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!)

The hearth moved

Ground-breaking sexual shenanigans from Jules Dassin’s PHAEDRA. Faced with the challenging task of manufacturing sexual chemistry between his wife, Melina Mercouri, and Anthony Perkins, Dassin pulls out all the stops. The result is like a MOVIE MASH-UP of love scene clichés — soft focus; roaring fireplace; clenching hands; rain battering on window; the sweeping music of Mikis Theodorakis on the gramophone (there will be NO remarks about Anthony Perkins and Greek love in this post. Apart from this one). By the end it’s a wonder there’s a stick of furniture intact in that apartment.

David Thomson in his BioDic of Film, writes, “In good company, and a little drunk, HE WHO MUST DIE, PHAEDRA and 10.30PM SUMMER might cure would-be suicides.” I’ll allow that Dassin skirts the edges of absurdity in 10.30, and PHAEDRA looks like it plunges headlong into a basin of ludicrous pomp, but I still get a kick out of this scene. The effect is overdone but the individual elements are orchestrated with great skill — I like the compositions and editing and music.

I heard of an English teacher one time who would object to purple passages of sexual action in DH Lawrence with the words, “But it’s not LIKE that!” which is a good argument, though not necessarily one that should take precedence over all other concerns. I don’t think it applies to Dassin — taken metaphorically, his sex scene could be seen as quite authentic. Unless what you’re after is complete authenticity (which would mean SOUND EFFECTS, and none of us wants THAT) evoking the corny (there’s rarely anything ORIGINAL about sex) but overwhelming emotions of what General Ripper calls “the physical act of love” seems reasonable, and doing it without fear of looking silly seems at least commendable.

Kubrick told Michel Ciment that the exhilerating and goofy William Tell Overture time-lapse threesome in CLOCKWORK ORANGE was in part a reaction to the way movies tend to solemnize sex, and he had a point there, but sex is very often quite humourless. There’s plenty of room for giggling at the start, but there comes a point where that could be  OFF-PUTTING.

So, if sex is overwhelming, serious, and best treated in a stylised way — Dassin is surely the man for the job. He was dismissed for his “strained seriousness” by Andrew Sarris, but that seems somehow wrong: it’s no strain for Dassin to be serious. His lighter films from this period, TOPKAPI and NEVER ON SUNDAY, seem far more effortful (though I love TOPKAPI and make allowances for NOS).

Dassin was a Sexual Pioneer! The bisexual triangle of 10.30PM SUMMER must have been strong stuff for 1966. I also think there’s enough textual evidence in his work to deduce a keen interest in sado-masochism (whippings abound in THE LAW, RIFIFI…)

Sex, in the movies, is fraught with difficulty. Maybe because it’s universal but also distinctly personal. There’s a cringe-making story of a well-known actor who, in his first sex scene, grabbed his partner by the hair and began slamming her head off the pillow. “Cut! What are you doing?” He was totally perplexed. What’s the problem? Doesn’t everybody do it this way?

Everybody does it every which way! The first sex scene in a mainstream movie is supposed to be in ECSTASY, in 1933. Director Gustav Machatý attempted to evoke an orgasmic reaction from his star Hedy Lamarr by pricking her feet with a pin. “That would just be really annoying,” says my partner. “Maybe everybody Gustav Machatý slept with found him really annoying.”

Another technique — in RED ROAD, an actress appears to receive oral sex. In reality she was holding half a peach between her thighs for her co-star to munch on. Hey, it’s a system!

In SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, Barbet Schroeder wanted to film a more than usually convincing blow-job, so he purchased a dildo for Jennifer Jason Leigh to fellate: the hope was to show she had SOMETHING in her mouth without offending the censor by showing WHAT. But, perhaps fearful of insulting his male lead, Schroeder acquired a jaw-breakingly enormous plastic dinosaur appendage…

DON’T LOOK NOW is justly famous for it’s cinematically beautiful love scene. One story I heard, from former producer/director turned educationalist Brent MacGregor, who heard it from an assistant editor, casts an interesting light on the scene. Supposedly, Donald Sutherland was more “into” the sex scene than co-star Julie Christie, which resulted in (a) her walking off the set after one take and (b) Warren Beatty bursting into the cutting room and attempting to beat up director Nicolas Roeg.

I don’t generally credit such gossip, but a couple of aspects of it at least make sense — if you look at the actual lovemaking, MOST of what you see is consistent with a single hand-held shot. But bits of the shot were unusable as the cameraman was clambering over the bed, etc. With only one continuous take, partly no good, Roeg was forced to intercut, and all he could intercut WITH was neutral material, the couple dressing to go out (which would have to have been shot deliberately for the purpose, later, if we buy this version of events). And thus is born a thing of immense beauty and poetic resonance.

