An interview with director desiree akhavan

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.

Interview with director of strawberry fields

Strawberry Fields is a film that feels woozy in the way that late summer often can. Emotions are heightened, stakes are raised, and caution is thrown to a mid-August wind.

The film follows a group of transient strawberry pickers as they muddle through their emotional problems amidst the beauty of the Kent countryside. Primarily a claustrophobic drama about the battle between Gillian (Anna Madeley) and her emotionally unbalanced sister name Emily (Christine Bottomley), Strawberry Fields focuses on issues of sexuality, family, and mental illness.

To coincide with its release on DVD, we spoke to writer-director Frances Lea about making the film.

Did the film have any direct inspiration?

I went strawberry picking once and there were three ex-cons and some Cambridge students and a small romance between two of those so there were many things that came together.

Photo: Catching the sun; Gillian (Anna Madeley) in Strawberry Fields.

Even though it’s set in Kent, it feels like another world. How did you try to achieve that dreamlike quality?

It was a very conscious decision to make the film feel timeless through the art direction and the costume, so you can’t quite place when it was made by the clothes or the cars or other objects. With the cinematography we focused on using handheld and slow motion and certain camera angles to get a sense of Gillian’s perspective. She has a peculiar and particular view of the world that’s also been distorted by her relationship with Emily. I wanted to distract the viewer, in the way that Gillian is distracted by the beautiful environment.

Did you feel a responsibility in how you portrayed mental illness? Obviously you want to make something dramatic and emotional but you’re dealing with conditions that people actually have as well.

That’s what I was trying to do with the script, balance the two: make it a dramatic story and also one that at its heart had a message I thought could be important to others, a universal point in it that other people would relate to. I was a writer in residence at Bedford prison for two years and I’ve worked with people who have special needs and I’ve also made a documentary about psychiatric hospitals. Over the years I’ve had a lot of interest in mental health and institutions and how they deal with people. In prisons now lots of people who should have been in institutional psychiatric care have slipped through the net and ended up in prison.

Photo: Sisters Gillian and Emily reconcile. The emotional drama surrounds their shared love interest in Kev.

You made Strawberry Fields for a very low budget in just 28 days. Are there benefits to that kind of compressed filmmaking?

Mostly I think it’s a really tough way to make a film. But the film was proving difficult to get made and funded, possibly because of the content, and maybe the remit of the scheme that financed it meant that they could take a risk.

They were actively looking for people with distinctive voices who couldn’t get their work made in the mainstream, I suppose that’s the benefit of making a film on this budget, because it got made and wouldn’t have otherwise, but it’s a very, very tough way to make a film. To make a quality film on that budget is difficult. But at least I made the film the way I wanted to make it. That’s definitely a big positive.

Photo: Gillian and Kev (Emun Elliott).

It looks very striking considering how little time you had.

We were very prepared for what we were looking to achieve, and worked very hard to make everything come together in the time we had. There were no accidents in the creation of the film, thankfully. We were amazingly lucky with the weather. It was one of the only months in the last eighteen where we had three weeks of glorious sunshine and then it rained after that. We had two or three days of horrible weather and those were the ones we weren’t filming in the fields, so we were blessed.

It was very important that it looked sumptuous because that was what was bigger than Gillian, what was taking her out of her shrunken world was this bigger picture, this beauty around her. I wanted it to seduce and entice her with that bigger world.

Strawberry Fields is released on DVD this week. Watch a trailer of the film at BBC Films.

Nebraska

By some distance, the best album cover of Bruce Springsteen’s long recording career is the one for his 1982 LP Nebraska. A stark black-and-white photograph taken from the window of a pick-up truck, the image depicts a flat, charnel landscape, divided only by a road that may as well be heading nowhere. As well as being a strong cover in itself, the photograph complements the spare acoustic recordings within--songs dealing with aimlessness and hardship amidst diminished expectations. It’s easy to imagine that if hadn’t already been used by Springsteen, the shot would have been ideal for the poster of Alexander Payne’s latest film, also called Nebraska.

Taking place in large part on the endless roads evoked by that image, the film follows aged, ornery recovering alcoholic Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) as he attempts to claim a million dollar prize promised in a piece of spurious junk mail. First seen lumbering along a stretch of highway trying to walk from Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska, Woody’s mind has flown off the thread, cast into a perpetual fug. After repeated unsuccessful interventions, his son David (Will Forte)--the definition of long-suffering – agrees to drive Woody to Nebraska himself. 

Payne’s greatest strength as a filmmaker is the way he creates empathy for his characters not in spite of their flaws, but because of them. Finding the grace in banal lives, he retains a fundamental compassion for his characters, understanding their circumstances even as he casts a clear-eyed gaze upon their personal failings. His protagonists, all layered studies in dissatisfaction, are met with warmth as well as arched eyebrows. This humanist approach is present throughout Nebraska: Woody, who on some level is aware that he hasn’t really won any money, is burrowing desperately into his own confusion to claim some meaning for his uninspiring life and failures as a father. He remains irascible and difficult, but his profound disappointment is both recognisable and deeply sympathetic. Woody’s knotty depiction has its roots in Bob Nelson’s understated script as well as Bruce Dern’s nuanced, enormously moving performance.

While Nebraska is littered with comedic moments, as well as a memorable turn from Stacy Keach as Woody’s old business partner, it’s the relationship between Woody and his son that forms the film’s emotional core. David, whose life is so indistinct that his girlfriend can’t even tell if they’re in a relationship, concedes readily to the futile task of transporting Woody not out of familial duty but to grasp a few days of distraction from an otherwise dreary existence. It’s refreshing to see Forte in such a weighty role, and his performance, all slumped shoulders and quiet exasperation, suggests a man felled by life yet unable to forsake his patient, Midwestern politeness.

As Payne carefully tends to the protagonists of his films, it’s not unusual to see smaller parts rendered with less complexity, employing minor characters entirely for narrative reasons or for the sake of a laugh. This fate befalls the extended Grant family that Woody and David– joined briefly by Woody’s wife Kate (June Squibb) and David’s local newsman brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk) – visit on their way to Lincoln. Unleavened by the empathy afforded to Woody and David, they’re portrayed with a superciliousness that hews towards the cruel.

David’s cousins suffer the harshest treatment, their conversational interests limited to how long it takes to drive specific distances. Once they come to believe that Woody is rich, the pair are depicted as spectacularly dim-witted and money-grubbing: if the film was animated then at some point dollar signs would surely appear in their eyes, accompanied by the ringing of cash registers. As in Payne’s previous film The Descendants, the vulgar avarice of distant family members is used as a way to unite the core family unit and remind them of their values. However, the consequence of this narrative decision is that a quartet of flawed, endearing humans are surrounded by problematic caricatures.

That the film espouses the same distrust of extended family as Payne’s last effort raises questions about the momentum of his work. As enjoyable as Nebraska is, there’s nothing in it that he hasn’t attempted before. As ever, Payne excels at creating a sense of place by identifying the mundane, swapping the suburban sprawls of Hawaii for the patio furniture and small talk of the Great Plains. With dissatisfaction as his key theme, he returns again and again to sad sack individuals in denial about their unhappiness. Woody, it could be argued, is just a slightly older version of Jack Nicholson’s character in About Schmidt, albeit one with a drinking problem and a cataract mind. Like Sideways and About Schmidt, his frustrations are brought to the surface via a meandering road trip--if you were to broaden the idea of a trip to include general long journeys, then the list of Payne’s films that use this strategy would also include The Descendants and Payne’s beautiful short 14e arrondissement, made for the uneven portmanteau film Paris, je t’aime.

Everything that Payne can do well as a filmmaker he does well here, but for someone who isn’t especially prolific his reliance on the same few tropes has the potential to make even well-constructed work feel like a retread. It isn’t Nebraska’s fault that it’s Payne’s sixth film rather than his debut, of course, but the endeavour is a little less impressive when held up against its overly-similar peers.

