Centers on the freak death of a partygoer on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean and the conflict that arises among the surviving passengers.

BD: DONKEY PUNCH sounds like a really dark thriller that deconstructs each character involved in a serious situation, what can you tell me about the film?

OB: Donkey Punch is a very extreme, real-world thriller – it’s about characters and events that are based in reality and it pushes them into very dark and extreme situations where they have to do things that they would never have imagined. The film shows all this quite realistically and doesn’t pull its punches.

The story is about a three girls in their 20s who go away for a weekend in Spain to have a good time and relax and get away from things. They meet some young guys in a bar who turn out to be the crew of a luxury motor yacht moored in the marina. It’s the end of the season, the owner and the skipper have already left, they have the boat to themselves for a few days so they invite the girls back. Everyone parties, has a good time, someone has the bright idea to take the boat out – watch the sun set on the sea, which they do. They take some pills, do some drugs, things get very hedonistic and intense and some – not all – of them get down to it in the bedroom. While they’re having sex something really bad happens, a fatal accident, which kills one of the girls. At that point, everyone is in shock and some very quick decisions have to made – the boys decide the best thing to do to bury the body at sea and pretend that Lisa - the dead girl - fell overboard. Everyone suddenly realises that they’re alone at sea, middle of the night, with a bunch of complete strangers. Paranoia sets in, people have their own agendas and everything spins out of control.

The film is definitely a thriller but it has strong horror elements to it – explicit/realistic gore, some shocks and the set up is a classic horror set-up (six beautful young people trapped in an isolated location). The difference is there’s no psychopath or monster here – all the terrible things in the film are committed by very realistically acted characters who the audience can relate to. Within the space of a few hours these characters are resorting to things that they never would have imagined they be doing in their worse nightmares – and that’s kind of the point of the film.

The film was produced by a new company called WarpX who were set up to make low budget genre/genre-bending films shot on digital technology. So this was a low budget indie production – we had 24 days to shoot, under a million pounds– and we were shooting on a boat, at night, with lots of effects and stunts and very demanding scenes that required some seriously intense acting. We were pushing the limits on everything - it was a huge challenge.

BD: Where did the idea come from?

OB: The idea came from real life. My co-writer, David Bloom, spent a New Year holiday in the south of France, and he noticed how all the luxury yachts there were not being used – it was the off season – but were tended by very young crew members who were mainly British or Australian. He thought that was an interesting premise – and together we got to work on it. We did a lot of research into the yachting culture and crews and it became clear that this was a totally realistic scenario – young crews are often left alone to look after fancy boats and, if they were risk-takers, would be able to take one out.

We put together a story that came out of this premise, and because it was about a group of young characters stuck in an isolated environment in the middle of nowhere – it had to be a genre film, no questions asked. We just followed that logic. We also started to come up with the characters. Some of them – especially the guys – were quite similar, from similar types of backgrounds to people we knew or friends of people we knew and we used that. There were also a bunch of stories in the press at the time about parties going out of control and things happening, in places where there’s a lot of luxury, young people, football stars with a lot of money, and that kind of fed into the set up too.

So really the genesis of the idea – which carried through all of the script writing process and also a lot of the preparation with the actors – was real-life events and people and stories.

BD: Have you seen MEAN CREEK? What differentiates your film from this one?

OB: I have seen Mean Creek but it doesn’t have much to do with this film – very different characters and themes.

BD: What films have inspired you as a filmmaker? Did anything reflect in DONKEY PUNCH?

OB: Donkey Punch is a genre film, but it’s not straight down the line – it does some things differently. But it definitely delivers – on shocks and gore and suspense.

The big inspirations for me were the classic uncompromising genre riffs - things like Straw Dogs and the Polanski horror/thrillers. Stuff that is really intense and uncompromising, messes with audience expectation and still delivers in spades. I love a film like Audition, which had the balls to do absolutely nothing for the first hour before going completely and totally insane – films like that.

I also looked at bunch of films technically – classic boat thrillers like Dead Calm, Adrift and Knife in the Water and lots of Larry Clarke films because I really admire the performances he gets out of young actors and the way he handles sex scenes - very naturalistic and not cheesy. Y Tu Mama Tambien for the same reason. I looked at Wolf Creek because it was about the same budget level as us, mainly takes place at night, is shot on hi def, and has good gore and suspense. Pans Labyrinth was also very useful in terms of gore – it’s so well handled in that film. I remember feeling the andrenalin rush in the most gruesome scenes and then I was in such a heightened state by then, the emotional character stuff that followed was even more intense. I wanted to try and do a similar thing in Donkey Punch.

BD: Where does the title come from?

OB: Well… the title is particularly weird and unpleasant sex act. If you don’t know what it is – Google it. How did I hear of it? Several months before we came up with the story, my co-writer was at a stag party, everyone started trading different weird sex stories, as drunk blokes like to do, and someone described a Donkey Punch. Dave was kind of appalled and described it to me the next day. Then when we were coming up with the story for the film and we knew something terrible had to happen once these characters got together on the boat – a Donkey Punch just seemed the obvious choice. That’s what I mean about the biggest inspiration for the film being things around us – a lot of things that were on our antennae at the time just filtered naturally into the story.

Can I just point out that if this film has a lesson… it is that doing a Donkey Punch is a very bad idea.

BD: Will horror fans get any gore or is it mostly a thriller?

OB: Yes, and yes.

BD: Is this your first Sundance? Are you nervous, excited?

OB: This is my first Sundance & I’m really excited! We’re a low budget, independent thriller, with some very edgy content, and a fantastic ensemble of young actors giving great performances, and we’re also trying a fresh take on the genre – so I was desperate to get into Sundance because it’s the perfect place to premier our film. Of course that in itself brought a lot of pressure – so when I finally heard we’d got in, I freaked out!

The film is literally hot off the presses (I only saw the finished version three weeks ago) so Sundance will be the first time a public audience has ever seen it. This is a British film but I reckon an American audience will really relate to it. The characters and the situations are things everyone in their twenties can connect with, the genre is universal and it’ll be very interesting for American audiences to see this aspect of Britain. I think it will be something new for them, because it’s not what they’re used to – it’s not country houses and comedy posh blokes and it’s not council estates in the rain. This film shows smart, glamorous, confident young people, who are very aware. They’re enjoying themselves in a sun-bleached location – like millions of young Brits do every year - and they’re emotionally and physically very confident… at least, at the start of the story. So the film is totally British – but it challenges the stereotypes a lot of people have about Britain.

BD: What is your favorite film genre?

OB: I love pretty much all genres – horror and scifi, action movies, thrillers, crime movies, heist movies, monster movies, swordplay, blaxploitation… all the way down to the sub-genres like underwater Nazi zombie films and Buddhist martial arts. I just think genre is one of the most amazing materials a filmmaker has, it’s like a miracle glue - it can be used for so many things, and the filmmakers who really love it and use it are often way ahead of the game – look at Romero or Cronenberg or Verhoeven’s work. They pretty much predicted the world we’re living in.

BD: What’s next? What genre do you want to work in?

OB: I’m working on a few different things – including a very hard, paranoid survival film set in the early 70s. Me and David Bloom are working on new things, in different genres.

A genre I’d love to work in is Sci-fi – I’d love to come up with a really cool conceptual sci-fi idea.