge for you: shooting the found footage section in near total darkness or trying to film the police procedural section of the film, which has to look like a polished, cinematic film?

Nathan Ambrosioni: The biggest challenge? That’s a tricky question. I mean, the easiest answer is neither, and to say that the climax of the film in that house where we shot was the hardest thing to shoot because there’s so much that needed to happen. And in the building that we shot in, it was always dark and dangerous because we were filming in a place with no light and no windows. That was scary, dark, and hot. But with the police investigation, we only had two days to shoot all of those scenes, so in terms of making sure everything was perfect, that was the hardest thing to do. We only had two days in the police station location, which means we had the really difficult task of shooting thirty minutes of a ninety minute film in only two days. We started shooting at 8am and finished at midnight, and all we did was shoot. We made sure we had everything ready that we could and we just shot, and that was the most intense part of the shoot. I don’t know what was the most difficult because it was always difficult in some ways, but the parts of the film that were the least scary to film were the most intense to make. We were scared making the parts of the film that were in the asylum because that was part of the feeling of the film, but as a filmmaker I was most scared with the police stuff because of how intense the shooting schedule was. On the whole, we were always naturally scared. (laughs)