It’s arguable whether or not this familiarity is a problem. If a film is excellent--and Nebraska certainly is--does it matter if its creator has made it a few times already? Repetition can produce diminishing returns, but using the same motifs and techniques in different circumstances can also cast a new perspective on pet themes. Ultimately, perhaps, it depends upon the path you hope an artist’s career will follow: whether you want them to grow from each creative experience and venture towards uncertain new directions, or to keep doing the things they do best.

Considering Payne’s cool-yet-ultimately-sympathetic approach towards his characters, perhaps a similar way to look upon Nebraska would be to conclude that it isn’t derivative of his earlier films, but is instead a distillation of them. After the relatively exotic climes of Sideways and The Descendants, Payne returns to the state where his first three features were set and where he grew up. In doing so, he strips his work down to its elemental form: discarding not only the picturesque backdrops which softened his previous two films but the use of colour as well, all he has left to work with are those flat landscapes and endless roads that may as well lead nowhere. It’s from this desolate starting point that he can wholly focus on his enduring interest: unhappy people, trying to find a way to make their lives feel meaningful.

Nebraska in out now in the UK.

An interview with director charlie lyne

Agonisingly stitched together from the hundreds of teen movies that were made in a verdant period from 1995 to 2004, Beyond Clueless documents the topography of a lost world: a faded cinematic landscape of high school proms, illicit house parties, friendship cliques, fevered emotions, late-night swimming pool sex scenes and Ryan Phillippe.

Created by debut film-maker Charlie Lyne – a young journalist best known for creating the movie blog Ultra Culture – the documentary is an act of sustained film criticism as well a sensorial experience and heady blast of nostalgia, scored by the blissful indie-pop duo Summer Camp. We caught up with Charlie in the middle of a nationwide screening tour to talk about bringing the movies of his youth back to the screen.

How many films did you watch while researching and how many made it into the film?

In the end I looked at about 300 films and somewhere between 200 and 300 made it in. Early on I had ideas of cramming in every little thing but for various reasons a few couldn't make the cut. We had no clue it was going to balloon so much. When I set out I drew up a list of about 100 films from memory, but then I'd spend five minutes on Freddie Prinze Jr.'s Wikipedia page and discover 25 more that I had to watch, or I'd go to a party and get talking to someone and come home with an Amazon shopping basket's worth of stuff. Even now doing Q&As people bring films up – a guy last night asked why The Butterfly Effect wasn't included and I couldn't give a decent answer about how it slipped through the net. One of the good things about the genre at that time is that it was defined by hundreds of mid-level films rather than a small number of massive hits.

In that case did you feel you had to be rigorous with your criteria?

There were instances where we slightly broke our own rules, purely because there were some moments in those films that were perfect. We tried to be as broad as possible. I wasn't worried about the strict ages of the characters – they didn't have to be set in a high school or anything like that. We were just trying to make sure every film dealt in some way with adolescence, with characters who feel like they're half way between childhood and adulthood.

Do you think that the teen movies from this period are distinct from the ones that came in the 80s or the YA-derived films that came later?

Obviously there are preoccupations which are perennial. I'm sure 50 years from now you'll find exactly the same sorts of themes and ideas popping up, but I do think that the movies that we looked at, from the mid-90s to mid-00s, are a lot less monolithic than the ones from the previous generation. Despite certain tropes appearing again and again the sheer number of cinematic modes that film-makers were using makes it a much more fertile world to explore. There were just as many horror films as comedies and dramas.

Why did they die out?

Teen movies tend to come in waves so after nearly a decade of intense production I guess it was inevitable that it would reach saturation point. I also think Hollywood had become reliant on teenage characters. They wound up in the very centre of the mainstream and therefore teen movies were extraneous once every movie was a teen movie. It did end very suddenly. You look at 2004 which I would pinpoint as the dying days of that wave, and yet half the films we look at closely in Beyond Clueless seem to have come from that year. It feels appropriate that it ended with a bang. Also it's like the span of an actual teenager. If you were just becoming a teenager when Clueless came out you'd be at the tail end of your adolescence when Mean Girls was released. Your bond with those movies would very suddenly come to an end.

Throughout Beyond Clueless the same actors appear again and again. It's notable how lots of them didn't really go on to adult stardom. Why do you think that was?

It does seem to be a difficult transition. One of the problems is that if you're a child star you can disappear and come back a few years later and redefine yourself, but if you become known for playing characters in their late adolescence it's more of an amorphous switch when you start playing adults, even when you've actually been one for years. It's a shame, especially because so many of those actors were very talented and never got a chance to show what they could do.

Beyond Clueless is both a criticism of these films and a celebration of them. Do you think they had an unfair critical reception at the time – that because they were aimed at teenagers they were dismissed?

I'm glad you say Beyond Clueless is a celebration and a critique because I think critical snobbishness meant that neither was done well enough at the time. People weren't giving these movies the time of day but equally they weren't critiquing them either. The default with a lot of teen movies is a critical assumption that they're inherently frivolous. I think it's a missed opportunity: they're hitting an audience at the most impressionable age it's possible to be, and yet we don't really stop and think about what they're telling that audience or how they're doing it. 

During your research was there anything you fondly remembered that was absolutely terrible? 

I recall being especially horrified by The Girl Next Door, which was a movie I took on board very unthinkingly as a teenager. Watching it with fresh eyes after a decade was quite terrifying, not that my affection for it has completely diminished. I still can't help but feel a real affinity for it despite its massive flaws and problematic central plot. But then for every one of those there was another film that I was delighted to find was even better than I gave it credit for. To revisit them was a constantly alternating participatory experience.

It must become difficult to separate what's good from what's bad.

Hours into the process I realised that I'd lost all concept of quality. They just became this massive blob of movies that coexisted and seemed to dance around each other, an entire movement in a state of constant flux, so any idea of which were the better or worse ones just went out the window.

Celeste and jesse forever

The primary objective for the protagonists of romantic comedies isn’t to defeat a villain but to attain love, winning over a possible partner by clearing a number of obstacles. The necessity of such obstacles to pad out the film often results in two characters who are suitably matched being kept apart by simple misunderstandings that could be easily resolved by a phone call.

The problem with this structure is that while it’s emotionally satisfying to watch two attractive people flirt and fight their way towards a reconciliation at an airport, it bears absolutely no resemblance to an actual relationship between actual people. At best, it only manages to rosily cover the shallow, early part of a relationship, whilst at worst it makes people feel that every moment in a relationship should feel like the third act of a movie rather than something that requires dedication, patience and understanding. Therefore it’s refreshing whenever any halfway-mainstream film manages to treat both its characters and its audience like adults. Luckily, Celeste and Jesse Forever is one of those films.

Starring and co-written by Rashida Jones, Celeste and Jesse Forever follows childhood friends-turned-spouses Celeste and Jesse (Andy Samberg) as they make their way through the challenges of a divorce. The film perceptively captures the confusing, painful process of being newly single after a long-term relationship, particularly in how Celeste and Jesse relate to each other: the awkwardness in knowing someone in a new context after being so close, the scary-but-exciting pleasure in trying on new identities, the strangeness in seeing the other person do the same.

Jones and Samberg are both wonderful in their roles; warm and believable as a couple with a long shared history who now feel awkward being in the same room. The viewer’s engrained instincts might want them to get back together, but the film does a good job of showing why it’s better for both of them that they don’t, even though it’s an upsetting truth for both of them.

As well-observed as Celeste and Jesse Forever can be, however, the film is hampered by an early development that causes a disparity between Celeste and Jesse. While it gives an opportunity for Jones and co-writer Will McCormack (who plays Samberg’s drug-dealing best friend) to explore what it’s like to lag behind in the race to move on, it means that Samberg’s character stops developing in order to become an unreachable symbol of the closure Celeste can’t attain.

Jesse’s emotional leapfrogging is plausible but it means that for much of the film he has little to do other than be disappointed in Celeste as she spirals out of control. As a result the film falls apart towards the end along with Celeste, as her desperation takes her to a low that’s reminiscent of Kristen Wiig’s nadir in Bridemaids.

