Barnaby Clay: “If I don’t do the jump now, I’m never going to”
Barnaby Clay has been working as a filmmaker for decades, but his feature-length debut, The Seeding, has finally arrived to see the director realise a dream he’d held since his teenage years.
Starring Scott Haze and Kate Lyn Sheil, the atmospheric and isolated horror finds the former’s Wyndham lost in the desert, where he discovers a shack inhabited by the latter’s mysterious occupant, Alina. Pleading for help, he soon realises that he’s at the mercy of much more than the unforgiving landscape, with his surroundings holding greater dangers than he ever could have imagined.
The Seeding may have premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June 2023 and released in January 2024, but Clay had been developing the project for nearly a decade, and he’s relieved to finally see it out in the open. “I think the initial seed of the idea came nine years ago,” he explained to Far Out. “Obviously, I’ve done other stuff in the meantime, but to finally have it done and finished, it’s a great feeling. I’m happy it’s out there. I’m happy people are getting to experience it.”
Having worked in short films, commercials, documentaries, and music videos during his career, directing features was always the goal, with Clay harbouring those ambitions for over 30 years. “I really thought that directors were just kind of like deities to me, just these gods that I couldn’t really stand alongside,” he added. “They were just these special, exalted people. And then, when I was a little bit older, I started seeing stuff like Evil Dead. And those kinds of films which were coming out were made by younger people just in some woods nearby their house, and you were like, ‘Oh shit’. OK, all right, you can do this. And that was very inspiring.”
Clay cut his teeth as a filmmaker during what he described as “the golden age of music videos”, where people like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Jonathan Glazer “were doing amazing work and really interesting work, something that sparked an interest for me”. Having put it off for so long, The Seeding marked a now-or-never moment of sorts.
“Eventually, I got to a point where I said, ‘OK. If I don’t do the jump now, I’m never going to do this jump’. So I took the plunge and put everything else to the side and said, ‘This is it.'” Fast forward to today, and his debut feature has arrived, telling a dark and twisted story with its own inbuilt mythology that stretches far beyond the borders of the frame.
Haze and Sheil are far from the only actors in The Seeding, but great swathes of the story unfold as a two-hander between their characters, who are diametrically opposed on a performative and personality level. With that in mind, Clay settled on the movie’s central dynamic after the roles had been cast, with each performer bringing their own sensibilities.
“They are very different characters, but at the same time, I wasn’t looking for two actors who are going to be so different in their approach,” he says. “It just happened to be that way, and it worked out well because I think Scott brings with him a certain level of prickly intensity that’s very much in his character.” As for Sheil, she was tasked with realising almost the polar opposite.
“Kate brings this very quiet mystery to her, and they play off each other within those characteristics, and it just worked out very well. They’re very different, and approach things in a different way, but they’re both equally patient with each other’s approach as well. I think the key thing is that they’re both very into the story and the script and really wanted to honour the characters and wanted to give them everything.”
That didn’t become readily apparent from day one, though, with Clay sharing how it was two weeks into the shoot that he knew in his heart of hearts that his two leads were knocking it out of the park both individually and collectively.
“Two weeks in or something, she’s very much on the defence, and I’m wondering to myself what’s going to happen when she has to explode on him and unleash on him, which she does at one point in the film,” he said. “And when she did, it was fantastic. It was everything I had hoped it would be, and I think she’d been using all that being beaten down by him to just finally turn that round on him. And it was a really fun moment, just witnessing that.”
Similarly, Haze ends up in a predicament that pushes him to the emotional limit, and the cramped confines of the set only aided his anguish. “Where this character goes, he ends up in a place which is kind of like the primal version of himself,” Clay elaborated. “And I feel like that’s a hard place to get to, that really just completely destroyed, beaten down, just primal. When he got there, I was so happy to see it because it was so gratifying knowing my intuition was that he could get there. But until you see it, you’re not sure. And I think everybody was like, ‘Holy shit’, in that situation.”
As the story progresses, the dynamic between the two leads is constantly shifting, a relatively simple narrative sleight-of-hand on paper but altogether more difficult to execute. For Clay, trying to maintain that balance without playing his hand too early was a key component of his approach.
“It was something which was constantly on my mind,” he admitted. “You want to try and keep a level of mystery of what’s happening and where the character’s motivations are because, on a certain level, they have quite simple motivations. His is to get out of there, and hers is to procreate, basically. But within that, human feelings get involved and certain things get muddy.”
