Hope Dickson Leach On Her Edinburgh Pic ‘The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde’ & Why It Took Her Almost A Decade To Return To Feature Filmmaking After ‘The Levelling’
21.08.2023 - 17:35
/ deadline.com
“It’s a mad way to make a film, and I’m not sure it’s not something I would rush into again,” director Hope Dickson Leach said of the process behind her latest feature, the Edinburgh competition title The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Leach, best known for her well-received debut, The Levelling, which debuted at Toronto in 2016, was approached by the National Theatre of Scotland during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to create a hybrid film-theatre project that could engage audiences while health restrictions were still in place.
The result was a stage production of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, performed live at the Leith Theatre in Edinburgh by a troop of actors who were tracked around the venue by six cameras. The footage was mixed and edited live by Leach, who sat in an operating van outside the venue.
“The actors were moving around the building, but the audience was watching a film that was happening live. If anything went wrong, there it was. One night the focus fell out of one of the cameras, and we had to get on with it,” Leach said.
The final version screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival is the completed edited performance, including some pre-recorded footage. Jekyll and Hyde is Leach’s first feature in seven years following The Levelling, which launched her career following strong reviews out of TIFF and an extended festival circuit run. The film was released in the US via Monterey Media, and Leach was nominated for three Scottish BAFTAs.
So why did it take her almost a decade to return to feature filmmaking?
“I’d been in development with a bunch of other films, and it had been brutal,” she said. “It’s so impossible to make films. I’ve been trying so