Celeste’s anguish is imprudently exaggerated for comic effect, but to Jones and McCormack’s credit the film is never less than honest about a state of despondency that most people have to suffer through at least once in their life. In a world where the average romantic comedy finishes just as a couple gets together, it’s invigorating to watch a film that sees a relationship through to its bitter end, and then keeps going.

Celeste and Jesse Forever was screened at the BFI London Film Festival.

Interview with director david wain

Diligently replicating the tropes employed by countless romantic comedies – from third act contrivances to thinly-drawn friends that exist only as sounding boards – They Came Together is both a merciless parody of the genre's well-worn conventions and an affectionate homage to them.

Starring Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd as archetypal business rivals-turned-romantic interests, the film shares its absurdist tone with the other work of director David Wain, which includes Wet Hot American Summer and seminal sketch show The State. Ahead of its upcoming release in cinemas and on VOD we spoke to David about the project's long gestation and why romantic comedies hold an enduring appeal.

You co-wrote They Came Together with Michael Showalter in 2002. What stopped it getting made then?

Originally we wrote it for a big studio as a more straightforward spoof that was in vogue at the time, more like Scary Movie, but the studio believed that the audience for those kinds of movies and the people who are interested in romantic comedies don't generally overlap. They were probably right: it wouldn't have been a great studio project. I'm happier with the way we made it now, more in our own voice. It seems to makes sense in this configuration: it's a smaller movie, and it's come at a time when the audience is more caught up to the people involved and our sense of humour.

Is it freeing to make something for a lower budget, or does it bring other challenges?

I tend to say it's more freeing because of the different stakes. For better or worse, we had the ability to make the movie we wanted to make, which is the only way it could have worked. Unless you happen to fall into a situation where a studio really understands your work and wants to protect it, the normal development and oversight process is creatively very hard on comedy that's from a specific point of view.  

They Came Together picks apart romantic comedies but it seems that to make it you'd have to have a genuine passion for the genre too. Do you?

I have a huge passion for them. Romantic comedies are among my favourite films. Michael and I have been friends since we were 18 years old and we bonded over talking about romantic comedies and the ones we love. Truthfully, even the ones that aren't great we love too. There's just something comforting and wonderful about the rom-com formula and we both have real nostalgia and love for it. Along with that comes having fun pointing out the tropes. My feeling is that They Came Together isn't saying romantic comedies are stupid, it's saying the opposite. They're worthy of being made fun of.

The formula works even as it's being deconstructed: you can't help being a little swept up in the story's romance.

Exactly. In a way if there's any investment in these characters that's a true testament to the genre formula. We are doing our best to undercut it at every single moment but still the chemistry and charisma of our two leads and the basic tent poles of the formula overrides that to some degree.

What would you say is the most egregious romantic comedy trope for you?

There are so many. From top to bottom there are requisite situations in romantic comedies that don't bear any resemblance to most people's real lives. One of the most bizarre ones is the larger narrative structure: more often than not the boy and girl are really in love and things fall apart based on a single event that is often very simplistic, and then the reason they make up is even more simplistic – one goes up to the other one and says the right thing at the right moment and all is forgiven. It grossly simplifies and romanticises the real nature of relationships, which I think is exactly why we love these movies. They avoid the complexity and frustration and messiness of actual relationships.

They Came Together is out in UK cinemas on the 5th of September.

Tim burton's frankenweenie

In America when a writer wants to work on an existing television series they’ll often create what’s called a "spec script", which would be an imaginary episode of the programme they want to work for. The script would not only demonstrate their skills as a writer but prove that they understand the style, pacing and tone of the show, as well as being able to ape the distinct voices of its characters.

If Tim Burton’s filmography existed as a television series, it's easy to imagine that Frankenweenie would be a spec script for it, an imagined, archetypal version of what a Tim Burton film is like.

Putting aside the $39 million budget, it’s as if Burton had forgotten to create a film, and suddenly it was the day before it was due in at Disney and so he stayed up all night putting it together out of the bits and pieces of his old ones. Here are some spindly characters, misunderstood by their community but ultimately lovable. Here are some evil fat antagonists. Here are some references to 30s horror films. Here’s Christopher Lee, Winona Ryder and Martin Landau. Here’s a Danny Elfman score, sounding identical to every other non-Simpsons score he’s ever done. Here’s a climax at a flaming windmill.

Cover it all in black and white stripes and you have yourself a creatively bankrupt Tim Burton film. At least from the perspective of its creator, Frankenweenie is one of the laziest films ever made. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, or one of Damien Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde, or basically anything Damien Hirst has made in the past 17 years.

There’s a moment towards the end of the film where one of the main characters, having done something self-sacrificial and heroic, lies dead. The music swells dramatically and the other characters mourn his loss. He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead … and then there’s a twitch. Just a twitch. The other characters don’t notice at first, but then there’s another, and then suddenly he’s back to life, having saved the day for everyone. It’s a miracle.

This isn’t really a spoiler because whether you’re aware of it of not, you know every beat of this scene. You’ve already seen it a few dozen times. The resurrection moment is one of the cheapest methods of audience manipulation in cinema, and yet it pops up again and again, mostly in films aimed at children who aren’t old enough to realise how lazy it is.

It’s a way to milk all the emotion of a main character’s death without having to have a pesky unhappy ending. Excluding E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, which can be given a pass for a similar scene because it’s sublime, there’s no excuse for it in modern cinema. That such a moment features as the climax of Frankenweenie is endemic of everything that’s wrong with the film. It assumes that because its audience is mostly made up of children that it can get away with being pedestrian and obvious and hackneyed. Hopefully parents of those children will be able to prove the film wrong.

Frankenweenie is on general release now. It was screened at the London Film Festival.

Blue is the warmest colour

An inevitability of life is that every Academy Awards ceremony will feature at least one montage celebrating "the magic of cinema", striped with iconic imagery from the medium's short, rich history. That many of these moments will come from epics is not incidental. An epic--like a child’s drawing of a house with two windows, a door and a chimney--is what one thinks of when envisioning the idea of cinema. With their duration and grand visual lavishness, epics share the same inherent appeal as film itself: a sense of overwhelming scale.

Typically, filmmakers use this ample canvas to portray significant lives and events, both fictional and otherwise. In his beguiling new film, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Abdellatif Kechiche employs the same maximalist approach, but his subject isn’t war, a historical movement, geopolitical manoeuvring or the trials of a great figure. Instead, over a running time of 187 minutes Kechiche charts in minute detail the rise and fall of a single relationship.

While the union between Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) comes for them at an age when love finds its most fervent expression, the relationship itself and the path it follows is fairly typical. From a distance it wouldn’t be much different from the madly consuming relationships that many others experience when similarly youthful. This ordinariness is what makes Blue Is the Warmest Colour so extraordinary. It is an epic of the human heart: understanding that who we love and how we’re changed by that love is one of the defining aspects of our lives, Kechiche uses the film’s substantial length to explore something apparently small, finding that it’s anything but.

As encapsulated by its beautifully precise French title, "La Vie d’Adèle – Chapitres 1 & 2", Blue Is the Warmest Colour covers the breadth of two distinct sections in its protagonist's life. Even though love--both in its arrival and departure--is a primary focus, Kechiche is singularly compelled by Adèle’s maturation into her adult self. It is through her relationship with Emma that Adèle first starts to define herself, but self-discovery scurries in from other areas too: literature; dancing; political engagement; the pleasure in simple food, well made. Most importantly, Adèle gives herself to work, finding that her warmth and discretion engenders a natural gift for teaching. The film has become notorious for the protracted sex scene at its centre, but Kechiche devotes just as much time to the other passions of Adèle’s mind and body. As each one blinkingly awakens inside of her, it takes her further away from Emma, whose engagement in a patronising art world renders her unable to appreciate the person Adèle has become.

