How Darren Statman Made His Short Film Land Mine

It’s 6AM, May 2016.

Heavy rain pours down. I’m up and restless. I’ve just finished watching Ridley Scott’s first feature film, ‘The Duellists’. I can’t get past page 5 of a feature film script called ‘Sugarfoot’ I’m writing.

Earlier on in the week, The Evening Standard newspaper had a front-page article about the rise of antisemitism in the capital.

The article has me thinking about a recent comment I had experienced. The comment was consciously antisemitic, a passive-aggressive comment slipped into an innocuous conversation. A comment dripping in subtext that cut deep. A comment that if opposed can be shrugged off and justified as ‘I’m only joking’ and ‘don’t be sensitive’.

The comment had stayed with me. I had tried to shake it off. The company I was with knew I was Jewish, but non-practising. The relish it was! The comment was a purposeful attempt to antagonise me. I’ve learnt to pick my battles, (mostly).

The comment echoed all week in my mind. I was angry at myself for not tackling the issue. Things don’t change as secular as I’d grown up, the person in question weaponised my ethnic roots and it was the early stages of mind games to dismantle a failing work relationship. I left the company soon after. 

I thought about stories I had heard growing up about the Holocaust and the aftermath of its survivors experienced returning to their homes in Europe. This fascinated me, because as far as I knew it had never been tackled before on film. Most people presumed the liberation of the camps was all ‘wine and roses’. It wasn’t.

Many survivors returned to their homes to find them stripped, their non-Jewish neighbours having looked for ‘hidden gold’ embracing the ‘spoils of war’ fuelled by the conspiracy theories about Jews that persist still today.

With their homes ransacked and taken adding to their uncomprehensive, raging PTSD, survivors now had to deal with their fellow countrymen, many compliant with their Nazi overlords inconvenienced by their return. We will never know how many were murdered. The subject has become politically verboten within Poland today.

A title – LAND MINE – exploded in my thoughts. An idea for the end shot to a film haunted me all that week. The seed for a what was to become LAND MINE tugged at my consciousness.

The rain continues to come down heavy….

It’s Saturday lunch time. I’m staring at my laptop trying to get past page 5 of the script I’m trying to write. Frustration and the intrigue of LAND MINE are wrestling for my attention. I now have an idea for the opening scene. I start to write, and by 5pm I have the first few pages down on what is to become my short film.

I had written and directed short films in the past and I had directed commercials and brand films past the 30 second mark. The discipline of short films excited me yet frustrated me.

Short films are a great medium, but many I had seen were either visual tone poems, elongated comedy sketches or truncated attempts to make a feature film under 20 minutes.

Who was I to make comment? I had been hiding in the world of advertising for too long.

I wrote quickly over the next 10 days.

I have a great passion for dirty, old spaghetti westerns. Not the ‘slick’ ones directed by the maestro, Sergio Leone; the ones I loved were mostly forgotten nihilistic, dirty fables set on the fringes of a lawless society. Their 35mm prints, in such bad states of repair, with Sellotape repair still visible on their edit splices. My script, by the time I reached page 20, was a Post-Holocaust Spaghetti Western with minimalist dialogue spoken only by the films antagonist, and for him to speak in native Polish. This approach gave credibility and respect to the story of a young man, the only survivor of his family to leave the Bergin-Belsen death camp and return to the family farm, only to encounter a farmhand who taken the property for himself after the family were taken by Nazi soldiers.

With only one character out of the 4 actors needed to speak fluent Polish, I could shoot in the UK, and cast here. That I thought worked from a budgetary standpoint if the film was ever to be made. 

The film did get made. The producer, Andrew Cole Bulgin, who I had stayed in contact with over the years got in touch while the pandemic was raging and we were in lockdown. He was setting up a new IP development company to be eventually called The Tickled Pink Group and thought the script was worth making.

I shot the film over 4 days in summer 2022 on a farm just outside Watford, the script stripped back to its bare essentials so I could incorporate the ambitious nighttime sequences of a burning building and a truck chase, blocked and shot all within 4 hours.

I was lucky to work with Tom Debenham as my cinematographer. Together we decided to approach the visual language of the film partly influenced by my illustrated storyboards.

The approach was to keep the camera locked off and let the action happen within its frame. The approach allowed the camera to take the role of a witness to the events unfolding instead of an overt participant. This stripped back simplicity to the cinematography stopped my ego as the director getting in the way of way of the emotion that had to be paramount. This is an approach I’m exploring, as some films in my mind use an overtly ‘star fucking’ technique and end up dating themselves very quickly as a result. I believe classicism is true cinema and never dates.

As I write this blog, I’m just about to screen the short within the next week at The Garden Cinema in London. The story, though, is not over. I’m returning to LAND MINE to develop it as a feature film, allowing me to deepen and expand upon the themes I could only explore within the constraints of a short film.