Holiday souvenirs: The Tea Towel

illustration: Eleni Kalorkoti

In issue 32, we investigate holiday souvenirs in all their tacky glory. Here we bow down in front of the mighty tea towel.

Just because something is a pencil sharpener with I WENT APE AT BRISTOL ZOO printed on it doesn’t mean that it can’t also be a profound human gesture. A souvenir’s value is not the object itself but what it represents: a symbolic memento of an experience in your life, passed on to someone you care about. The British, naturally, embrace kitsch tat, but most cultures have their own version of the tradition. In the Philippines it is called pasulubong; the word translates, quite beautifully, as “something meant for you when you welcome me back”.

Tea towels

If someone knocked over the internet and austerity wiped out the country’s remaining libraries it would be possible to entirely reconstruct the sum of human knowledge through souvenir tea towels. From breeds of terrier to the rules of field hockey to German wild flowers to the cafes of Anglesey, there is nothing we know as a species that we haven’t put on a linen rectangle. We are bewitched, drawn to kitchenware that brightly imparts information: at this exact moment in a RSPB gift shop in Dungeness a retired couple are buying a tea towel that explains Balkan proverbs, another that depicts the 31 sea areas of the Shipping Forecast and a third that lists every person you’ve ever kissed.

What's your favourite holiday souvenir? Discover more pasulubong inspiration in issue 32 of Oh Comely, out now.

A festival of silent film

The biggest misconception that people have about silent cinema is that it was silent. In fact, early cinema was never silent, as there would always be a musical accompanist present.

If you’ve had the chance to actually see silent films in this way then you’ll understand how wonderful it can be. It brings not just the films, but the whole era, to life, in a way thats difficult even for later cinema. It isn’t difficult to see why an audience in 1924 would enjoy silent film, because you’re enjoying it in the same way. Silent films stop being objects from an earlier, intangible past and become something that is current, a performance, something that engages with you.

If you’ve yet to experience silent films in this way, then this year’s British Silent Film Festival is a good place to start. It starts today and runs at the Barbican until Monday.

The use of sound and music in British silent cinema is the Festivals theme. It will be showing some of Britain’s best interwar silent films, many of which haven’t been screened since their original releases.

Musicians such as Neil Brand, Philip Carli, and John Sweeney will accompany the films, and there are a number of other presentations and events.

Highlights include the world premiere of the restored original score for Morozko, a Soviet film based on the Russian fairytale “Father Frost”; Yasujiro Ozu’s classic I Was Born, But…, and a lecture by Matthew Sweet from Radio 3’s Night Waves, on the stories behind the history of British silent cinema, and the role of gossip within it.

Recipe Friday: Zombie cocktail

In issue 31, we investigate the history of cocktails in all their weird and wonderful glory. Whether you're drinking to remember or to forget this weekend, we thought you'd appreciate a lesson in creating the particularly tropical, highly infectious, Zombie.   

Illustrations by Padhraic Mulholland for issue 31 of Oh Comely. The 'Zombie' is third from the left

Cocktails – with their numerous ingredients and complicated preparation techniques – are seen as drinks for special occasions; perhaps if beer came with a little umbrella or a sparkler we might think of it the same way too. Novelty drinking places emphasis on presentation – at its most evocative, cheesy and wonderful in the Tiki Bars of the pre- and postwar period. Serving rum-based drinks like Zombies (also known, thrillingly, as “skull-punchers”) in coconuts and pineapples, these romanticised impressions of Polynesian culture understood that a good cocktail feels like the first day of a holiday.

You can serve a Zombie in a Hurricane glass too, or a tumbler, we're not fussy.

Serves 1

25ml White rum
25ml Golden rum
25ml Dark rum
25ml Apricot brandy
25ml Pineapple juice
A dash of 151-proof rum
Squeeze of lime
Garnished with a cocktail cherry

Mix all ingredients together apart from the 151 in a shaker with ice. Pour into the glass and top with the 151. You can also set this drink on fire if you're feeling particularly exasperated/celebratory.

Find more cocktail inspiration in issue 31 of Oh Comely, out now.

Our Little Sister: An Interview with Director Hirokazu Kore-eda

words Jason Ward

14th April 2016

It seems fitting that talking to Hirokazu Kore-eda closely resembles the experience of watching his films. The august Japanese director and his work share the same quiet, gentle, contemplative qualities: our conversation was filled with long pauses as he carefully weighed his thoughts. There is something respectful in the act, which finds its match in his films' humanism.

Kore-eda's latest, Our Little Sister, is no exception. A drama about three house-sharing sisters who invite their teenage half-sister to move in after their father's death, it delicately explores the inner lives of its characters and the complications and joys of sisterly relationships. Ahead of its release, we spoke to the director about making the film.

Our Little Sister is based on Akimi Yoshida's manga Umimachi Diary. What about the story made you want to turn it into a film?

I'm a fan of Akimi Yoshida so I've read all of her work, not with the intention of adapting any of it at all. I normally write original scripts so it's rare for me to adapt other people's work. It's not something I look for, but as I read this particular one I knew that it would make a great film and that other people would be trying to make it too. I really wanted to do it myself, which doesn't happen often so I trusted it.

The film's key dramatic action is the death of the estranged father, which takes place before the story even begins. Your work often looks at the aftermath of a big event rather than at the event itself. What interests you about that approach?

You're right that I'm attracted to the aftermath of events. I wonder why. It's quite difficult to explain.  Portraying people left behind and how they deal with that is interesting to me. I started as a documentary film-maker, and when I was 28 the first documentary I made was about a man who committed suicide. There was a big scandal in Japan about factory poisoning causing Minamata disease. He'd worked in the ministry of the environment, felt responsible and killed himself. The documentary was shot, of course, after his death, so while it was about him it was more about how his wife coped. That was my first proper film and I wrote a nonfiction book about it too, so maybe that's how I became drawn to aftermath as an idea. Sadness and new hopes are always together. I'm moved by the duality of life, that losses come with gains too.

What I like most about your work is that it's deeply humane. All of the characters in Our Little Sister naturally show kindness towards each other in both big and small ways. Why is the kindness between people important for you to depict?

“Why?” questions are the very hardest for me to answer. I was attracted to how the characters accept each other. The sisters are able to accept their late father's weaknesses, and the younger sister who felt guilty about her existence eventually accepts that it's okay for her to be alive. Kindness is reflected in acceptance. In Japanese society, maybe that is something that's disappearing. Everybody just wants to fight each other. I want to show that it's possible to accept others and therefore to be kind.

The film depends on the audience believing the relationship between the four sisters. How did you work with the actresses to make it feel authentic?

It's a combination of a few factors. We shot over a ten-month period to capture the different seasons and in between the girls did a lot of things together, they went to see movies or went for meals. They bonded quite well away from the filming. What also contributed is that I interviewed a lot of real sisters about their relationships and incorporated the research into my depiction. What came out of those interviews was that, certainly in Japan, a lot of the quarrels between sisters were about clothes – who borrowed what and who's wearing what.

At this point you've been making fiction films for twenty years. Do you think what you're fundamentally interested in is the same or has it changed at all over that time? Are the things that excited you about film-making in 1995 the same things that excite you now?

I think it has evolved through the years. It's not the same as it was originally. From a viewer's point of view I can't quite say how my work has changed, however. It may or may not be related to the way that cinema has changed over that period too. To bring in a baseball analogy, though: if you're a young pitcher you'd just throw straight with speed, but as you get older, two decades later you might start to throw curveballs. The sheer power can't continue over twenty years. So now I may try to do different tricks and throw some curveballs. That's an analogy, but it reflects what's changed within me. The more I make films the more confused I get, but it gets more fun, too.

Our Little Sister is in cinemas now. Images: Curzon Artificial Eye

High Rise: An Interview with Director Ben Wheatley

After four decades of abortive attempts, J.G. Ballard's dystopic 1975 novel High Rise has finally made it to cinemas. Set in a near future that happens to be the 1970s,  the film depicts a luxury tower block as it becomes isolated and descends into savage factionalism. Amid a cast of morally ambiguous residents, the film's nominal protagonist is Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a pragmatic survivor who is able to navigate intricate class loyalties and unafraid to eat dogs when he needs to.

