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When did the fascinating idea for Triangle first come to you?
"Well, it's been a work of many years that film and it nearly cost me my sanity and my marriage! It was a tough one to put together. The absolute truth is, we were in the Cannes Market Festival where they were screening Creep. I was sat on the beach and said we should try to make a movie that's not in the Underground that's on a beach or somewhere really nice so that we can have this shallow moviemaking experience. Literally at that moment I had the idea - what if a girl's on an upturned yacht and she looks up at ship and one of the people on the yacht is actually the person looking back on them from the ship. That was back in 2005 I think, and then I made Severance in between."
Obviously places like Eastbourne and Clacton-On-Sea might not be so idyllic, but what made you settle on Australia as the movie's location?
"Well, the movie does hint at the Bermuda Triangle so I wanted it to be in the Caribbean. We ended up, because of the budget, filming in Australia. There was a time when I was going 'Okay, we're not going to raise enough money to make this movie, so why don't I set it on a lighthouse and make it on a little island off the Isle Of Man?' That was considered funnily enough, but I wanted the movie to have a Dead Calm look. Lots of back lighting and a bleached out look."
Just how tough was it to assemble such an intricately structured and mindbending script?
"Put it this way, I don't think I'd ever want to do it again. I was trying to do something different. The more you unravel it, the more it opens up, so it becomes a genre movie but it's also about what it feels like to go crazy. As soon as I started to do all these twists, it became very complicated and it does start to drive you mad. A circular narrative movie - don't do it is what I say!"
Apart from the Dead Calm influence, were there any specific films or filmmakers that influenced your approach to Triangle?
"Yeah, clearly The Shining for the interiors. I love that film and was reading about it and learnt that Kubrick read this essay by Freud called 'The Uncanny' before he made it. He put all of these things that Freud mentioned into the story of The Shining. I felt that Triangle has to be about a ship, but also about the workings of the mind. So that's a real influence. It scares you without using shadows and fog and any movie clichés. It scares you by making you feel crazy and you start to feel as crazy as Jack Nicholson’s character."
Water-based movies like Titanic and Waterworld have been fraught with production difficulties, especially with the seaborne sets. Was it relatively plain sailing for Triangle?
"The hardest thing about Triangle was trying to convince the financiers that we weren't going to have problems at sea. When someone who doesn't know anything about sailing or making movies on the water tells you that everything is going to be fine, it doesn't reassure them. I wanted the movie to be set in real sea and not in a tank. I wanted to go out into the ocean like they did with Jaws because I think that the characters feel different, the spray hits their face and it all feels very real. Actually, we had no problems. There were no storms, nothing. But it is very hard filming at sea because you get tired and your brain is very gradually changing your balance all the time. You don't realise this and after a day's filming you shut down as soon as you hit the shore. But I'm not complaining. You're at sea making a movie in Australia - it was brilliant."
How did Melissa George cope with the filming and all the gruelling stuff she has to endure?
"Well, it was tricky, I'm not going to lie. I was determined, as was she, to get a performance that goes beyond a scream queen because she's playing a very complicated role. That's what attracted Melissa to it. My job was to follow the Kubrick role with Shelley Duvall to get her to go that level beyond acting scared or acting crazy and actually just start to feel it. I would do many takes and eventually she'd start to operate on adrenaline. That's what you see on the screen. It was a hard shoot, but Melissa is very proud of her performance. She was playing three different people at the same time and it was nuts."
She stars in a series called In Treatment that's just started airing in the UK, and it also shows just how good she is at playing fractured personalities.
"It's weird, because I was thinking of Melissa George and I got sent that by her agent and that's exactly what it is - a fractured personality. I think she's amazing in In Treatment. I called her up and said bring all of that madness - I didn't use the word fractured, I wish I had because it sounds cool - and use that persona and bring it to this character. She said 'deal'. The trouble was that you've got a madman like me running around making you be more scared or more mad, because you still have to do all those horror things as well."
If Triangle is a deserved commercial success, are there any possible sequel ideas floating around in your head?
"I said to the financiers that if the film is a runaway success then we'll just release the same film and call it Triangle 2. Let's see if we get away with it!"
Triangle opens in UK cinemas tomorrow.
