A Brighton filmmaker’s feature film directorial debut has landed on the streaming platform Disney+.
Gabriel Foster Prior, who grew up in Brighton and returned to live in the city last year, co-wrote and directed The Bystanders which was added to Disney+ on January 1.
The Bystanders is an “off-the-wall sci-fi comedy” set in a parallel dimension, a world in which invisible immortals watch over their subjects and intervene in their lives – not always for the better.
Gabriel, who co-wrote the script with fellow Dorothy Stringer alumnus Jack Hughes, puts the inspiration for the film down to “nominative determinism”.
“People talk about angels a lot more when your name is Gabriel,” he said. “As a child I thought more about angels than the average kids did.
“One day I was playing computer games with my brother, and we had been sat at the same spot for hours when it occurred to me that if guardian angels were real, it must be so boring sitting at the same spot watching us play. I found that thought quite funny.
“I had the very initial idea and brought it to Jack and he fleshed it out; lot of my favourite lines are things he wrote.”
A self-financed and produced independent film, The Bystanders finds itself on Disney+ surrounded by films with a thousand times the budget.
“I worked out that none of the other films on the sci-fi page on Disney+ had any less than 500 times our budget – that’s quite a feat,” Gabriel said. “It’s a cliché but it was a team effort.
“The hardest thing about film is that it’s expensive and The Bystanders was quite an ambitious film with sci-fi elements and lots of locations.
“You make up for in time and effort what you don’t have in money. Not every director has to leave set to cycle from Camden to Highgate because you need a hire bike as a prop. Or push that bike up and down the street with a green painted broom handle to get the VFX plate you need. You find a way and you get it done.”
The Bystanders was made with the help of friends and family, with Gabriel’s father, Foz Fozter, composing the music, his mother, Dorothy Max Prior as associate producer, and his brother, Frank Foster Prior, as lead VFX artist.
The film stars comedian Seann Walsh, who attended Dorothy Stringer with Gabriel alongside co-writer Jack Hughes and editor Will Steers.
“I knew he [Walsh] would do a really good job,” Gabriel said. “He’s a very good stand-up comic and comic performer and he’s very physical with how he does his stand up.
“It was really nice to have a friend on set because film sets can be very stressful places. Sometimes it would be absolute chaos, and Seann would say something funny and cut through the tension.”
Born and raised in Brighton, Gabriel went to Dorothy Stringer School followed by film studies at Varndean College and fine art at Met before obtaining a degree in Film and TV from Edinburgh University.
He has worked ever since as a film editor, including working as lead editor on Lucid (2018), starring Billy Zane and Sadie Frost, and The Wall of Mexico (2019), starring Jackson Rathbone and Esai Morales.
Work on The Bystanders initially started in early 2020 but, as a low budget production, was heavily impacted by the Covid pandemic, meaning shooting was completed in small batches across 2020 and early 2021, with post production following in 2022.
Filming through a pandemic had its challenges and oddities, including recasting one character, intended to be played by someone in their fifties, as a 96-year-old during the period when only those aged 80 plus had received the vaccination.
The film selected to have its world premiere at the prestigious Austin Film Festival in 2022, where it was nominated for a Comedy Vanguard Award and made a staff pick.
Its UK premiere was as the closing night film of the London Sci-Fi Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Best Feature Film, an award it also won at the Sydney Sci-Fi Film Festival, where Seann Walsh also won a Best Actor award.
Following this, it had a limited UK cinema release, including a homecoming screening at Brighton’s Duke of York’s.
The release led to positive reviews, with The Guardian praising the film’s “scrappy energy” and describing it as a “throwback to the loose mumblecore movement of the early 2000s”.
Gabriel is enjoying the calm of living by the sea after the “trauma” of making a film, but already has another feature film script he is trying to develop.
“There is a community of filmmakers in Brighton and hoping to engage with people down here and make more films,” he said.
“Brighton is definitely a place of people doing things and making things and it’s an encouraging place to be.”
Share