One of the main reasons that Ballard has proved resistant to cinematic adaptation is that his formally inventive prose is so idiosyncratic that it requires an equally distinctive film-maker to successfully translate it. In the case of High-Rise, it required two: director Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump, the husband and wife team behind Sightseers, Kill List and A Field in England, who are among Britain's most promising and ambitiously imaginative film-makers. Ahead of High-Rise's release, we spoke to Ben about his work on the film and having faith in his own voice.

High-Rise is often deliberately disorientating. How did you strive to get the tone?

It's kind of a taste thing and it's also intuition, how you make it all balance out. There was a lot of watching the movie again and again. During the six months that we cut the film, it was assembled within two months and the rest of the time we watched it every day, editing for thirteen, fourteen hours at a time. Every little change rippled up the whole movie, so we couldn't really alter anything without watching it all. That's a bastard on something that's two hours long, but it was the only way. We created the tone frame by frame across the whole running time.

It must be difficult to get critical distance at that point. When you've been working on a movie for years and you're watching it every day, how do you know what's right for it?

Because that's the job, you know? There are ways of working where you throw yourself at the mercy of groups of people and surrender your authorship, but I can't imagine ever working like that. There's two of us editing it, Amy and I, and she's written it as well, so there's enough oversight that that wouldn't happened. Amy is particularly ferocious when it comes to cutting. She'll strip it down and strip it down until it's as hard as a diamond. And then when we're happy with it ourselves, that's when we stop.

On a film like High-Rise everyone can have an opinion on what they'd change, but that doesn't necessarily make the film better, it just makes it different. We wanted to make sure that the translation of our taste and our decisions to the screen was as unfettered as possible. Where things go wrong is if you start taking on other people's ideas: even if in the moment they might be right, by the time you get to the end your film is slightly fucked because it doesn't have a proper viewpoint. It needs one voice, for better or for worse. We stand by ours, and it might not be to everybody's taste but that's just tough. If you feel too afraid and try to double guess what the audience are going to want then you've already lost. You've got to assume that the audience is within you. What you're doing as a creator is producing stuff that you want to see and then making the assumption that others will feel the same way.

The residents of the tower block all have very different objectives, so are we supposed to identify with certain people and not others? How much sympathy do you wish for the audience to have for the characters?

I'd like to think that I'm even-handed. That's important, as part of the emotional realism of a film is that the director isn't short-changing the characters and setting them up to fail. Audiences can detect that really quickly, and life isn't like that because everyone has shades of grey. One character commits an awful act later in the film, but at the same time he's a human being and though he does despicable, terrible things it doesn't necessarily mean that everything he's ever done is despicable and terrible. It's very safe to imagine that people who do bad things are evil, and I don't think that's true.

Other than the change in mediums, the most significant difference is perhaps that book takes place in the 1970s, while the film is set there. What interested you about that?

That's true, but then the book is also a predictive fiction to the near future. It was written in about 1974, so it's predicting somewhere between 1978 and 1983. We made the decision to not do the same and set it in our near future because too much of the technology would break the central core of the book. Social media totally destroys the idea of being able to hide away in a tower block somewhere going crazy because everyone would know about it.

We thought it was a look from our perspective of being born in the 1970s, knowing that our parents would have been like these characters, around the same age. At this point we're in the far future ahead of the story looking back, so we have an insight into what happens after its events. It's almost like we're reaching back from the future to join the book, and from that position is where the film exists.

High-Rise is in cinemas now. Images: Optimum Screenings.

Women Who Changed the World: Jennie Lee

Every Wednesday throughout March, we'll be introducing you to women who changed the world with their creativity. Our second instalment of the mini-series shines a spotlight on Jennie Lee. 

“As soon as I had an independent roof over my head, I was ready for battle.”

When the 24-year-old Jennie Lee became a member of parliament in 1929 she wasn’t even old enough to vote for herself. After growing up in a mining community so close-knit that her house literally had no back door, she went on to have one of the most colourful and inspiring political lives of the twentieth century.

A fearless, uncompromising socialist, her accomplishments included becoming the first minister for the arts and founding Britain’s last great social project, the Open University. Her 1965 governmental arts white paper—still the only arts paper ever written—argued for the arts to be a crucial part of everyday life, available to everyone. Under her stewardship the creation of new galleries, museums, music venues, theatres and other institutions fostered an unprecedented creative environment that continues to benefit the entire country.

Until the end of her life, Jennie was unable to attend the theatre without receiving a round of applause.

You can read more about her in Jennie Lee: A Life by Patricia Hollis, and find more of Cristina BanBan's beautiful illustrations of women who changed the world in Issue 29. Inside, we also pluck pennies from pavements, watch caterpillars burst from cocoons, and talk personal turning points. Get your hands on a copy here!

Illustration: Cristina BanBan

London lesbian and gay film festival

Friday marks the start of the BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, reliably one of the stronger of London’s many film festivals.

The significance of the Festival is that it exists both as a celebration of a community, as well as a cultural entity in its own right. There’s an unfortunate tendency to ghettoise queer filmmaking, and the Festival’s value derives from the range of work it shows not just to a LGBT community, but to a wider audience as well.

Highlights this year include special screenings of classics such as When Night is Falling and Mysterious Skin, to celebrate the Festival’s 25th anniversary; Resist Psychic Death, a lecture on “DIY cultural production for queer community building”; a discussion on feminist pornography, and novelist Sarah Waters in conversation. An adaptation of her excellent book The Night Watch is also being previewed.

The Festival’s gala opening film is Kaboom, written and directed by Gregg Araki. Its the story of a libidinous college student who somehow finds the time to uncover a conspiracy between his endless couplings. As a film Kaboom is profoundly stupid, but it’s difficult not to be charmed by it. It’s hard to hate a film that’s enjoying itself so much. The whole thing is effortlessly subversive and its lack of shame is gleeful.

Look out for our interview with Gregg Araki when the film is released nationwide in June. For now, more information is on the festivals website. 

Film Interview: Nina Forever

Nina Forever is constructed around a single elegant metaphor. Depressed supermarket employee Rob (Cian Barry), still mourning the death of his girlfriend, begins an uncertain relationship with his co-worker Holly (Abigail Hardingham), but whenever they try to have sex Nina (Fiona O'Shaughnessy) comes back to life to harangue the couple. The internal is made physical: Rob's grief assumes physical form, and it's that of the loved one he's lost, appearing naked, bloody and sardonic at the symbolic event of him attempting to moving on

With its ambitious visual language and sensitive depiction of bereavement, Nina Forever is the striking feature debut of Chris and Ben Blaine. We spoke to the brothers about lost loves and the benefits of close collaboration. 

Bereavement is a sad, dramatic topic, but the film is also funny with horrific elements. Was it difficult to balance that tonally?

Chris Blaine: Not really. Partly it's a function of how we write, in a variety of different moods all at once, but I think it came out of our experience of grief. Often in films grief is the bit where you're sad and you look at the dead leaves and you go for a walk by yourself, and we both found that it was incredibly sad but also weirdly funny and terrifying. You have this strange embarrassment and almost magnetic sense of feeling everything all at once.

Ben Blaine: You also feel incredibly horny because you've lost someone and there's this big gap. So much of it is that presence of the person, their touch and their feel and their smell, so you've just got this desire and you kind of latch on to the next person that you see. I think Rob does that, where he's not jumping into this thing because he's thought about it, but because there's something deep within that craves the attention of someone else. He's lacking it from the person he really wants to still be there.

So many of Nina Forever's most crucial scenes take place during sex scenes that are using lots of practical effects. There's blood everywhere and the cast are all naked, and you're trying to tell an emotional story. How did you accomplish that?

