Todd Haynes

After three decades of directing actresses including Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore in their defining roles, Todd Haynes finds himself amazed by deaf 14-year-old Millicent Simmonds

Portrait of Todd by Ellie Smith

Todd Haynes has been living in the past for some time. Each of his films – from Velvet Goldmine to I'm Not There to the sublime Carol – has been set in earlier periods and made using cinematic techniques from those eras. His most recent film Wonderstruck splits its time between pasts, telling an intertwined story of two deaf children in the 1920s and 1970s as they each run away from home and experience New York's frenzied enchantment.

Wonderstruck nods towards silent movies and 1970s American cinema. Are you interested in capturing something about how the world was at certain points, or is it more what older films tell us? It varies. Speaking through the prism of film language is sometimes exclusively, almost academically what I'm trying to do: Far From Heaven was set in the late 1950s and was about what those films said about their own time through the artificial language of Technicolor melodramas. Wonderstruck is a little different in that I was thinking about the kids' subjectivity. I felt a messiness in the 1970s. You see images of children from that time and their hair is in their face! Particularly there was a sense of the tactile in their creative interests. I think of Wonderstruck as what they're making with their hands. It feels handmade in that way, and going back and forth between the stories it's almost like pieces of a puzzle being pressed together by little dirty fingers. My films are always interpretations of cultural themes, stories, characters, real people, cinema. I never feel like I'm inventing new ideas, nor is that my intention – I'm just commenting on the culture as it exists and recombining components. I'm curating my films, maybe, much like these kids explore the idea of museum curating.

Is there a kinship between the job of film director and museum curator? You both locate different things, put them together and find the relationships between them. Absolutely. You're not just curating themes and references and in my case historical moments – selecting what is relevant from your research and films and popular culture – you're also putting together creative partnerships. Actors, cinematographers, costume designers, all of those elements are selected yet also have an autonomy. You may guide them but ultimately as a director you're letting something out of your control happen, and that's also the thing you want to capture, to let it in.

Until now you've collaborated mostly with adults, but much of the film is on the shoulders of Millicent Simmonds, a deaf 14-year-old. Did that affect how you worked? Every actor is different anyway. They bring their own personality, temperament, and in the case of professionals, their own training and approach to their work. The cliché that directing is really about casting is true: it's selecting that right person and providing them with confidence so they can take risks and do things that neither of you knew were possible. I know I have good instincts and I'm surrounded by people whose opinions I trust, but I've also been very lucky. With Millie there were unknowns on top of unknowns, but we followed our instincts and met this extraordinary kid. She has an understanding of the camera and the medium that you can't teach, that you can't direct out of anybody. I'm not sure how she knows just the right amount of information to express, or even what she looks like when she's performing. How many of us really know what we look like as we talk and emote? And she's a kid! It's a weird thing. Julianne Moore, who has that same understanding of the scale of the medium, would look at Millie on set and say wow, there's something remarkable here.

There are few deaf characters in cinema, let alone stories about deaf people. Do you feel that in losing dialogue you also gain something in those complications of communication? It asks the audience, who will mostly be hearing viewers, to supplement information, to imagine what it's like to be without hearing but also to interpret things in ways they're not usually asked to. When I was 12, The Miracle Worker became a point of obsession for me. I know it was about Helen Keller as a phenomenon but it made me think about language. Initially she represents a rejection of social norms and law and language, a wilful postponing of entering the codes and terms of a society. That's fascinating when you're young. I think kids feel an affinity for deafness and blindness, for limits and novel ways of improvising how to communicate and express yourself. Limited abilities and freedoms and constraints are built into their status – they get it.

Wonderstruck is in UK cinemas 6 April 2018

What we're reading: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Photo: Liz Seabrook

In issue 34, four writers shared the books they like to dip into, again and again. Here Jason Ward shares why, for him, December always means returning to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. 

It’s surely not a coincidence that our most ebullient rituals occur during the bleakest days of the year. As winter batters its fists upon the windows, tradition is a friendly face at the door, a comforting visitor to help us ignore the darkness outside. Without even noticing, Christmas rites accumulate naturally around us. We listen to the same songs every year as we put lights on the tree, make the same biscuits we always make, watch the same Christmas specials that we could recite by heart. For the satisfaction they bring, we observe these events as closely as if they had been ordained.

Here’s a ritual of mine, then: every December I listen to a different audiobook of A Christmas Carol. An unabridged reading takes around three hours, so I’m able to get through it over a couple of crisp, lonely walks. In keeping with the oral tradition that fomented literature, A Christmas Carol is not a story you’re meant to read, but rather one you’re meant to have read to you. Dickens himself did this for 127 audiences during his lifetime, including his final public reading.

Like a bicycle or the zip on a jacket, we take A Christmas Carol for granted because it works perfectly. Possessing the quality of a fable, the story unfolds with such pleasurable inevitability that it’s difficult to imagine someone actually sat down and toiled over its nouns and verbs, that Ebenezer Scrooge and his misery didn’t always exist somewhere. Not wasting a moment, its elegant narrative works like a machine: there’s a reason why two centuries later we’re still telling the story to ourselves, not just through adaptations but versions starring everyone from Bugs Bunny to Fred Flintstone.

Despite the Bob Cratchit in my head bearing a striking resemblance to Kermit the Frog, however, I am helplessly, joyfully drawn to the original text. I love how its opening line – “Marley was dead: to begin with” – manages to be spooky and witty at the same time. I love that it’s written with a noble purpose and yet Dickens can’t resist showing off how clever he is. Most of all, I love the meaning of the tradition in my life. Every year, wandering the same city as Scrooge once did, I’m provided with a reminder that change is achievable, and that it is always possible to be one’s best, most compassionate self. 

For more tales of Return, pick up a copy of Oh Comely issue 34. 

The Neon Demon: An interview with Nicolas Winding Refn

"It started off as a horror film, but then I also wanted to make it into a comedy with a lot of camp, because I love extremeness, and it needed to have melodrama. And in a way it also became a science fiction movie."

The inability of Nicolas Winding Refn to precisely categorise his own film is to its credit. The Neon Demon is at once gruesome and arch, empathetic and heartless, icy provocation and savage allegory. Employing the same mesmeric tone as his earlier work like Drive and Only God Forgives, the film follows aspiring model Jesse (Elle Fanning) as she attempts to prosper in the cannibalistic world of fashion. As Jesse's beauty warps herself and everyone around her, however, The Neon Demon's fundamental acceptance of human cruelty unsettles as much as its sudden, brutal lurches.

Ahead of its home release today, Nicolas discussed the meaning of the film, and tried to persuade us that narcissism is a virtue.

