SXSW Interview: “The Peril at Pincer Point” Directors Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine

Directors Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine just premiered their latest collaboration, the feature film The Peril at Pincer Point, at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival (where I reviewed it). The story centers around a movie sound recordist, Jim Baitte (Jack Redmayne) who travels to a mysterious island (Pincer Point) to gather audio for a demanding director, on whose latest project he is working. Little does Jim know that fate will conspire to make the journey much more than it originally seems. Shooting in black-and-white and the 4:3 Academy ratio, Kuhn and Stratton-Twine (both of whom play small roles in the production) craft an original tale filled with narrative surprises. I spoke with the two of them at the festival, and here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: I understand from the press notes that this film is your love letter to British cinema, blending The Bunny and the Bull with The Wicker Man. Now, I’m very familiar with the latter. I’m not at all with the former. Please tell me about it.  

Jake Kuhn: So, The Bunny and the Bull is Paul King’s debut feature. He is the person who did the Paddington movies recently and then went on to do Wonka. And he started out doing this TV show in England called The Mighty Boosh, which is a really popular show that’s sort of got wacky, irreverent humor, similar to our film, I think. And what The Bunny and the Bull and that show have in common is this beautiful handmade quality to them. They have this feeling where you really get the sense that the whole thing was made with glue and thumbtacks and things like that. And you can kind of feel it being put together.

But also, because of that, it takes on a very playful quality, like something that just feels a little bit more like the audience is kind of in on the creation of the thing with the filmmakers. And I think both of us are really in love with that feeling of just something that kind of hopefully has the same ability to inspire you creatively or kind of bring you back to when you’re a kid and you get like a cardboard box and you just sit inside and you’re like, “Great, I’m in space.” And so that film was a huge touchstone because of what they managed to do with not a lot of money and it’s very beautifully rendered.

CLR: And then being on an island with this weird mythology, that makes sense for The Wicker Man… the 1970s Wicker Man, that is.  

JK: No, no, no, no, no.

Noah Stratton-Twine: What are you talking about? (laughs)

JK: Yeah, what do you mean? (laughs)

CLR: (laughs) You also write in the press notes that you wanted to test the limits of improvised mumblecore. Your film doesn’t feel improvised at all to me, but rather very carefully designed. So please explain what you mean by that.

NS-T: So, I find with a lot of mumblecore movies, or improv movies in general, that it sounds on paper like a good thing, but actors have too much agency over the structure of the movie. You’re starting to shoot these people and they kind of approach the end of the scene and they say like, you know, “Well, let’s go to the pub, then.” As a director, like, “Shit, all right, now we’ve got to go shoot at the pub.” You know what I mean? And lets them have this way over it. For us, we sort of had this, I think we recently learned it was called a “step treatment,” where essentially everything that’s described … (turning to Jake) do you want to talk about the step treatment?

JK: So, the step treatment is like every scene in the movie, except all it says is the subtext of the scene. So it’d be like “in this scene, Jim, the main character wants to get an interview with this old man” and that will be it. And because of that, the sort of way that I’ve been describing it, maybe it sounds a little bit pretentious, but it’s the idea that instead of giving the actor the text and asking them to provide the subtext, we’ve given them the subtext and asked them to create the text.

And separately, what we were trying to do—which maybe is slightly different to some improvised films that we’ve heard about the making of, where every take is very, very different—was we ran the first take, it would go maybe nine minutes and then we go, “We like that bit, we like that, but we like that bit. Can you do it again?” And then we would try and hit those beats again and they do that. And then after like seven or eight or nine takes, suddenly we find ourselves with like a two-minute scene that’s actually quite well-structured and quite well-written. So it’s almost like we’re writing the scene on the spot with the actors.

And I quite like something that I think Matt Johnson [of BlackBerry] said recently in an interview where he said sometimes writing his last movie was like everybody in the crew trying to remember a dream they had last night. And I kind of felt like that was what it was like for us. So it was sort of like the actors would do something and we’d all go, “Yeah, yeah, that is right. That is what happened.”

NS-T: Why wouldn’t it be? Yeah.

JK: Instead of being like, “Oh, I’m not sure about … “

NS-T: Yeah. It’s giving the actors a box and within that box, they’re able to do whatever they want to do, but they just can’t escape it, you know what I mean? But it still gives them the freedom to really make the characters their own.

CLR: If you know Tom DiCillo’s 1995 film Living in Oblivion …

JK: Yes.

NS-T: Of course.

CLR: … one of my favorite moments in that film is when one of the actors, the one who’s supposedly based on Brad Pitt, decides he wants to improvise a scene and of course it’s a disaster because you do need some structure.

