“Isn’t it a bit old-hat?”

Kenneth Branagh usually comes up with some interesting directorial strategies. The trouble is, they usually don’t work, and neither do the films. He’s inventive, ambitious, and courageous, but I somehow never feel he’s a natural film-maker.

Nevertheless, some critics were perhaps too nasty about SLEUTH. The film unites an interesting bunch of people, looks very handsome, and is easy enough to watch. There are good bits. Harold Pinter’s reworking of Anthony Shaffer’s play is often amusing.

JL: “Maggie never told me you were… such a manipulator. She told me you were no good in bed, but she never told me you were such a manipulator.”
MC: “She told you I was no good in bed?”
JL: “Oh, yes.”
MC: “She was joking. I’m wonderful in bed.”
JL: “I must tell her.”

As in the original, a successful thriller writer confronts the much younger man who has made off with his wife, and a variety of vicious mind-games are played. Pinter dispenses with Shaffer’s critique of the English mystery novel tradition, leaving the piece as simply another Pinter power-play of pauses. Even the title becomes irrelevant.

One can’t escape the fact that the gimmick casting — Michael Caine returns from the original Joe Mankiewicz version, but playing the other part, Jude Law, who’s already played a Caine role in the ALFIE remake, plays Caine’s part from the original –  is a titillating concept, but not necessarily the best way to fill the parts. Olivier, in the original film, stood boldly for the English establishment, and Caine was the working-class upstart — it was almost too perfect. With cockney Caine as the rich author and the vaguely classless Law as his romantic rival, the distinction is lost. But more important is what Branagh can get out of these actors in the way of acting.

Caine starts off like he’s trying for poshness, perhaps imitating Alan Bates (a fine interpreter of Pinter), which is a bit queasy. The it starts to feel like he doesn’t know his lines well enough — little hesitations and bodging of the difficult bits are either methody additions or genuine screw-ups, and either way they’re harmful to Pinter’s rhythms. But gradually Caine’s undiminished charm and inexplicable authority work their spell, and he becomes enjoyable.

Law is fine when he underplays, and rather embarassing when he tries too hard. He’s a star when he just holds the camera’s gaze. Some insecurity forces him to spoil it by doing stuff, and the effort shows. He’s probably most useful when he’s being tormented by Caine, since some evil part of this viewer derives some pleasure from seeing Law having a hard time. Later, he will do foolish things with a loaded pistol, much like the detective in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE.

Nobody would call this prime Pinter. Although the Great Man has written screen thrillers successfully in the past (THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM, under-valued) here there are odd, damaging implausibilities. Why does Caine have an automated rope ladder in his stately home? Why does Law take his gun from his holster for no reason, lay it on the bed for no reason, thus allowing Caine to grab it at the climax? That’s quite bad playwriting, or direction.

What makes the film watchable? The set, designed by Branagh’s regular collaborator Tim Harvey, is very nice, all shiny surfaces and disco lighting, and the photography of Haris Zambarloukos serves up innumerable great widescreen close-ups. But the James Bond lair doesn’t make much sense, and is part of the overall watering-down of Shaffer’s original concept, the conflict between tradition and progress. The Bond vibe is both apt and ironic, since original Bond designer Ken Adam created the look of the original SLEUTH,

The stylised environment is doubtless meant to provide a comfortable setting for the stylised talk, but Pinter’s verbal gymnastics are defiantly archaic, and sound more so amid these glossy surfaces and pointless hi-tech appurtenances. I’m reminded of the grand staircase in FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S KENNETH BRANAGH’S MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN (I think that’s the full title), which has no bannister and makes you nervous to look at it. It’s quite an interesting effect, but you can’t help wonder WHY would anybody have a stair like that in their house?

This next is a bit spoilerific — if you’ve read the above and still plan on seeing SLEUTH, skip this last stuff.

Full disclosure — Stephen Murphy, prosthetic makeup artist for Jude Law, did the make-up on my clown film and is a good friend. He’s been working on HARRY POTTERS and stuff, turning ex-porn dwarfs into goblins, working his way up, and this is is his biggest job yet. Oddly, the transformation reminds me of another make-up creation, even though Stephen didn’t design the Law job.

It’s the Ringo Starr/Mexican bandit look Stephen created for Alice Bicknell in my film CLARIMONDE using mainly liquid latex and wet tissue paper. I’m also reminded of another makeup creation, Reece Shearsmith as Geoff Tipps in THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN:

Even the voice is the same! The transformation works OK until Law starts overdoing it again, which makes him more recognisable. Stephen reports that Law was a very nice chap to work with, which is about what I’d expect, actually. Hitting the odd paparazzo doesn’t make him a bad guy, in fact I give him points for it, even though I’m anti-violence.