The detail that Keviche lavishes upon every facet of Adèle’s life helps construct a complex, evolving portrait of the character, supported immeasurably by Exarchopoulos’ exceptional, emotionally munificent performance. If the long, steady and unhurried nature of this portrait is at times exhausting, then it’s because life itself is exhausting: we’re all living inside our own epics, Adèle included.  

It’s the equal application of Keviche’s attention that counters the arguments about his motivations in depicting sex between the characters. Sex is an important aspect of Adèle’s life, but it is only one part amongst many. The length, physicality, explicitness and voracious passion of its sex scenes undeniably makes Blue Is the Warmest Colour stand out, but it isn’t the film’s fault that it's an outlier. Instead, its rarity highlights the need for the language of sex in mainstream cinema to be expanded.  

Despite its unique potential to depict the act in poignant, sensual, expositional, bold ways, cinematic sex is rarely anything other than perfunctory: an indication of romantic progression between characters, or to demonstrate some transgression taking place. The sex in Blue Is the Warmest Colour--a physical manifestation of Adèle and Emma’s wild, desperate longing for each other--stands as a rebuke to such drab portrayals. The length and nature of the sex scenes is unusual, but any erotic power they have comes entirely from Exarchopoulos and Seydoux’s performances. Whether the scenes are a physically accurate depiction of sex is beside the point: they are an emotionally accurate depiction.

While "Chapitre 1" of "La Vie d’Adèle" conveys what it's like to be young and love – its secret languages, its near agony--the film's second part is concerned with how adulthood can affect those passions. By the film's conclusion, Adèle is left struggling to experience anything as powerful as her relationship with Emma. In part that's a testament to the strength of their love, but it's also indicative of how people put walls up around themselves as they get older.

Being too young to know any better, Adèle's inability to protect herself was what made her relationship with Emma so potent, even if it led to pain eventually. By guarding herself from being hurt, she excludes joy as well. It's here that the inconclusiveness of the ending is a balm for the audience, if not for Adèle. She doesn’t realise it, but she's still evolving: there are other chapters to come. Sadly for us, we won't get to see them.

Room 237

Stanley Kubrick’s films are laden with ambiguities and unanswered questions, and his adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining even more so: from spatial impossibilities to rotating carpet patterns, the film provides a wealth of potential readings.

An icy, unsettling film, The Shining received a poor reception upon its release in 1980, disowned by King and unloved by critics (in large part due to the fact that in the preceding fifteen years Kubrick had made A Clockwork Orange, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey). Now rightfully seen as an equal to those earlier pictures, The Shining is the subject of Rodney Ascher’s engrossing new documentary Room 237, which is composed entirely of interviews with five individuals who became fixated with the film and its possible meaning.

Each interviewee is heard only in voiceover as they lay out their reflections on its subtext: one believes the film is about the Native American genocide, whilst another thinks it’s a statement on the Holocaust, and a third maintains that the film is Kubrick’s confession for faking the Apollo Moon landings. Aside from some stock footage and clips from Kubrick’s other films, the majority of Room 237 is comprised of footage from The Shining itself, and the pleasure in the documentary comes from watching as the interviewees grasp for hidden meaning in background posters, typewriter brands and disappearing props, their observations alternately ingenious and insane.

Photo: A still from Kubrick's 1980 film, The Shining.

What differentiates Room 237 from an online video essay is the way the interviewees’ opinions are presented, piling up on top of each other and finding evidence for their theories in the same shots and lines of dialogue. As the interviewee’s reflections become more outlandish it becomes difficult to distinguish an astute observation from a far-fetched one, and Room 237 descends into a kind of obsessive madness similar to Jack Torrance’s in The Shining.

Photo: A computer generated image, from Room 237, of the scene from The Shining shown above.

The overriding reading of Kubrick’s film is that it’s about the need to break free from the past, whether that past is America’s bloody beginnings or Nazism, and yet the interviewees themselves are unable to heed the message of their own theories. For the most part they seem unaware of the parallel, lost within a maze, consumed by the Overlook Hotel and its many ghosts.

Room 237 is being screened as part of the London Film Festival. More information here.

Josie long talks about her new film project

"We have a connection!" Josie Long says to the stranger on the bench. She gestures to their mutual friend: the books they're reading, written by the same author. Nearly digging his face into the pages, the man pretends that she doesn't exist.

The first of two short films written by and starring the comedian, Let’s Go Swimming follows its heroine as she moves to "indie theme park" Glasgow to make a new life after a soured relationship. The moment on the bench, which comes early in the film, is played for laughs but is as revealing as it is quietly heartbreaking. Lost and lonely, the protagonist finds herself in a world indifferent to what she's trying to put into it. Whilst not quite autobiographical, Josie's character shares her sincere desire to connect with other people, even if they rarely seem to reciprocate with the same warm enthusiasm.

At a time when most short films struggle to find non-online distribution outlets, Josie has taken the novel approach of embarking on a tour of U.K. cinemas with director Doug King to present the films directly to audiences. Battling the afternoon traffic whilst en-route to another screening, we spoke with Josie about her move into filmmaking.

What made you decide to take the films on the road?

I guess it just didn't seem as fun to put them on the internet. We wanted to get actual responses from actual people. We also loved the idea of screening them in cinemas. Mostly with short films, if you’re incredibly lucky you might be able to get them on mainstream television, but probably you're trying to enter them into festivals and that's it. We are entering the films into festivals too, but we wanted them to have more of a life.

What sort of responses have you had from the audiences so far? 

It’s been great--better than I’d hoped, actually. We've been delighted. I'm used to being on stage and you're kind of in it. You can't really assess anything as it's going on, but when we're sitting at the back and watching people watch the film, seeing them laughing in the right places and feeling the atmosphere in the room, it's incredibly thrilling.

Is it strange for you to be on tour but not have to perform a full stand-up set?

Yeah, it's really odd. Doing a stand-up tour is exhausting. When I perform, I tend to do twenty minutes in the first half before my support act and then 90 minutes in the second half, so I'm fucked at the end of it. With this I'm doing a little bit of stand-up in between the films, an intro at the start and a Q+A, but I'm only on stage for a total of about 40 minutes. And for half of that I'm not even the only one on the stage! It’s amazing because it's so easygoing. It feels like cheating.

What made you decide to make two short films rather than fold the material into your stand-up?

The films are kind of sad comedies about people's personal lives and it really didn't fit in with the stand-up I've been doing recently--although some of the stand-up is personal, a lot of it is about other things. I wanted to do something that was more collaborative, and I met Doug and found we were on the same wavelength.

Also, while I'm never going to stop wanting to do stand-up--I love it and it’s a huge part of my life--I got frustrated with how ephemeral it is. You put everything into these shows and then when you record them it never quite captures what it was. I wanted to work in a medium that was a little more permanent and durable.

You've spent your career developing your comedic voice. Was it difficult to write scripts which contain other sorts of voices?

That was something that made me really grateful to have Doug there to collaborate with, especially on Romance and Adventure, the second film, because he gave me lot of advice about making the characters more distinct and real. It's been a challenge. I'm currently writing a feature that we're making next year, and it's new for me to properly try to develop characters that are full and not just little ciphers for my stand-up.

I feel proud of my stand-up because I try my hardest to make the shows as textured as possible. My last one was about personal things but also about politics, my age, where I was in my life, and all sorts of really silly stuff. I like that you can have several threads in a stand-up show, and I'm trying to accomplish the same in my writing: to make something about all aspects of a person’s life, not just one specific element.

Do you think there's something gained by screening the two films together?

I really do. I’m so glad that we can show them together, because I like to imagine that the second film is a continuation of the first one. There's an 18-month gap between them and they almost feature the same characters--not totally but with enough artistic license to get by. And they were shot in the same locations and with the same actors and crew, so I feel they complement each other well. Even the stand-up I do in between is stuff that I wrote at the same time, so it's all quite coherent.

What do you think you learned from Let's Go Adventure that helped you to make Romance and Adventure?