Donald Sutherland reports being locked in that bedroom “for hours” with Roeg, Christie, and an extremely noisy unblimped camera. But what’s seen in the film isn’t consistent with such a prolonged shoot. And what’s been rumoured about Roeg’s swinging lifestyle might be consistent with the desire to go a little further than usual in the name of realism…

(Also — looking through the scene for not-too-explicit frame grabs, I realised that it’s quite a bit more explicit than I’d previously thought. Much of the “stronger stuff” is compositionally decentred and hard to spot due to the pace of cutting, but… let’s just say I hope Julie Christie remembered to bring half a peach to the set…)

Roadkill

 

I’ve been sounding people out about my treatment of RED ROAD (in brief, watching it in episodes over an entire week and sorta live-blogging the experience). I was worried that I wasn’t being fair to it. I was much meaner about THE COTTAGE (and somebody, perhaps the director, has objected to this in the Comments section) but at least I saw that one in approved conditions, at the cinema and in one go.

Generally, friends said things like “You’re being quite even-handed about it, but the fact that it’s taking you a week to watch it…one can read between the lines.”

Well, without my even noticing, I managed to watch more that 24 minutes of it last time — in fact, it was more like 30! So I knew I had only one short burst left in store, but somehow I couldn’t quite settle down to it last night. I spent the evening making screen grabs of Anton Diffring’s arse exploding instead, which somehow felt more, I dunno, rewarding.

But, with Jaffa Cakes to the ready I finally completed my epic slog through the film. I was pleasantly surprised! As I had suspected, the long-delayed revelation that explains Kate Dickie’s erratic behaviour through the whole film was kind of a damp squib in dramatic terms, failing to exceed what I’d already imagined. And in the aftermath of her LADY VENGEANCE-style attempt at gaining retribution (a completely half-arsed scheme that could never have worked — does Andrea Arnold have any idea how appallingly hard it is to secure a conviction for rape?) the pace slows to a crawl, to the point where you expect it to start replaying backwards, like that bit in FUNNY GAMES. Kate’s in-laws make tea. We watch three cups being carefully poured, in real time. A biscuit is selected. Will her dad-in-law have a biscuit? No, he’ll not bother.

BUT! A happy ending. How surprising. Not overwhelmingly happy, but redemptive. Joy Division drone rapturously onto the soundtrack, just to stop us getting TOO excited, and this is accompanied by a high-angle shot that might as well have “The End” stenciled across it — the combination of song and locked-off composition rupture the carefully-preserved aesthetic of the rest of the film, but it’s arguably appropriate to do so. It seemed kind of wrong, though. Maybe making the shot a security camera view would have justified it.

This is the first in a three-film scheme originated by Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa Films, who have been drawn to Scotland by the preponderance of gloom. Like moths to a flame, only a flame that somehow makes the room darker. Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen created a core group of characters (a not-too-diverse bunch of working-class whites, alas) who are to feature in all three films. As I always say, it seems a screwy justification for making films, but if the films are good they won’t need any justification. I’m dining with the writer of the second film this evening, so expect GOSSIP.

RED ROAD seems to struggle slightly with the imposed form. At least one major character, Natalie Press, has no storyline of her own and no real involvement with anybody else’s. Martin Compston is only slightly more integrated. The film apes REAR WINDOW’s construction to a moderate degree, with Kate Dickie’s surveillance job affording her a window into numerous lives, but this isn’t exploited the way Hitchcock did it: there’s really only ONE supporting character, a man with a dog, and his “story” is extremely slight (dog dies, is replaced, a distant echo of one strand from the Hitchcock film). The surveillance work is smoothly woven into the central plot, but other elements, such as Dickie’s van-driving, premature-ejaculating lover, have no real narrative function and seem to occupy space that could be better filled.

My feeling is that the film’s constant hugging of its central enigma to its chest is a neurotic mistake. If we opened with the background tragedy, all Dickie’s behaviour would carry more emotional weight, while still being intriguing and baffling. The story overall has a decent heft to it, but it’s drawn out to staggering lengths, and what might help would be a bunch of supporting stories using the other characters. At present they don’t serve any purpose except to pad out a thin plot.

