Cambridge film director Matthew Hill seeks backing for latest project
Young up-and-coming filmmaker Matthew Hill is looking for a producer for his latest project, an independent feature film titled Feral.
Shot in familiar locations in Cambridge, it is a ‘psychological thriller’ in which “an aspiring musician’s career is made complicated when an old unhinged classmate begins obsessively targeting his personal life”.
“The impetus of the idea [for Feral] came to me about six years ago,” explains writer and director Matthew, 25, whose recent short film, Blunt Instrument (his fourth), was officially selected at the London Lift-Off Film Festival in 2022 and also won Best Thriller Short at the London Independent Film Festival.
“I was coming up with ideas for a short film and I had two ideas in mind. One was about an aspiring musician who couldn’t get his career going and was struggling, and the other was about this person who follows an old school mate and he wants revenge because he used to bully him at school.
“I had these two ideas in my head and then one day I thought ‘Why don’t I combine these two ideas?’ Why not the person aspiring to be a singer/guitar player encounters this guy who’s a bit of a socially awkward character and there’s a whole history between them, in their past at school, and he wants revenge?
“That’s the impetus of the story, and then I started thinking ‘How can we shake this out, because this is a story that is quite familiar to a lot of people, if you look at the psychological thriller genre?’
“Then I came across the form of psychotherapy called art therapy, which I thought had never been depicted in a fictional feature film before.
“I thought ‘That could be an interesting subject to delve into as a coping mechanism for one of the characters’, so that’s how I came up with the idea for the film.”
The powerful trailer for the movie was filmed in the summer of 2022, in parts of Cambridge including Senate House Passage, Jesus Green and inside Anglia Ruskin University.
The script is written and the actors and crew are all on board. Matthew, an alumnus of Long Road Sixth Form College, now needs a producer and financial backing to help get the project off the ground.
“The actors have been holding on for quite a while now,” notes Matthew, who studied media at Bournemouth University after finishing at Long Road.
He also attended the BFI National Academy at the National Film and Television School (NFTS), working as a sound recordist.
“I’ve got crew ready; it’s all about the hard part in filmmaking, which is convincing people that it can get the green light.”
The cast includes Marcus McSorley as Holden (the guitarist in the pictures), Kaitlin Reynell as Lucy (Kaitlin also appeared in the 2021 horror comedy film When the Screaming Starts) and Lee Peck as Jacob (pictured in the glasses and red jacket).
Behind the camera, Matthew has been ably supported on Feral by Jeremy Dawson (director of photography), Dale Suttle (sound operator) and Laura Elmer (assistant director).
Unsurprisingly, film has long been Matthew’s passion. “I’ve wanted to make films since I was seven years old,” he says.
“My early films were animation; I was really into stop-motion when I was younger, so I did a lot of Lego films and little animations, and a lot of my influences at that age were mainly animation.”
As he got older, Matthew moved more into live-action feature films and now cites Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Thomas Anderson and Stanley Kubrick – “because he pushed the envelope for the cinema” – as his main influences.
If you are a producer interested in working on Matthew’s film, find out how to contact him at matthewhillfilmmaker.com.