The first film was all about Doug and me working out how we worked together, what our style was, finding a crew. By the second one it I felt like I'd come on so much and knew so much more, even just in terms of my performance. I've done bits and bobs for television and stuff but I've never really been so deeply involved in something like this. Also, it's interesting for me because my personal life moved on quite a lot. Let’s Go Swimming did reflect that I felt really lost and confused at the time, but in writing the film and making all those friends whilst shooting it, things did get better. Romance and Adventure reflects that, I think. It shows how eager we were to make another film, how excited we were by the whole process.

Let’s Go Swimming and Romance and Adventure are on tour now: visit www.dougandjosie.com for venues and dates.

The sessions

For many viewers, John Hawkes’ career started in 2010, when he was nominated for an Oscar for playing the menacing, mercurial drug addict Teardrop in Winter’s Bone. Until that point, he has been a steadily-working character actor — one of those people you see popping up in everything, a face without a name, usually dying in the first act.

Hawkes followed up Winter’s Bone with an equally acclaimed performance as a cult leader in Martha Marcy May Marlene, and he became an overnight sensation at the age of 51. In his latest film, The Sessions, Hawkes stars as the late poet Mark O’Brien. Paralysed from the neck down due to childhood polio, the film depicts O’Brien’s attempt to lose his virginity with a sex surrogate (Helen Hunt, who spends most of the film being completely naked, and all of it being terrific). Even after Winter’s Bone and Martha Marcy May Marlene, Hawke’s performance is revelatory. Despite only being able to move his head and often being encased in an iron lung, Hawke is funny, tender, and enormously soulful.

With the release of the film — and what will be almost certainly a second Oscar nomination — a solid career as a character actor has blossomed into that of a legitimate leading man. Hawke’s acting career actually began in 1985, so why did it take 27 years for his breakthrough role?

Partially, the answer is that the career of an actor depends as much on circumstance as it does on talent. It doesn’t matter how good an actor is if they don’t have the roles to demonstrate the fact. Hawkes has rarely been less than excellent in a variety of supporting parts, but his natural charisma was always buried playing underachievers and misfits. It wasn’t until Winter’s Bone that audiences were given a full showcase of his talents, which shone in an excellent, much-celebrated film.

Additionally, as someone with a character actor’s looks — that is, the looks of a regular human being rather than a movie star — Hawkes wasn’t sought out for larger, leading roles, despite his versatility as an actor and obvious talent. Often talented actors with non-movie star faces don’t get roles worthy of their ability until they’ve aged a sufficient amount. Their looks matter less in middle-age, so they don’t find themselves losing out in the search for good parts. If anything, it helps that they’ve built a career out of diverse, well-received smaller roles. Conversely, middle-age can also be a boon for talented-but-conventionally attractive actors who are stuck playing bland heroes until their faces get a bit puffy and their waistline starts to expand (see: Leonardo DiCaprio).

By finding himself in leading roles midway through his acting career, Hawkes follows the path of former character actors like Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti who both flourished after they reached a certain age and found their breakthrough roles (Capote and Sideways, respectively). Mark O’Brien is a gift of a part for Hawkes, but what’s really exciting is the potential for more to come, not just quirky, interesting characters who perish twenty minutes into the film.

The Sessions is screening as part of the BFI London Film Festival. More details here.

Philomena

Cinema, like chemistry, is the study of change. In the classic Hollywood narrative – still utilised by most mainstream films – a protagonist starts at a point of equilibrium, has a journey of some kind, defeats something, and ends the story in a different, usually better situation. There’s a reason why this basic narrative model predates the invention of cinema. Problem solving is central to the human condition: it’s fundamentally satisfying to see characters face an internal or external obstacle and overcome it.

Employing this narrative structure becomes difficult, of course, when depicting actual events. Reality is just too untidy and contradictory. In order to create elegant narratives out of the disappointments and dead ends of real life, filmmakers must condense, conflate and simplify. An implicit understanding exists: unless the changes are completely egregious, audiences are willing to accept a certain measure of factual massaging in service of a better story. This strategy, whilst useful to a screenwriter dealing with a 600-page novel about dense historical events, can also be eschewed in favour of directly confronting life’s inherently convoluted messiness. Where Stephen Frears’ mostly-terrific drama Philomena runs into difficulties is its inability to decide which of these approaches it wants to take.

Based on Martin Sixsmith’s 2009 book, Philomena follows the former BBC correspondent (played by Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote the screenplay) as he tries to help septuagenarian Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) find the son she was forced to give up for adoption half a century earlier. Having been unceremoniously fired from his job as a government advisor, Sixsmith is motivated by listlessness rather than compassion, dismissing Philomena’s plight as another human interest story about “the weak-minded, vulnerable and ignorant”. Frears cuts between the unlikely pair’s transatlantic investigations and the story of teenage Philomena, virtually imprisoned in a Magdalene home for the alleged sin of having a baby out of wedlock.

The character arc that Coogan and co-writer Jeff Pope try to build into the plot is not unexpected: Sixsmith, initially self-absorbed and unfeeling, comes to care for Philomena, developing a righteous anger about the way the Catholic Church treated her and her child. What muddies this intended character development is that Sixsmith is unchanged by anything that happens. Unwilling and unable to understand Philomena – a devout Catholic who espouses forgiveness despite the enormous, shameful wrongs committed against her – he doesn’t learn anything from the experience. This is where the film seems unsure of what it’s trying to be: depicting a character who remains essentially the same regardless of external events is admirably in its realism, but it’s as if Coogan and Pope want the audience to respond to something that isn’t there. Sixsmith is unsympathetic at the start of the film, and almost no less unsympathetic by its conclusion, and the constancy seems unintentional.

When considering Sixsmith’s likeability problem, it’s useful to consider that this is a role Steve Coogan wrote for himself to perform. From the self-deluding Alan Partridge onward, Coogan has built a career out of playing vainglorious, often disagreeable characters (including the part of “Steve Coogan” in a handful of his collaborations with Michael Winterbottom). Underneath his characters’ inevitable arrogance, though, he has regularly managed to find other qualities – resilient ambition, and notes of melancholy and loneliness – that warm us to them. Coogan communicates Sixsmith’s underlying kindness on occasion, but it’s often lost amidst his self-interest. A character doesn’t need to be sympathetic to be interesting, but it’s clear that Sixsmith is meant to be, at least in part.

Part of the reason Sixsmith is problematic as a character is what also makes so much of the film pleasurable to watch: Philomena herself. Judi Dench is wonderful in the role, portraying the character with tremendous warmth and humanity.  Regardless of her foibles, Philomena is so unerringly decent that Sixsmith’s irritation with her seems out of proportion, his condescending responses bordering on the cruel. Accordingly, the audience’s sympathies lie with Philomena from the beginning, so even when she is dottily reciting the plots of romance novels or getting overexcited at the concept of a hotel breakfast, the joke is never at her expense. Considering how easy it would have been to make her a figure of ridicule compared to urbane Sixsmith, the self-control is commendable.

It’s this sensitive depiction of Philomena that is essential to expressing the raw hurt that defines her. Philomena is complicated in a deeply human way, and it’s ultimately her faith – incomprehensible to Sixsmith considering what organised religion took from her – that provides the film with its thought-provoking, expectation-subverting denouement which denies both Sixsmith and the audience of the moral retribution they crave. A film that could have been glib or overly sentimental in other hands, Philomena’s impressive restraint can be credited to Frears. One of Britain’s most prolific and versatile directors, he demonstrates his experience by wisely getting out of the way, confident in the story’s power. The skill with which Philomena’s complex humanity is portrayed is to the credit of everyone involved. For Philomena alone, perhaps it’s worth the narrative muddle.

Philoena is in UK cinemas today. 

Premium rush

Wilee—the industrious bike messenger played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in offbeat-bicycle-action-movie Premium Rush—refuses to ride anything but a fixed gear bike. "Can't stop. Don't want to, either", he states, eschewing brakes, gears and common sense for sheer velocity and the thrill of the ride.