BB: It was a challenge but one we knew we were getting into, and I think it was one of the things that excited us about making the film. We liked the idea of these scenes where the characters are totally honest and everything is absolutely stripped away both physically and emotionally. It was very difficult, that mixture of sex scenes with naked actors and the technical challenge of it all, but the emotions gave us something to steer us through. We could focus in on that, so we knew where our priorities were in the scenes. We knew that what really mattered was that the audience understands how these people are feeling, and as long as we were getting that we were on the right course.

As a film-making team how do you divide your labour? Do you do tasks together or do they naturally separate?

CB: In terms of writing we used to try to do individual passes of scripts, but we found that the best thing for us was to be in the same room and to talk about it constantly, and that's kind of how we do things all the way through to the edit. It's really liquid and it's not like there are assigned jobs. We slowly but surely we keep improving on each other's ideas because we're talking about the ideas rather than the words on the page.

BB: It's easy to fall in love with the way you've written something, and easy therefore to forget that no-one's going to see the script. The script is a blueprint and often not a particularly useful one, and so we find ways to talk about the ideas that we're actually going to put to the audience. Similarly that fluidity extends to the actors and the crew. It becomes a creative space for everybody who works with us, and anyone can come up with ideas.

That makes a lot of sense: the creative process starts as a conversation rather than the choices of a single person, and so it can easily expand.

CB: We really enjoy that. It's one of the things about film-making that's so great, the fact that you're working with loads of other people and it's not just you on your own. You've got a full cast and crew around you and crew who are all coming up with magical stuff and it makes the work and the experience so much better.

Nina Forever is available on DVD and Blu-ray from 22nd February. For a chance to win a copy courtesy of the Blaine Brothers, head over to our Facebook page and leave a comment on the post. The film will also screen at select cinemas throughout the month: https://www.ourscreen.com/film/nina-forever. 

Images: Fetch Publicity

Film Interview: A Bigger Splash

It is not a coincidence that A Bigger Splash takes place on a volcanic island: the film is comprised of dormant passions, waiting to erupt.

David Kajganich's adaptation of the sensual 1969 thriller La Piscine follows rock star Marianne (Tilda Swinton) and her recovering alcoholic boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) as their blissful holiday is soured by the unwelcome, sexually provocative intrusion of her ex Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and his new-found daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson).

As its foursome flirt and fight, the film throbs with intense, volatile emotion: it is also not a coincidence that in person its director Luca Guadagnino is similarly animated.

One of the central ideas of A Bigger Splash is the conflict between two ways of living: a traditional hedonistic rock and roll lifestyle, which is embodied by Harry, and a contemporary sort of clean living which Paul and Marianne are attempting to pursue. Why were you interested in exploring that divide? You put me in a place in which I feel uncomfortable because you're asking me to give my own explanation of the film, which I am not very eager to do generally. I think the audience should make a judgement by themselves. I would say that the idea of nostalgia and wanting to get back what you've lost is something that I always think about, and in these characters you have that clash, a kind of battle between wills. It's a very universal, powerful dynamic.

When you have characters who have opposing philosophies, as a director do you take a side or is it important to be sensitive to both points of view? A director should never judge their characters. It's a disgrace if you do that. You should be as open as possible, as broad as possible and you should be able to invest in every act the characters make without judging them ever. If you judge your characters you're putting yourself on top of them and it's a disaster.

The characters are all driven by desire for each other--We all are. Aren't you?

Yes, certainly. I thought it was notable however that there's this struggle where each character wants someone else sexually, and is motivated by this. But this is exactly what we are bound to, so I wanted to make a movie about something that people can absolutely recognise in their own lives, even if they're not rock stars.

Due to an operation on her throat, Marianne is almost entirely silent and has to express herself in other ways. Was that a challenge to depict? Not when you have a great performer like Tilda Swinton. In general, no, because I think that people behave and communicate not just with words, but with the position they take in physical space. You are communicating much more through the position of your feet right now than by anything you're saying, in my opinion. A director is someone who has to be very attentive of behaviour and try to capture everything that comes as communication, whether in words or physically.

The original film La Piscine was set on the French Riviera which is warm but cool, while A Bigger Splash takes place on the island of Pantelleria, where there's the intense Sirocco wind. Was shifting the location a key decision for you? It started everything. When I said I'm going to do this movie based on La Piscine, I had to move the action to an island. I needed the movie to be set adrift and for the environment to challenge the characters. I didn't need a luxurious backdrop. That doesn't interest me, I hate it.

What would you say is the biggest difference between the original version and yours? I haven't seen that movie. I saw it only when I was 16, so I don't know what to say.

Do you think it's a better approach to adapt a film from a distant memory rather than looking at it closely? I was just working from the concept that there were two couples: one father and daughter and one new couple. That was my memory of what was in the movie. The writer may have seen it again but I didn't. I remember there was a moment in La Piscine in which Alain Delon slashes Romy Schneider with a branch, but we don't have any slashing in this movie.

You also altered the title to A Bigger Splash, which is the name of a David Hockney painting that depicts a splash of water as someone dives into a swimming pool. Why did you change the name from a location to the consequence of an action? The pool isn't the important point, the point is the clash. I'd much rather focus on the action rather than the concept of the pool itself.  I also wanted, in my megalomania, to buy that painting when I was young. Somehow I feel I now possess it in a way because it's the title of my movie.

A Bigger Splash is released on 12th February.

The Forbidden Room: An Interview with Director Guy Maddin

words Jason Ward

11th December 2015

For the past three decades Guy Maddin has operated on the farthest reaches of cinema, employing the film-making techniques of silent and early films in service of creating intoxicating, blissfully confusing works. The late Roger Ebert, as he often did, summed Guy up perfectly: 'You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other films by Guy Maddin.'

Guy's latest work, The Forbidden Room, is his most ambitious to date: growing out of an online project to recreate lost films, it is a compendium of stories that travels deeper and deeper within itself.

A strange, sexy and comic sensorial assault, The Forbidden Room is almost certainly the only film ever to feature the dream of a murdered man's moustache, or a story told by a character's deceased ex-boyfriend who has transformed into a blackened banana. Ahead of its release today, we spoke to Guy about raising the dead.

What was the genesis of The Forbidden Room?

Back in late 2010 I had started this internet interactive project called Seances, without any notion that The Forbidden Room might ever exist. The plan was to shoot in public my own adaptations of about 100 lost movies or lost movie fragments, and I'd lined up a few museums where I'd do this. It would be financed through Telefilm Canada, this fantastically generous state-run film funding body, but it involved them bending their rules to go beyond their maximum allowable grants for new media projects. It was essentially as costly as a film, and after 36 days' worth of shooting Telefilm became uncomfortable and told me the only way we could continue is if I produced a feature film too. In April next year I'll break everything up into little bits and upload them into the Seances interactive, but meanwhile we figured out a way of fitting together all the pieces in a way that made some sense to me.

It might not make immediate sense to viewers though, who may feel they're being presented with a welter, or being tossed into a storm of narrative after two hours of which they're washed up on a shore having barely survived drowning, but that's how it came about. There was a practical, bureaucratic ordaining of the feature. I think it might be the only case in peacetime where a film has been ordered into existence by the government.

Did being forced to make the film help or hinder the creative process?

I loved it. The directors of westerns – which only have about five moving parts – would often say that the restrictions were very liberating, and it's true. When you're faced with too much choice it's paralysing, but it's strangely freeing to have restrictions. And I had extreme restrictions: I had to take the footage I'd already shot and figure out a way for it to make one film. Luckily they were all written and directed by the same people with the same temperament, the same world view, the same sense of masculinity and gender politics.

No matter the genre of the lost film or the actors, the passive or active tenor of each one, each film seemed to be about the same things. Even though there was something like forty different protagonists they are also maybe playing the same man: gripped by the male gaze but a little vaginaphobic, trying to navigate through a fearsome world with bulging eyeballs.

I don't know. I'm not going to analyse my own film, it's just the way I felt while making it. In the writers' room we gave free rein to our dreams, our fears, our autobiographical humiliations. So it was a simple matter of fitting thematic parts together so that the 17 fragments of lost movies, even if they are disparate, all seem to point in the same direction.