A wide-eyed teenager going to Los Angeles to “make it” is a plot that's roughly the same age as movies themselves. What appealed to you about using that story?

There was a simplicity to it that I found very interesting. The more simple something is, the more it resonates. That can be confusing because there's a certain expectation for culture to be “complex” and “thought-provoking”, but those are usually devices to steer away from what's really the essence. I believe that less is more, and none is everything.

What do you think is driving Jesse? Is she just looking for fame? Is she trying to escape something?

I think Jesse lives in two parallel universes. On one level she's the deer-in-the-headlights young girl coming to the big city. She feels she doesn't have any particular skills but she can make money from being pretty, so why not take advantage of that? You never know where it might lead to. And then there's another part of her where she's like an evil Dorothy that comes to meet the wizard, but she is the poison that's going to drive the wizard insane because she has what everyone desires, and she knows it. You never really know if she is manipulating or being manipulated, until she goes through the journey of becoming the complete narcissist.

The character of Jesse has to be the most magnetic person in the room, and yet this is a film where every single actor is beautiful – even the sleazy motel owner is played by Keanu Reeves. How did you work with Elle Fanning to create that effect?

Elle is not just beautiful, she's unique. There was no-one else who could have done this but her. If there was no Elle Fanning I don't think I could have made the movie. It was the same thing as Ryan Gosling in Drive. If you weren't gripped by her then there was nothing to take you in – the whole idea is that Jesse has some ineffable quality everyone wants.

How much of The Neon Demon is specifically a comment on fashion? Do you think it's more vicious than other industries?

I don't think fashion is more vicious than other industries, but it's very complex and non-complex at the same time. It is about the most beautiful image, and yet fashion reflects our cultural evolution, our historical evolution. Fashion is very important to us as people. I love fashion personally, I love making fashion commercials and working in advertising. I enjoy the glamour of it, and also the vulgarity and the silliness. It's a great mirror of society.

The models in the film take their competitive nature to extreme, bloody ends. To what extent are their actions allegorical?

It's just normal human behaviour. We're competitive creatures. That's usually seen as something negative, but a lot of The Neon Demon is about celebrating narcissism as a virtue. It's the next human level, our next evolution is a full love of thyself.

Are we supposed to support Jesse throughout? Is there a certain point where we start judging her, and is that hypocritical?

Secretly there's a desire to go through her journey, but then there's morality that's very ambiguous because we still live in a world where narcissism and ego and vanity is usually considered negative. However, we all have it to various degrees, and I think that with the next generation there's more of an acceptance of narcissism, an encouragement of it – the idea that it's okay to completely love oneself openly. For my generation that was a very terrible thing to even admit to, but my kids' generation accept so much more of human behaviour, and fully accepting oneself is a part of it. Of course there's also the hypocritical nature of us, that we all teach this notion of equality, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. All those things that I tell my own children, but I also know that if it's not beautiful I don't look, and neither do you. We have to accept that rather than trying to dismiss it, but it's a horrible feeling. It's also very refreshing because it's like letting go of your own fear of what is right and what is wrong and just accepting what thou will. It's about giving in to your urges.

The Neon Demon is out now on DVD, Blu-ray, Digital and VOD.

One Good Thing

I was waiting for a train, desperately trying to think of something that wasn't terrible. My phone – that usual bulwark against darkness and commuting – stayed in my pocket: by any measure we're living through a tumultuous year, but at that moment the news seemed so unrelentingly grim that I couldn't even check Twitter without getting depressed and teary. I wanted to imagine something, anything, that had some delight in it, that wasn't defined by hatred or uncertainty. Just one good thing.

Photo: Clemente de Muro for Oh Comely issue 28.

As the train pulled up to the platform, it came to me: I started thinking about how much I enjoyed it when I poured water from the washing up bowl into the sink, and the bowl floated around like a boat. It was small and silly, but I felt better for the mental image. It reminded me that even when times were difficult, my days were still dotted with moments that brought me pleasure. Although their slightness made them easy to overlook, that was also the very thing that made them special. For a brief interlude, instead of fretting about what was happening in the world, I was overwhelmed by thoughts of green ink, independent bookshops, David Attenborough, kissing under streetlamps, and the way sunblock smells precisely like summer.

I knew that I didn't want to let it go. I could either forget about these fragments or try to share them. By the time I arrived at my destination I'd decided to opt for the latter. There was only one meaningful home for this, of course: if Oh Comely stands for anything, it's that there is joy in liking things. Since then I have tweeted every day at 13:00, and will continue to do so until someone changes the account password and confiscates my mouse and keyboard.

In writing these notes, the greatest pleasure – other than honing my own wonder-noticing skills – has been relinquishing the space to friends, family, readers, members of the Oh Comely team, or anyone else with a good suggestion. What's encouraging about it is that the same seemingly idiosyncratic concepts keep coming up: I like the idea that there are all of these splendid things in our lives that feel incredibly specific, but are actually universal. In a country that has felt alarmingly divided of late, it's cheering to know that at least we all enjoy remembering that we've made a cup of tea, and finding that it's now at the perfect temperature.

Follow us on Twitter to read our daily #onegoodthing at 13:00.

So long, farewell to 16mm film

The visual artist Tacita Dean wrote an interesting piece in the Guardian last week about Deluxe buying the London-based Soho Film Laboratory, and how as a result they will no longer be processing 16mm film. It’s worth a read. Dean focuses on the effect this will have on artists such as herself, but I’d argue that there’s another group that also thrives on 16mm: film students.

The appeal of digital for film schools is understandable: it’s cheaper for the course runners, and is easier to use for the students. Speaking as a former film student myself, the first 16mm films that one makes inevitably end up looking like bawdy British sex comedies from the 1970s. It’s depressing.

However, the value in 16mm is not in the picture quality (although it can look gorgeous, actually) but what’s gained from the process of using it. There’s a horrible sinking feeling that accompanies the knowledge that you have more footage left to film than stock left to film it with, and it’s one of the most valuable things a film student can learn. Not only does it force you to be economical, but it teaches you to be creative and decisive. What is the most efficient way of telling this story? How do you want to shoot it? These are things you can’t learn when it’s possible to leave the camera running all day.

If British Cinema in the 2020s is bloated and unwieldy then this decision by Deluxe can be pinpointed as its genesis. Dean has started a small campaign of letter-writing and has created an online petition; if you’re interested in signing, its online here.

