THE PEEPER! He can look over walls, using his special height!
THE POISON PEN! His penetrating eyes grown beady, this ink-stained wretch should seek decent employment as a critic, where his perversion can be put to socially responsible use.
THE RAPIST! If you see this man, do not approach him. He will approach you, if he’s interested.
More on this film shortly. I might even tell you what it is. But I’m reminded of a bit of nonsense. My friend, BAFTA-winning director Morag McKinnon, once told me that she didn’t like the Cowardly Lion in THE WIZARD OF OZ because “he looks like a rapist.” She will deny this if you ask her but, like everything else I tell you here, it’s TRUE.
I protested that Bert Lahr looks like a vaudevillian, not a sexual predator, and that if actual rapists went around dressed like that they’d be easier to identify, apprehend and convict. It would make for interesting police line-ups, anyway.
One of the things that usually gets a gratifyingly big reaction from audiences in CRY FOR BOBO, the clown film I directed in 2001, is Little Joey the infant clown.
Played by three-year-old thespian Lewis Reid, he’s an endearing yet nightmarish figure, and his entrance is the point where the viewers realises they’re in a rather different kind of world. Coulrophobes start squirming immediately.
Lewis was used to the idea of acting and make-believe, like most kids, but especially because both his parents are actors, and he’d seen them at work in panto. He came to meet us while we were preparing the shoot at our studio/offices, having been suggested by one of our adult clowns, I think Stevie McNicoll. Lewis worked the room vigorously, seeming like a complete little grown-up, eagerly showing us his Thunderbird 2just the way an adult would. We were all immediately convinced he had what it took to play the part of Joey. “It was amazing — the whole time he was here I just assumed we were definitely going to cast him,” remarked costume designer Ali Mitchell, who had the substantial job of making both a clown wardrobe and a business suit for the little thesp.
So, Lewis’s first day of filming dawned. I screwed up. Lewis was so self-possessed and confident I failed to realise that a three-year-old is like an elephant, you have to kind of work around their needs. I devised a tracking shot that pulled back with our two clown protags, Mark McDonnell and Stevie, and then Lewis was supposed to walk in. But he was afraid of the tracks. He’d seen the camera dolly trundle along them and he was damned if he was stepping into its path.
On take one his dad sort of prompted him into shot, but got into shot with him.
For take two I sat Lewis in the foreground and let the camera reveal him. But he looked like a sort of abstract squiggle down at the bottom of the frame, a colourful hair in the gate or something.
Take three — I had Tracey Robertson, as Betty the clown housewife, carry Little Joey in. He’d been demoted from actor to prop. That seemed to do the trick.
Then we filmed other stuff. For hours. BIG MISTAKE.
This is what happened when we put Lewis in front of the camera just after his bedtime. Three-year-olds have an Off-Switch somewhere in their little brains, and when they get tired, it trips, and they’re out like a light.
“We’ll have to be quick,” I told cinematographer Scott Ward, “Lewis is falling asleep.” Scott assumed I meant “Lewis is tired,” until he looked through the camera at the close-up, and realised, NO, he’s LITERALLY falling asleep.
I promise, just about the cutest thing you’ll ever see.
Lewis was nothing short of magnificent for the rest of the shoot. While acting as an extra, Fiona asked him what his favourite film was. “CRY FOR BOBO!” he replied, without hesitation. Now that’s my kind of actor.
One of the local papers here just carried a surprising story that ungovernably prolific genius Raoul Ruiz is planning an adaptation of Robert Louis Stephenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to be filmed in “modern” Aberdeen, with John Malkovich in the lead.
Ruiz has often expressed his admiration for RLS, and has worked with Malkovich successfully on TIME REGAINED and KLIMT, and recently gave a lecture in Aberdeen which I only heard about when it was too late. I would willingly have travelled to that granite scowl of a city to hear the Great Man’s thoughts. So these various facts make the project more or less explicable.