What was appealing about resurrecting lost films? Is there something interesting about early cinema or were you attracted to the idea of a film being lost?

At first I told myself I was haunted, that the complete works of Murnau and Hitchcock and Lang weren't available and I was haunted by the missing pieces. I've always been intrigued to try to figure out time's great flow through the twentieth century by the changing context of pop culture, film especially. However, I discovered that what really excited me was that there was a mother lode of fascinating narrative free for the taking. No-one else wanted it. No-one else was interested. I could have it, so I took it. I think it was greed mostly.

As a matter of fact when some lost films have been discovered I've actually felt disappointed, even angered in one case. In Paris I was going to shoot Hello Pop!, a lost Technicolor Three Stooges movie. I was really excited about shooting an all-female version with Elina Löwensohn as Moe and the film was discovered a couple of days before we shot. I was ghoulishly disappointed, so you could hardly say I'm haunted by the loss of cinema if I'm pissed off when some of it gets found. I came to recognise that it was some sort of mania, like a dream in which you find a pound note on the ground and then discover another and another and the next thing you know you've got all this free money. I felt like I was fiending for narrative, and I had this all to myself. I didn't want anyone else to have it.

As I watched The Forbidden Room I felt like it could go on indefinitely – I don't mean that as a criticism – rather it's the result of its structure, the way it goes deeper and deeper within itself. How did you construct the film and how did you find your way back out again?

The structure is one of the things I love about the film but it's also a problem. It's got three acts and there's a story within a story within a story: you go six stories deep in the first act, work your way down to the very centre and then back out again, then in act two you work your way down through nine narratives and back out again, and then in the third penetrating thrust you work your way down through another nine and pull out and climax. I may have gone too far this time. The trouble is I'm still introducing whole new stories with fifteen minutes to go! It gives the viewer no conventional indication of ending any time soon. I hope in the future people feel free to dip in and watch for a while here and there.

Had I known from the beginning that it was going to be a feature film that probably would have affected the writing so that we could have given an indication. But you're right, it could have gone on forever. We shot so much footage that I could have easily made another five or six feature films.

The Forbidden Room is in a fixed state but Seances will create bespoke randomised short films that destroy themselves after viewing. Why create art deliberately to be lost? Cinema isn't an ephemeral medium – do you like the idea of making it so?

I think there's a growing, possibly falsely confident sense that everything will last forever now and everything will be kept. I wanted to reintroduce a sense of loss into cinema, and if someone watches one of these things and the programme in the randomness of matters produces something really enjoyable, it would create a sense of pleasure as that person watches the film slip off into oblivion. It might be giving something to the internet that it's been missing. The missing has been missing! We'll see. It's just a big experiment. I feel for the first time in my life that I am experimenting. There are so many variables in this thing. No mathematician would take it on. I like the fact that there are so many ball bearings rolling around on the floor that no-one knows what they're going to get.

Does that feeling of experimentation come because of the interaction of two different mediums?

Yes, because it's both. The project has one foot planted firmly in the analogue realm, in a big roiling puddle of film emulsion – I picture that foot in a rubber boot – and then the other foot is in the digital realm. It's the 21st century and Internetty but it's also ghosts, it's ectoplasmic goo, and it's definitely made out of emulsion. I just like something that's exactly both.

You mentioned autobiographical elements arising when writing. If you're recreating lost films and then randomly altering them, do they still remain personal?

I'm the medium through which these things come. Evan Johnson too, the co-writer and co-director. We're the medium so it comes out in our voices and inevitably autobiographical details get stuck on the ectoplasmic flypaper. They come out in the scripts and in the direction and even in the gestures of the actors, although I didn't really direct the actors – I just put them in a trance and slapped them on the ass and let 'em go for a day. I was acting as a spirit photographer.

The Forbidden Room is out now.

45 Years: An Exclusive Playlist Made by Director

words Jason Ward

10th August 2015

Adapted from a short story by David Constantine, Andrew Haigh's new film 45 Years is about a complacently happy married couple, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), whose lives are thrown into disarray when the long-lost body of Geoff's first love is discovered in the Swiss Alps, frozen and unchanged after decades in a glacier.

A beautifully told, quietly moving two-hander about an unexpected marital crisis, 45 Years features wonderful, lived-in performances from its leads, and further confirms Andrew as one of Britain's most talented film-makers. Ahead of its release in cinemas and on demand from 28th August, the writer-director has put together an exclusive playlist of songs for Oh Comely, inspired by and included in the film.

Given that 45 Years doesn't feature a score, its sound design and use of music is crucial. Andrew told us about his process of selecting music: “Most of the music choices were in the script. I was trying to have songs that reflected the past and parts of their character.” He mentions a key song from the film, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by The Platters, which Kate and Geoff had played at their wedding. “I love their choice for their first dance, because really when you listen it's unclear whether it's a happy song or a really melancholy one. I've heard it being played at wedding parties before and thought, wow, I'm not sure if that's super romantic.” Andrew relates this idea to another song the couple like in the film, Go Now by The Moody Blues: “It has the perception of being romantic but then when you listen to the lyrics you think, 'my god, really?' I find that juxtaposition in music really interesting: that something might have the sense of being a romantic song but the truth behind the lyrics mean something different.”

45 Years: A Playlist Curated by Director Andrew Haigh (available on Spotify) 

I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire - The Ink Spots

Remember (Walking in the Sand) - The Shangri-Las

Suzanne - Leonard Cohen

The Old Man's Back Again - Scott Walker

Stagger Lee - Lloyd Price

I Only Want to Be With You - Dusty Springfield

Tell It Like It Is - Aaron Neville

Happy Together - The Turtles

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - The Platters

Go Now - The Moody Blues

45 Years is released in UK cinemas and through Curzon Home Cinema on 28th August. You can listen to the exclusive playlist here.

Photos: Agatha A. Nitecka.  

An Interview with Director David Gordon Green

words Jason Ward

6th August 2015

David Gordon Green has made so many left turns as a film-maker that he's found himself back where he started. After drawing repeated comparisons to Terrence Malick for his stunning debut George Washington and becoming a reliable source of underseen but critically admired dramas, David surprised many by directing the stoner action comedy Pineapple Express. A sizeable sleeper hit, the film heralded the unlikely second phase of his career. However, just as big, broad comedies like Your Highness seemed to define his work, the film-maker shifted direction again and moved into deliberately unassuming character studies. The latest of these is Manglehorn, a lovely, low-key story about a brooding locksmith with little time for anyone except his sickly pet cat. As the eponymous near-hermit Al Pacino gives his best performance in too many years, matching the understated charm that the film exudes. Ahead of its upcoming release, we spoke to David about his exploratory creative process.

You conceived of Manglehorn after meeting Al Pacino about another project. What quality did you want him to bring out of him with this film?

Al does a lot of larger than life characters and Manglehorn is smaller than life. I was really looking to do an intimate, very vulnerable character study, inspired by the meeting I'd had with him where he was laughing and soft spoken and had this wonderful modest quality. It was something that I hadn't seen in a movie of his in a long time. I was thinking about his old films like The Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow, early Pacino work that I've always admired. As a big fan I wanted to find a good reason to get in the ring with him. I thought one way might be generating a great character for him first.

I found it quite telling that both Manglehorn and your previous film Joe are named after their protagonists. What's the value of focusing on just one character?

A couple of years ago I'd just had kids and wanted to live in a place and make movies in that place, so I moved to Austin, Texas and started thinking less conceptually about big budget explosive content and more intimately about the area I was walking around in. The locksmith shop in the film is just two blocks from my house. I could walk to the set every day. When you have kids you have this epic mindset – the universe around you explodes, in a way – and I wanted to focus on something that was less extraordinary and look at it through a microscope.

Do you think you'll ever have the urge to make films again on a larger scale?

