The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
After a production spanning seven years with a one-man crew, Jordan Graham’s debut feature Sator is a deeply personal film about supernatural entities and the terrors of inherited trauma. We spoke to Jordan about his real-life inspiration, his approach to crafting horror, and the struggle to break into the film industry.
There’s been a lot of buzz around the inspiration behind the film. For anyone not aware, could you explain where the idea of Sator came from?
My grandmother is one of the main characters in the film, but she wasn’t supposed to be a part of this project at all. Even up until we started shooting her scene, she was going to be a quick improvisational cameo. But when we turned the camera on, she started talking about the voices in her head and her automatic writing—where she would sit down with a pen or paper and let spirits write through her. After that initial scene I went home and started researching her past: in 1968 she brought home a Ouija board and conjured up a bunch of voices, one of them being Sator, and by the end of that summer she ended up in a psychiatric hospital because of it. I didn’t know any of this before I started shooting, so her sharing that was just a random occurrence, but I knew I had something special, I knew I had something unique, so I was just like, how do I get this into the story I already have.
You made this film pretty much single-handedly, taking on everything from cinematography to sound mixing, even building the cabin in the woods yourself. Was that a budgetary decision?
I had three major reasons why. One was the budget—I don’t like using people unless I have something to offer them—but that wasn’t the main reason. The second was that it’s been a struggle to get noticed in this industry, I’ve been trying for 21 years, and so I wanted to do something that was really unique to get people to notice. But the biggest factor was that when my crowdfunding failed, I had local filmmakers in my area tell me how you can’t make a film unless you have this and that, and I didn’t have the means of getting that. They were basically telling me I wasn’t good enough to do it; and this wasn’t just one group of people, I met with multiple people and they all told me this same thing. So after that I thought that if I ever got a chance to make this film, I was gonna do as much by myself as I could to show them, but also other filmmakers, that you can make a film of quality without all the bells and whistles.
Sator has a unique visual style, cutting between different aspect ratios, between colour and black and white. What was the inspiration behind that?
So, I was always going to do a flashback in the film, and I was thinking about using a Super 8 camera, but I’d never shot on film before and it would’ve been too expensive. But I was going through a bunch of old home videos my mom had transferred to DVD, and ended up coming to a video of a birthday party in my grandmother’s house. It looked exactly the same as it did on the shoot, and what was great was my grandmother and my grandfather were positioned in such a way that I could create my own scene around that footage. So, I went out and bought the same camera, the same Hi-8 tapes, I made the same birthday cake and the same presents. I took my actors and put them in the middle, then made a scene working around the footage I already had. After that I was really liking the quality of the Hi-8 tape, the creepy quality it had, so I kept shooting with it just hoping that I could put more of it in the film.
Was keeping that tone a priority for you?
Yeah. There’s not really many pop-outs in this film, but I was trying to create an atmosphere and a tension. I always have an issue with music in horror films—when it’s time for something to be scary, as soon as the music comes on, I lose the tension. That was one of the initial things with this film, I wanted to have as little music as possible so there’s fewer cues telling you when something’s going to pop out at you, so there’s this tension throughout the whole film.
Of all the elements that have gone into this film, which are you most proud of?
There’s a couple of things. On the technical side, definitely the audio, because that was the one part that I was least comfortable in, and I went into the project knowing I wasn’t going to be comfortable with that. The whole film, everything you hear except my grandmother speaking, that was all done in post. It took me a year and four months, so that was definitely my biggest accomplishment on the tech front.
On the personal side, just being able to immortalise my grandmother like that, being able to bond with her during the experience. Like, our relationship before the project was fine, but it was nothing like it was while we were making this film—even when we weren’t around she’d be ringing me up all the time to ask when we were gonna come back and hang out. That was invaluable to me. She was never able to see the film unfortunately, but it’s a great memory that I have.
Sator will be available on digital download from 15 February and on DVD from 22 February.
Interview conducted by James Harvey
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