Adult Life Skills: An interview with writer-director Rachel Tunnard

The protagonists of debut films sometimes resemble their creators, but in keeping with Rachel Tunnard's impassioned advocacy of collaboration, the editor-turned-director states that her lead character Anna in Adult Life Skills is a combination of herself and two of her actors, Jodie Whittaker and Rachael Deering. The inspiration for the film – a sensitive comedy-drama about a bereaved twin living in her mum's shed – came from a holiday the three friends took together in 2009, where they commiserated over how rarely they saw women like them believably represented on screen. While Rachel herself has never suffered such a loss, at 29 she found herself in a similar morass of late twenties confusion, moving back into her parents' house “like a bloody teenager.” The experience was one of many to feed into the screenplay: “There's lots of stuff in there that I've taken from different areas of my life,” she explains. “You patch them together until it feels like a cohesive world.” Ahead of its release in cinemas today, we spoke to Rachel about making the film.

Do you think Anna would be experiencing the same existential panic if she hadn't lost her twin? How much is her lack of direction tied to her grief?

I think if you're somebody who's creative you can have a little bit of a crisis around the end of your twenties. You might have done an artsy degree and you imagine that you're going to work in the arts and get an Oscar or whatever, and then suddenly you're 30 and it hasn't quite worked out the way you thought it was going to. Your parents are looking at you wondering is this ever really going to work out. Potentially Anna would have had an early mid-life crisis anyway, but I was interested in twin loss because it manifests itself differently to normal grief. It provokes an identity crisis and in my work I like to explore big existential ideas in a really lowbrow way.

Film production notes are usually very staid and formulaic, but the ones for Adult Life Skills are covered in irreverent annotations by you. They have the same handmade quality as Anna's various projects in the film. Where does that impulse come from?

It's how I present everything really, mainly because I can't use Photoshop. I draw stuff and then I take a photo and that's how I've always done it. As an editor you get sent statements by directors and I always find them really dry. But the main reason it came about is because the credits says “A film by Rachel Tunnard” and I completely hate it. All the way through the production I said I didn't want that credit, and in the end my agent pointed out that it was something her male clients actually ask for. It seemed really arrogant. Even though I've done loads of jobs on this it's a collaboration between so many different people. It's our film, so I wanted a chance to add the words “and everyone else.”

Are small creative endeavours a useful outlet when you're working on one large project like this film?

I just do all of that stuff without thinking about it. My husband and I write pep talks to each other which are nonsense, and I started doing this thing called Tunnard Tasks, where I made my mum, dad and brother do a task every month, like write a limerick. My parents begrudgingly do them when I ask but it's really interesting to see what my 68-year-old dad writes in a limerick about our house growing up. I can't stop it. The film is one part of that continual amalgamation of crap.

Before making Adult Life Skills you directed a short called Emotional Fusebox that you've described as being a “pilot” version of the film. How did it come about?

The Adult Life Skills script was getting some attention from the BFI and Creative England but I hadn't directed anything. They asked if I wanted to direct it and I said no, so they suggested all these other people and I kept saying I don't know, I don't know. Somebody told me if I didn't direct it then I had no right to complain about the fact that there are so few female film-makers, and they were right. But before we received the money to do the film I had to prove I was going to be able to direct it, so I wrote a short film based on the characters.

Was it a good exercise?

Absolutely, because I wasn't 100% sure I wanted to do it. I knew that I liked editing and writing, but I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy directing. I'd never considered it before. Rachael Deering who plays Fiona in the film said it was like when we were at uni and used to make projects together, and I saw it a bit like that too. We were just going to make something and it could be shit or it could be alright, but we were going to have a go regardless.

So did you enjoy directing in the end?

Yes! I loved it. I felt very secure with the cast and the crew. I'd worked with a lot of them before and we were careful in trying to put a crew together that would all get on with each other. I was adamant that people had to be positive and friendly and have a good sense of humour, because low budget film-making is like going into battle. It's tough and you need to be surrounded by people who really care about it and want to do it. When we were making the selections for heads of department there was a pressure to choose the most experienced person we could possibly get, whereas I felt it was much more important to get the one who cared the most.

Did you find that making a low-budget film gave you more creative freedom? Was it important to have that sort of autonomy?

It depends on what you want to do. I'm in a relatively privileged position to have written, directed and edited a film, and what that means is that whether you like it or not it's got a distinctive style and feel. I'm not particularly interested in taking the big money and having no control – I'd much rather have less money and more creative freedom. But then I'd also really like a massive house with a water slide from my bedroom into a swimming pool.

Adult Life Skills is in cinemas now. You can read Jason's interview with its lead actor, Jodie Whittaker, in issue 31 of Oh Comely, also out now.

The east end film festival

As festivals go, the East End Film Festival is one of the shaggier. The problem is, it finds itself caught between two stools: it’s both a festival celebrating East London filmmaking and a film festival that happens to be based in East London.

The programme is dotted with things that have only a notional connection to the East London area, such as its gala screening of the documentary The Libertines - There Are No Innocent Bystanders.

There are also seemingly random events, such as a screening of Taxi Driver “presented” by Adrian Utley from Portishead, or a screening of the director’s cut of Ken Russell’s The Devils.

Either would be a treat to go and see, but what’s the connection? Perhaps the randomness of it all is meant to reflect the idiosyncratic nature of the East End, but it’s hard to not flick through the festival programme and wish there was a bit more shape.

What separates a film festival from being a collection of interesting films to being something truly special, is a sense of there being a curatorial impulse - the idea that the screened films can illuminate things about each other by their presence together.

This doesn’t mean that the festival isn’t filled with worthwhile films and events, but I can’t imagine someone seeing a programmed afternoon by Guillemotsduring the Camden Crawl feeling inclined to check out the strong Romanian strand in the Festival’s European section, or vice versa.

You could do either and still have a great time, of course, but you might not feel like you’re a part of something. Sometimes that’s enough, if you see a good film. But perhaps a great film festival is one where you see a bad one and that’s still okay.

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.

An interview with director hirokazu kore-eda

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

An interview with guy pearce

Over three decades of a highly successful acting career Guy Pearce has avoided being typecast by enthusiastically pursuing an array of different roles, from bombastic drag queens to vengeful amnesiacs to self-righteous detectives. Ahead of the release of tense dystopian Australian drama The Rover, in which he plays a violent, taciturn ex-soldier opposite Robert Pattinson, we sat down with Guy to talk about his character in the film and his open-minded approach to career.

Was The Rover difficult to shoot? You spend a lot of it with flies all over your face.

I do! It wasn't tough really. I love being in the Outback. It's so fascinating and evocative and unusual. I get so much out of being there. Also we were making a very interesting movie. I think anything that is difficult, you either take it on or you try and forget about it. It felt like the flies and the heat just added to the experience and to the look of the film. It was probably tougher for Rob. It's funny – every Aussie movie I do out in the desert there are always a couple of English actors going, “Fucking flies! My god!” Terrance Stamp or Ray Winstone or John Hurt or Rob Pattinson, all suffering.