Actually just last week I finished a movie that's like that. There's a bus chase on a cliff and big name actors and set pieces and everything. It's fun to have money and toys, and there are a lot of Hollywood things that appeal to me, but it's nice to strip all the conversation away too. On the movie I just completed there were hundreds of people I needed to refer to in order to discuss visual effects and action sequences and safety and set design and construction. For a film like Manglehorn it's just three or four people walking around looking at the light and moving some set dressing from one side of the room to the other. There's something really calm and peacefully collaborative about that. It's more meditative. I think I have the type of mentality that needs to bounce back and forth between things.

How did that calmer approach apply to your working relationship with Al Pacino?

For many months before we shot I would fly to California and sit in his back yard and eat strawberries and talk about the character. We'd invite friends over and just read the script aloud, start to hear it and evolve it. There were some characters in early drafts that we decided not to incorporate. We wanted it to be organic, so we shot mostly in order and I didn't want to know how it ended necessarily. There was a screenplay, a roadmap for what we were doing financially and logistically but the film became very different because we found detours.

How did you come up with the name Manglehorn? It's evocative of folk stories.

That was part of the goal, to make something that felt like a fairytale. In an early conversation we said that we wanted to make a children's film. We got a little too melancholy for that, but still there's no profanity or violence or drug use. We tried to refrain from anything objectionable as a subconscious reference to the idea of a magical craftsman. I've always seen the locksmith profession in that light, like woodcarvers or the toymaker Geppetto or other things that might exist in a fairytale.

Were you interested in the symbolic idea of a man who can unlock any door but can't open up parts of himself?

Once you take anybody and start looking at what they do you invoke a world of metaphors. This was a situation where we weren't resistant to that. None of it was conscious but we started smiling our way through when we realised the fable that was unfolding had that little nod to symbolism. It was a very casual production process. It wasn't one of those calculated, storyboarded, pre-conceived type of movies. It was really just getting a creative, collaborative group of artists together and convincing Al Pacino to show up and then everybody felt their way through filming. That's a fun way for me to work, to carve time to do some unique weird shit during the day.

Have you always been that way, or did you have to establish your own voice to be confident enough to explore and experiment?

I think any film-maker evolves in their enthusiasm and their process. For me it's always changing and I wake up every morning with different interests. Sometimes that means to do a big movie or a little movie or a television show or  a TV commercial. I try not to think about the end result too much but I follow things that appeal to me, narratives that appeal to me, people that appeal to me. I just go with my intuition and instinct and sometimes everybody's happy and other times it takes me to strange and questionable places.

Manglehorn is released in U.K. cinemas and through Curzon Home Cinema on 7th August.

An Interview with Director Desiree Akhavan

words Jason Ward

29th June 2015

The release of Desiree Akhavan's debut feature Appropriate Behaviour earlier this year heralded an impressive new film-making talent. As well as being the film's writer and director, Desiree plays its protagonist Shirin, a confident-but-floundering newly single woman attempting to move on from her former girlfriend Maxine (Rebecca Henderson).

Between flashbacks that trace Shirin and Maxine's ill-fated romance, Desiree excels at detailing the minutiae of life after a relationship: the efforts to redefine one's identity, the abortive attempts at online dating, the fleeting melancholy of realising that an ex is wearing clothes that you haven't seen before, their life carrying on without you. In a film distinguished by its emotional honesty as well as its humour and wit, one of Appropriate Behaviour's most perceptive observations is the idea that heartbreak exists as background radiation in modern dating: to varying degrees, everyone's trying to get over somebody.   

Ahead of its release on DVD, we spoke to Desiree about making the film.

Appropriate Behaviour starts and ends with Shirin on a train. In superficial terms not much has changed in her life but there's a clear emotional shift. How did you approach the journey she goes through?

When you study screenwriting you're given all these books that tell you there has to be an inciting incident, a villain, a hero, an act one. I remember reading them made me want to gouge my eyes out. It was incredibly boring. I thought if this is what screenwriting is then I'm not a screenwriter. I loved writing plays, and I loved writing scenes and building relationships through character, so that's how I started: I wrote scenes between Shirin and Maxine. I built that relationship and the film was about examining it. Once I finished the first draft I shared it with my producer Cecilia Frugiuele and she said it was good but she wanted to know who this woman is, who is her family, what's her job. She thought I should pull from my own life. That's when it became a journey of how this girl changes without really changing. There are so many films that deal with coming of age and young people in Brooklyn, but I wanted to make something that was so specific to the way I see the world that no-one else would be able to lay claim to it. That's all film is: telling the same story over and over again through a different lens.

Throughout the film there are flashbacks to Shirin and Maxine's relationship but they're non-chronological. Were you trying to replicate how Shirin's mind works?

It was about following a train of thought and what triggers a memory. When you have a breakup it's like being haunted by a ghost. You're in a moment with someone new and just the way their hand moves or the song that comes on or the food you're eating brings you back to a specific memory. You have this ex relationship on your shoulder, constantly reminding you: “Remember when you were happy? Remember when you were loved?”

Are the flashbacks subjective then? Even when they're in love Maxine seems a little aggressive to Shirin. Is that just her personality?

I always thought they were accurate but also Shirin is inspired by me and I'm an asshole. Who knows? The whole film is a flashback of mine. I say it's not autobiographical but at the same time I play the lead, so in a way it's all indulgent to one point of view. I tried to be as diplomatic as possible and to make it feel like that was the truth of what had happened, but if you get the sense that Maxine is a one-sided character then I haven't done my job well and we'll just say Shirin's bad memory at fault.

If the film isn't strictly autobiographical, do you see it as a heightening of reality?

It is, because of a few factors. One is that my life isn't interesting for a 90-minute narrative. It's not convenient enough. I wanted to draw parallels between characters and shape scenes to create a little arc in each scenario. The elements of my life are there but then characters and details had to change to suit the narrative and the story I wanted to tell. Also I rely heavily on my collaborators. I get so much credit because it's my face on screen, but my producer Cecilia is my work partner and had her hand in sculpting the script, while on set my cinematographer was a collaborator in how each scene played out and the same thing happened later with my editor. It's not just mine, so it would be insanely self-indulgent and false for me to say that this is a diary entry, because then it would be their diary entry too. I think the only way to make very personal work that is also universal and speaks to people who don't share your history is to rely heavily on others, because they add their perspective. They can tell you if you're going off the deep end or to go further. It's really necessary and it's a great joy.

What's it like to write, direct and star in a film all at the same time? Even with collaborators, that must be complicated logistically?

Well I'm a power hungry bitch so it works out really well that I get to wear all those pants. Also Cecilia had her eyes on the monitor the whole time. I didn't have time to watch playback so we were just moving forward; with other people's performances I knew exactly what I wanted, but there were a couple of instances when I looked at her and asked if I had it. One moment that sticks out in my head is the threesome scene. I watched one playback and it looked very graphic. I took her aside and said “This is too gratuitous, I've made a huge mistake, I'm going to pull back in the next take,” and she said to trust her and not pull back. I'm really glad I did because that's how we got what we have.

Your depiction of sex is interesting: it's not trying to titillate but it's casually graphic in the way that real sex is casually graphic. People have brought up Annie Hall when discussing Appropriate Behaviour but it's hard to imagine that sort of sexual honesty in comedic films of that era.

I think people are shooting sex differently now than they did before. There was a lot of dishonesty in the sex I saw when I was younger, but then films were very different in a pre-internet world. Now we have such a different dialogue – kids are coming out earlier, our relationship to porn is different – there's a frankness now and that's reflected in movies.

Sex in films never really got messy.

Or it was all awkward. The characters have a bad date and then bad sex and everything is terrible, but in reality sometimes things weave in and out of being pleasurable. That's the worst: when you hold on to the nostalgia for a moment you had two hours ago, hoping that the person will go back to your first impression of them. That happens quite often and I don't see it depicted in movies. Films lied to me about sex, and everything I learned about sex until a certain age I'd learned from watching a movie. It wasn't a conversation I had with my parents or something I could find out on my own. When I finally started dating I realised I'd been fed fairytale lies about simultaneous orgasms and never-ending love.