But it’s still a little odd, since Malkovich has already played Jekyll & Hyde, in Stephen Frears’ unsuccessful MARY REILLY (basically, the Jekyll story told from the perspective of the doctor’s maid), and a little of that was actually shot in Scotland. Although RLS set his morality tale in London, it’s often been suggested that the schizoid nature of Stephenson’s hometown, Edinburgh, with its respectable New Town and dark, crooked Old Town, was a major influence on the tale. Plus I think Stephen Frears fancied getting out of the studio for a bit, so the whole company transferred from Pinewood to Edinburgh at considerable expense to shoot a little around St Stephen’s Church and Greyfriar’s Churchyard, 90% of which wound up on the cutting room floor.
Through eminent Scots producer Iain Smith, some fun stories filtered from the shoot: one day, star Julia Roberts summoned him and announced, with much toothy smiling, that she was thinking of flying to New York to be with her new husband Lyle Lovett (remember THAT love match?) for the weekend. Smith said that sounded very nice, but wondered what it had to do with him. By the time he walked from Roberts’ trailer back to his office the phone was ringing. He picked it up and a man swore at him. It was Roberts’ agent, explaining, through the medium of profanity, how Smith had better find the money in his budget for Roberts’ little jaunt. I don’t think Smith ever actually agreed to do this, but it happened anyway. Studios like to keep their stars happy.
At the end of shooting the last scene, Malkovich approached his co-star and told her, in the frankest terms, how little he had enjoyed working with her and how greatly he looked forward to never finding himself in her presence again so long as he lived. A few months later both were called back to re-shoot the romantic finale… That must’ve been a happy reunion.
In the end, three endings were shot, none apparently very satisfying (the book kind of peters out too). This failure to get to grips with what the story was trying to achieve had a deleterious effect on the whole film. It starts well, creating horror and anxiety out of seemingly innocent domestic details, then fails to find any h. or a. in the actual horror-movie events central to the plot. The normally bright-witted Frears allows startling mismatches of word and image: Roberts describes her cruel father as having “not quite a limp”, and then we get a flashback of Michael Gambon lurching about on one ankle, the most extreme limp anybody’s ever seen. Malkovich’s Jekyll looks and sounds just like his Hyde (different hair and nose, is all), making nonsense of everybody’s confusion, which is all the more damaging in this version, since we’re supposed to share Julia Roberts’ viewpoint. We get the striking Bronagh Gallagher from THE COMMITMENTS as the other maid, which allows us to notice how much better suited than Roberts she would be to playing the lead. The best thing in it is living legend George Cole, late of the 50s ST TRINIANS films, as Poole, the butler.
Returning to the Ruiz: why Aberdeen? Presumably the place impressed Ruiz on his recent visit. It has a heavy slate ceiling of sky so low you can reach up and touch it, which could be a dramatic feature, and the whole city is grey, which at least gives it a unified look, even if the look is one you could achieve by diving into a cement mixer. I don’t have a copy of Christopher Brookmyre’s A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away to hand, but the author devotes most of chapter two to a demolition job on the “Silver City”:
‘”Silver City” my arse. It was grey. It. Was. Grey. If Aberdeen was silver then shite wasn’t brown, it was burnished sienna.’
Or words to that effect. But what the hell. I’m excited by the idea of Ruiz filming anywhere in Scotland, anywhere in the UK, anywhere AT ALL. The idea of him having to deal with the bureaucrats at Scottish Screen, our native funding body, is oddly hilarious, since in KLIMT he created a character called the Secretary, who defines his job at the Ministry of Arts as that of preventing any art from actually happening. Some people have said the same thing about our own Scottish Screen.
In fact, I can hold my hand up and say that when the organisation was called The Scottish Film Production Fund, it was I who started referring to it as The Scottish Film Prevention Fund, a nickname that caught on with alarming speed, until the outfit was reborn as the S.S. No possible jokes there.
