Josh Hicks on conspiracy theories, making animation and the BAFTA Cymru Awards

Chuck Chuck Baby has been nominated for three BAFTA Cymru awards, comprising Best Feature/Television Film, Best Production Design for Caroline Steiner, and the Breakthrough Cymru award for writer-director Janis Pugh, while Being Seen and Spectre of the Bear have been nominated for Best Short Film.

Directed by Josh Hicks, written by Ioan Morris and produced by Nia Alavezos, Spectre of the Bear is an animated film about one man’s unhealthy obsession with the nostalgia-fuelled return of Nom-Noms. 

To celebrate the BAFTA Cymru award nominations, we caught up with Spectre of the Bear director Josh Hicks to chat about getting the short animation made, casting Bill Nighy and Craig Roberts, and the mystery behind nostalgic crisps. 

Congratulations on your BAFTA Cymru nomination! Can you tell us what inspired the idea for Spectre of the Bear?
“Thanks! Everyone on the team is very happy about the nomination. The initial idea for Spectre of the Bear is all the work of Ioan Morris, who wrote, scored and designed the film. We’d been working together in comics for years, travelling across the UK for small press comic shows, and we both thought it’d be fun to collaborate on something in animation. I love Ioan’s comics work and was really into the idea of trying to adapt and translate his style to the screen, while hopefully adding in some of my own sensibility along the way.”

The title is intriguing, what does the Bear represent in the context of the film?
“After deciding to do something together, Ioan brought up this old idea that had to do with a sort of snack-based Mandela effect, and it felt like a good place to start. He does claim that some of the film is autobiographical, which is slightly worrying. 

When we started working on the story it was the strange, seventies conspiracy thriller element that got me most excited, and I wanted the title to reflect that sense of neo-noir foreboding. The two of us kicked a few options back and forth and Spectre of the Bear just felt right. The Bear can kind of speak to everything in the film: obsession, a need for purpose, corporate heft and, most importantly, the shape of these stupid potato snacks that begin to ruin this guy’s life.”

What are the main themes you explore and what messages do you hope to convey to the audience?
“We started working on the film during the height of lockdown, when the prevalence of conspiracy-minded thinking was becoming very apparent, and that worked its way into the script more and more as it developed. We wanted to poke fun at that stuff without building in a super didactic message. We felt it was sort of funnier – and creepier – if things were left a bit open at the end. Obsession just generally seems to be a big running theme in our individual work, and that rears its head in all sorts of ways in the film, too.”
 
The visual style is very distinctive, how did you develop the look of the film?
“Most of the early work for me was trying to figure out that visual style – I knew I wanted to try to faithfully adapt Ioan’s approach to comics to the screen, but he primarily works in black and white, so I had some choices to make. It was important to both of us that he did all the design work, so the film felt unified in that way. I then drew the storyboards and went off with our producer Nia Alavezos and our animators Tom Lucas and Dani Abram to figure out how it would all work with movement and colour and texture. Ioan drew the layouts for each shot based on my boards, and then Tom and Dani took it from there. They did an amazing job.

I had some touchstones and points of inspiration – I’ve always loved the limited-animation anime approach – but there was a lot of early trial and error to put together something that felt like a true, big-screen evolution of Ioan’s comics practice.”

Were there any specific cinematic influences that guided the direction of the film?
“Gordon Willis was the cinematographer on a lot of the seventies movies that we were discussing while developing the film – he’s a master – and so we looked to his work for inspiration in terms of composition and layout. I had my own animated influences, especially in terms of comics people working in animation or animated adaptations of indie comics stuff – Kenji Iwasaiwa (On-Gaku: Our Sound) and Dash Shaw (My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea; Cryptozoo) sort of loomed large in my mind throughout the whole process.”

How did your relationship with Ffilm Cymru Wales begin?
“The relationship with Ffilm Cymru began when we pitched the film, basically. We sent in the outline and proposal via an application for the Beacons scheme. They then let us know that we’d gotten to the next stage, and worked with us to develop the initial drafts of the script before giving us the green light to start making it in earnest.”

There are some very recognizable voices in the film, how did Bill Nighy and Craig Roberts get involved?
“We owe the amazing cast to our casting director, Michael Llewellyn Williams, who’s been friends with Ioan since they were kids. He’d worked with Craig and Bill in the past, who luckily loved the script and kindly agreed to get involved, and then worked with us to cast the rest of the film – everyone pretty much blew me away. Huw Stephens even came in to narrate the advert that kicks the whole film off. Craig and I are both the same age and grew up about 5 minutes away from each other in Maesycwmmer, which is a tiny little village in the valleys, but weirdly we’d never met until the voice session for the film. One of my proudest achievements is getting Bill Nighy to say the word ‘Maesycwmmer’ on screen.”
 
What role did Ffilm Cymru Wales play in bringing the film to life?
“We mainly worked with Jude Lister, who’s an executive producer on the film, and the relationship has been great. Ffilm Cymru Wales has been super supportive throughout the entire process – they even paid for a lawyer to glance over the script to make sure we wouldn’t get sued. Jude set me up with our producer, Nia, and we’ve continued that relationship and worked on a few different animated projects together since.”

How did Ffilm Cymru Wales’ involvement shape the direction of the film?
“Jude at Ffilm Cymru Wales and Chris Walsh-Heron at BBC Cymru Wales would regularly feedback on script drafts, animatic cuts and rough edits and gave a lot of thoughtful notes that benefitted the film. At the script stage we worked quite closely with them in moulding the ending, and just having that extra insight and perspective really helped the film become what it is.”

What advice would you give to other emerging Welsh filmmakers?
“In terms of filmmaking, I solely work in animation, so mileage may vary for live-action filmmakers, but I think being as technically grounded as you can is a massive thing, especially if you’re working ambitiously on a modest budget, as you tend to be as a short-form filmmaker in Wales.

I try to always draw – or at least edit – the animatics for things that I do, and also do the compositing on the back end, which means there are a load of things that I can jump in and fix myself without us having to kick stuff back to animators or artists. I also run CPE Productions – the company that produced the film – and so Nia and I always had a firm sense of deadlines and budget and knew the areas where we could free up resources to pay for things that I couldn’t really do myself… Having that sort of grounding just helps smooth things over, especially if funds or time are tight.

In a general sense, finding good collaborators that you can trust is the most important thing, I think – from fellow artists to places like Ffilm Cymru Wales that can give you the support that you need to bring ideas to fruition. It’s all about the team.”