NS-T: It’s tough. I’ve been on sets before, when it’s scripted and you give the actor the chance, you can just throw an improv line in there, it makes everyone in the room aware of what that line is and it stops becoming improv. It just becomes this stark moment of like, “Does that work?” And it gives pressure for the other actors and it’s a whole thing.

CLR: Why do this in black and white and in the Academy ratio of 4:3?

NS-T: There are many reasons we can justify the 4:3. For me personally, I think it’s the superior aspect ratio. I think it gives the most scope. I feel it frames faces beautifully. I just like the boxed-out image; it just makes sense to me. And of course, in our movie, we’re obviously in servitude of these Golden Age movies of the ‘40s and melodramas of the ‘50s and the Roger Corman movies of the ‘50s going forward. We kind of understood from the get-go that we’re trying to create a large amount of scope for this movie.

And black and white certainly also helps with blending a lot of the additional VFX seasoning that we’re doing. There’s a very handmade quality to the movie. Our post team is three people and I’m pretty much heading up the VFX and the post-production and the rest of the sound. So every shot’s been touched in some way and when you’re putting in the halation and the grain and this kind of analog simulation, it really does just like glue all these other elements that would have been more noticeable as separate parts if it had been in like very sharp Scandinavian-style color.

JK: I think the other thing is that we realized that to get the most bang for our buck with this movie, the best thing to do would be to just lean very hard in one direction. And so like the black and white and 4:3 just give it a style that we can lean into. It helps a lot with the practical side of things. I think especially with low-budget film, making so many people try to mimic something like the bigger Hollywood films and it’s like you just cannot do certain camera moves with a tiny, tiny team. It’s going to come out looking amateur, but we knew that if we just picked …

I was thinking the other day about this movie called A Snake of June, which is by … I blank on the director’s name [it’s Shin’ya Tsukamoto], but it’s a great movie. It’s just all blue. The entire movie’s blue and it’s so unique and you think it takes such guts as a director to be like, “You know what? Whole thing’s blue!” But it’s really beautiful when you watch it and you’re like, “I’ve never seen something like this.” Or like I actually was thinking about Kieślowski, how A Short Film About Killing is like entirely green, and maybe this is the way to go, just pick a color and stick to it. (laughs)

CLR: Did you always want to make a film with a sound recordist as your protagonist?

JK: I think we kind of stumbled across it, actually, when we were putting the film together and coming up with it. I mean, it might be worth just doing a little bit of backtracking in terms of how we came to write it, which is basically that Noah and I had been writing for ages, feature-film scripts in like a little writer’s retreat on the coast of England and for ages, we’d go there and be like, “It would be so amazing to make a movie here. It would just be so fun. It looks amazing. Everywhere you point, the camera’s got a great natural production design.” And also we could just film there for like free because it’s not in London where you go to a pub and they could go, “That’ll be 10,000 pounds here.” They’re literally like, “Do you guys want coffee?” and whatever else you need to hold up traffic. That was so great.

And so we came down to this village and were basically like, “Right, what are the USPs [unique selling points] of this village?” They’re famous for crabbing and they’re famous for a pint of beer called Ghost Ship and we’re like, “We’re going to make the film about crabs and we’re going to make it about ghost ships.” (laughs) And it kind of happened like that. And as we sat down and just started putting it together, this idea of the sound recordist just sort of … we stumbled upon it instinctually. And I think so much of what this project has been is stumbling across things instinctually or just trying to find things that were already there in front of us and then just hit them as hard as we possibly can. And it ended up being that after we stumbled onto this idea, it just wrapped around and made so much sense for the rest of the movie. And it was so natural to find ways of threading it through everything, so that it makes sense, thematically.

NS-T: And being a sound recordist just puts you in situations. There’s a reason why he would want to stay, instead of being like, “Oh my God, I’m having a conversation with a ghost, I should get the hell out of it. ” There’s more of an impetus for him to be intrigued to record it. “Yeah, it needs good audio. That’s going to help in the long run.”

CLR: Also, watching your film, it wasn’t until the end when I saw up on the screen the birth and ostensible death date of your protagonist that this film was taking place in 2002. So why set it then?

JK: I think we’re playing pretty fast and loose with the date. (laughs) He’s got one of the most ridiculous sound equipment, a sort of analog retro-futurism.

CLR: He’s shooting on a Nagra, I noticed, but he’s also got a tape deck.

JK: Yeah. And he pulls a USB out of the tape deck! (laughs)

CLR: That’s true! 

NS-T: I think the easy answer, and I think a lot more filmmakers are doing this nowadays, is that the early 2000s still feel more or less kind of modern and still familiar (including the haircuts), but you just don’t have iPhones.