Despite their initials, they are good people over there in Glasgow, the only problem being the endemic inertia and caution associated with committees and quangos the world over. Dynamic leadership might yet overcome this barrier. They were kind enough to co-fund three of my shorts, which gave me a career of sorts, after ten years’ aimless hoping. When I asked the then-head, Steve Macintyre, why he had voted against CRY FOR BOBO (he was in the minority and it still got selected) he told me that it struck him as the kind of film that would be very good if it was done well, but awful if it was done badly. Now, allowing for the strong possibility that perhaps this was a polite lie and really he just hated the script, it seems to me that the only films worth doing are the ones that fall into this exact category. The alternative is films that will never be terribly good no matter how hard everybody works, and it is these to which Scotland has devoted much of its slender resources through most of our brief history as a feature-film producing nation.
So, if Ruiz’s formidable imagination and strong reputation can stir Scottish Screen to action, and he can raise the rest of his finances elsewhere, from venture capitalists with short memories who no longer recall MARY REILLY, we could look forward to a truly unusual rendition of the Stephenson classic, one that genuinely merits that part of the original title usually omitted: The Strange Case…
I’ve linked to my short film, CRY FOR BOBO, before, but the YouTube version doesn’t really do justice to Scott Ward’s luminous photography, or the costume designs of Ali Mitchell and her team. Dissecting a few scenes in frame grabs gives me the chance to write some more about it and also show off how nice it looks (but even nicer in 35mm, obviously).
This is the jail-break scene. We start with a pleasingly dull establishing shot.
I sort of like the greyness. There’s something nice about a shot that’s sort of black-and-white-in-colour, especially if you rupture that by injecting something bright-hued. It’s the whole aesthetic of William Wellman’s frenzied allegorical melodrama TRACK OF THE CAT. Martin Scorsese used the idea for the music video section of BAD, his short Michael Jackson film (not the greatest moment of Scorsese’s career, but an important move in re-establishing him as a commercially viable force).
We’re also going for a Keatonesque flatness in the framing: the edge of the wall runs exactly parallel to the top and bottom edge of frame, like a kid’s drawing. I first noticed this simple framing approach in Richard Lester films, and discovered later it came from Buster Keaton. In this film we apply a bit of Kubrickian symmetry to it as well, sometimes.
We had a huge discussion about what to call the clown prison. It turns out there just isn’t a good pun out there. We considered Clownschwitz and Clownditz, but they were too heavy, and the wrong kind of prison. Luke, the props guy, came up with the best suggestion. In the film you don’t really have time to read it anyway.
(If anybody can suggest anything better, I’ll digitally add it in when I become George Lucas.)
Anyway, Coco, the more cunning of our two clown protags, has built a cannon in the prison workshop. (When challenged about this, he pretends it’s an ashtray.) There’s a BOOM!
– and a tiny figure flies over the wall. This is a Masters of the Universe doll belonging to our production designer, Tom Clay, who has a substantial collection of action figures and robots. The costume department went crazy dressing the figurine up as Coco, down to the last detail, even though I assured them it would only be glimpsed for a second.
The wall is only about five feet high. The design department built several, for reasons that will become clear.
After the doll falls out of the bottom of frame, Coco rises up and dusts himself off. (His cigar has been crushed by the fall.)
It’s a traditional false perspective effect. No special effects involved, it’s all in-camera. The miniature wall is right behind Coco, balanced on top of a short stone wall to give it extra height. You can just see some real tree branches at top left, which add a little more “reality”.
Creating the illusion that Coco came over the wall is mainly down to timing: he stands up just a second after the doll’s exit. It’s a balance between making it clear what’s meant to be happening, while making it obviously fake-looking.
Coco turns to the wall and there’s another cannon blast on the soundtrack: Bobo is following Coco.
A second doll smashes through the wall. This is on a wire fed through the part of the wall where the fake brickwork has been prepared. That’s why we needed several walls. I think we had five but only used two or three.
We had quite a few outtakes where the first doll failed to clear the wall. And there’s one where the second doll just hits the wall on the other side, you see the wall bulge, and that’s it. The Bobo doll was spreadeagled flat against the wall, just like when Wile E Coyote swings into a cliff face.