RED ROAD is a superior Scottish film. That’s my problem — it exemplifies an approach to filmmaking that ignores the need for complex narratives and replaces it with nothing but nice photography. It’s well shot, well-acted, well-scored (but some actual TUNES would have helped), but it seems parsimonious, refusing us subplots, tonal variety, changes of pace, fun. It’s the kind of film people abroad might expect from the Scots: dour and tight-fisted.

I don’t need each Scottish film to fulfill every possibility of cinema, but I’m tired of the sameness. A filmmaker as able as Arnold ought to separate herself from the herd by making something genuinely different for her next project. Scottish cinema needs a change.

Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?

 

OK, admittedly it’s late at night, but Fiona’s safely abed with a cold, there’s no chance of interruption, SURELY I can finish watching Andrea Arnold’s RED ROAD this time. I must be about halfway through it.

In episode three of this exciting serial, Kate Dickie is drawn closer still to the ex-con (Tony Curran) she’s been stalking. In fact, having submitted to a pawing at a party round at his flat, she’s working up to a full-fledged seduction.

The film’s third sex scene is something of a departure for Scottish cinema, since it seems to be both consensual and, to a degree, pleasurable for the participants. Not necessarily for the audience, mind you, but let’s not get carried away with hibernian joie de vivre here. More beautiful photography is deployed (night-time views from a tower block are a gift to digital cinema), though I’m uncertain about the cut-aways to a gently burbling lava lamp during the actual coitus — it seems somehow comical. But the shots themselves are v. pretty.

The semi-pleasurable sex (very explicit, very unromantic, kind of squalid and horrible to watch, but photographically nice at times) fits in with the general vibe — this is post-RATCATCHER Scottish miserabilism. Lynn Ramsay’s sullen wallow of a film departed from the social-realist vibe of the Loach imitators with flights of fancy, like a mouse landing on the moon by balloon — only a moment, but it lifts the thing out of straight realism. The new flavour is more “artistic”,  in the sense that poverty must be rendered aesthetically pleasing, less political, but just as dour. (Lynn Ramsay = Tarkovsky with deep-fried Mars Bars.)

Curran’s chat-up line, in which he speculates frankly as to the flavour of Dickie’s genitals, and his description of her as “that bird with the nice arse” seem to have won her over, and the sex scene goes off without a hitch, nobody gets beaten or covered with custard (thank you, YOUNG ADAM, for that enduring image of Caledonian loveplay) and everybody seems to have as good a time as they’re capable of, within the generic constraints.

Then Dickie walks out on Curran, goes to the bathroom, and does something horrible involving bodily fluids.

And to think, I’d been invited round to one of my student’s flat to watch an evening of films about MINING.

Time for bed. I’ll finish this tomorrow. I’ll admit I’m intrigued as to what she’s up to, though. But I can’t help feel that by holding back Dickie’s whole motivation, Arnold has effectively shut the audience out of the film. I have more sympathy at present with the rather vile Curran character, because I share his puzzlement. It’s hard to share anything with Dickie as she’s such a closed book. But I expect all this to be cleared up, and that may justify everything.

Apart from the lava lamp, which needs no justification.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. MacBuse

 

RED ROAD, chapter two. Good thing the filmmakers helpfully divided their movie into episodes so I could watch it over several days.*

Last seen, Kate Dickie was starting to sort-of-stalk a fellow called Clyde (Tony Curran) newly released from prison. After another 24 minute installment, that’s still all that’s happening, but she is now doing her stalking at (very) close quarters, rather than relying on her security cameras. There’s been more extremely nice, atmospheric photography, and the revelation that while she knows who he is, he’s never seen her before in his puff. So the plot has coagulated just a touch.

Co-stars Martin Compston and Natalie Press have appeared. The latter dumps half a tin of dog food directly onto the kitchen floor for her puppy to chow down on, and I am genuinely impressed by the inventive squalor of this. Almost everybody in the film still seems to be suffering from clinical depression. Kate Dickie is actually one of the liveliest, with Compston bringing some of his colossal charm to bear, and Press has a spasming, out-of-control face that seems to be obeying the dictates of some alien power, which makes her disconcerting yet pleasurable to watch, as she was in MY SUMMER OF LOVE (I do like SOME modern British cinema).

 

The pace is starting to wear me out — the relentlessly SLOW pace. Not that events are spectacularly drawn-out, or that nothing’s happening, but nothing of clear significance is happening. If we’re heading for an amazing revelation, one feels that it had better be amazingly amazing. My spirits are at a low ebb, and then Kate Dickie throws up in an elevator. Lovely. A basic staple of entertainment, something no truly Scottish film can be without: somebody heaving their guts up in a confined space.