Your character Eric doesn't speak a great deal and there isn't much detail given about his life. How did you approach playing him?

That was tricky in the beginning, and not because of the lack of dialogue. I really needed to understand who he used to be, where emotionally this character had gotten to by the time we meet him. I knew I was going to say yes to doing the film – I love David Michôd and his work, and was honoured to be asked to be the lead – but I nearly said no a few times. I couldn't figure out who the guy was. So I forced David to ask some real questions about the character. I was trying to get a sense of the personality, because that's what you play when you perform a character.

I remember talking to somebody on a job once and I said “I'm trying to understand the personality of this character”, and the guy said to me, “Well, he was very wealthy and he lost all his money and he had to steal...” But that wasn't his personality, that was just what had happened to him. Is he nervous, is he anxious, is he confident? That's the stuff that I'm interested in. That's what you need to play a role. When we got close to shooting, David started to talk about the animal that Eric had become, this survivalist creature that he'd been stripped down to, and after that I felt like I was really able to get my claws into it.

There are very violent moments in the film, but it isn't like Eric snaps: that violence is an underlying presence, always there in him.

He's beyond the point of snapping. He's already snapped. I think he's given up on himself. He's just left everything behind of who he was morally and ethically. So it was an interesting character to play because you're looking at a ghost of somebody.  It's not until we start to see the subtle development of the relationship with Rob's character that things start to bubble up to the surface again.

The film purposefully never fully articulates any of this, though, does it?

That's right. It's not very evident, and that's why I went through that process with David to try and have these questions answered. But I feel as an audience member, what you haven't been explicitly given in regards to motivation or plot or character development is all there in the tone. As long as there's a logic behind it then it doesn't need to all be explained. I think a lot of films go too far the other way. All the time they're asking “Are you still with me? Are you still with me? Are you still with me?” Whereas what's great about David is that he says “This is the story I'm telling and how I'm going to tell it. Keep up.” That's a brave way for a film-maker to be.

It seems like you actively go for roles which are more complex, which often means characters who aren't entirely sympathetic. What has been your thinking behind that?

I always just go for what's interesting to me at the time. There's no conscious decision about structuring it in any kind of way. You just take the best of what's in front of you, and sometimes you might take something that you wouldn't have a year ago, or ten years ago, depending on how you're feeling about yourself and what you're going through. I feel like I'm always changing. I always want to explore and open up to other things. The industry's tough, though. It's a tough machine to become part of and not feel like you're being swept up in it. Standing your ground is tricky, but I've managed to do it, I think, much to the disappointment of my many agents.

You've been a professional actor for almost 30 years. Do you feel like there's anything that you haven't done yet but want to?

Absolutely! There are seven billion people in the world. That's a lot of stories to tell. A lot of different characters to play and a lot of exploring to be had. I really like to respond to what the universe is offering up. It's important for me to be surprised and to respond really spontaneously to something. Even if I have questions and have to go through a process of talking to the director, that initial “Oooh!” has still got to be there. If it's not then there's no point in doing it because then I'll be two months into a film wondering why I'm there.

I imagine that's especially the case with bigger films, where you work on them for ages and then have to spend months doing promotion.

Yes, of course, and sometimes films lose their steam. You might jump on board something because it takes your fancy and then half way through you feel like it's not being realised the way you wanted. And that's okay. That's just the way it is. As long as I'm reacting to what I understand to be the fire in me then that's all that I can do, really. I know I give my best performances when I do that.

It took a while to understand that about myself because I got into a situation where suddenly there were all these opportunities and I felt I had to make hay while the sun shines, and one agent was telling my to do one film and then another agent was telling me to do another. I know that's a first-world problem, but it was overwhelming. I think, though, that in order to follow a path and carve out some sort of longevity you've got to understand why you're doing things and what it is you're getting out of them, as well as when you're doing your best and what your limitations are. Luckily I feel like I've done a pretty decent job of understanding that over the years. I may not have as big of a career as other people might have but I'm pretty happy. It works for me. 

The Rover is out now in UK cinemas. 

An interview with director guy myhill

Among the reasons that many debut film-makers are drawn to coming-of-age stories is that adolescence is a defining, universal experience, the heightened emotions of which make it naturally suited to drama. In addition, such narratives provide the opportunity to create a work that is fiercely personal without necessarily being autobiographical. The danger, however, is that the path is already well-trodden

With that in mind, what distinguishes writer-director Guy Myhill's first feature The Goob from other entries in this overfamiliar category is its strong sense of place. Shot with a mix of professional and non-professional actors in rural Norfolk, the film depicts a region that is both dreary and dreamy: a deprived fenland made up of lonely transport cafés, transient farm work and amateur stock car races. Although his subject is the wiry, guileless 16-year-old Goob (Liam Walpole), Guy is equally interested in Goob's fraught mother (Sienna Guillory) and her bullying beet-farming boyfriend Gene Womack (Sean Harris). The film becomes a study of the three characters and their inevitable reckoning: as Goob is exposed to positive external influences he is brought into direct conflict with Womack, who represents everything he wants to leave behind. Ahead of its release we spoke to Guy about making the film.

You've been working in the industry for a long time. Why did you choose this story for your first feature?

The starting point was a documentary I did on the stock car scene in Norfolk. There's something about that world that I really like: these old men and their cars, going around and around and around, stuck. I was also aware of  migrant workers in the area. I know their habits and some people who work in that business. I felt there was a spectacle to be had from both of those different set-ups and then it was really a question of marrying into that some kind of drama.

Contemporary Norfolk is an area that is rarely depicted on screen. Was that part of the appeal of setting the film there?

Definitely. The project came through a film initiative called iFeatures who funded it with the BBC and the BFI, and they were looking for specific regional stories. This particular story seemed to chime with that. I don't think there's anywhere in the UK that looks like Norfolk. It's really unique. There's this flatness you don't see anywhere else. It's like filming the sea; you don't really have to try. It's just there, all consuming, all powerful. I liked the idea of setting an intimate drama against this huge great backdrop. I think it's a land full of secrets. It's got a lawless quality.

What are the biggest challenges of making a film on a relatively low budget?

Time is the priceless commodity. We shot it in about 24 days so everybody at the end was absolutely shattered, because there were days and nights going on too. It was the little things: a car battery would go down, so you're in the middle of bloody nowhere waiting for a replacement, but that can take two hours. I guess you can't control what you can't control, though.

Liam Walpole who plays Goob was street cast. What had you been looking for when casting him?