Appropriate Behaviour is now available on DVD.

Director ruben stlund on family life and the crisis of masculinity

This article contains spoilers for the central premise of the film. 

Force Majeure charts the slow-motion unravelling of an affluent model family. As Tomas (Johannes Kuknke), Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their two children dine during a skiing holiday, they become briefly convinced that an avalanche is approaching. Faced with a moment of reckoning, Tomas impulsively grabs his iPhone and abandons his loved ones to their fate.

In darkly comic, excruciating detail, writer-director Ruben Östlund explores the aftermath of this event as the family confronts Tomas' failure to conform to his socially-ordained role. Ahead of the film's release we spoke to Ruben about gender expectations and nuclear families.

Were there any real life events that inspired the story?

The starting point was that I've skied a lot and have made ski films and wanted to make something set in a ski resort, but hadn't known how because it's such a kitschy world. Then I saw an online clip of a group of tourists sitting at an outdoor restaurant, similar to how it's visualised in the film. They see an avalanche and think it's beautiful but seconds later they're screaming in panic and fleeing, before realising their error. They become ashamed of themselves, of losing control and exposing something that is uncivilised.

I was talking about the incident to a friend. You could tell that he's done a lot of things in his life that he's ashamed of. I'd had the idea of putting a family in that situation, and he said “What if it's only the father that runs away?” Immediately I realised this would expose expectations of gender. I started to talk with a lot of different people, and many had personally experienced women losing trust in men because of how they behaved when it came to a crisis situation.

As I was watching I kept thinking about what happened on the Costa Concordia.

I thought it was extremely interesting how the captain of that ship started this lie that he fell into a lifeboat to avoid losing face. At one point Tomas says "I am a victim of my instinct", which is a direct quote from that captain.

Ultimately the worst thing that Tomas does isn't momentarily running away but continuing to lie about it.

I agree with that, but it's so painful to lose your identity. If you're a man and a lot of your identity is this expectation of what a man is, then lying about it is a way of trying to avoid that moment. The outside perspective of who we're supposed to be has such a strong influence over our behaviour. In our society a man is supposed to sacrifice himself when there's a sudden outside threat.

As a man or a woman you're adapting to the role of being a man or a woman, to the expectations that come from those cultural influences. For me Tomas and Ebba are just performing the characters of the woman and the man in a family, acting like what's expected of them. It's role-playing. When tested, that brings out silly behaviour.

Were you trying to deconstruct the idea of a family unit?

It's not very often that we see the nuclear family from an economical and historical perspective. We think of it as a fundamental thing about being a human being, but the actual term "nuclear family" was invented in the 1950s. Before then we lived in large families, and the industrial movement made us move into towns and small flats so we had to cut the bands with an older generation.

To motivate ourselves in this new lifestyle we conceived the idea of a nuclear family, but it's totally stupid to not have grandparents around. In the large family there were more adults taking care of the children that were being brought up. The nuclear family is so much more vulnerable. If the mother and the father are not functional then the children are much more exposed.

If we look at the kind of lifestyle we can see that we're following a pattern: we're going down to individuals, which is the most efficient consumer unit. Stockholm, for example, has the most single person households of any city in the world. If there is eventually only one person in every household then they have to buy all the equipment that they'd buy when there are four people. We're going from nuclear families to living alone in our apartments, being more and more efficient consumers all the while.

Is Force Majeure offering a critique of that process? Does it argue for a different way?

No, that part is not the film criticising. I wanted to look at the kind of family that is upper middle class and has that kind of lifestyle. By our criteria Tomas and Ebba have succeeded. They're a beautiful couple staying with their beautiful children in a five-star luxury hotel. But then actually the perspective of the film is we're looking down at them. These poor people! Going out in the hallway to have arguments about a catastrophe that never happened.

You're right that they're not actually in real peril at any point. Do you think Tomas and Ebba are looking for things to be unhappy about?

We have a culture today where we're allowed to put 99% of our time and concern into our relationships. There's something about this lifestyle that creates existential crises. We feel like love should be a problem, and we hear it in pop music over and over again. In movies, on television, it's all relationship challenges. As long as we have that kind of focus for our lives we won't be able to look at society's problems from a proper perspective. I wanted to question that.

Force Majeure is out now.

An interview with director guy maddin

For the past three decades Guy Maddin has operated on the farthest reaches of cinema, employing the film-making techniques of silent and early films in service of creating intoxicating, blissfully confusing works. The late Roger Ebert, as he often did, summed Guy up perfectly: 'You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other films by Guy Maddin.'

Guy's latest work, The Forbidden Room, is his most ambitious to date: growing out of an online project to recreate lost films, it is a compendium of stories that travels deeper and deeper within itself.

A strange, sexy and comic sensorial assault, The Forbidden Room is almost certainly the only film ever to feature the dream of a murdered man's moustache, or a story told by a character's deceased ex-boyfriend who has transformed into a blackened banana. Ahead of its release today, we spoke to Guy about raising the dead.

What was the genesis of The Forbidden Room?

Back in late 2010 I had started this internet interactive project called Seances, without any notion that The Forbidden Room might ever exist. The plan was to shoot in public my own adaptations of about 100 lost movies or lost movie fragments, and I'd lined up a few museums where I'd do this. It would be financed through Telefilm Canada, this fantastically generous state-run film funding body, but it involved them bending their rules to go beyond their maximum allowable grants for new media projects. It was essentially as costly as a film, and after 36 days' worth of shooting Telefilm became uncomfortable and told me the only way we could continue is if I produced a feature film too. In April next year I'll break everything up into little bits and upload them into the Seances interactive, but meanwhile we figured out a way of fitting together all the pieces in a way that made some sense to me.

It might not make immediate sense to viewers though, who may feel they're being presented with a welter, or being tossed into a storm of narrative after two hours of which they're washed up on a shore having barely survived drowning, but that's how it came about. There was a practical, bureaucratic ordaining of the feature. I think it might be the only case in peacetime where a film has been ordered into existence by the government.

Did being forced to make the film help or hinder the creative process?

I loved it. The directors of westerns – which only have about five moving parts – would often say that the restrictions were very liberating, and it's true. When you're faced with too much choice it's paralysing, but it's strangely freeing to have restrictions. And I had extreme restrictions: I had to take the footage I'd already shot and figure out a way for it to make one film. Luckily they were all written and directed by the same people with the same temperament, the same world view, the same sense of masculinity and gender politics.

No matter the genre of the lost film or the actors, the passive or active tenor of each one, each film seemed to be about the same things. Even though there was something like forty different protagonists they are also maybe playing the same man: gripped by the male gaze but a little vaginaphobic, trying to navigate through a fearsome world with bulging eyeballs.

I don't know. I'm not going to analyse my own film, it's just the way I felt while making it. In the writers' room we gave free rein to our dreams, our fears, our autobiographical humiliations. So it was a simple matter of fitting thematic parts together so that the 17 fragments of lost movies, even if they are disparate, all seem to point in the same direction.

What was appealing about resurrecting lost films? Is there something interesting about early cinema or were you attracted to the idea of a film being lost?

At first I told myself I was haunted, that the complete works of Murnau and Hitchcock and Lang weren't available and I was haunted by the missing pieces. I've always been intrigued to try to figure out time's great flow through the twentieth century by the changing context of pop culture, film especially. However, I discovered that what really excited me was that there was a mother lode of fascinating narrative free for the taking. No-one else wanted it. No-one else was interested. I could have it, so I took it. I think it was greed mostly.

As a matter of fact when some lost films have been discovered I've actually felt disappointed, even angered in one case. In Paris I was going to shoot Hello Pop!, a lost Technicolor Three Stooges movie. I was really excited about shooting an all-female version with Elina Löwensohn as Moe and the film was discovered a couple of days before we shot. I was ghoulishly disappointed, so you could hardly say I'm haunted by the loss of cinema if I'm pissed off when some of it gets found. I came to recognise that it was some sort of mania, like a dream in which you find a pound note on the ground and then discover another and another and the next thing you know you've got all this free money. I felt like I was fiending for narrative, and I had this all to myself. I didn't want anyone else to have it.