In the original SLEUTH, make-up artist Tom Smith, required to transform Michael Caine completely, executed a self-portrait, changing Caine into a Smith clone. I asked Stephen if he’d been tempted to do the same, but alas, he hadn’t known. What might have been REALLY interesting would have been if the remake’s make-up DESIGNER, Eileen Kastner-Delago, had given Law a sex change and made him over in her own image.

Sexual ambiguity does enter the picture in the last act, with both Caine and Law suggesting bisexual sides, a motif borrowed from Sidney Lumet and Ira levin’s DEATHTRAP, the low-rent version of SLEUTH — Caine, having kissed Christopher “Superman” Reeve, now kisses “Sky Captain”. But this additional twist leads to no new dramatic suspense, and certainly doesn’t carry the mild shock value it did in 1982 (”But it’s so juicy,” Lumet pleaded, when Reeve objected to the kiss). As with the despised DIABOLIQUE, the re-makers try to preserve the twist surprise by adding a further wrinkle to the already-creased story, but it does nothing but drag the film long past its emotional climax… which is about half an hour in.

For all that, the film is diverting, short, and at least it has a different set of flaws from the ones we’re used to seeing all the time. Any bets on what the next Michael Caine remake will be?

“I am not a mung seed.”

A Scottish Kenneth Williams?

A treat for you! DIARY OF A MADMAN is a half-hour short directed by Morag McKinnon back in the ’90s, written by and starring Colin McLaren, based on the story by Nikolai Gogol. Morag, assisted by Travis Reeves has planted the thing on YouTube in three bite-sized morsels, to be enjoyed by all.

I edited the film! I don’t recall there being that much work involved in that — the long-take style employed meant that 90% of the work was done when I’d removed the clapperboards. But I had a good time with the sound effects, which I roughed in before Bronek Korda and Derek Livesey at BBC Scotland mixed things and thinned it down and took out all the distracting stuff I’d tried. Looking at it now the editing seems the weakest thing about it. As it goes on there are fewer match cuts and it gets better and better. My choice of when to dissolve or fade looks alarmingly random though.

The Scotsman newspaper rightly praised the film as a minimalist masterpiece and bemoaned the fact that the talents emerging from Edinburgh College of Art’s film department weren’t finding the financial support to create a new wave of Scottish cinema. That might be finally changing, with former E.C.A. students like Travis, Morag, Martin Radich and Sarah Gavron all making feature films recently. The idea that it takes the U.K. film industry ten years to spot new talent isn’t too encouraging, but at least it’s happening.

Madman McLaren, seen here in full flow, has scripted Morag’s forthcoming tragi-comic feature ROUNDING UP DONKEYS. Although almost pathologically sane, to quote Herzog, Colin has a rare handle on insanity in his writing that’s reminiscent of Spike Milligan. Here he deftly interweaves original gags with Gogol material. You can’t see the join!

I’m sorry that Colin hasn’t done more acting of late — I think Morag would like to tempt him back, but I don’t blame him from withdrawing — he did a bunch of student films, which must have been a bit tiresome at times, but he also had several theatrical triumphs, playing Hamlet, the M.C. in Cabaret and creating a theatrical version of MADMAN in which Morag appeared.

Colin’s work here is even more impressive here given that he had a cold during the three nights of filming. And swinging those shoes round his neck nearly sawed his head off.

I’m impressed all over by Kenneth Simpson’s 16mm photography. I recall we had one shot that was out of focus, which we ditched — the only out-take! I think it featured the conclusion of the Fat Patsy “sub-plot”. The rear projection worked great, and the long take at the end now seems… rather brave!

Apologies if the inter-titles are hard to read — they are on 16mm too!

“I’m not right glad the now.”

More Gogol madness soon!

Suspects

Here are some SEXUAL DEVIANTS:

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.

Geology, litigation, gender, cinema: my Saturday night.

The glamour of film-making — the unit assembles for ROUNDING UP DONKEYS.

Just back from the rat-infested city of Glasgow, which I plunged into in order to attend some birthday celebrations. I was also on the look-out for info that might help me land another film or TV job, though it was unlikely that anybody at this party would be able to grant me one directly, and I was also looking out for any little items of interest for the blog.