Liam's got this strange quality, and his movements are quite gangly. He looks like he's part David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, part Mr Spock. He doesn't entirely belong. He's a very different man to Sean Harris, or to the actor who plays his brother who is much more of a macho sort of lad. Liam offered us this otherworldliness which is what I wanted. When we found him it was just brilliant.

While Goob is Liam's first role, actors like Sean Harris and Sienna Guillory are well established in the field. Did you work with them differently as a director?

What was great about Sean and Sienna is that they knew I wanted to bring in people like Liam who had never performed before. They appreciated the authenticity we were bringing in – the Norfolk dialect is very hard to pull off if you're not from there. What I got from both of them wasn't just generosity of time but incredible support in working with people who hadn't done anything like this before. What it generated was a real sense of togetherness. Sienna came up a week before we were due to shoot and we spent time with Liam, not doing scenes from the story exactly but improvising, trying to foster a bond.

The relationship between Goob's mother and Womack is on the verge of being abusive. How did you envision Sienna's character felt about the situation?

It's hard for her. Is she trapped? Yes she is. I think she'd been single too long. None of this backstory we wanted to share directly. We wanted to be quite impressionistic with it but I think it's a common experience in the sense that a lot of women or men with children who haven't been in a relationship for a while will often neglect their kids for the sake of a new partner. In Sienna's case, Mum, in my mind she'd been single for a long time, desperate to hang on to this bloke who's not a good fit, who puts her kids' lives in jeopardy but will ignore it for this need of a partner.

Do you think Womack is a bad man or an unhappy one?

Both. He's trying to do the best he can but he's coming from a bad place. Early in the film he humiliates a character when he could have killed him, so he's holding back. He's got that handbrake on. He's not a good man but he's trying. There's an attempt to be a father figure but he can't pull it off properly, and things spin out of control. I don't think he is happy. He's unfulfilled. There's a scene when he's outside the caff and he's at the roadside and these cars are moving backwards and forwards. He turns and sees Goob by a window looking out, and I think it dawns on him that Goob is going to have a different life to his, which is one of repetition. He knows he's stuck.

The Goob is released in U.K. cinemas on 29th May. 

How to invent an imaginary library

In issue 14, we featured the designs of four trashy genre paperbacks that never existed. Their inventor, Jason Ward, describes his winding journey through the throw-away fiction of the Twentieth Century.

The Silent Tomorrow is a 1950s sci-fo novel. Design by Dani Lurie.

The idea for An Imaginary Library grew out of a conversation about the covers of old books. There are scores of long-forgotten genre novels that feature incredible art on their covers, often of a much higher level than the writing within.

Books that once cost 3’6 have artwork that you’d gladly have on your wall: the spare, chilling design of 70s “airport” horror novels, the alien landscapes and abstract imagery of 1950s science fiction, and the lurid sexiness of hardboiled detective novels. Dismissed at the time as populist and disposable, their existence provided an opportunity for talented artists to sell their work, and for some truly awful ones to prosper as well.

But instead of highlighting books that already existed, we decided to invent some of our own.

Death Carries a Spade is a hard-boiled 40s thriller. Illustration by David Doran.

I wanted all of the text to be completely original and yet seem authentic; my intention was for the books to feel as if you might actually find them in a second-hand bookshop.

The internet was useful, but it was rare to find examples of back covers, which are as fascinating in their own way as the front covers, loaded with hyperbolic quotes from long-defunct publications. My favourite was from The Green Odyssey by Philip Jose Farmer, described as a “Wonderful, lusty and roistering adventure…!”

Wanting to see the books properly, I spent several long afternoons joyfully searching real secondhand bookshops, the kind where the owners have non-ironic beards and the books are kept in bins.

Boot Hill is a 70s airport horror book. Design by Fab Gorjian. 

What I found most striking during my research was how many conventions there were for each genre, like the endless blurbs of detective novels and their tendency to be re-released again and again under completely unrelated titles. As if to compound the sense of disposability, hardboiled covers were pretty much interchangeable, usually with a scantily-clad woman either seducing or being threatened.

Even though the books themselves were churned out, they were created in a very specific way and with very specific language: it’s a given that a science fiction publisher would be called something different to a horror publisher, for example, but even the types of names of the authors (often pseudonymous) were different. Everything about them was designed solely to sell more copies, and yet from that naked pursuit of commerce some great art was made, wonderful, lusty and roistering.

Rain On Its Way is a piece of 30s modernist fiction. Illustration by Naomi Elliott.

An interview with rich moore

Considering that most new films are released on a Friday, it seems like a perfect time to think about movies: our new series Film Friday will gather reviews, interviews and general features about some of the most interesting upcoming films. This week: an interview with Rich Moore, director of Disney's new 3D animated film, Wreck-it Ralph.

If you were to make a list of your favourite episodes of The Simpsons, it’s likely that several of them would be directed by Rich Moore. Involved with the programme since its pilot, Rich was an integral part of the show’s glorious, peerless first decade. Rich followed The Simpsons by becoming the supervising director of Futurama – directing many of its best episodes too – and has now directed his first feature, Wreck-It Ralph.

Starring John C. Reilly as the eponymous Ralph, Wreck-It Ralph is about a villain from an arcade game who dreams of becoming a hero. Like his television work, the film is visually inventive, densely-layered, and as sweet as it is funny. To coincide with Wreck-It Ralph’s release, we spoke to Rich about making the film.

How did you first get involved with the project?

Disney had entertained the idea of a video game movie for about 15 years – there had been at least two other versions of the film that didn’t take off. When I joined Disney in 2008 John Lasseter said to me, “We’ve wanted to do this for a long time and no-one has cracked it. Do you think you’d like to take a shot?” I thought, well, yes!

I asked John if he wanted me to take what had been done before and make it work, and he said to start with the idea of the life of video game characters – what that means to me and what I wanted to do with it. I didn’t want to look at the work that had been done previously because I didn’t want to be influenced; if they never really got off the ground then I wanted to make a fresh start and build something from the ground up.

So many films based on video games are overly sombre, whereas what’s refreshing about Wreck-It Ralph is how fun it is. Was that a deliberate choice?

I always found that comedy was a big part of the culture of video games – I grew up playing them with my friends, laughing and joking. Video games movies always seem so grim, trying to tell these really heavy stories and taking themselves too seriously. They set stories in the world of a particular game like it’s any other setting, ignoring the nature of what games are. My approach to it was to own the fact that these are game worlds and that the characters within them know where they work.

What was it like to spend four years working on one film after a career of working in television?