This isn’t the perfect take: on this one, the doll kind of PAUSED on its path through the wall, held up by the “brickwork”. In the end I liked that better than the smoother take we did next. Dubbing an “Argh!” onto the impact helped too.
(In the great single-shot heist scene in THE KILLERS, director Robert Siodmak ended up using the first complete take, the one where everything went wrong — it looked much more real.)
I first imagined this as a full-scale wall, with obvious dummiesbeing slung about. Tom was happy to build a strip of full-sized wall in between two existing walls, but we couldn’t find a set-up where we could do that. He suggested miniatures, and I said okay, as long as we could still do it in one shot… We practiced with a set wall and a doll and a camcorder and me standing up in the foreground. Everybody said “Naw, that doesn’t work.” We tried some kind of variation with the timing, and that was worse. Then I said, “Let’s watch the first version again.” This time we all loved it. Weird.
Now Bobo stands up in the foreground, holding one of the bricks.
The movie is part of a scheme called Tartan Shorts, which was in its tenth year, and had most often concentrated on a kind of social realist working class miserabilism. It felt good to be breaking out of that prison. Scott, the cinematographer turned to me after this and said, “I think we just did the best shot ever in a Tartan Short,” which pleased me no end. I think Scott did more beautiful work eslewhere in the film, but the idea here is so mad, I’m proud we did it.
We were filming in a children’s playground, since it provided enough space to shoot without distracting buildings in the background. So throughout the shot we had an audience of little kids, asking the usual irksome questions: “Is this going to be on telly?”
A tiny four-year-old asked a more intelligent one: “Why did the big clown go like that?” and she made a dusting motion, like Coco had done.
“Because he had come over the wall,” I said.
She looked at my like I was an idiot. “No, the big clown.”
I think I passed the question onto one of my assistant directors.
Super-costumier Ali snapped this additional false perspective shot as we were filming. I’m in the foreground wearing a reject clown costume (the stripes were too small).
At the premier, the audience went wild for this scene. A nice lady who works at the funding body, Scottish Screen, said to me, “I don’t know how you did that.” So I proceeded to explain it. She smiled and said, “I don’t know how you did that,” at which point I realised she didn’t CARE how we did it, she just liked it.
This is CLARIMONDE, a short film I directed mumblety years ago.
I thought it might be fun to ‘fess up to the various things I stole in making it. Whether this is instructive or interesting to anybody else, I have no idea. It might serve as a useful insight into the creative process, or that part of it that’s not so much creative as felonious.
First stolen item: the story, THE SPIDER by Hanns Heinz Ewers, also author of THE ALRAUNE, filmed with Brigitte Helm. Ewers was a queer sort of fellow: an early member of the Nazi Party, he also believed that Jews made the best Germans. He fell out of favour, unsurprisingly, and died as an un-person. So I figured there was no copyright to worry about… apologies if I was wrong!
The title sequence. The text is kind of illegible, which I regret. But I liked the idea of using SPACE: 1999 type lettering seemingly for no reason. It broadens out the confusion about when the hell this story is set.
The way each title appears below the one before is lifted from a couple of Richard Lester films: he does it in PETULIA and JUGGERNAUT and I always thought it looked really nice. (I’m always telling my students, “That’s NOT a good enough reason!”)
The artwork which we slowly zoom into is sort of influenced by VERTIGO’s titles. I happened to know a really gifted cartoonist, Garry Marshall, now an award-winning animator, so I drafted him in. (Filmmakers’ rule #1: exploit your acquaintances!)
The opening shot. Hitchcock again, I was wowed by the massive amount of information gathered by the camera exploring Jimmy Stewart’s apartment at the start of REAR WINDOW, so this is my poor man’s version. The iris-out was achieved in-camera, with a borrowed lighting iris gaffer-taped to the matte box (Gaffer Tape, and not The Force, is what binds the universe together, at least in film and TV). We had no tracks so the camera pulls back on a wheeled tripod as the guy on the floor making the curtains billow backwards-somersaults out the way and cinematographer/operator/grip has to step gingerly over one tripod leg while maintaining a steady movement and panning 180º so the track away from the window becomes a track in on the door handle.