The 40th birthdays belonged to Travis and Helen Reeves, whom I know from way back. They are that rare phenomenon, non-identical twins who look alike, though not so much now. I shall explain — while not genetically identical, they have a strong facial resemblance and similar build. But not so much now, since Travis, who used to be Helen’s sister, is now her brother, which makes a fair difference.

It’s all prefigured weirdly in my film CLARIMONDE, I think, where Travis, then outwardly female, provided the voice for a male character (a ghost). The same scene featured another male ghost who was actually a woman in drag, looking like a cross between Ringo Starr and a Mexican bandit.

Along with his gender reassignment, Mr. T has also changed careers — apart from his writing and directing, he used to be a production designer, arranging objects within the three-dimensional space of a set, and is now a sound designer, arranging noises within the three-dimensional space of a cinema (or TV viewer’s lounge). This comparison between the two jobs originates with Walter Murch, and it’s the reason he invented the job title “sound montage designer”.

Helen Reeves is a “diminutive antipodean singer-songwriter” who used to duet with Travis under the unofficial heading “The Twindigo Girls”, though Travis’ deepened voice has made their harmonizing trickier, and rendered the nickname inaccurate.

I did find out a few things that might prove useful in my film-hustling, and caught up with several old friends, such as Bert Eeles, editor of CRY FOR BOBO, and John Cobban, sound designer of same. I also picked up fascinating insights into forensic archaeology from Travis’ friend Friga (sp?), with whom I also co-invented a futuristic dwelling space (the kind of thing I tend to do after a few pints). Friga was bemoaning the fact that geological drill cores, which are basically cylinders of rock, are often very beautiful, what with the interesting laminations in sedimentary stone, but if you’re a geologist you get too many of them to keep. I suggested building a house out of them. Friga initially thought this impractical, since the cores are cylindrical, not brick-shaped, until we jointly realised they could be assembled into a STONE LOG CABIN.

So when you find yourself spending your retirement years in an edifice constructed from little cylinders of laminated sedimentary rock, you’ll know it’s my fault.

The night was spent in Morag McKinnon’s spare room. Morag is fresh from directing her first feature, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS, but I can’t tell you much of anything about that because it’s all at a sensitive stage, rough cut and all. I’m still very much psyched to see it, but there’s a no-DVD policy in force at the moment to stop unfinished edits falling into THE WRONG HANDS, i.e. probably mine.

I can tell you about the LAWSUIT though, because that’s been in the papers. As I mentioned before, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS is the second film in a trilogy, following on from Andrea Arnold’s RED ROAD. While the films are supposed to deal with the lives of a common group of characters, the fact that each movie is the work of a different writer and director means that this was never likely to have the uniformity of Kieslowski’s DECALOGUE. In fact, screenwriter / mad god Colin McLaren refitted the characters to suit his dramatic purposes, giving Kate Dickie a new daughter, and having her meet Martin Compston for the first time, even though she meets him in RED ROAD. So it’s an alternate universe sequel to RED ROAD. (There should be more of those!)

Following in the same spirit, Morag recast a minor character in RED ROAD — Dickie’s dad — since he’s the major character in ROUNDING UP DONKEYS. James Cosmo, a distinguished player who also embodies a dad in TRAINSPOTTING, takes the role. This has upset the actor from RED ROAD, Andrew Armour, who apparently feels that by taking the part in film 1, he was effectively contracted to play him in all subsequent films, should the character appear. I don’t think he has a legal leg to stand on, but there’s a terrible pathos to his position: he’s said that this is his only chance at a leading role, which is tantamount to admitting nobody would ever cast him in a star part except by accident.

I like Armour in RED ROAD — he seems like a real old guy who’s kind of wandered in front of the camera, rather than like an actor, which is surely a good thing. But the character written by Colin is a new person in all but name, and requires a different sort of player to bring him to life. It’s just one of those things.

If you want a really sad casting story, consider the case of the actor originally cast as Sonny in THE GODFATHER. In order to get Paramount to agree to cast Al Pacino (an unknown who had underperformed in screen tests), Coppola had to agree to take James Caan as Sonny and let the original guy go. Not only had the guy already celebrated getting the part with his family… I can’t remember his name. Because he’s not famous. He never got another break — that was his shot.

(Maybe I’m inclined to depressing tales because I’m hungover. More cheerful stuff tomorrow!)

Quote of the Day: Guess who’s coming to lunch?