On The Simpsons I’d do maybe four episodes a season, so over four years that’s about eight hours of animation, as opposed to a film’s 90 minutes. On a film you’re really concentrating on those 90 minutes and trying to make them the best they can be. But the longer schedule was great, actually. Television’s one of those worlds where you feel like you’re always behind, even before you’ve started. “You’ve really got to go fast because you’ve got time to make up.” “But this is the first day!” We were always sprinting, trying to get to the end of the line before the clock ran out. Wreck-It Ralph was more of a marathon. You have the luxury of letting things breathe and looking at them from a different angle and trying different things.

The film is littered with nods to video games. How did you decide which games you wanted to reference?

It was all based on the characters that we loved. What were the ones we grew up with? Which ones were appropriate for jokes within the movie? There were definitely favourites of mine, since I really loved playing games as a kid and a teenager, but I didn’t want it to all be coming out of my head. I went to a lot of the crew at Disney and asked them. We even put up a board in our break area that said “Which characters do you feel need to be in a video game movie – who could you not live without?” We got a great cross-section of different people’s opinions. There were hundreds of different characters suggested. 

Until now you’ve worked almost exclusively with traditional animation. Was it difficult to transition to CG?

It’s like working with another tool. The fundamentals of animation don’t change: the same language that I used on The Simpsons and Futurama, talking to animators in Korea, is the exact same language that I used talking to CG animators in Burbank. For me as a director, I would be communicating with animators the same way if I was directing claymation. The job of a director is conveying emotion and clarity in a scene, and to that end the Simpsons and Wreck It Ralph are not that different. You’re trying to tell a compelling story with characters that the audience invests in and cares about, and set that story in a world that feels like ours but is fantastic. That’s The Simpsons, that’s Futurama, and hopefully that’s Wreck-It Ralph too.

An interview with director steve james

Roger Ebert was perhaps the most prominent American film critic of all time, known not just for the 46 years he spent writing reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times but also for his popular and enduring television programme At the Movies. After complications from cancer treatment necessitated the removal of his lower jaw, Roger spent the final years of his life unable to eat or speak, and yet his writing diversified and flourished during this time. In Steve James' absorbing new documentary Life Itself, based on Roger's memoir, the film-maker explores his extraordinary story while filming him during what turned out to be the last few months of his life.

Ahead of its release in cinemas, Steve sat down with us to talk about the film's complicated road to production.

When you're making a documentary about a man who co-hosted a television show for decades, published scores of books and reviewed almost every film that came out over nearly half a century, where do you start in your research?

The memoir itself was the template. It was an incredible bible for the film, and inspired in so many ways. It helped to organise his life and tell me what was important to him, which guided me towards who to interview. He devotes chapters to significant film-makers like Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog but also Bill Nack, his friend from college, and John McCue, his newspaper buddy. That said, he doesn't really talk about his film criticism in the book. He excerpts some of his profile writing, but not a single review. He doesn't talk about his show much either – there's just a simple chapter devoted to it. So there were things that I wanted to do more on and in that regard it also led me to other sources. There was a lot to get my arms around.

In addition to being a prolific writer, Roger also had a storied life. How did you decide how best to weigh your coverage of it?

After I read the memoir I knew I wanted as much as reasonably possible for the film to be a comprehensive biography of Roger's life, taking account of his critical place in cinema, his impact and what he contributed, as well as his remarkable personal life and journey. I wanted it all, but we weren't going to make a three-hour film or a mini-series, either of which we could have easily done. Instead, I wanted it to be no longer than two hours and as comprehensive as it could be in that time. That meant picking and choosing. There were lots of things we could have dealt with that we didn't, but I feel good about the choices we made. I think we hit most of the significant milestones in his life, but hopefully not in a scattershot way.

One of the most affecting things about Life Itself is how you show Roger handling the prospect of death with dignity and grace. Was that important for you to capture?

Absolutely. When we started the film we had no idea that he would pass away four months in. That just wasn't in our thinking. His health was more unstable than it had been and he was growing increasingly fragile, but he was otherwise fine. The memoir is written from the perspective of someone late in life who has been through a lot and is reflecting, so I loved the idea of going back and forth between the present and the past and finding interesting ways to do that. I wanted to film Roger going to the cinema, writing, travelling, seeing friends – even though he could no longer speak he'd still throw dinner parties and sit at the head of the table. I was going to show what a vigorous life he continued to live despite all he'd been through, and in that we would get some sense of his perseverance, his courage, his good humour in the face of everything. All of that is in the movie, it's just we didn't get to film it. We ended up shooting him largely in a hospital and a rehab institute, but those earlier things became far more poignant because you know that he is dying.

There's a moment in the documentary where Roger writes that it would be a major lapse if you didn't depict the full reality of what he was going through, but was there anything you were personally worried about showing on film?

I was initially concerned when I first got to the hospital. If you look at any pictures of Roger in public after the start of his health problems he was either wearing a black turtleneck or a white scarf wrapped around his neck. He was always very stylish, but it was strategic as well. When I walked into the hospital room for the first day of actual filming he was asleep and his jaw was hanging down. There was nothing there. It was quite pronounced and I remember thinking, “I don't know how people are going to handle this.” But I filmed it, he woke up, smiled, and his eyes lit up. I put that early in the movie to let people see what he was going through and allow them to feel that inevitable discomfort. My hope was that they'd have the same experience I had where it stops being shocking – you see past the illness and see him. You're looking into his eyes, not down his throat. For a man who was dying, he made this easy. He was remarkably co-operative and engaged.

Memoirs are usually adapted for the screen as fictionalised accounts rather than as documentaries. What did you think a documentary could express about Roger's life that might have eluded a scripted feature?

Biopics are particularly hard to do because there's a tendency to want to tell everything, and trying to tell too much can work against the inherent drama of the storytelling. It can feel like a connect-the-dots presentation of a person's life – you're never in one place long enough to feel the deep significance of that moment in their life. You have the same potential hindrance in a documentary, but one of the advantages if the subject's alive is you have them there in flesh and blood, so who they are is communicated as much by their presence as by their important milestones. For example, if we were making the scripted biography of Roger's life, we probably wouldn't spend as much time as we did on his daily travails and him coping with his condition. You're not going to give up screen-time to illness when you could be showing him when he adapted Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, hanging out with Russ Meyer and big breasted women. But in a documentary you can get so much from observing simple moments in someone's life: the way they answer a question, or how they look at their wife.You see how they live.

Life Itself is out in UK cinemas today.

An interview with playwright alecky blythe

In 2006 the playwright Alecky Blythe was researching a new work set in a brothel when she heard news reports of an apparent serial killer murdering sex workers in Ipswich. One of the stage's most notable practitioners of verbatim theatre – a technique in which plays are constructed from the exact words of interviewees, including every “um” and “ah” – Alecky headed to the area to speak to local people about the events. The material she collected didn't make it into the play she'd been working on, but over the next few years she followed the story's difficult aftermath, paying particular attention to the residents of the street where the killer had lived as they formed new bonds. Working in collaboration with the composer Adam Cork, Alecky turned her interviews into something genuinely new: a verbatim musical.

