Written & directed by Kate Lloyd
A comedy short about Mary-Sue and her alien boyfriend, who have the most unusual, out of this world meet-cute story.
ABOUT THE FILM
MY ALIEN COWBOY screened at our Short Film Open Mic Night earlier this year and we’re exicted to spread this alien invasion to the web with it’s online premiere.
ABOUT THE FILMmaker
Kate Lloyd is a writer/director born and raised in London, UK. Her short films have screened at numerous film festivals around the world including London Short Film Festival, Lisbon and Hamburg. She previously worked in production/producing for companies including Manchester International Festival and the BBC. Kate has an unhealthy obsession with the weird, so she writes dark comedies inspired by a punk sensibility to disrupt the status quo. She likes to write about good people who do bad things, complicated characters who grab the audience by the heart and genitals.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH kate
Welcome to our Short of the Week series. Tell us a bit about yourself and your filmmaking background.
I started off in a fine art background, and studied Video Art at Brighton University, which is sort of like a fine art degree but in film. This provided me with a lot of education around theories, concepts and ideas, much more of an “intellectual” approach to art, which I later rejected in my work.
I am more interested in people - relationships and narrative, so I started making my own short films with more emphasis on these subjects..which was also much more fun than having to win intellectual points!
Tell us about the genesis of My Alien Cowboy. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind the film?
I absolutely love cheesy 70s B Movies, like early John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. So I knew I wanted to play around with this genre and make a film that was really sludgy, gnarly and off-beat film.
I also wanted to see what I could make with a limited budget of 300 pounds. There is a hotel in Brighton that has themed hotel rooms and one of them was an Americana themed room which looked absolutely fantastic, so I purposely wrote something I could set in that hotel.
And I wanted to explore in a comedic way the desperation people could go to in love, even losing your eye for a partner!
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making My Alien Cowboy and how did you overcome them?
Definitely the accent! I’m pretty new to on screen acting and I underestimated what a challenge an accent like that could be.
The shot where the eyeball falls on the floor also took a few practice shots to get right as you have to get the exact part of the eyeball to line up in focus.
Not sure if it’s was an “obstacle” exactly but I know the colour grader Alex Marshall and the DP Andrew Butler worked hard on making the flashback scene look like film, which I think it really does and adds a lot of texture and old school B Movie vibe to the short.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences and some of the festival circuit highlights.
We’re waiting to hear from a few genre festivals and local festivals in Brighton, due to financial limitations I am being cautious with over submitting and instead putting most of my finances into the budget for my next short.
It was a real pleasure to see it in front of an audience with Kino Short Film Open Mic, and I was super delighted to hear the laughs from the audience, it’s interesting that some parts I didn’t expect to get much laughs were the biggest.
Also excited to be part of Kino’s Short of the Week! Thanks for having us.
What advice or hacks would you give to other short filmmakers?
If you can find an interesting location and write your film around that, it will instantly stand out.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
Love Lies Bleeding by Rose Glass, I’m obsessed.