I stop the disc and run off to see Jancsó’s THE ROUND-UP at Filmhouse. More later.

*They did no such thing.

Crossing the border

 

People of Britain — go and see George A Romero’s DIARY OF THE DEAD! It got mostly wretched reviews here but it is pretty damn interesting. Certainly if you’re a Romero fan you’ll dig it, possibly more than LAND OF THE DEAD (hardcore gorehounds were disappointed with the 15 certificate levels of violence in that one, but I enjoyed it’s anti-neo-con satire and the Hawksian relationship between the three leads).

DOTD is plenty grisly, and packs in a lot in narrative terms as well. Seeing it in the midst of RED ROAD was certainly a lesson in what can be achieved in a low-budget digital feature. In the evening, I saw THE ROUND-UP with a q&a afterwards with octogenarian film god Miklós Jancsó, and he explained how his film’s long-take style enabled him to make it in 26 days. “Hah! DIARY OF THE DEAD was shot in 23 days,” I thought. And it has a higher body count, too. Plus, Romero is 68!

(Nevertheless, Jancsó and his film were amazing. Much more on Mr. J. later.)

Criticism of DIARY has centred on supposedly unlikable characters and the mockumentary technique whereby said characters, a team of film students, are seen making the film we’re watching, capturing the mayhem as it unfolds. Of course, CLOVERFIELD has already delivered the big-budget version of this trope, and rogue spanker Brian DePalma’s REDACTED uses a similar approach. It’s a zeitgeist thing, I guess, especially as the elephant in each film’s room is Iraq/Guantanamo Bay/Abu Ghraib, with only BDP’s film tackling the theme overtly. I’m guessing the reason the style and subject are coming together in this way is a reaction to the ubiquity of the war on YouTube, as well as the photographic documentation of atrocities at Abu Ghraib by the perpetrators themselves.

Romero’s fictional filmmakers are really not that unpleasant — compared to the fleshwads who litter THE COTTAGE, waiting to be disemboweled, they’re positive paragons of humanity. Their worst trait is their tendency to film everything, but it’s a good job they’re ruthless with the cameras, as how else would we get to watch? (But unlike in CLOVERFIELD, they have realistic travails with battery power.) One of Romero’s themes is how filmmaking is passed along like an infectious disease, parallel with the spread of the zombie contagion, so that the characters who morally reject the urge to document every tragedy are gradually tainted with by the process, and end up carrying on the film after the originator has gone.

Apart from the compromised heroes, some of the supporting figures are very appealing, or at least memorable. The deaf Amish guy with the sticks of dynamite ought to have a movie of his own. Hell, he ought to have a daily prime-time show. There’s a brilliantly scary National Guardsman-turned-looter, played by someone whose credit I can’t even find, but who ought to be a star. And there are cameos by Romero himself, Romero associate John Harrison (read of my encounter with the delightful Mr. H. here) and audio contributions by Stephen King, Wes Craven, Simon Pegg, Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo Del Toro. Guillermo’s sound-byte is the best value, partly because he has a recognisable voice, and also because of his distinctive Mexican take on the zombie phenomenon: “What we have to worry about now is all these people crossing the border between life and death.”

It’s kind of rare to see a film that basically gets better as it goes along. At first the mockumentary effect is rather unsatisfactory — you can’t have verité camera style unless you’re performances match it, and Romero’s are a touch too broad. The decision to use music (justified by one of the student’s explaining she’s added it because “I want to scare you”) seems a little cowardly, and Romero has never been great with music — it required Argento’s lurid skills to bring DAWN OF THE DEAD to full life in that respect. But as the action develops, taking the usual slow downturn into anguished despair (a big motif in all the Romero DEAD flicks), the film picks up increasingly, with sharp satire, surprising gore effects (a scythe through two heads at once? New to me!), and some disconcerting crazy humour. The post-modern version of gratuitous nudity struck me as naff — it may be a joke, but it’s still demeaning — but aside from that I was all in favour of this damn thing.

Interesting to note that it was forty years ago that the zombie invasion began, in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. And in the new film, it’s still beginning. Message: the zombie invasion is a constant in our lives.

Red Roadblock

 

Well, the evening sky is bluing deeper, with a shapeless chunk of half-chewed moon glowing all the brighter in the orangy post-sunset light, and it’s time to try to watch RED ROAD. I ritually dust the TV screen — no sense letting this be any more unpleasant than it has to.

