No photoshop trickery in the above picture. That’s a genuine Seattle sunset, making like a mile-wide CGI graphic across Puget Sound. You can tell the tourists in and around the city at a glance: they’re the ones craning their necks up at the sky with mouths wide open, whilst regular Seattle townfolk just stroll around, going about their business as if this sort of shit is normal. You might not believe a sky should get like that. Apparently it’s something to do with science.
We were in the US to watch my short film all my dreams on VHS taking its first tentative steps in the New World. SIFF is a multi-limbed monster of a film fest, showing more flicks over its length than seems humanly possible… and trying to see it all would be like, oooh, I dunno, trying to snog the entirety of China in one go: most likely doomed to failure, even if planned in advance.
(Continued)
Hey hey. Above, a photo from the production of and the line goes dead at Battersea Arts Centre. Apologies if you were in the audience either night, and were unlucky enough to get ‘rained’ on. The NY-based artist Ann Liv Young was taking a post-show shower upstairs, and… what can I say? — apparently the sealant wasn’t up to much.
A shame, as I got the feeling that much like Astronaut, my show last year at Burst Festival, this was a story which you had to watch uninterrupted. It’s a quiet, ominous sort of piece and I can’t imagine that the pitter patter of someone’s ill-sluiced ablutions did much for the atmosphere. Given that rehearsals had been extensive and emotionally draining, I spent a few hours immediately after the show feeling pissed off and / or upset in a sort of see-saw motion. Then I went back to Bristol and calmed the fuck down. Hooray!
(Continued)
So, we took all my dreams on VHS out to sunny Bucharest; a city that in terms of its vibe sits somewhere between the austere granite charms of the major eastern European capitals and the dusty bustle of a Mediterranean hub (stitch that, Lonely Planet! That’s proper travelogue writing, right there.)
We were in competition at the NexT International Film Festival, dedicated to short and medium-length movies. It’s a wonderful event and I’d recommend it without reservation to anyone wanting to show their film in Romania. For the most part the audiences were young (around student age,) very engaged and open towards the films on show, whatever their style or content. I was worried beforehand that a film with as many textual ‘asides’ as VHS might not travel all that well, and was nervous as hell before our first competition screening; but the audience was laughing along with the film almost instantly, and various bits of comic business along the way (hello O-T, hello Gugu) even got impromptu rounds of applause.
Tanuja (VHS line producer) and I spent most of our time in the cinema, seeing all of the competition screenings and some off-competition ones where possible. Favourites? Vestido by Jairo Boisier, an understated and touching story of unrequited love; Le mort n’entend pas sonner les cloches by Benjamin Mirguet, a hushed, poetic treatise on the pitfalls of blind faith, reminiscent of Tarkovsky or Herzog; and Tudor Cristian Jurgiu’s Nunta lui Oli, a fly-on-the-wall style drama where a father ‘attends’ his son’s USA wedding via webcam… proper heartbreaking stuff that deservedly won the Best Romanian Film award. (Continued)
(On-set photos by George Chan)
Between greenlighting in January and the shoot in July, the task of labeling 1, 200 VHS tapes forms a sort of constant background noise to the business proper of making a short film. Every now and then I retreat into it, conjuring up 50 or so titles as a ‘reward’ for progress on more concrete matters like the location, or casting, or prospective crew. I soon learn that the role of film director involves answering unending questions from all angles with as little hesitation as possible, never procrastinating. It’s not quite like directing theatre, which operates at a very different speed. As a creative endeavor it’s also very, very different from writing; if screenwriting is mostly a process of cogitation, quietly piecing together a puzzle, then directing is the equivalent of walking into a room and bawling, from the top of your lungs, “HELLO EVERYONE. HERE I AM. COME RIGHT OVER AND ASK ME ABOUT MY AMAZING IDEA.”
(Continued)
This is the first image from The Dead Phone, a stageplay I’m writing for the Inbetween Time Festival 2010.
It’s been a scattershot week. Good and productive for it. But to give you a picture, woven in and around the day job, I’ve had -
Thursday: Writing the first drafts of The Dead Phone. It’s a series of conversations, conducted on a stage, empty and blank but for 1) a table 2) a succession of performers and 3) a telephone connected to the afterlife. Currently drafting an extremely upsetting and foul-mouthed exchange, full of violence and regret.
Friday: reviewing Forced Entertainment’s Spectacular for Venue Magazine. An amazing show - succinct, unexpectedly affecting, totally focussed. Remarkable in that it even survived constant interruptions from a self-obsessed tosspot of the highest order (the link is for Ed Rapley’s description of the event — I have to stress, Mr Rapley is by no means the tosspot in question.)
(Continued)
With the first European screening of all my dreams on VHS due in Romania this April, I thought I’d jot down a quick diary of its production for anyone remotely interested.
