Bailey- Bond Film Club
Censor writer-director PRANO BAILEY-BOND takes us inside the bloody guts of her excellent BBFC-inspired horror
Clockwise from main: Life mirrors art for film censor Enid (Niamh Algar); Director Prano Bailey- Bond; Enid at work; And with parents George (Andrew Havill) and June (Clare Holman).
PRANO BAILEY-BOND WON’T settle for anything less than the right kind of foliage. For her directorial debut Censor, the filmmaker went to extraordinary lengths to intricately, accurately deliver a slice of 1980s-set meta horror, from lovingly made VHS covers to just the right type of leaves on a forest floor. Speaking with Empire, she breaks down the forensic detail that went into crafting the film.
CASTING
Niamh Algar plays Enid, a wilting film censor who discovers a video nasty that she believes stars her missing sister. Bailey-Bond describes the character as “a coiled spring”, who at the end of her character-arc transforms into “an explosion of emotions” when the trail runs cold and her world unravels. She hadn’t written the part with anyone in mind, but Algar, who Bailey-Bond had first seen in Shane Meadows’ The Virtues, made her mark on the director from her first reading. “She made total sense of the scenes in a way that not everybody does,” Bailey-Bond recalls. “She tunes into the rhythm and depth of the words that you’ve written, and she has an ability to put thought on screen, which is what I needed.”