It's a ready-made analogy for the film itself: like the bike, Premium Rush is at its best when it’s in motion, zipping through the traffic-snarled streets of Manhattan in search of the next destination. It runs into trouble whenever it slows down, but to its great credit tries to avoid that at all costs.

The film is refreshingly, thrillingly efficient. Sometimes, Wilee has to pick up or drop off a package. Sometimes, he has to outrun someone on a bike or in a car. That’s pretty much it. For at least an hour of its slim 90 minutes running time, Premium Rush is one of the purest films ever made, existing solely to provide one chase scene after another.

Non-stop chases would likely turn tedious in any other film, but the film’s action is so light, fast and fun that it doesn’t seem to matter. By making its hero Joseph Gordon Levitt on a bicycle instead of a grunting man in a car, it adds a level of empathy almost entirely absent from today’s CGI-heavy action films. Even though the film is shot with a heightened reality that can feel like a video game, we can still see Wilee peddling away for dear life, and the combination of his physical exertion and the very real danger of the traffic around him has a unique thrill to it.

While there’s a clunky backstory involving a corrupt cop (Michael Shannon) and people-trafficking, the film clearly cares little about it, and suggests the audience does likewise. Shannon’s character is so hapless at every turn that there’s no doubt that he’ll eventually get his comeuppance, which leaves the viewer free to just enjoy what’s going on elsewhere—which is largely Shannon being outwitted by Wilee and his bike messenger friends. Wilee, who would be a stock hero in lesser hands, is a warm and engaging figure due to the performance of the warm, engaging Gordon-Levitt, equal parts John McClane and Bugs Bunny.

Premium Rush is very a silly film from its nonsensical title onward, but it’s hard to truly begrudge any action film with a protagonist whose biggest motivations are riding a bicycle and maybe getting a sandwich.

Interview with bfi london film festival director, clare stewart

The next issue of Oh Comely will feature a interview with Clare Stewart, the BFI’s Head of Exhibition and Director of the BFI London Film Festival.

Clare's unbridled passion for cinema is understandable given her job, so whilst chatting about the joys and headaches of running a major international film festival I was impelled to ask which films she was most looking forward to screening at this year’s festival. Here is her response.

Photo: Judi Dench and Steve Coogan in Philomena.

"Well, I suppose it's illegal for a festival director to have a favourite film--we love all our children equally--so what thrills me most about this year's festival is how much amazing British work there is. It really is such a strong year for British filmmaking. But then, while British talent inflects nearly every one of our main gala presentations, from Stephen Frears' incredibly moving Philomena to Steve McQueen’s devastating 12 Years a Slave, it’s exciting to look at the Official Competition section and see four films there by British directors.

Photo: Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.

There’s David Mackenzie who has been very under-the-radar with his film Starred Up, an exceptionally powerful prison drama, which I really think is going to knock everybody’s socks off.

Or if you look at Jonathan Glazer, everybody’s been waiting ten years for Under the Skin, and it completely delivers. It’s an extraordinary, visionary piece of filmmaking.

Then there’s Clio Barnard and her film The Selfish Giant. Clio’s debut film The Arbor was so wonderful, and this one features absolutely knock-out performances from its young actors.

Photo: Conner Chapman in The Selfish Giant.

And finally there’s Richard Ayoade and The Double, which demonstrates his astoundingly coherent sense of cinematic style. Those four films alone would give you a lot to get excited about where British filmmaking is right now, but they're just the tip of the iceberg."

The 57th BFI London Film Festival continues this week. Visit bfi.org.uk for listings.

Interview with director peter strickland

The story of Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a repressed sound engineer who travels to Italy in the 1970s to create the soundtrack for a violent Giallo horror movie, Berberian Sound Studio is the second film of writer/director Peter Strickland. A horror film without the horror, the film creates unease largely through its sound design, a few claustrophobic sets and Jones’ gripping performance. Ahead of its release this weekend, we spoke to Peter about the film.

Berberian Sound Studio is in large part about the feeling of being a foreigner. You’ve lived out of the country for much of the past ten years – did that experience influence the film at all?

When you’re writing something you have your main focal point but other parts of your life just creep in somehow. I have been away a lot. Also I’m half Greek and half English, so there’s always been that clash between two cultures which are worlds apart even though they’re on the same continent. But first of all it came from sound, that was the starting point, these Giallo soundtracks. A lot of their composers were highly regarded avant-garde composers who did exploitation soundtracks on the side, and I find that compelling.

I was also interested in extreme violence: this ridiculous pantomime element of smashing vegetables to make foley sound. Is it disturbing or funny? It’s fascinating to tread that line. I thought what if you saw that horror every day of your life, where would you be ten years down the line?

Did you make a deliberate choice not to show any of the violence that the sound engineers were viewing every day?

I was interested in how filmmakers represent violence, and the question of responsibility. How can you manage how an audience interprets an image? Once it’s out there the filmmaker has no control. I think if we’d shown the violence we would have failed—that satire would have fallen flat on its face. I didn’t want to be didactic, I wanted it to be entertainment so it doesn’t go further into moralising, but I think if we’d shown what actually happens we’d be as bad as the Giallo directors.

Also it’s an experience about how an audience responds to that, what goes on in your head. I hadn’t really seen it done in a film before, to completely strip away the visual side. It’s the inverse of a normal film. The film is hidden away: we only see the mechanical side of it. So it’s holding a mirror image to it.

Gilderoy is an amalgamation of actual English sound engineers. What fascinated you about their story?

Some of these people had devastating lives: some got into the occult, or they just became alcoholics. They were tragic characters. And Gilderoy comes from this whole tradition of the garden shed eccentric, which I guess is dying out now with digital technology. Sound engineering was an alchemical process. It was talismanic. You can understand how you could spend too many late nights working, after all that tape looping, everything’s like a spell.

You funded your first film, Katalin Varga. How did having investors change the filmmaking process?

It was very, very different. I don’t think I’ll ever have the freedom I had for my first film—I was on my own. But I didn’t like it. You need someone to bounce off of. Obviously if you’re being told what to do that’s a very different thing and I don’t like that. I think I was very lucky. I can’t imagine a film like this being made by the Establishment in 1998. It seems there’s a climate now where people are more receptive to personal filmmakers.

Do you think that freedom is related to the budget?

It’s all about working to scale. The lower the budget the more risks you can take. You need to be responsible. You can say you’re an artist, but it’s not your money. It’s about balancing that responsibility with doing something that will hopefully be exciting and original, and not second guessing what the audience wants, which I think is fatal.

You have to respect the fact that audiences don’t want to be respected. I love films where the director confounded me somehow. I don’t want to be pandered to. So much of a film is about what’s going on in the audience’s head, not what’s on the screen. I think if you allow the audience to open that side of themselves up it’s more enriching. If they give you a bit of space, there’s room for your imagination to run riot.

Sean ellis on metro manila

The inspiration for Sean Ellis’ newest film came whilst he was on holiday in Manila. As the writer/director watched two armoured truck drivers having an argument, he began to think about the circumstances that led them to that point. That germ of an idea became Metro Manila, just announced as Britain’s submission in the Best Foreign Language Film category for the Oscars. Starting as a moving portrait of an impoverished rice farmer and his wife, the film shifts gears mid-way through to become a tense crime drama. We spoke to Sean about the film.

Metro Manila is entirely in Tagalog. You don’t speak the language, so how did you create the film? Well, the script was in English. There was talk of doing a translation but I felt that if someone translated the script then it was another interpretation of what I’d done. It’d be like having another author. Then in the casting sessions it became apparent that it was easy for the actors to speak about their lines in English and translate them into Tagalog in a way that they felt the characters would say. It slowed us down a little bit because they had to learn the lines in English and then translate them, and then there was discussion between the two main actors about the intonation of what was being said and how.

How did that process affect how you directed the actors? I think when you write a script you’ve got an idea of where everyone is emotionally. You’re there for the actors in that respect if they’re wondering how should they play a scene, whether the character is upset or angry. So once the translation had been done it was just dealing with acting. The great thing about acting is that most of it is non-verbal, so I could sit there and watch them speak Tagalog and know whether it was a performance I believed in or not.