As I watched The Forbidden Room I felt like it could go on indefinitely – I don't mean that as a criticism – rather it's the result of its structure, the way it goes deeper and deeper within itself. How did you construct the film and how did you find your way back out again?

The structure is one of the things I love about the film but it's also a problem. It's got three acts and there's a story within a story within a story: you go six stories deep in the first act, work your way down to the very centre and then back out again, then in act two you work your way down through nine narratives and back out again, and then in the third penetrating thrust you work your way down through another nine and pull out and climax. I may have gone too far this time. The trouble is I'm still introducing whole new stories with fifteen minutes to go! It gives the viewer no conventional indication of ending any time soon. I hope in the future people feel free to dip in and watch for a while here and there.

Had I known from the beginning that it was going to be a feature film that probably would have affected the writing so that we could have given an indication. But you're right, it could have gone on forever. We shot so much footage that I could have easily made another five or six feature films.

The Forbidden Room is in a fixed state but Seances will create bespoke randomised short films that destroy themselves after viewing. Why create art deliberately to be lost? Cinema isn't an ephemeral medium – do you like the idea of making it so?

I think there's a growing, possibly falsely confident sense that everything will last forever now and everything will be kept. I wanted to reintroduce a sense of loss into cinema, and if someone watches one of these things and the programme in the randomness of matters produces something really enjoyable, it would create a sense of pleasure as that person watches the film slip off into oblivion. It might be giving something to the internet that it's been missing. The missing has been missing! We'll see. It's just a big experiment. I feel for the first time in my life that I am experimenting. There are so many variables in this thing. No mathematician would take it on. I like the fact that there are so many ball bearings rolling around on the floor that no-one knows what they're going to get.

Does that feeling of experimentation come because of the interaction of two different mediums?

Yes, because it's both. The project has one foot planted firmly in the analogue realm, in a big roiling puddle of film emulsion – I picture that foot in a rubber boot – and then the other foot is in the digital realm. It's the 21st century and Internetty but it's also ghosts, it's ectoplasmic goo, and it's definitely made out of emulsion. I just like something that's exactly both.

You mentioned autobiographical elements arising when writing. If you're recreating lost films and then randomly altering them, do they still remain personal?

I'm the medium through which these things come. Evan Johnson too, the co-writer and co-director. We're the medium so it comes out in our voices and inevitably autobiographical details get stuck on the ectoplasmic flypaper. They come out in the scripts and in the direction and even in the gestures of the actors, although I didn't really direct the actors – I just put them in a trance and slapped them on the ass and let 'em go for a day. I was acting as a spirit photographer.

The Forbidden Room is out now.

An interview with directors lucien castaing-taylor and paravel

Larus Marinus. Pollachius Virens. Cleona Celata. Alongside the fishermen who appear in Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s documentary Leviathan, the film’s credits list the binomials of every species featured on screen: the fish the men catch, the crabs that end up in their nets, the gulls that swarm their boat. This concession to the importance of non-human life only hints at the complexity of Leviathan’s perspective.

A dialogue-free, sensorially overwhelming portrait of an 80-ft fishing trawler, the film depicts the experience of being at sea from ever-changing viewpoints. Utilising miniature cameras attached to fishermen, lowered below the water or even sluicing amidst piles of dying fish, Leviathan freely switches its point of view between humans, machinery and animals, creating a fragmentary representation of the sea, equally beautiful and horrific.

Members of the pioneering Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University (where they both lecture), Lucien and Véréna are intense, deeply meditative individuals, genuinely attempting to do something new. Ahead of Leviathan’s release, the pair sat down to discuss their inability to discuss the film.

You created the film to be open to interpretation, but do you have your own reading of it? And does that reading matter?

Lucien Castaing-Taylor: We’re human beings so we’re constantly interpreting. The problem is that most of the time when we’re interpreting ourselves and our actions and other people, trying to give some meaning to life, we’re doing it in a very inconclusive way.

An interpretation that we come to now would be different from one we come to in six months’ time. Interpretations mutate as we go through life and have different experiences, so the moment a filmmaker assigns one to a film it constrains the aesthetic potentialities that the film can put into play.

For me it’s not to give our own interpretation, nor is it even to give lots of interpretations and allow people to choose between them. We’re not stopping that – its open-endedness is part of it, something people can respond to. But the film itself exists before interpretation intervenes. Our purpose was to give people a very potent aesthetic experience, to give them a glimpse into a reality that they haven’t had first-hand--a protracted, painful, difficult, visceral, profound embodied experience.

If you were attempting to create an experience rather than make something didactic, then how did you put the film together? How did you decide which shot followed which, for example?

LCT: I’d say it’s both easier and harder to try to simply give shape, to give form to an amorphous mass of aesthetic experience. The idea of making a documentary that provides an interpretation of the world is a very peculiar notion if you think about it. It’s very odd if documentaries are claiming to have some privileged purchase on reality, on lived experience. Our desire was simply to give an experience of an experience.

Véréna Paravel: We were trying to come up with general, big concepts about humanity and having metaphysical discussions, but it was also a question of going back to the visceral feelings that we had.

LCT: It was dictated by the material. We had these debates but they ended up being less significant in the editing. The material transcended us and worked through us. I think it worked through us in ways we still haven’t come to terms with.

VP: And this is the problem. Every time we talk about the film we’re trying to make sense of it through our prose, but then when I’m at all these screenings, watching the first 20 minutes to check the sound, what I’m seeing has nothing to do with all the bullshit that comes out of our mouths. We’re trying desperately to put some words to it and we’re attached to this thing, but every time I’m sitting there I think this is absolutely bullshit. This film is way, way beyond our words. It sounds super pretentious to say that.

LCT: But it happens to be true.

Is there anything that can be gained from discussing the film, then?

LCT: Yes, I think there’s every point in talking about it. There’s so much to discuss and debate because it’s not trying to encapsulate one particular point of view, whether ethnological, political or argumentative. You could run a poll of 200 people watching it and get radically divergent responses based upon their own intellectual convictions, their political orientations and above all their lived experience.

VP: The format can create really interesting questions. The range of discussion can be biblical; can be about the cosmos, about the scientific conversation, about literature, about painting, about the filmmaking process, about technology, about belief, about capitalism. At the same time, whenever we talk about it, somehow at the end I feel those discussions ended up diminishing the film, reducing it to just a tiny part of what it could be or what it is.

LCT: Reality has a magnitude that will always exceed our representations of it and our capacity to understand it. The challenge when you make a work of art is to do the same thing: to come up with an aesthetic object or experience that people will argue over constantly, irreducible to something that can be summarised in a single representation. You watch a documentary and you know what it’s saying, what its point of view is. To me that’s an abdication of aesthetic, intellectual and political responsibility, because it’s reducing the world to something that the filmmaker is pretending to be able to give you certain pronouncements about, to edify the audience.

Even though you find yourselves unable to summarise the film now, what was its starting point?

LCT: I would say that we both know and don’t know. There are lots of different reasons, some of which we can remember, some of which we can’t remember. One of them was that we both have a childhood relationships to the sea that we were interested in revisiting. I didn’t know where it was going to take me, to do something that would be in dialogue with my experience of growing up with my father, who worked in shipping in Liverpool.

VP: We didn’t know what we were seeking, but we knew we wanted to find a new way of representing the sea. Not just the sea, but the idea of “the Deep”, and humanity’s relationship to it. We had a vague idea because you have imagery in your mind, but that was one of the challenges: to try to not reproduce any of that imagery that we knew, and find a fresh way of capturing the experience.

The film keeps shifting perspective. What were you hoping to accomplish through that technique? Were you trying to produce a holistic depiction of the sea?

