Robert Carlyle’s new short film, erotic thriller Three, is being developed into a full length feature which he is set to direct.
Robert Carlyle’s short film, erotic thriller Three, is set to become a full-length feature.
The 65-year-old Scottish actor stepped into the director’s chair for the first time since 2015’s The Legend of Barney Thomson to helm Three, which was written by Isaac Gryn and Patrick McPherson and stars Isaac Gryn as Matt, Victoria Hamilton as Sarah and Nicholas Rowe as Ed.
The plot of the short film follows Matt, a 24-year-old man who accepts a late-night invitation to the lavish London home of Sarah and Ed, a wealthy older couple who proposition him for a sexual encounter. However, that initial offer turns into a darker, seductive game of control and power.
The 23-minute film contains themes concerning the nature of consent, class, privilege, repressed desires and cross-generational attitudes to sex, and Carlyle has revealed that his short was intended to be a “proof of concept”. Isaac and Patrick are currently working on a script for a full-length feature focusing on the characters.
Speaking to BANG Showbiz, Carlyle said: “It was never really the plan to make it just purely as a short.
“It was done as a proof of concept piece to try and raise finance to make a feature of that.
“Hopefully it goes ahead, and we do manage to do it. It’s very difficult to try and raise finance for any kind of films, particularly on an indie scale. So hopefully, it’ll see the light of the day at some point.
“Hopefully what you had the feeling of is that’s the first act.
“It’s about desires, suppressed desires. It’s also about power, I think, between the three characters.
“I think, particularly from Sarah, she enjoys toying with Matt. And I think Ed does too, but he’s a more kind of stranger entity in this whole thing. You’ve got power, class, as well, comes into it. Is it about sex at all? This thing that happens is obviously what gets these people off. And as you say, it’s a very strange thing.”
Carlyle – who famously played Francis “Franco” Begbie in Danny Boyle’s 1996 movie Trainspotting – deliberately wanted to convey the class divide between Matt and the married couple, who are able to use their financial power to coerce him into selling his body in different ways.
He said: “The bizarre kind of thing is that at the beginning of our little film Matt seems to be up for it, as a laugh or whatever. Then as Sarah starts to list the demands that Ed wants from this, it starts to become something else. But it’s the money, he’s going to sell himself in the end.”
Carlyle’s feature film directorial debut was the comedy thriller The Legend of Barney Thomson, which was based on Douglas Lindsay’s 1999 novel The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson.
The Full Monty star also played the titular character, a barber living a mundane life in Glasgow, Scotland, who accidentally becomes embroiled in a world of murder and crime.
Carlyle says it took him over 10 years to return to directing because he found parts of the director’s job frustrating and tedious.
He said: “Well, you know, I’ve directed a few things, and the biggest thing was the film that I made, The Legend of Barney Thomson.
“I really loved being on the floor with the actors and doing it, that was great. But all the stuff that came before it, and all the stuff that came after it not so much. I think Barney Thomson was something like three-and-a-half years from start to finish, so it takes a lot of time out of your life, it takes a lot of time out of your diary. I was kind of burned by that, I suppose. And I thought, I just don’t want to go down this road again too quick.
“I’d never said that I would never direct again, I always thought that I would, but it had to be something that was containable. And Three was that.”
Robert Carlyle’s Three premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival and is available to watch now.
Robert Carlyle ready to turn short erotic thriller Three into a feature film