The performances are very naturalistic. I really tried for that. I don’t think they were used to the sorts of silences that I was asking for, because in the Filipino school of acting they make a massive amount of stuff for TV. I kept saying things like, "That’s great but slow it way down. Make it more difficult for you to say, as if you’re searching for those words". They would then do that for what they felt was a long time and then we'd look at it and maybe even say let’s do it more and see how far we could take it. It just felt right for the material. What this family has to go through is an emotional and difficult journey. I felt like some of those silences would say more than what their words could.

The crime elements in the film aren’t introduced until quite late on, about an hour in. Was that a conscious decision? In some respects it's a cross-genre film. It starts off as a world cinema drama and moves slowly into a heist movie, and I thought that was an interesting combination because I love world cinema but at the same time I do like more commercial fare as well. I always said that it was a very commercial story in disguise. I feel like one thing compliments the other--it serves to reinforce the characters and the empathy you have for them so by the time the crime stuff kick in you're going through that gauntlet with them.

Before filmmaking you had a long career as a photographer. Is that why you chose to be your own cinematographer on the film? Obviously I've got a photographic background so I'd like to think that visually I know what I'm talking about to a certain extent, but in many respects it was a budget call as much as a creative one. Being my own cinematographer had a massive impact: it enabled us to not have to buy five flights to Manila and put five people up in hotels for three months. When you're talking about the budget that we made the picture for, that sort of thing makes a huge difference.

I suppose that by shooting it yourself it gives the film a lot of fluidity. There's an emphasis on handheld shots. It looks almost like a documentary. I felt that style of filmmaking would help the audience to relate to the family, because you're right there with them. Also, I wanted the story to be first and foremost. I think that the more that visuals lead storytelling, the more the audience falls off. So if there are any visual flourishes in the film it's to back the story, to reinforce it. There are probably two big visual moments in the film, but they’re earned.

Metro Manila is in UK cinemas on 20th September.

Seeking a friend for the end of the world

Ever since it first developed the tools to destroy itself, the human race has been obsessed with the idea of its own extinction. In cinema, this fascination with potential apocalypse has found willing analogies that reflect the threats and traumas of specific times, in everything from Japan’s post-Hiroshima monster movies to North America’s AIDS-influenced body horror films in the 1980s.

Perhaps indicative of our self-absorbed, self-documenting present, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’s apocalyptic vision has little to do with the fear of colossal death, but with the concern that we’re somehow not living right. Set three weeks before an asteroid strikes the planet, the film follows morose, recently-single Dodge (Steve Carrell), and his rent-a-quirk neighbour Penny (Keira Knightley) as they join together to reach old flames and family members before their untimely ends. Really, though, their journey is an opportunity for self-examination, as Dodge reflects upon a life of timid living and missed opportunities.

It’s apocalypse as therapy session, with the bitter joke being that any realisations are too late anyway. The downside of this is that Carrell spends most of the film depressed and disengaged from the world around him before his inevitable conversion, which dampens the comedy more than it should. Knightley gamely tries to bring energy to the proceedings and almost succeeds, but her part is essentially a stock “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” role rather than a recognisable human person.

While it’s commendable in an age of big-budget disaster movies for such a film to eschew spectacle and focus on a personal experience, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a little too mawkish and safe to fully take advantage of the opportunity. By far the film’s strongest (and funniest) scene comes near the beginning when Dodge attends a house party where all of the guests are embracing manic, bitter hedonism, desperately pretending that they’re not completely miserable as mainline drugs and sleep around frantically. It’s a bracing, perceptive take on how people might react to the prospect of their short-lived existences suddenly rendered meaningless, and makes the film all the more disappointing when writer/director Lorene Scafaria leaves those more interesting characters behind in favour of a wet blanket and a kook who keeps screwing up her face and going on about vinyl records all the time.

Post-apocalyptic worlds remain attractive to filmmakers and audiences because even though the reality would unbearably grim, they’re fantasies in much the same fashion as stories of the Wild West or Tolkien-esque adventures are. Such stories portray worlds without society, or at least worlds without water bills and commuting and National Insurance numbers. The freedom almost seems worth zombie attacks or mohican-sporting biker gangs. As such, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is not without its pleasures, but it largely shuns these for a tired road movie plot, filled with life lessons and budget-trimming countryside exteriors. The film at least has the courage to end well, and finds itself as a sweet, funny, completely passable missed opportunity.

The look of love

It’s palpably disheartening when the protagonist of a film is introduced to cocaine. This disappointment is not borne from concern for the character, but instead surfaces because you now know every step of the well-trodden path to come. The introduction of drug use pinpoints the exact moment when someone has risen almost as far as they’re going to, leaving only their long, unavoidable descent to come. It’s an event that comes midway through The Look of Love, and in structuring its narrative in this manner, the film joins a distinct sub-genre that encompasses pictures like Goodfellas and Boogie Nights, where damaged people become successful through disreputable means, and cocaine acts as a hubris-symbolising, tragedy-inducing catalyst for their inevitable downfall.

The fourth project in the fruitful collaboration between Steve Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom, The Look of Love is a deliberate twin of their earlier work 24 Hour Party People. Like that film, The Look of Love is a portrait of an unconventional Northern mogul courting controversy and success to the detriment of those around him. Dissimilarly, however, the film leaves a less pleasant taste in the mouth afterwards. While The Look of Love possesses 24 Hour Party People’s capacity to be funny and insightful, the story is by necessity less warm, and told without the same affection. 

Documenting the life of entrepreneur Paul Raymond, The Look of Love follows Raymond’s rise from a post-war mind-reading act to becoming Britain’s richest man in the early 90s, controlling an adult publishing empire and owning most of Soho. Echoing loosening attitudes to sexuality, Raymond slides from revue impresario to pornographer, his venues morphing from theatres producing gratuitous plays to strip clubs. Raymond is complicit in the coarsening of his trade, barely minding as long as his titles keep selling and he owns more and more property. 

Winterbottom captures Soho in its many stages of evolution, grounding the film in specific details like its little side alleys and low-ceiling offices. The production design, hair, make up and cinematography all excel at depicting the march of years (the way Received Pronunciation fades from usage is a particularly neat touch), but the true markers of change come from Matt Greenhalgh’s script: it's easy to place the year by how people react when Raymond mentions his association with the Beatles, or to gauge his reputation and desperation to be hip by the way he brings it up.

Greenhalgh intelligently observes how Raymond disguises the emotional distance he keeps from everyone in his life, but this makes the character difficult to empathise with. Never terribly interested in artistry, he has a lack of passion for anything beyond pleasing himself. Greenhalgh suggests that perhaps Raymond is empty save for his distorted, corrupting love for his daughter Debbie. Although Greenhalgh occasionally can't help turning Raymond into Alan Partridge for the sake of a good line, he is adept at succinctly defining his characters: early in the film Raymond offers to buy a round of champagne and quickly clarifies "house champagne", a laugh at his expense but also one that demonstrates the prudence that allowed him to become so successful.

While it would be satisfying to see Raymond challenged by inner turmoil, this detachment is intentional, and in no way due to Coogan's excellent performance: his absolute self belief and ability to charmingly weather criticism is what allows him to become so successful. However, as the corrosive, static centre around which the film revolves, Raymond is less compelling than the characters surrounding him. Raymond never really changes, as patterns repeat themselves again and again and he always escaping comeuppance, essentially because he owns everyone and everywhere around him. Instead, it is Imogen Poots’ portrayal of Debbie Raymond that lingers. Cursed by her inability to match her extraordinary father, she forms a co-dependent, symbiotic relationship with him, based on mutual neediness – his to be adored and hers to feel accomplished. Poots is wonderful in a role that in lesser hands might have been a film-sinking annoyance.