VP: It’s a totalitarian approach but also one of fragmentation. The way we go from one point of view to the other is never systematic. It goes from one to the other and at the end there’s this unity. I see this wholeness, and I cannot distinguish one from the other. I cannot distinguish the fish from the man, the visible from the invisible, the boundary when you go from below to above. I cannot distinguish when it’s a gaze with intentionality, because suddenly its intentionality retracts, the camera is another embodiment and the status of the image is completely different.

LCT: All human cognition and consciousness consists of fragments--sensations, words, images, memories, sounds--jostling in different strands that come together into moments of clarity, or moments of meaning, and then they desegregate and come back together again. Films do that too because films are created by humans, who are sentient, meaning-making, moralising beings.

If you watch a film, it’s just these shards, these tiny fragments that are put there in a sequence--fragments of sounds and images that the viewer constructs a hypothetical universe out of. It’s a kind of domesticated totality, and in this film we’re just proceeding with these fragments but not trying to domesticate them into something that’s super-linear or something that could be expressed linguistically. Instead, it’s an 87-minute experience of being at sea, both metaphorically and literally.

Leviathan is released in the UK today.

Being elmo

The Muppets of Sesame Street were each specifically designed to embody a different teachable issue: Bert and Ernie show how friendship can endure despite differences; Oscar the Grouch teaches children how to react when someone shows positive and negative emotions; and Big Bird represents curiosity about an adult world that one is not quite able to understand yet.

Fashions changed, the curriculum evolved, and a few humans came and went, but other than that Sesame Street has otherwise remained largely the same show as it was when it debuted in 1969, until the arrival of puppeteer Kevin Clash and the attendant ascendency of Elmo in the 1980s and 1990s.

Photo: Elmo and Kevin Clash in BEING ELMO, a Submarine Deluxe release. Photo courtesy of Scott McDermott.

The reason for Elmo’s phenomenal success was simple: Elmo embodies indiscriminate, fullhearted love. As narrator Whoopi Goldberg points out in Constance Mark’s new documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey, Elmo needs people, and that’s why they love him in return. His popularity has risen to the point where he has become the star of the programme, despite his inauspicious beginnings as a caveman-like Muppet that no-one could figure out how to perform successfully.

Photo: Kevin Clash and Elmo in BEING ELMO, a Submarine Deluxe release. Photo courtesy of Submarine Deluxe.

Being Elmo examines the popularity of Elmo as a character, but its main focus is squarely on Elmo’s performer, Kevin Clash, and his journey from being a child enchanted by Sesame Street to becoming the show’s “Muppet Captain”. Indeed, if Being Elmo has a problem at all it’s that the journey of the title is relatively straightforward: Kevin grew up in a poor but supportive family, was teased a little for his passion but people largely understood that he was special, and he worked solidly as a puppeteer from high school through to the point that he finally realised his dream of joining Sesame Street and then his breakthrough moment when he created the modern version of Elmo.

It’s certainly inspirational to see Kevin’s journey, and it would be almost impossible to come away from the film without developing admiration and respect for him, but there’s not much else to it: Kevin wants to become a puppeteer, and due to his talent and dedication is able to do so. That’s the entire narrative.

Kevin is an undoubtedly talented, hard-working, soulful person, but there are other layers to him that Being Elmo doesn’t fully engage with. There’s a more interesting, slightly underexplored thread about how he began to miss out on his daughter’s upbringing due to his commitment to performing Elmo for other children, but it’s largely brushed over in favour of footage of Kevin teaching new puppeteers and cheering up terminally ill children (both of which are compelling and inspiring, of course).

Photo: Kevin Clash (1975) from BEING ELMO, a Submarine Deluxe release. Photo courtesy of Kevin Clash.

The most memorable scene of the documentary is his daughter’s 16th birthday party: Kevin watches his daughter watch a video he made for her filled with birthday wishes from her favourite celebrities. At the end of the video is a message from Elmo, telling her that Elmo loves her. Kevin cries as the Muppet says the things that he couldn’t say in person. The love that Elmo expresses so freely – the quality has made him so popular – is love that Kevin himself can only properly express through a puppet. It’s a deeply sad moment, and one that says more about the documentary’s subject than any number adulatory talking heads ever could.

Photo: Kevin Clash training a French Puppeteer with the puppet “Griotte” in BEING ELMO, a Submarine Deluxe release. Photo courtesy of Submarine Deluxe.

Marks, whose husband James Miller (the film’s cinematographer) worked on Sesame Street for several years before making the film, clearly came to Being Elmo wanting to celebrate Kevin Clash and his life, and the film does this so successfully that it’s hard to begrudge her for that. Despite its unrealised potential to go a little deeper into Kevin’s mindset, it would be churlish to hold that against what is a charming and lovely documentary about a charming and lovely man: for anyone who not only adores Muppets but also what they represent – joyfulness and community – Being Elmo is a treat.

Film review: Shame

Carey Mulligans greatest strength as an actress is that shes good at looking. This talent first announced itself in An Education; some of that films loveliest moments occur when Mulligan looks out at rooms filled with dancing and music and life, wordlessly conveying the nervous enchantment of a child entering an adult world for the first time.

Mulligan is one of the most empathetic actresses working today, with the power to make the audience understand the depth and root of her emotions and to make them feel those emotions at the same time.

More recently Mulligan has put her innate looking-at-things skill to use in Drive, where she and Ryan Gosling develop a thrilling, utterly believable attraction whilst doing little more than just looking at each other. Without the need for snappy dialogue or laboured music cues, the film perfectly captures what it’s like to meet someone who makes you giddy just from the sight of them, someone whom you just can’t stop looking at. Their courtship gives a strange sort of validation for the ultraviolence that follows, providing it with context and motivation.

Mulligan has a further opportunity to look meaningfully in Shame, the Steve McQueen-directed sex addiction drama in which she co-stars with Michael Fassbender. As the bruised-but-merry Sissy, her significant looks are employed to depict the sadness which stems from her fraught, transgressive relationship with her brother Brandon (Fassbender). Their maladjusted relationship is the core of the film and defines them both; expressing itself through Sissy’s self-harm and Brandon’s unquenchable need for sex.

It seems strange to focus on Mulligan‘s role, excellent as she is in it, when Fassbender appears in every scene of the film and gives such a bold, mesmeric performance (as long as he continues to have such good taste in projects, he will surely become one of the key actors of his generation).

The connection to Mulligan’s looks of developing emotions is relevant, however, as Brandon in Shame uses those same looks for more malign purposes. In an early scene of the film he makes eye contact with a woman on the subway, sharing flirtatious glances. Like Mulligan in Drive he just can’t look away, but here it’s a trick: one of the many subtle ways in which he gets women interested in him. She thinks that he’s making some fleeting yet deep connection, when he’s really trying to position her into giving him what he wants.

Shame is less a film about having a sex addiction than it is about having that addiction whilst looking like Michael Fassbender and having the intelligence to manipulate situations for your own benefit. It’s a study of a man who wants something constantly and has the ability to obtain it, again and again, and again and again and again, until there’s nothing of him left but his need.

Shame is being screened as part of the 55th BFI London Film Festival. Find out more information on the film here.

18/10/2011film review: we need to talk about kevinjason wardfilm review: we need to talk about kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin is Lynne Ramsay’s third feature film. She made her debut with Ratcatcher in 1999, which she followed up with Morvern Callar in 2002, and now in 2011 We Need to Talk About Kevin is being released. That’s nine years between her second and third films. It seems like quite a while.

To make an unfair comparison, Woody Allen made nine films during that same period. To make an even more unfair comparison, the Beatles were together for nine years and managed to record 12 albums, 13 EPs and star in four films. Between 2002 and 2011 Ramsay has made one 112-minute feature, which works out at about a minute per month. The obvious question to ask is, well, what was she doing during all that time?

The story behind the answer is a torturous one. Years spent working on an adaptation of The Lovely Bones were for nothing when the book became a big success and the project was taken from her to be given to Peter Jackson. After recovering and slowly adapting We Need to Talk About Kevin, the production’s funding fell through, requiring a complete rewrite. Over nine years setback after setback beset Ramsay, and the result is nearly a decade lost to the making of a single film.