By Shannon McGrew
In BLACK CAB, when Anne (Synnøve Karlsen) and Patrick (Luke Norris) hail a black cab after a night out, their driver (Nick Frost) is chatty, jovial even, but they are in no mood to talk. In fact, the couple is barely on speaking terms. That is until they realize the driver has no intention of taking them home. Locked in the cab with no means of escape, the driver transports the couple to a deserted, supposedly haunted road. But what is his purpose? Is he mad or just plain evil? Why did he select Anne and Patrick as his victims?
For the release of BLACK CAB, Creepy Kingdom's Shannon McGrew spoke with actor Nick Frost and director Bruce Goodison. During their chat, they discussed the challenges of filming in a confined space and how Nick Frost brought depth to his chilling, complex character.
Thank you both so much for speaking with me today! What about the story made each of you want to be a part of this project?
Nick Frost: It came about as a story at my production company, Stolen Picture. We produced it, got it to the screen, financed it, and rewrote and tinkered with it. I'm always thrilled and grateful that anyone would want me to be in their film. I loved the character, I really liked the story, and I liked the script. I like Bruce, and I like taxis. Getting the chance to sit in a cab for six weeks - I wasn't not going to do that [Laughs].
Bruce Goodison: The interesting thing for me was [that] there's Nick and two characters in a cab, and really bad things happen to them. It happened to all of them, to be honest. And I think that they, as in Shudder, AMC, Sony, etc, were quite keen on me applying that sense of characterfulness, if that's a word, and reality onto what is a ghost story. The fact that they wanted that from me was really fascinating. I haven't done genre in this way before, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and there's something brilliant about being able to tackle quite difficult subjects. I mean, you've got a coercively controlling husband, nearly husband, who Nick's character very quickly picks up on and was dispatched straight away. So, we're very quickly on Nick's character's side.
There's something so fascinating about Nick's character in this because he's, on the one hand, kind of [this] moral Crusader to defend women who horrible men have attacked, and also someone who then wants to do something really quite horrible to that person because he's also done something quite questionable in his own personal life, both to his wife and his child, we think.
Trying to convey a sense of reality is a real gift and a real challenge because people are complicated. Nick's character was complicated, and it wasn't straightforward. I enjoyed that about it. We ensured we protected that aspect of it, not being tied down and unclear about what happened. It makes it a bit spookier, I think.
Most of the film takes place in a very confined setting in a taxi cab. For Bruce, what was it like filming these scenes? And then, for you, Nick, how did this confined space impact your character?
Bruce Goodison: Well, on the technical side, we were quite keen on trying to make the whole film feel like it wasn't quite of 2023, 2024 - that the taxi itself was quite a retro cab, very old. The red light goes on in the old cabs when the cab is moving, and you can't open the doors. The reverse is true here. The red light goes on. It's stationary, and you can't go anywhere. But we were determined to protect performances. Performance was crucial for all three actors, so the design department and the DOP got a cab. We cut it in half. We opened it up like a book so we could light each part of it, and it helped protect the performance and not be freezing cold in the Manchester countryside. So that was the technical side.
Nick Frost: For my part, there's something about my brain in which I really like being in a car and a taxi. I made it my home and stayed in it as much as possible. I sat in it for the whole lunchtime and got used to everything. I made it my own. There were lots of little doors and secret hiding places in taxis, and every bit did something. And so, I just made it my own, sat in it constantly, and drove it as often as possible.
It's his house. You look at the taxi driver itself. We're in taxis all the time, and it's like, okay, so this is where my pens live. This is where I put my notebooks. Here's my taser. He's got a little space for everything, and I can relate to that. I love my car. I've never kidnapped anyone yet, but I've got some little hidden trunks in there. If you were to open it, you'd see an empty Snickers wrapper. That's what I hide and kidnap.
Bruce Goodison: It's completely true as well, Shannon. Nick was there, 24/7, in the seat, driving the car all around the set. It did fit him like a glove, and even the little ticks of cabdrivers on automatic. As someone gets in or gets out, they're up there on the left-hand side. They're doing the fare. These things were so automatic to Nick. You could tell that he'd just grown into that part in an almost preternatural way.
I appreciated all the fun quips the Driver had, especially when directed at Patrick since he was the absolute w-o-r-s-t. Nick, did you improvise some of those moments, or were they part of the script?
Nick Frost: Yeah-ish. So, when I had my chance to draft the script, a lot of polishing was about the minutiae of the characters. I'm interested in dialog that seems like humans have said it, not just written. I have a little bee in my bonnet sometimes where writers write, and they don't say it aloud, and they don't have a read of it, and they don't have people saying it. Often, when you hear it said for the first time, you think, Oh, well, that's gotta go because no one will ever say that, you know? So that was what my polish was. It was to make it human and small and to find little character things for everyone. So I think we probably worked on that beforehand and then just put it into the script so we could shoot.
Bruce Goodison: Luke [Norris]'s and Nick's rhythms worked well. It was the kind of rhythm I was very excited by because, as Nick says, those little character adjustments tell us an enormous amount. There were a few little quips in that particular exchange that felt a little more alive than things written ages ago, [where we went] how do we perform this? Because of the discipline I come from, I'm very happy for performers to improve on what's there within what we're trying to achieve. There were one or two moments where Nick improvised a couple of times, and it was all good. You rehearse it through, gauge if it doesn't feel right, and then go for something else. Nick is very good at improvising as well, thinking quickly and wittily. People can think quickly, but thinking quickly and wittily is quite hard. Nick's got that in spades.
Nick Frost: I always find that if you're the character, anything you say within the remit of that human being will work for you. I've often found that the hardest scripts to learn for me as an actor are scripts that have no melody in them at all. And I'm just like, wow, this is flat; there's no link to it, and it doesn't flow. So, it's nice when you get a chance to rewrite it a little so you can put a bit of melody into it.
Bruce Goodison: You might have forgotten about this, Nick, but you came up with Rabbit. Rabbit was new, and Rabbit came very late. Therefore, things like the piggy promise and the animal noises were all things that Nick had invented on the spot. We went with those because there's something a little creepy about all that.
Nick Frost: But there's also that thing when I ask her, "Do you not do a piggy promise?" And that says, like, Oh, you do piggy promise with your kids, and maybe your mum did it to you. So that tiny little improvisation gives you a lot of backstory in terms of, oh, he was a child at one point, and he loved it when his dad went, you know...
Bruce Goodison: And also, he's got a child himself that may or may not be with us. So, it has a whole range of layers. That's the thing, I think, that we were all looking for to bring it alive.
BLACK CAB is now available to stream on Shudder.
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