Towards the end of the film the endless scenes of sex and drug taking becoming extremely wearing, even boring, but the effect is intentional. Equipped with almost limitless money and the opportunity to indulge every whim, Raymond and his peers become unable to break free from a lifestyle they’ve long stopped enjoying, trudging on because there’s little else to do. At its best, The Look of Love is a skillfully-observed portrait of an area buffeted by the continual upheavals of the twentieth century, depicting sexual liberation compromised by canny, ruthless commodification.

Music from a lost village

The Dorset village of Tyneham was one of the many British communities devastated by World War Two. Unlike Coventry or East London, however, its damage came not from Axis bombing but from the British Government. Requisitioned by the army for training manoeuvres, the village’s inhabitants were all evacuated in 1943, and after the war none were allowed to return. Tyneham still exists today as a ruinous ghost village, a home for wildlife and spent shells, stranded in a military firing range.

Illustrator Frances Castle became interested in the story of Tyneham after hearing a collection of songs about the village, created by a group of anonymous musicians from independent label Second Language. That music, along with a booklet illustrated by Frances, has now been given a limited-edition release as a joint venture between Second Language and Frances’ own label Clay Pipe Music. We spoke to Frances about Tyneham House and the pleasures of micro-releasing.

How did your involvement with the project start?

I initially heard the music and thought it would be a great project to work on graphically. As Second Language always have so much on, the idea of me designing the artwork and the booklet was good for them, and us each taking on half the work meant we could get the thing out.

Were you influenced by the music as you did the illustrations?

As soon as I heard it I instantly had an idea of the kind of illustrations that would go with it. I researched a lot of post-war and pre-war illustrations and drawings; I was inspired by Eric Ravilious and very English prints and drawings from that period. The illustrations are almost like a children’s book or school poster from that era.

It was definitely influenced by that sort of thing, and I think that’s what the music inspired me to create. The music is so English, and I wanted to reflect that.

Clay Pipe Music’s releases are as much about the physical aspect of music-listening as about the music itself. Was that a conscious decision when you started the label?

It was. I make music myself but I hadn’t done so in a while. I’d put things out on other labels and then I stopped for a long time. When I started again everything had changed: the internet had really taken off as far as distribution was concerned. A lot of labels were deliberately selling less and as such were more willing to take risks.

I had actually seen Second Language and thought they were great. They’re very similar in that they put things out that are very tactile and well-designed with low runs and I guess that was an inspiration. But being an illustrator I wanted to use that as well. People seem to like the handmade side of it.

It’s such a contrast to the way we usually consume music these days.

Exactly. That’s the purpose of these releases. In the old days you’d sit down with a record; you’d gone out to buy it, or chosen it in a record shop, and you’d look at the cover while listening to the music. Now you can trawl through the internet and download lots of music straight away, but you end up not listening to it because the music was so easy to get and there was no effort involved in it. You can forget about a download, but an actual record occupies a physical space in your house.

On your side of things, what’s the appeal of running your own label?

I’m an illustrator and that’s my job, so a lot of time I’m doing work for clients and I don’t get a lot of space to try new things. One of the ideas that made me start the label was not having to work for a client who’s commissioning me to replicate something they’ve seen in my portfolio. It’s a place to push my work and experiment.

Are you hoping to get to a point where you can just focus on Clay Pipe Music, or do you want to continue balancing your commercial work with running your own label?

No, I completely enjoy doing both. I wouldn’t just want to do one or the other. When I’m not busy doing commercial work I have more time to put into the label. The thing with illustration is you’re either really really busy or you’re not, so it’s a good thing to do when you’re quiet. I do a range of things: I create children’s books, I’ve even just finished something for a building company. Nothing gets too boring.

For more information on the Tyneham House project and Clay Pipe Music, visit the label’s site here: claypipemusic.blogspot.com

Simon pegg interviewed

After a string of high-budget blockbusters, including Tintin, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and the just-wrapped Star Trek 2, Simon Pegg is back in a low-budget British film. In A Fantastic Fear of Everything, he plays Jack, a paranoid children’s book author convinced that a murderer waits behind every door, and haunted by his suppressed childhood and visions of his loathed and most popular creation, Harold the Hedgehog. A funny, peculiar, very British film, it’s also the directorial debut of former Kula Shaker singer Crispian Mills (Look out for our interview with Crispian in the next issue).

Out in cinemas next week, we spoke to Simon in a roundtable discussion about his involvement in the film, acting in his underwear, and working in America.

How long did you actually have to spend in your underwear?

The shoot was 28 days and my pant-work was five days I’d say, max. I was very happy to go to work in my underpants. I’m sure anyone who could, would. Everyone was used to it by the time I’d done my first day’s shoot. I’d just be sitting around on my little deckchair and nobody batted an eyelid.

28 days sounds ridiculously short.

Considering I’d come off a shoot that was seven months, it was quick. But that’s unsupervised filmmaking for you.

How did you first come on board?

Crispian brought me a version of the script which was a direct adaptation of Bruce Robinson’s novella Paranoia in the Launderette, and it was a very funny, artful, interesting script and I liked it a lot, but it was probably only a short film in terms of its size. There isn’t really a platform for short films at the moment, sadly. I said if you could flesh this out it’d be something I’d be really interested in getting involved in because I loved his writing. Through a process of evolution it because A Fantastic Fear of Everything when it morphed out of being an adaptation and became something completely new. So I was attached to it all through that.

Does that long involvement mean you feel more of an emotional connection with it than you would with a bigger film?

When you get involved with something you put your heart and soul into it, so whether I’ve written it or it’s something I’m coming on board with, you tend to invest your entire self in it. So yes and no. I think because I’m a producer on this movie it does feel more personal. It was also a very personal experience for me as a performer as I had to give so much of myself. It wasn’t like I could rely on my fellow actors all the time. When I do Star Trek I’m part of a great ensemble and it’s really easy to just sit back and have fun with it because I’m surrounded by people all the time in scenes, whereas with this I spend a good deal of it by myself I have to carry it a little bit.

The film has horrific elements and a lot of it very dark. Do you think in future you’d be interested in pursuing other roles that aren’t strictly comedic?

I’m always just up for whatever’s good. I don’t specify what I want to do. I tend to get offered comedies because I’m known for them, but I’ve certainly done a lot of serious acting in my life that no-one ever saw − plays and things that I did when I was a student. My comedic reputation comes from the fact that I chose stand-up as an alternative to acting. Comedy’s my first love, but if you watch Shaun of the Dead or even Hot Fuzz we play it very straight all the time − it’s the situation that’s funny. I don’t distinguish between comedic and serious acting.

Considering your career in America, do you think about where to base yourself?

The thing about being in L.A. is that you’re in the very thick of the industry and that’s where everything tends to happen. You find yourself getting jobs at dinner, rather than having to go and make an effort to meet people. It’s the difference between being in the stream and being on the bank, basically. But the fact is that I could move to L.A. tomorrow and do my next three films here, so there’s no point for me, unless you’re working in television. At the moment I’m not interested in entering into the TV side of things, even though it seems to be where all the serious acting is at the moment. It’s become an incredibly auspicious thing, particularly American television, but it means that you play the same character every year for seven years and at the moment I want to mix it up a little bit more. So until then I’m very happy living in Hertfordshire.

Is filming abroad difficult considering you have a family?

I take them with me. Occasionally I have to be separate and that’s agonising, but thank you Facetime and Skype for easing that. Martin Freeman who’s currently doing the Hobbit put it very well, he said you’ve just got to do your time. There’s always small print, and in this job it’s sometimes having to be away from home, and having your privacy slightly impinged upon and all the trials and tribulations that being well known involves. It’s the hard part of the job, but I pay for the joy of doing something I love.

Does it make you wary of another lengthy shoot?

I always try and plan ahead. For Star Trek we all moved out to L.A. for six months. We got a nice house and lived on the west side and had a delightful time. My daughter’s American anyway because she was born there, so she got in easy. She had no trouble with immigration, it was me and my wife that had the problem − she sneaked us into the country.