I read an interview with George Cukor where he said something like ”I’m not one of those directors who tracks in on door handles,” and I thought, “Well *I* *AM*!”)
The door handle in the film is now on my front door.
Just as the shot was ending the film ran out! I liked the way that looked, so I kept it in. Scorsese did the same at the end of LAST TEMPTATION, but I wasn’t consciously emulating him on this shot, I just got lucky.
When our protag, psychic detective Anthony Flear, enters, the way his face is revealed by his lowering hat is a direct steal from Alec Guinness’ first appearance in THE LADYKILLERS, a film I should write more about later. Flear is played by Colin McLaren, a genius writer who later won a BAFTA and now, like your friend and humble narrator, spends most of his time writing screenplays that don’t get made. It’s important work.
(Actually, it looks like one of Colin’s is finally happening, and it’s the follow-up to RED ROAD. But his version will be funnier.)
Colin had just made a short film with Sarah Gavron, for which he’d been paid in coal. I paid him in spurious money, since he owed me some but we couldn’t agree how much, so it seemed the best policy to make that his fee rather than let it get in the way of a beautiful friendship.
Colin wears my old National Health specs a la Harry Palmer.
The floorboards of this room are actually made of BROWN PAPER.
The use of diary entries: TAXI DRIVER, I guess.
The camera’s tracking and zip-panning about: GOODFELLAS, I think.
The three victims pictured: a film student, the composer’s sister (in drag as Ringo Starr) and a harmonica-playing cartoonist. The theme of gender-swapping is oddly Prophetic since the production designer is a man now, but at the time we made this, I could have sworn he was a woman.
Our makeup artist has since worked on all the HARRY POTTER films, and transformed Jude Law in the recent SLEUTH. His work here was mostly done with tissue paper and liquid latex. The corpses wore ping pong ball eyes with pinholes in. The transvestite corpse wore only one eye because the tunnel-vision made her claustrophobic.
All this tracking around — I just got into it! On my previous films it had been too much work to move the camera, and we’d been habitually behind schedule struggling to finish. here, because it’s a studio film, suddenly there was time to make things more interesting. In all the previous movies, the shots I achieved were compromised versions of the storyboard — on this one, they were enhanced versions.
Peter Greenaway once said, “I don’t move the camera much because that would tend to increase audience involvement,” and I thought, “Well *I* *WILL*!”
Some things were just spontaneous, wild choices, like the camera gradually tilting diagonally, or pulling out of focus on the phone (influenced by an ad for Cadbury’s Flake, I think). I would say to Kenneth Simpson, who was shooting it, “This shot seems a bit normal. What can we do to weird it up?” If you have Just Enough time, you can pause for a nanosecond when a shot is ready and think about whether there’s anything you can do to improve it. The falling leaves at the end of THE THIRD MAN came about that way: two men up ladders with sacks of dead leaves they’d gathered a minute before.
The first clip ends with my fake time-lapse, which required the help of the entire crew. One person was turning the clock hands from behind while another dimmed the lights and another pair physically lowered a biggish light outside the window to simulate a setting sun.
BTW, the building seen across the street is a quarter-scale model in long shots. In Clarimonde’s closer shots it’s actually the same window Colin is at, dressed differently. So the actors are never actually looking at each other at all.
The second clip begins with some out-of-focus stuff that I should have retaken, but I couldn’t afford to. It would’ve been nice if it had gone into focus when he puts his specs on though. I’m not too keen on the dream sequence. The words which the corpses mouth, out-of-synch, are the same words divined by Flear earlier, and they sort of make a warning, but it’s not very clear or well-done. Should have just cut this scene.
Somebody once said they thought the way Clarimonde slides her finger along the window sill was “erotic”, which pleased me. “I can do erotic!”
