One director which often directs similar films to ours is Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is notoriously known for his explicit use of violence with lethal weapons and drugs. With the use of these iconographies, Tarantino creates a tense and hostile atmospherical feel to many of his films, such as Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. In Pulp Fiction, high class drugs are a stimulus which represents a surreal reality throughout the film, giving the audience the impression that the characters are some what irresponsible and dangerous to themselves and the people around them, due to their drug related habits. This relates to our film, as during the first opening scene, a large bag containing high class drugs is exchanged between two mysterious characters, showing the audience that they are menaces to society.
Drug use in Pulp Fiction
In Reservoir Dogs, the theme of violence is often used, where a sequence of events unroll after a group of anonymous men rob a diamond store. Tensions rise when the characters become suspicious as to which one of them informed the police that the robbery was going to take place. As things become more heated the characters become more violent towards each other, even resulting in petrel being pored over a man with the intention to set him on fire, as his ear being chopped off. This is similar to our film as violence will be a theme which is used to create similar effects, to show the audience that the characters have a deep routed interest in themselves, and would do anything to avoid justice or their own downfall.
Explicit violence in Reservoir Dogs
Another crime thriller film which is similar to ours is American Gangster. As well as using many iconographies similar to the ones in ours, such as weapons and drugs, American Gangster unravels the story of an ongoing battle between a drug lord and a New York City Police Department officer, by using a split narrative, switching between the drug lord's perspective and the detective's. This unique structure, allows the audience to experience the story from both the protagonist (the officer) and the antagonist (the drug lord), allowing the audience to gain a broad over view of the events as they unfold. Also, the split narrative encourages the audience to involve themselves more in the film, as they can follow both sides of the story and decide which side they want to succeed, wether it is the protagonist who brings the criminal to justice or the antagonist who escapes justice and destroys all glimpse of it. This is similar to our film, as ours follows the battle between a high class drug dealer and a police officer. The split narrative is used in our film, to give off the desired effect of the audience gaining a wider perspective of the story, showing the events unrolling from the protagonist and the antagonist, resulting in the audience getting more involved in our film.
Furthermore, American Gangster is set primarily in an urban city area, like wise is ours, which is filmed in an urban area with in South Yorkshire.
The antagonist in American Gangster
The protagonist (police officer) in American Gangster
Another crime thriller film which demonstrates features similar to ones we would like to show in our film, is Taken. In this tense opener to the two part series, the colour red is specifically used in one scene, where a building with a large red door is the location where a retired special forces officer's (Liam Neeson) daughter is being held after she has been kidnapped and introduced to the human trafficking market. The red door represents danger and prepares the audience that what ever lays behind the door may be a big threat, implying that something may happen. This is similar to our film, as just before one of our main characters (Lewis Lock) gets hit over the head with a weapon and seriously injured, he strolls past a red balloon which is floating in an ally way, oblivious to the fact it was even there. The colour red can be a very effective stimulus to the audience preparing them for what is ahead, as it has connotations of danger, violence, and fear, which can be triggered in the viewers mind every time they are presented with the colour in context with the specific film or genre. For example the red balloon, or possibly a red weapon.
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