When filmmakers Benjamin J. Murray and Michael Christensen set up their New York indie production outfit Incline Studios, the plan was to launch their slate with Blood Bank, a darkly satirical vampire heist film set in an alternative timeline, about an underground gang of dissidents who stage a daring raid on the city’s blood reserve.
Christensen’s script for Blood Bank imagined a world where, years before, a vampire virus infected the population. The government used the infection as an excuse to discriminate and scapegoat minority communities. The ambitious feature was deep into pre-production when the L.A. fires hit.
“Several people involved lost their homes,” Christensen recalls. “We knew we had to shut the film down.”
Incline was already heavily invested, having spent significantly in upstate New York. The plan had been to shoot Blood Bank in Syracuse to take advantage of the state’s tax incentives. Rather than write off that investment, Murray and Christensen decided to make another movie there, only a lot cheaper and a lot faster. Their solution was to make a prequel, set in the same fictional world as Blood Bank, but with a couple of twists.
“It was a monumental pivot,” says Murray. “We knew we had to make the film in one location and for a fifth of the money and a fifth of the time [of Blood Bank]. But we wanted it to feel big. So we decided to make it a period film.”
They also took a page from Netflix hit Adolescence, deciding to shoot the film as a oner, unfolding in real time in a seemingly uninterrupted single take.
The result is Red Ink, which had its world premiere at the ToruńCamerimage festival this week. Co-directed by Murray and Christensen, from a script by Christensen and Murray serving as cinematographer, the film is a low-budget, noir-inspired newsroom thriller. With vampires.
‘Red Ink’
Incline Studios
Set over a single morning in November 1949, Red Ink unfolds inside the bustling headquarters of Verity Press, a New York Times-style newspaper. Billions actor Toby Leonard Moore stars as Bob Hoover, Verity‘s editor-in-chief, a celebrated war photographer whose Pulitzer-winning image of Nazi concentration camps helped sway public opinion at the end of World War II.
Now Hoover is about to break the biggest story of his career: A mysterious virus is sweeping the globe. Reports are emerging of infected people with a lust for blood and raw flesh, and bodies turning up with puncture marks on their necks.
With the paper’s deadline approaching, Hoover must decide how Verity will frame the story and, in turn, shape the national narrative. His publisher, Walter Nash (D.B. Sweeney), is under pressure from the politically ambitious Senator Conrad (Mike Doyle), who wants to exploit public fear to justify a government crackdown.
The eight-day shoot brought together an ensemble cast including Siobhan Fallon Hogan (Men in Black), Tommie Earl Jenkins (Wednesday), Eugene Cordero (Loki) and Oona Laurence (The Beguiled).
“We had three days prep and an eight day shoot,” says Christensen. “It was really a labor of love, for everyone involved.”
The filmmakers drew inspiration from classic thrillers of the period, with the 1952 Humphrey Bogart film Deadline USA, in which Bogart plays a newspaper editor fighting to save his publication, a particular touchstone.
Oona Laurence in ‘Red Ink’
Incline Studios
For the technical execution, Murray turned to the same camera system used on Adolescence: the DJI Ronin 4D, which enables extended continuous camera movements across four axes, adding a vertical dimension to the traditional three-axis pan, tilt and roll of a gimbal. Although Red Ink plays as a single take, Murray assembled the final version from “around 13 shots of 8-10 minutes each.”
Red Ink wasn’t supposed to be Incline Studios’ first feature, but it serves as an appropriate calling card for the kind of movies the company wants to make: scrappy independent features that sit between IP-driven blockbusters and the darker, less accessible dramas that dominate the arthouse space. A post-credit sequence even sets up the world of Blood Bank, bringing the filmmakers back to the project that started it all.
Next on Incline’s slate is Engaged, an adventure comedy set in Malta that Murray compares in tone to Indiana Jones.
“We think there’s a gap in the independent space for movies of the kind we love,” says Murray, “fun, more mainstream films with original stories.”
“We want to break the mold, to bring validation back to the indie space,” adds Christensen. “I think with all the doom and gloom in the world, people are ready to feel hopeful again, at least at the movies.”
Red Ink is seeking U.S. distribution.