Inventive, funny, moving and unsettling, London Road received ecstatic notices upon its debut at the National Theatre in 2011. Four years later, the film version is an equally distinctive presence on screen. Ahead of its release in cinemas on 12th June, and the stage version's NT Live premiere on 9th June, we sat down with Alecky to talk about verbatim theatre and the complicated process of adapting it for a new medium.

London Road is perhaps the first verbatim play to be adapted for film. Why do you think there's been a lag?

One of the main reasons is that verbatim is by its nature quite wordy because it's interview-based. A written play might naturally have more action, which film requires as a medium. One of the challenges in making verbatim theatre is finding dynamism. I'm always looking for situations that are active so that you don't just have actors sitting on chairs talking, which is why I try to collect my interviews not after an event but as it's going on. London Road the show had a lot of movement compared to some verbatim, so it became a matter of pushing that even further visually. It's a big step for producers to realise verbatim can work for film and be a better approach than a documentary, which would be cheaper.

Has your relationship to the work changed over time? As you return to the text, does your increasing distance from it change how you see those events?

I think it probably does. It's easier to take some creative, imaginative leaps with the material because it didn't just happen last week. Things become a bit fuzzy. I have notes but you don't remember everything, and that allows you to be more free with moving it on in another direction. It's a good thing as long as you know the truth of what happened and the story you're trying to tell and you never deviate from that too much. If you take it too far out of context it breaks it.

Do you feel a sense of obligation towards your interview subjects?

Yes, it's a really big responsibility. I felt it even just in the very beginning telling them this was the first musical piece I'd worked on. It was difficult to explain because there wasn't really a template. It's not Mamma Mia!, it's not an opera, it's not atonal. By that point they knew me quite well and trusted that I would look after the work – I was taking it in an unusual direction but one that would help tell the story rather than get in the way of it. Later, the director Rufus Norris, Adam and I went to Ipswich before we made the film with pictures of the shooting locations, new cast members, all that kind of thing, to try to explain what we were doing. I thought it was important to do that to the people we were representing. I'm in touch with them a lot. If the work is active they need to be kept abreast of what's happening. It's their lives, which are ongoing and obviously the film will now have an impact on them. They've been brilliant, but I have sleepless nights about whether they'll be happy.

What first drew you to the residents of London Road as your main interview subjects?

Although I know why journalism is sometimes mentioned – I work in quite a journalistic way – I just try to come to a subject that people think they already know and shed new light on it. When I discovered what the residents were doing after the murders, I felt this was something that hadn't been talked about. We knew about the tragedies, which was a story that was clearly told in the media, but not the fallout. There were people who weren't in the eye of the storm whose lives had been affected too. Obviously this was to a much lesser degree than the family members of the victims, but I saw there were wider repercussions in the community that seemed to resonate. I was compelled by this, and these people wanted to share their experiences with me. It seemed like a story that wasn't being told.

Your subjects in London Road are the sort of people who usually only pop up in vox pops on the news to give a bit of colour.

That's right, exactly. They're never the centre of the story. It wasn't that I heard about the murders and thought, “Oh yes, I'm going to go and make a piece about the people who were affected by it.” It was very much an organic journey in terms of working out what the story was. I was paired with Adam in a musical theatre workshop run by the National Theatre Studio and I took this material that I'd collected from Ipswich, just as clay for us to work with, to experiment with the form. What we found was that the music seemed to help create this mood of fear that I remembered from Ipswich at the time. I thought the subject and form seemed to work together, and then not long after the workshop it was announced that the trial was going to be in Ipswich rather than at the Old Bailey, which brought the story back to life in the town. As the real life events happened I started to shape my piece around that.

Are certain sorts of stories are better for this approach than others? Your play about the 2011 Hackney riots, Little Revolution, also uses different voices to explore a community in crisis. Do you think that's something that verbatim is particularly suited for?

I think it is. Verbatim is very good at collecting shared voices and depicting different opinions. If there's an event, like a protest for example, it gives you a setting to go into. You can find the story from there. You could maybe say that all of my plays are about communities of sorts, even though I'm not conscious of it at the time. So there isn't really a protagonist in London Road; the community is the protagonist.

London Road premieres on 9th June via NT Live and is on general release on 12th June. Visit londonroadfilm.co.uk for more information.

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

Eating a ham roll was the happiest moment of my childhood

In practice, my life began at the age of five, when my family moved from Scotland to Wales. The memories before the move are like a dream you can barely recall the next day: crossing a road, a tricycle, a policeman, my mother picking me up from nursery.

Distinct and clear, the move shook me into existence. My mother drove my sister in the family car, whilst my father drove myself and my brother in a hired lorry along with all of our possessions. I can still remember how it felt like an adventure, my brother and I bundled up under a duvet as we drove all night.
We made a handful of trips back north to visit my half-brother Scott. Travelling again with my brother and father, we would leave after school on a Friday and not arrive until late that night.

To my mind, the journeys were endless, and wonderfully so: strings of motorway lights marking our way, my father’s house music thrumming the car windows as single songs lasted for what felt like hours. My father drove lorries around the country for a time and he knew where all the best motorway services were—always, coincidentally, the ones with the best arcade machines. Each trip was a holiday, was a whole world.

When I was young it felt terribly important to maintain lists of the things I liked. Until the world became too complicated for such categorisation, it was essential that I knew the order of my favourite films, songs, jumpers and places to sit, for how else would I know the appropriate amount to enjoy them? I can say with some certainty, therefore, that the best moment of my youth took place in a service station.

The memory that lingers was the first trip to visit Scott. It was the first time I’d returned north since we’d moved, and my time in Wales had been made difficult by shyness and an impenetrably thick Scottish accent. In the middle of the night, we stopped at a motorway services to fill up on petrol. Thus, the best moment of my childhood was spent half-asleep in the back of my father’s car, as he passed out rolls wrapped in tin foil. The options were cheese or ham. I chose ham, and Stupid Girl by Garbage played on the radio as I ate my roll. As my father opened the door to get out and fill up the car, I felt the coldness of the night, and understood that it was warm inside the car. The song ended, he paid for the petrol, and we drove off again. That’s it, the whole thing.

When I think back now to my childhood I can think of lots of experiences that seem as special as that one and certainly more notable, but that moment in the petrol station is the one I consistently upheld as being the best, remaining vivid in my mind for years after. In a life filled with good and terrible things, triumphs and filling out forms, it would be foolish to claim it was the best moment of my life. But it was perfect and unencumbered: the back seat of my father’s car, a ham roll, and then moving again, waves of orange light flooding us for just a moment, over and over again.