“Maybe there is a version of the story where they carry on their dinner, and that’s it, there’s a nice happily ever after moment,” he reflected, but that wasn’t the story he wanted to tell. The world of The Seeding has its own distinct set of rules that apply to each of the people who occupy it, and that extends to the children who initially and unwittingly lure Haze’s Wyndham to his demise.
“If you don’t have these rules, as barbaric as it is, then society crumbles,” he adds. “That’s the basic idea. It’s really simple”. Anyone who doesn’t adhere to societal standards is held accountable for their actions, then, but human nature always has a funny way of throwing a spanner in the works. “Real life gets in the way, real emotions start coming, and you begin to like people and experience feelings of whatever it is. Lust, or just companionship, and it starts to get a bit muddy or less clear.”
As for the boys themselves, while there’s little backstory explicitly spelt out, it was important to Clay that they didn’t simply tick the ‘evil child’ remit that’s been a staple of horror for decades. His intention was to present them as nothing more than a product of the environment from which they were created, an important distinction he wanted The Seeding to make.
He “didn’t want these boys to just be cartoon evil kids”, something that’s outlined by everything that unfolds around them. “They’ve created this society, but the society is real, and everything they do is bound by the laws of reality. Kids aren’t inherently evil. They’re not. And these kids aren’t. They’re just a product of this world that they’ve grown up in. So if people break these rules – and maybe they get a kick out of it, but just like kids can get a kick out of butting each other when they’re together and just being a little nasty – they just take it further than that. That’s the issue.”
Despite being a self-contained story that unfolds almost entirely in a single location, it’s intimated that The Seeding is just one arc in an already-established cycle that carries on in perpetuity. Clay confirms that there was more backstory in additional scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut, but as much as the cast, crew, and production were all fully aware of the world that exists beyond the frame, those nods stay hidden in plain sight.
“Producers are always like, ‘Oh, that’s great. That will make for a great origin story film, or the sequel or whatever’. So it’s always looking for that.” By that metric, it was well worth asking if Clay had considered taking the Yellowstone route with The Seeding and telling different standalone stories separated by centuries.
“Absolutely. There is a version of that,” was his admission, and there’s even been some serious thought put into it. “They have a dialect which suggests they came from somewhere else. And that dialect, it’s not nonsense. It’s basically created out of an amalgam of Eastern European dialects. There is a story of some woman coming over during that period, maybe with dreams to go further west. And then it just grew from that into this weird, warped version of society, which never moved and never changed from that, the world which was slowly created out of this one moment.”
The genesis of what would become The Seeding was partially inspired by Clay’s impending fatherhood before his son was born, but the movie also deals with the notions of fate, fear, and control, among other things. It’s a story that can be interpreted in a multitude of different ways, but its writer and director doesn’t think that’s something a filmmaker can intentionally strive for.
“I don’t think you go in with any of those intentions. I go in with this idea; there’s a story that interests me, and within it, it brings up certain questions. Questions, which I think are interesting, and if you are perceptive to that or open to it, then you might want to think about it afterwards. I like a film which makes you think on a grander scale, not just, ‘Why did this character do that?'”
The Seeding is far from a message movie, then, despite being open to numerous interpretations. As a viewer and a filmmaker, Clay prefers when movies “make you think about life or your place in the world”. Of course, he’s “conscious not to ram it down people’s throats”, but it’s nonetheless important to him to ensure he’s “putting the questions in there, just because they are thematically within the same world and feel.”
“I think, not being afraid to – and to not – answer those questions” was another integral aspect of The Seeding‘s construction. “I’d rather you walk away from it without knowing everything, but take away these certain things and interpret it your own way. It’s more interesting like that.”
Beyond The Seeding, and with his first feature now in the rear-view mirror, what comes next for Clay? Putting him on the spot, he was asked which project he’d choose above all others if he was handed the ability to make it in whatever way he wanted with limitless resources and given complete creative freedom.
As chance would have it, there is a literary adaptation that would pique Clay’s interest, with several notable auteurs having shown interest over the years. “I think Yorgos Lanthimos was attached to it. It’s called The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan. It’s a fantastic book, and it’s totally tripped-out psycho-western comedy. It’s very bizarre, and it’s completely in its own world. I think at one point Tim Burton was attached and at one point, Hal Ashby was attached as well. It’s just one of these books which has attracted these kind of odd but brilliant filmmakers over the years and still hasn’t been made, so I’d love to get my hands on that.”