Come with me now to the heady, giddy days of November 2006, when you could still buy a pint for less than a limb, and the speedy collapse of civilisation appeared slightly less likely.
It’s sometime during those halcyon days that I first chat to George Chan. Along with Deep Sehgal and David Olusoga, George is a founder of BBC Film Lab, an organisation run by BBC staff in their spare time and dedicated to producing short dramas. To date Film Lab has been making “short shorts”, 90 seconds long for the most part, within the parameters set by the annual Depict competition. George mentions that they’re looking for slightly longer, script-led works. He gives me the brief: around 10 minutes in length; minimal cast and locations; no car chases, werewolves, or daisy-chain-explosions of the minor moons of Jupiter that subsequently knock the Earth off its orbit thereby sending our fragile planet spiraling, screaming, into the sun. That sort of deal. Have I got any ideas that might do the trick?
(Continued)
Friday, February 13, 2009
The image above shows the artist Claire Blundell Jones introducing tumbleweed to the Finnish landscape. Picture by me, taken on a cold misty morning in the town of Kuopio.
Posted for why? Fuh’pause I have uploaded some WRITING to the INTERNET, and you can find it hey-orr, or by clicking on the “Sample: writing” link elsewhere on this page.
I hope to chuck more PDFs online as time goes by, but for the moment there’s a screenplay, some critical writing, an exercise in pop music-based masochism and an account of attending the wonderful festival that the pictured Ms Blundell Jones was part of in 2007.
WHAT MORE U WANT? U WANT MORE PICS? YEAH OK.
(Continued)
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Above: an image from Auf Der Strecke (On The Line), director Reto Caffi, and undoubtedly the best film I saw at this year’s Encounters short film festival. A testament to the magic that can happen when excellent performances are shot impeccably in the service of an engaging story, and nothing else gets in the bloody way. Looking at the programme afterwards I was astonished to read that its runtime clocked in at 30 minutes. It felt like half as long.
Anyway, the significant other and I spent two full days at Encounters, and saw 81 films (one of them twice, as a result of a free screening leaping upon us unexpectedly after lunch.) Alongside Auf Der Strecke, I’d say the standout films were Pop Art by Amanda Boyle and Love You More by Sam Taylor Wood. There was, of course, some appalling shite as well, but that goes with the territory.
So what, if anything, have 81 short films taught me? As a film maker you can’t help but watch some things with an eye on your own work… although the best stuff had me wide-eyed and slack-jawed, ignoring my preoccupations completely (I remember Richard Dreyfuss describing how, when he watched Jaws for the first time, he completely forgot he was one of the actors on screen.) Here’s a quick list of some STUFF I noticed, and the odd resolution arising.
(Continued)
Monday, November 17, 2008
I spent most of last Thursday in a state of giddy bliss, playing a gorgeous Broadwood grand piano at the Angel Tech studios. The ’studio’ is actually a soundproofed room in the basement of Doug’s house, a grotto of techy toys and blinking lights; the grand piano, meanwhile, is one he inherited from a Great Aunt. A condition of the inheritance is that a portrait of his esteemed ancestor should hang, at all times, overlooking the keyboard. And here she is:
Normally I’m a foul-mouthed, slouching and generally uncouth individual in recording situations. But as you can imagine - with Doug’s Materera Magna looming over my shoulder I tend more towards zipping my lip and sitting up straight.
The piano itself has led a life best described as ‘cinematic’. It was originally shipped to Jersey, installed in a home which was commandeered by the occupying German Army during WWII. Upon retreating from the Channel Islands the Nazis destroyed most of what they left behind as a matter of course; and sure enough, they kicked the crap out of Doug’s ancestors’ house, even going so far as to take a chainsaw to the staircase. However - they didn’t so much as scratch the piano.
Which then leads us to a few years ago, and Doug is examining the condition of the instrument before undertaking the complex task of shifting it from his Aunt’s home in Surrey, down the M4 to Bristol. He clambers beneath with a torch to check out the underside of the woodwork; it brings back feelings of nostalgia, because as a child he would use this sheltered space to play in. And what does he find in the torchlight, hiding beneath there for decades?
German soldiers.
(Continued)
The precariously stacked cassettes pictured above are part of All My Dreams on VHS, a short film I’m writing / directing at the moment. I’m hoping it will clock in at something like 10 minutes long. And I say ‘hoping’ because at the moment we’re editing, and about to record and compose the score (yup, in that order. I’m aiming to get some cut-and-splice results that sound a little bit like The Books.)
So we shot the film in early July, in and around a flat in north Bristol, with two truly excellent, inventive actors and a marvellous crew who gave up a whole weekend to be there. Everyone worked astoundingly hard: normally you’d be lucky to get through three pages of screenplay a day… in our case we battled through six.
(Continued)