JK: And I think there was this other thing that we were talking about where we really just wanted the movie to feel like it washed up in a bottle on the beach and that was kind of like the only thing we said to Murray [Zev Cohen], our cinematographer. But I think, also, that this kind of mishmash of different technology from different times, plus the analog look of it and the hearkening back to 1950s movies, it feels more dreamlike if you suddenly have these like strange inaccuracies or anachronisms.

CLR: Or we feel like we’re out of time, which is where the character ends up, in a way, at the end.

JK: Yes, exactly.

CLR: I have to say, his final fate doesn’t look that terrible. (laughs)

NS-T: It looks great! (laughs)

CLR: Yeah! (laughs)

NS-T: (to Jake) That final stinger scene was something that I don’t even know if I’d even briefed you on yet. It was originally just like we had a green screen set up and we were going to do Jim entering oblivion, you know what I mean? Spoiler for those who haven’t seen it … (laughs) But we just had a thing and we pulled a crate up and gave him a deck of cards and I was like, “This just feels like the ultimate stinger for the end of it. It should be a happy ending.”

CLR: So I don’t want to forget to ask about the cast. You have Jack Redmayne in the lead role and then these two jokers named Noah and Jake who play some small parts in the movie.

NS-T: (laughs) Yeah.

CLR: Can you talk about casting the film?

NS-T: Yeah. I mean, this is, I think, probably the only film that we’ve ever done where we just didn’t really cast anyone. We just sort of only reached out to our friends. There was no casting call, there were no auditions. Even when we got to the point where we realized that the cast pretty much looks only like twentysomethings and we should probably get someone older. And the guy, Mike Mackenzie, who plays Telson and Erasmus, who’s this old drunk sailor at the pub, is the first actor that I ever worked with. He just came on, and I still think he has no idea what’s going on with the film. (laughs)

JK: Definitely doesn’t know what his character’s called. (laughs)

NS-T: Yeah, definitely. Even on the set, he didn’t know. Me and Jake are only in it sort of by proxy, but we flipped a coin about who would play the character that I play. And we only had, for the entire cast and crew, this very, very tiny cottage and we had one hotel room where like every day we’d bring up an actor from London, shoot with them and then they would go back home and then that hotel room would be free. Other people would have played our roles in the movie had we had more hotel rooms, I think. So it’s very much situational of what was there.

JK: And then I think there were three main people who were really intrinsic to it. Jack Redmayne had done one scene in Noah’s previous feature, called Two Big Feet, and we watched that scene and it is just like …

NS-T: Electric.

JK: It’s electric. The second he’s on screen, he’s just got this incredible naïveté, but also this beautiful energy and he’s very watchable. And so we came up with this idea and immediately we were like, “Jack.”  I had this feeling. I was like, “Jack is not going to say no to this. I just know he won’t.”

NS-T: I thought he would.

JK: It was like fate. I was like, “He’s going to do this. ” And we called him up and he was like, “Yeah, yeah, strangely, that week I’m free. I’ll come down.” And so it was kind of all written for him and around him. And then also we have Os Leance who’s playing P.W. Griffin, and he’s one of my childhood friends. I’ve been friends with him since I was about 8 years old and he’s really taken off as an actor. He’s doing some incredible, incredible work, but every time you see him, he just looks completely different because he’s one of these great actors who really has the ability to change his energy. It’s like he can really appear as somebody very timid or someone very angry or very whatever. I just saw him on stage in London play a 70-year-old German man and I literally completely lost him in the role. It was incredible. And so for P.W. Griffin, this maniacal director, we were like, “This is the funniest guy we can get to come and do this. “

And then finally there was Alyth Ross who we’d both worked with a little bit before and she is just like such an incredible actress in terms of just being down for anything. She will just come and nail it. And we literally gave her the monologue the night before and she just picked it up like that and just went for it. It was so incredible.

NS-T: Yeah. I think the entire cast is friends, which is why it was easy to cast ourselves because we’re just having conversations. The whole film was born out of riffing with each other and just trying to make each other laugh. We were saying how instrumental Os is in the role of P.W. He was cast 24 hours before. That scene looked very, very different on paper. And it’s even worth saying that the other guy in that scene is our buddy Dash Upton, who we put in the scene very last minute because we just think he’s the funniest person on the planet. When we got to know him a couple of years ago, he came to some of our writing retreats and he just activated and we’re just like, “Now we can’t imagine not putting him in a movie.”

JK: And in terms of us being in it, as well, I cannot act at all. If you look at me in the scenes, I’m just breaking in every scene because I have a terrible thing of smiling every time I’m on camera and I just can’t get out of it, but it just had to happen, unfortunately.

CLR: Well, it works for the scenes you’re in.

JK: Thank you. I’m glad to hear that.

CLR: Gentlemen, thank you so much for talking to me. I found your film really quite intriguing and enjoyed watching it and I wish you all good things with it.

JK: Thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it and your questions.

NS-T: Thank you!