Friendship against all odds

From its electrifying opening sequence onward, in which two teams of teenage girls face off in an American football match, every moment of Girlhood pulses with life and colour and youth.

Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s thoughtful yet boisterous film follows shy sixteen-year-old Marieme (Karidja Touré) as she joins a gang of girls in her economically-disadvantaged Parisian banlieue. Neglected by school, parental figures and their community, the quartet rely upon each other to weather their oppressive, underprivileged circumstances.

We spent a day in Paris with Karidja Touré and Assa Sylla, and what follows is an extract of pictures from Liz Seabrook's afternoon with them. The full photoshoot and interview with director Céline Sciamma will be published in the forthcoming Oh Comely issue 25.

Girlhood is released in UK cinemas today.

All photos by Liz Seabrook.

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.

An interview with domnhall gleeson

While Frank is ostensibly inspired by screenwriter Jon Ronson’s youthful experience of playing keyboards in the band of Frank Sidebottom (the comedy persona of the late Chris Sievey), the film eschews direct autobiography in order to explore ideas about outsider art, mental illness and ambition. Using the basic concept of a frontman who sports a papier-mâché head at all times, the film is an intense, weird, often very funny character study of two men: Frank (Michael Fassbender), an emotionally damaged yet brilliant musician who lives life “in the furthest corners”, and Jon (Domnhall Gleeson), whose crushing averageness makes him both attracted to and envious of his innately talented bandmate. Ahead of Frank's release, we spoke to Domnhall about his work on the film and what it’s like acting opposite a papier-mâché head.

Jon is portrayed very sympathetically at the start of the film, but the depiction of him evolves throughout. Did that influence how you played him?

For me, when I read the script I had empathy with Jon until the end. I really delighted in him being a total dick sometimes. I always think that if somebody’s entertaining you’ll continue to want to watch them. Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood is a nightmare of a man, but there’s not a second you don’t want to watch him because his moral corruption is compelling. So I felt like as long as we could keep people laughing, and as long as Jon kept trying to do things with his life, then no matter how horrible those things were you would want to watch him. Being liked by the audience isn’t really here nor there.

He often makes the wrong decisions but you understand why.

Yeah, the others treat him horribly. And he’s not talented. At a certain point you just want to tell him “Look, you don’t have any talent!”, but he keeps trying. In a way, what else is he to do – just accept that he has no ability and give up? That’s not interesting. What you want to see is somebody struggle, and god help him he struggles hard.

How do you play mediocre?

You’ve got to be really careful how you phrase that question! It’s very easy. You make the character try as hard as he can and have what he does tell you that he’s not any good. The producers were really nice to give me songwriting credits for the terrible songs Jon sings at the start of the film, because I went in and made them up with the music guy. I knew they couldn’t be above a certain level and actually ended up revelling in how far I could push mediocre towards shit. Also, it helped that I’m not talented as a keyboardist: I learned keyboards specifically for this movie, so I was limited in that way too. My mediocrity was all there already, I just had to use it.

Your character is called Jon and the story is a fictionalised version of what happened when Jon Ronson joined Frank Sidebottom’s band. Did you bear the real Jon Ronson in mind at all?

Obviously there was the day when I considered if should I go down that route, but it was really clear that the film was inspired by the way Chris Sievey looked when he had the head on and by his spirit as opposed to his actual life or the songs he wrote. That’s why the film’s called Frank and why they have this character in the movie. You just leave everything else behind, I think. They wrote a character who isn’t anything like Jon Ronson, really, so I didn’t speak like him or behave like him. I just tried to do what would work for the script, and that was already difficult enough without throwing something else in on top of it.

It’s an obvious question to ask, but how difficult is it to act opposite someone when you can’t see their facial expressions? How did it affect your performance?

I guess that’s going to be the question, yes, and the problem is that the answer is probably slightly boring and unbelievable, which is that it didn’t feel weird except for when it was supposed to feel weird. The times when it’s supposed to feel strange in the film are when you really want to tell what Frank’s thinking and you just can’t because he chooses not to let you know. Michael was so expressive when he needed to be: he chose when to be exuberant or expressive and when not to be and in a way that’s the same as anybody else. We got into it really quickly, and he wore the head for quite a bit of the music rehearsals too so we got used to it before we arrived on set.

I’m guessing he wasn’t Method about it – he’d take the head off at the end of the day?

I think Michael is probably a bit mad but I don’t know if that was for the film or if that’s just him all the time. I guess I’ll find out the next time I meet him! I don’t know. But he took it off between takes, yeah. I just know that it was really fun because you don’t know what he’s going to do next, and I have a feeling that would be the case even if he wasn’t wearing a papier-mâché head.

What was the first thing that attracted you to the project?

Well, straight away when I read the script I thought it was really funny. I really like physical comedy and I hadn’t done much of it before on film. Mostly I liked the challenge of it. It’s one thing to write a story like this and another to actually put it in a film. How do you make all that madness into something which isn’t just a mess? I didn’t know how you do that, I really didn’t, but I felt if we managed it then it’d be the exact sort of film that I love, something strange and touching and big and odd.

It’s a film that’s unafraid of being weird, that doesn’t see weirdness as being a bad thing.

Yes, although I honestly don’t think that the film is trying to be weird; it’s just its sensibility. If you stay true to that sensibility it’ll become its own thing. It’ll have its own grammar, its own way of existing, and you’ll be able to have ridiculous sex in a hot tub or punch somebody full in the face or have some weird wrestling match, but also have scenes of full-on emotion. All that stuff is a gas, you know, playing dress up and putting on a holey costume and a big fake beard, it’s fucking great.

Jon is a departure from the other characters you’ve played in the past – is the opportunity to play different sorts of people part of the appeal of acting to you? You wouldn't want to be on a soap opera for thirty years playing the same character.

I’m sure other people do, but I don’t. It’s fun purpose-building a character for a movie and then turning up with him, and knowing you can do whatever you want with him because it will fit, because he suits the movie. And then to let it go and move on to the next one. It’s always scary, which is good. You want to be scared. Look at Michael’s career choices or Maggie Gyllenhaal’s career choices: they’re people that challenge themselves all the time. People talk about longevity like it’s all about what other people will give you but I think it’s also about keeping yourself interested and hungry as well, because if you play the same part over and over surely you’ll just get bored and hate your job. Your interest will drop. Variety is as much for yourself as for other people, and hopefully I’ll get to continue doing this for a while. Of course, you never know. I could be unemployed next year. But we keep our fingers crossed.

Frank is out now in UK cinemas