Andrea Arnold’s RED ROAD is an extremely attractive film, which is obvious from the get-go. An opening title announces GLASGOW and my prejudices kick in. But the imagery is really nice, making excellent use of the particular qualities of digital. Kate Dickie works in a room full of TV monitors, as a kind of benevolent Big Brother, watching the video piped in from the city’s security cameras. The cameras can zoom and pan in jerky, computerized motions, while the “live” footage of Dickie is loose and hand-held. Both kinds of material exploit the photogenic qualities of long-lens photography. Both partake of the observational aesthetic of Ken Loach, which I’m not to keen on. It’s a definite look (RED ROAD is much more concerned with creating a pleasing cinematic surface than Loach) and it fulfills a clear function in terms of realism, I just usually prefer being involved in a scene, as opposed to spying on it from afar.

Seven minutes in and we get the statutory joyless intercourse scene, which no Scottish film can be without. I suspect The Film Council is trying to make the Scottish people vasectomize themselves out of existence in sheer horror at the ugliness of human procreation. The most radical and shocking thing a Scottish film could do nowadays would be to create the mood of romance you can find in early Bill Forsyth. But even he doesn’t do that anymore: GREGORY’S TWO GIRLS opens with the terrifying spectacle of John Gordon-Sinclair’s “Oh Face,” followed by a closeup of the damp aftermath of his wet dream on bedsheets. Thanks for that.

So far the only thing wrong with the film, per se, is a tendency to overemphasise Dickie’s reactions to the security camera footage. A man has a funny dog: she smiles warmly. It’s not bad acting, it’s bad direction, I think. REAR WINDOW uses this kind of situation, and proves that the person watching needn’t show any particular reaction at all, since the context gives us the meaning. Kate Dickie laughing at a dog won’t make the dog any funnier. Although it’s nice to see she CAN laugh.

Fiona reminds me that our chum Morag McKinnon, who’s directing the Dickie in ROUNDING UP DONKEYS right now, says that she has a really good sense of humour, is fun, etc. “Yes, but she keeps it off the screen,” I say.

There’s a good bit when Dickie finds herself on the street next to a man she’s spied on earlier. There’s an edge to the encounter and the handheld look really works for it, and the ability of digital to film basically by streetlight makes for glossy, strangely coloured beauty, augmented by eerie Muslim show tunes on the soundtrack.

A mystery is announced! Dickie is obsessed with a man she sees on cam, who’s on early release from a ten year prison sentence (Dickie keeps the old newspaper with the headline in a bag in her closet). This puzzling set-up, emerging twenty minutes in, seems rather late to act as a plot motor (it’s a common misinterpretation of the three-act structure that the story starts at the END of the first act, rather than the beginning) and evokes only a vague curiosity. The central character seems to have no successful relationships or clear goals, so apart from the desire to figure out why we’re watching this, it’s hard to figure out why we’re watching this.

I’m pretty sure an American movie would start by coming right out and telling us what the mystery man did and why it effects Dickie’s protag, and then we’d be watching not to get the puzzle cleared up, but to see what consequences this will all have. But it’s too early to say whether this film would work with that approach. All that can be said is that there’s not enough going on to create a compulsion to watch: at 24 minutes I feel an ocean of gloom closing in with the night, so I stop the disc. But I didn’t hate it, I will return for more tomorrow. Stay tuned. 

(Old people — a boon to any film, because they have learned to be themselves.)

Footnote: my DVD suffers appalling combing when I try and frame-grab images, so apologies for the distorted stills, which don’t give an accurate portrayal of the lustre of Robbie Ryan’s photography.

Rocky Road

 

Those who know me — happy few! — will aver that in one thing I am something of an absolutist. I absolutely don’t like depressing Scottish realist films. My producer and friend Nigel Smith is even more adamantly of this opinion, and has dubbed the genre “miserabilism”, a term which has since CAUGHT ON and been used in no less an organ than Sight & Sound. Nigel further categorises these films as the “piss in a milk bottle and sling it at yer granny” school of filmmaking, quotes the Johnny Rotten line “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery,” and suggests that the ultimate message about the Scottish people promoted by miserabilism is “we are victims and we live in a terrible place.” While perhaps being more moderate in my views, I don’t strongly disagree with any of this pithy assessment. But then, maybe my moderation is due to the fact that unlike Nigel I generally avoid seeing any of these films if I possibly can.