When she catches the fly I used both takes, so we get a nice flurry of action. I like that it’s not too obvious that she catches it TWICE. When Flear opens his hand to show her, we pull back through the window without breaking it (because, duh, there’s no glass in it), a swipe from CITIZEN KANE.
During the dance, we used a simple matte to block out the top of Clarimonde’s window, since I was worried the studio lighting rig might show up. Just a black piece of tape in front of the lens. So when C raises her hand to mime a toast, her hand kind of disappears…
I’m pleased with the theatrical lighting change on Flear’s face. Had I seen DETOUR at this point? Or A CANTERBURY TALE?
The curtains billowing open is played in reverse: we weighted the curtain ends and THREW them at poor Althea, who caught them.
The spider shadow puppet was designed by my flatmate, who later went schizo and started stalking the critic and documentarist Mark Cousins.
The vertical mouth is a straight Freudian vagina dentata. A lot of horror films play with this image and I thought it would be fun to do it fairly blatantly. Poor Althea had her mouth glued shut and couldn’t help but inhale the fumes through her nose. She communicated in Post-It notes, which were apparently quite obscene, and mostly detailing how she’d like to avenge herself upon me.
The policeman on the phone is voiced by awesome genius Ken Campbell, who recorded his role in the green room at the Traverse Theatre during a break in a six-hour performance he was giving of his legendary “bald” Trilogy. Diamond geezer.
I like the idea that when Flear tries to resist, we get the only handheld shot, but revert back to “tracking” when Clarimonde takes control again.
Believe it or not, the visual rhyme of the doorknob and Flear’s hand wasn’t planned at all. Fortune favours the prepared mind.
The next two shots don’t show Colin’s face because he was late that morning.
Colin sat in the corner hemmed in by alarm clocks was one of the first images I got reading the short story. Vaguely inspired by the guy in prison in CALIGARI.
Clarimonde gets the old-style movie lighting, a patch of light that just hits her eyes. Selective Moonlight.
Colin at the window with his hand raised is pure NOSFERATU. We decided right then to make it rain and rigged up some tubing… we’d seen the clip from IN COLD BLOOD which they excerpt in the documentary VISIONS OF LIGHT, where the light filters through the rainfall onto Robert Blake’s face… this may have come about through me asking the cameraman, “What have you always wanted to do?”
The fast Psychological Track-Ins on the victims and Flear: this comes from a combination of MILLER’S CROSSING and Sam Raimi. I was interested by the sense of violence the moving camera can have. Now I say that for violence in camera movement the real king is Andrei Zulawski.
The spinning wheel shot was done at the end of the shoot, after we’d taken the set apart but I didn’t want to stop filming, I was enjoying it too much… I figured I could use the shot somewhere…
Craning up (actually raising the camera on the tripod’s pneumatic riser) to reveal the noose: some of you may have spotted where I pinched this from. Thanks to Maestro Leone for a really terrific, funny shot.
Colin rides towards his death on the tripod itself, a foot atop each wheel, discretely hanging onto its neck. Inspired by Cocteau, probably:
The POV track thru the noose was another idea that came to me as I read the story for the first time.
Clarimonde’s voice-over comes from a different short story altogether, another fictional CLARIMONDE from Theophile Gautier’s La Morte Amoreuse, translated by the great Lafcadio Hearn.
The kiss: REAR WINDOW again. The zoom into the eye doesn’t really work. But the repeat of the opening shot is something I’m fond of. My heads of department all did a great job on this movie, considering we had no money and the heads of department generally were the departments.
Even though it’s made of cardboard and string, I like this film best of all my stuff apart from CRY FOR BOBO. If I can defend the plundering at all, it would be by saying that while I lifted general style and atmospherics from German Expressionism and noir, the specific things were often swiped from more unexpected sources, like comedies and spaghetti westerns, so that they hopefully get transformed somewhat in the process — stealing becomes an imaginative act.
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FILM | Tagged: Bert Lahr, Cry For Bobo, David Cairns, Morag McKinnon, The Wizard of Oz | 
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