Can I just recommend Cocteau’s Diary of a Film very very wholeheartedly? It’s tremendously reassuring to us filmmakers, and I would think amazing and fascinating to everyone else too, that the making of such a beautiful, graceful, seemingly “effortless” work like LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE should be nothing but physical and mental anguish. Cocteau is having such an exaggeratedly bad time it becomes perversely amusing, even as you feel for him. Just as you can open Klaus Kinski’s autobio at random and find him trashing some colleague or shagging some actress (usually both) on any given page, so Cocteau’s pages are stuffed with skin rashes, toothache, carbuncles, rain, faulty electrics abd general existential angst.

It’s what I call a PAGE-TURNER.

“Wednesday the 26th, 11p.m.

“My face is only a shell of rashes, ravages and itches. It’ll take me all my strength to forget this task, and go on living underneath it. Rained this morning, but the barometer was up. Built the scaffolding etc. for the cameras whilst the artists were making up a changing. At eleven o’clock we’ll do the two shots which we missed yesterday. The light was very difficult owing to the smoke machines. Marais won’t use a double. And does the jump from the terrace with the help of a spring-board. After which we remember that he’d carried his hat in his right hand yesterday, whilst today he hasn’t got one at all.

“Marais and I lunched at Madame de Labédoyère. A strange meal. I sat on the right of the old lady; she was dressed all in black, while Marais, on her left, was still made up as the Beast. I dare say her little girls will always remember it.”

I first read this right after making my own first short, THE THREE HUNCHBACKS, and I identified deeply. It’s all so unpleasant, why do we do it? As Cocteau and Marais are afflicted by carbuncles, I developed an unheard-of boil at the base of my spine, like the attachment for a Cronenberg gamepod, only EXISTENZ hadn’t been made yet. Horrible.

You make a film; it gets inside you; and then it EMERGES through your skin.

Misadventures in Babysitting

This is a low-budget kids’ short I made for BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen’s Tartan Smalls scheme. It was fun to do Joe 90 sci-fi props and muck about with a childs’ eye view. But I guess I’ll never be Carol Reed or Alexander Mackendrick when it comes to directing kids. These boys were really good, but I didn’t know how to get the best out of them. I gained a lot of experience directing a couple episodes of a kids’ show called INTERGALACTIC KITCHEN afterwards, and feel I could do a lot better now.

But here’s how it SHOULD be done:

I like how the (very) little girl doesn’t seem to have been CONTROLLED, so much as turned loose with her dialogue. She swivels around and fidgets and she’s constantly in RANDOM MOTION, like a real kid.

It’s from THE NANNY, script by Jimmy Sangster, directed by Seth Holt. S.H. was an interesting chap whose career crosses from Ealing (he produced THE LADYKILLERS) to Hammer (he died – of hiccups — while making BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB). Holt was singled out by the iconoclasts at Movie magazine as representing the best hope for British cinema to escape its literary-inspired “tradition of quality” and achieve some kind of robust, authentic, home-grown cinema. It didn’t quite happen.

Holt’s NANNY star Bette Davis described him as “a tower of evil” and “the most ruthless director I have worked with apart from William Wyler,” which I assume was intended as praise, since Bette had a tempestuous affair with Wyler and made three great films with him. I wish she’d made more with Holt! Perhaps his failure to sleep with her ended that collaboration.

I can see why Movie rated Holt so highly — he’s gutsy, clever, and in THE NANNY, genuinely inventive and capable of exercising a tight grip on the audience’s emotions. TASTE OF FEAR (AKA SCREAM OF FEAR), the film Movie singled out as showing signs of real promise, is an above-par DIABOLIQUES clone with effective frissons (a corpse seated at the bottom of a murky swimming pool traumatized a young Tom Hanks when his mother mistakenly took him to see the film!). Even a piece of hokum like BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB has points of interest, from its frenzied character performances to its knock-out ending, which seems to anticipate Polanski’s THE TENANT.

More kidstuff: THE NANNY also features a turn from Perky Pam herself, Pamela Franklin, a Shadowplay favourite for her work in THE INNOCENTS and AND SOON THE DARKNESS.

Google Gaga

This post is solely intended to make it easier for people to Google me:

David Cairns Shadowplay film blog Shadow Play movie

There!

If you’re new here, click on the banner at the top and it’ll take you to the most recent entries.

The author prepares to DESTROY HIS ENEMIES.

Anatomy of a Gag

 

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.

I ought to be content with that.

Me and My Gal

The author and Jeanne Moreau, captured just instants before both were consumed by a MIGHTY COLUMN OF FLAME!

It’s quite a horrible picture of both of us, but I hope you’ll consider the difficult conditions under which it was taken — encroaching column of flame, death imminent, etc.

“Her name is Clarimonde. I am sure of 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.

I hope.