But no more! Since my great good friends Colin McLaren and Morag McKinnon have embarked on their feature film debut ROUNDING UP DONKEYS (Morag actually has a no-budget feature to her name already, but she’s been keeping quiet about that), and since said extravaganza is a follow-up of sorts to the award-winning RED ROAD, and since RR seems to epitomise many of the attributes associated with miserabilism (unhappy working-class characters, tragic backstories, unpleasant sex scenes) … in short, since all of that, I feel I’m going to have to bloody watch RED ROAD.

I’m treating this as a kind of scientific experiment. Each day for a week I’m going to run a bit of the movie but if, after a bit, I can no longer stand the skull-crushing depression, I’ll stop it, watch something cheerful, and resume the next day. Now, I might actually become HOOKED and forget my aversion to this kind of entertainment and watch the whole thing at once — if so, I solemnly vow to let you know how it went down. On the other hand, the sheer Scottishness might be too much for me almost at once, but I figure that even if I can only manage fifteen minutes at a time I’ll have the thing well and truly watched inside of a week. And I can send despatches from the front line along the way.

If I do end up fragmenting the film thusly, I’d have to admit that’s not an ideal viewing experience of the kind the makers had in mind, so you can make allowances accordingly. On the other hand, I HAVE screened some films I respect and, in a sense, enjoy, in just that way. I found Bob Fosse’s STAR 80 so horrific, and Eric Roberts’ performance in it so skin-crawlingly unpleasant, that I had to keep stopping the tape every ten minutes so I could prance around the room clawing the imaginary ants from my body. Despite this, my admiration for the film is enormous, and not just because it’s the only film, to my knowledge, photographed by Sven Nykvist to begin with a close-up on a portrait of Telly Savalas.

So — I will begin my assault on the north face of RED ROAD immediately, and will be posting regular updates on my progress to its rugged and inaccessible summit.

Wish me luck.

The Round-Up

The James Cosmo Experience.

“Production has begun on Morag McKinnon’s ROUNDING UP DONKEYS featuring James Cosmo (BRAVEHEART, TROY), Brian Pettifer (AMADEUS, IF), Kate Dickie (RED ROAD) and Martin Compston (SWEET SIXTEEN).”

This is the second film in Lars Von Trier and Zentropa’s ‘Advance Party’ project, three films using the same group of characters. I thought it was a dumb idea at first, but any excuse to make a film is a good excuse, if the film itself is good, and I have hopes for this one. The writer is gifted word-engineer Colin McLaren and the director is Morag McKinnon, both friends of mine and long overdue for a feature gig.

The scheme was intended for writer-directors (schemers are fond of limiting their options in this way, in hopes of whittling out as many promising candidates as possible), and Morag signed on as such, then found herself a bit stumped and got Colin in to help.

“Is it OK if Colin helps?” she asked.

Then, a little later: “I think we’ll have to give Colin a credit, he’s really collaborating quite actively on it.”

Then: “Colin’s writing it.” 

“A bittersweet, tragicomic tale of making amends, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS centres on Alfred Patterson (James Cosmo), who learns of his impending death and decides it’s time to make amends with his estranged daughter and her precocious 12-year-old.”

The first film in the ‘Advance Party’ scheme was RED ROAD, which won some awards and which I suppose I’ll watch at some point, but which seems, form its reputation, to embody exactly the kind of miserabilist mindset I generally can’t stand in British cinema. But I have to give it a chance.

The exciting difference with ROUNDING UP DONKEYS is the addition of humour, including an opening inspired by Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME and a lot of tragi-comic black comedy around the feckless central character and his numpty pal. (I’ve discussed the project with Colin and Morag a few times during its looong gestation.)

The same two collaborated on several previous shorts, including BAFTA-winner HOME, available on the Cinema 16 DVD, the film which introduced their lucky donkey motif, and both have collaborated with myself in the past: I produced Morag’s first ever short, THE END, back when we were babies, and edited DIARY OF A MADMAN, starring Colin, who adapted it brilliantly from Gogol’s short story. Colin then starred in two of my films, HOW TO GET UP and CLARIMONDE, proving himself the leading exponent of the Scottish Expressionism school of performance. We wrote a bunch of unmade films together, including such misterpieces as ENTITY BLOUSE AND THE SPY FROM FFABRIC and INSIDE A DOG, and then co-hatched CRY FOR BOBO after an evening spent getting outside of some wine and watching three hours of mind-palpatingly depressing Scottish short films.

So there’s history there, and so I’m no doubt biased, but wouldn’t it be nice to think somebody was making a British film that might be worth seeing? Join me in my world and believe.

“Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins.”

“Homer Simpson, smiling politely.”

“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.