Possile location for Will It Stop Raining In Summer
Will It Stop Raining In Summer will be our next short film. It's a love triangle thriller, about Roger, who is having an affair with Beryl, but every-time they meet-up, Beryl's husband, Maurice, shows up co-incidentally, apparently oblivious to his wife's illicit trysts. The film came about when a jumble of images popped into my mind and I tried to make sense of them. The film owes something to those suburban British films from the '50s and '60s which would be on telly on those days when you were home sick from school. This is not an homage or even a reference however, I couldn't tell you the names of these films, I can't remember their plots or who was in them, it's more a feeling that the images of these films absorbed themselves into my sub-conscious and now they have filtered back through my imagination to create something new. I could also hear the feint sound of another echo in Will It Stop Raining In Summer, and that is of benign middle class sitcoms, which were prevalent in the 1980s (I unknowingly lifted the name of Beryl from No Place Like Home, a sitcom which starred William Gaunt). I have no specific affection for such sitcoms or any real interest in the sitcom as a form, but again, they created images which have been locked in my sub-conscious for years, but which are now rattling their chains. So, Will It Stop Raining In Summer is my imagination's regurgitation of these films and shows, giving them a new darkly ironic form.
And what of the acting then? Again, I will play opposite John Giles, and we are currently working on finding an actress to play Beryl. The script is full of characterization (ie - how the character does something, rather than what he does), for example; the character of Maurice, is a cuckold written in the style of a cuckold, bluff and amiable, and this, coupled with the context of the scenes, means that the actor never needs to show us that his character is a cuckold (which is how most modern acting is done: “hi, I'm a serial killer”), the script has already done that work, so the actor need only concentrate on doing the actions called forth in the scene. We will again be aiming for performances which are direct, simple, forceful, and truthful. Filming will begin over the next month, and I will post regularly about the film on here and on the Drifting Clouds Cinema blog. Finally, for me, I will once again be directing and acting in the film, and I will strive once again to perfect the process of switching between those two roles – I'm still too reliant on will power, but want to get it down to a science, and I will of course share my findings on this blog, in the form of a repeatable and transferable technique.
Tarkovsky’s War Ivan’s Childhood 1962 USSR Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky Artificial Eye DVD Region 2Please note: I am reviewing Tarkovsky’s movie from the Region 2 DVD here because I saw it cheap in a sale and jumped at the chance to upgrade from my old VHS copy because I’d unfortunately forgotten that Criterion had released a version of it in the US. I can say, without having viewed it, that the Criterion edition is almost certainly the best option to go with and that I would have abstained from parting with my £7 and gone with the US version if I’d remembered its existence. The Artificial Eye version seems to suffer from the same problem that a number of foreign language films seem to suffer from over here in the UK - which is that you cannot remove the subtitles if you want to study the power and beauty of a shot without the typography getting in the way... a big setback for these kinds of films, especially on films like this which are shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and therefore intrude fully over the shot.Andrei Tarkovsky is one of my favourite directors (second only to Akira Kurosawa in my book) and richly deserved his reputation as the great poet of cinema. Ivan’s Childhood was his first feature length film and also one of his most commercially successful. It is based on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov and tells the rather grim tale of Ivan, a 12 year old boy orphaned by the conflict of war who is used, guiltily, as a child spy against the nazis in World War 2.Tarkovsky is one of those rare directors who’s mise-en-scene is so compelling that the subject matter really doesn’t matter. Each and every shot composition in his films look like an utterly beautiful still photograph... and Ivan’s Childhood with it’s sometimes dreamy, sometimes stark black and white photography is no exception. The opening shot of Ivan in a forest looking through a spider’s web is just for starters in the beauty stakes... it just is such an amazing movie to look at. Like all Tarkovsky’s films. This is the kind of movie that the home viewing medium of DVD was made for.The sound design was a little alienating at times, not sure if this was deliberate or not but everything seemed quite uncomplicated and simple... there are two sound options on this disc... Dolby Digital or original mono... I obviously opted for the original mono. C’mon DVD companies! It wasn’t going to sound like Dolby Digital when it was released into cinemas in ‘62 so I’m damn well not going to watch it like that now. Next you’ll be trying to sell me heavily doctored Blu-Ray prints which lose the grain of the film and make everything look like a larger than life cartoon-like, piece of fluff, bad CGI experiment gone wrong instead of the original movie! Oh, wait...Anyway, another slightly off kilter thing about this movie is the overscoring of certain scenes with music which is quite a bit overly dramatic and romanticised for both the subject matter and, indeed, for the way that subject matter is represented visually. I don’t remember how much control Tarkovsky had over the way his movies were presented but I’m guessing not very much apart from the two films he made abroad. Most of the film plays with no musical score but the only time it is really effective and appropriately chilling is when two characters ride a boat back from behind enemy lines.But the weight and power of the visuals, the excellent performances and the fine script easily outweigh the film's musical and sound distractions. There are a few flashbacks and dream sequences which would normally be in stark contrast to the way the rest of the footage is presented, but everything is presented so beautifully that you will be into these sequences before you even realise you have broken off from the main narrative for a while... and maybe that’s the point. One such sequence where Ivan rides a cart full of apples with his sister uses back projection for the forest background, but no attempt is made to hide this as the back projection is printed as a negative image and contrasts surreally with the foreground footage. A neat little trick that I can’t, off the top of my head, remember being done in other movies (I’m sure that five other examples will suddenly present themselves to my memory five minutes after this review goes live).Ivan’s Childhood is quite a simple little film for Tarkovsky... the texture and density of the narrative structure is nowhere near his later films. It’s all there in the shot, though. Texture and depth like you don’t see in many director’s works on such a consistent level (maybe Mario Bava). If you like the sheer poetry and beauty of the visual image presented to you in crisp and stunning black and white photography then Ivan’s Childhood should definitely be on your movie hit list.To read more by Nuts4R2 visit http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk
Tarkovsky’s War Ivan’s Childhood 1962 USSR Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky Artificial Eye DVD Region 2Please note: I am reviewing Tarkovsky’s movie from the Region 2 DVD here because I saw it cheap in a sale and jumped at the chance to upgrade from my old VHS copy because I’d unfortunately forgotten that Criterion had released a version of it in the US. I can say, without having viewed it, that the Criterion edition is almost certainly the best option to go with and that I would have abstained from parting with my £7 and gone with the US version if I’d remembered its existence. The Artificial Eye version seems to suffer from the same problem that a number of foreign language films seem to suffer from over here in the UK - which is that you cannot remove the subtitles if you want to study the power and beauty of a shot without the typography getting in the way... a big setback for these kinds of films, especially on films like this which are shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and therefore intrude fully over the shot.Andrei Tarkovsky is one of my favourite directors (second only to Akira Kurosawa in my book) and richly deserved his reputation as the great poet of cinema. Ivan’s Childhood was his first feature length film and also one of his most commercially successful. It is based on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov and tells the rather grim tale of Ivan, a 12 year old boy orphaned by the conflict of war who is used, guiltily, as a child spy against the nazis in World War 2.Tarkovsky is one of those rare directors who’s mise-en-scene is so compelling that the subject matter really doesn’t matter. Each and every shot composition in his films look like an utterly beautiful still photograph... and Ivan’s Childhood with it’s sometimes dreamy, sometimes stark black and white photography is no exception. The opening shot of Ivan in a forest looking through a spider’s web is just for starters in the beauty stakes... it just is such an amazing movie to look at. Like all Tarkovsky’s films. This is the kind of movie that the home viewing medium of DVD was made for.The sound design was a little alienating at times, not sure if this was deliberate or not but everything seemed quite uncomplicated and simple... there are two sound options on this disc... Dolby Digital or original mono... I obviously opted for the original mono. C’mon DVD companies! It wasn’t going to sound like Dolby Digital when it was released into cinemas in ‘62 so I’m damn well not going to watch it like that now. Next you’ll be trying to sell me heavily doctored Blu-Ray prints which lose the grain of the film and make everything look like a larger than life cartoon-like, piece of fluff, bad CGI experiment gone wrong instead of the original movie! Oh, wait...Anyway, another slightly off kilter thing about this movie is the overscoring of certain scenes with music which is quite a bit overly dramatic and romanticised for both the subject matter and, indeed, for the way that subject matter is represented visually. I don’t remember how much control Tarkovsky had over the way his movies were presented but I’m guessing not very much apart from the two films he made abroad. Most of the film plays with no musical score but the only time it is really effective and appropriately chilling is when two characters ride a boat back from behind enemy lines.But the weight and power of the visuals, the excellent performances and the fine script easily outweigh the film's musical and sound distractions. There are a few flashbacks and dream sequences which would normally be in stark contrast to the way the rest of the footage is presented, but everything is presented so beautifully that you will be into these sequences before you even realise you have broken off from the main narrative for a while... and maybe that’s the point. One such sequence where Ivan rides a cart full of apples with his sister uses back projection for the forest background, but no attempt is made to hide this as the back projection is printed as a negative image and contrasts surreally with the foreground footage. A neat little trick that I can’t, off the top of my head, remember being done in other movies (I’m sure that five other examples will suddenly present themselves to my memory five minutes after this review goes live).Ivan’s Childhood is quite a simple little film for Tarkovsky... the texture and density of the narrative structure is nowhere near his later films. It’s all there in the shot, though. Texture and depth like you don’t see in many director’s works on such a consistent level (maybe Mario Bava). If you like the sheer poetry and beauty of the visual image presented to you in crisp and stunning black and white photography then Ivan’s Childhood should definitely be on your movie hit list.To read more by Nuts4R2 visit http://nuts4r2.blogspot.co.uk
Phone Box Gun is neither comic nor dramatic: one viewer may find a certain moment in the film to be funny, another may find the same moment to be sad, and another still may find no interest in it at all. All responses are valid. What I am doing is creating a very obvious line of action (or plot) - in the case of this film we have a protagonist who commits robbery in order to get cash - and follow that line to it's logical end. The film exist as a culmination of filmmaking choices in service of that line of action.
"There are musicians who practice all the time but we actors are not able to do that. We don't have an instrument, except if you say we are our own instrument, and yet I always try to continue searching and working for the moment where you have to deliver". - Michel Piccoli
Mostly I fail. Mostly I don't accomplish the thing I set out to accomplish. Or more accurately, I rarely accomplish my objectives in the time-frame I expected to. What generally happens, is I make an attempt, and fail, but within that failure, I learn what about myself I need to improve such that I am capable of accomplishing the thing I just failed at. And having made those improvements, I have another crack at it. Again here, we learn that life is like the rehearsal room, or put the other way round, we may see that the rehearsal room is a microcosm of life: at the start of rehearsals we are barely able to walk across the room, the director is an important crutch, but by the end we are strong and independent and long to get out infront of an audience, and in between, there were all those embarassing failed attempts at doing the scene, accompanied by the awkwardness and the gross feelings of falsity. But in the end we do get there. Similarly then, to life outside the rehearsal room, each failure should be an invitation to improve, not an excuse for lamentation. This is not always easy, especially for us actors because we are, in the main, tragic-romantics who love to throw are arms in the air and curse the cruelty of fate, our work is generally about dealing with overwrought emotions and situations – cool reason can sometimes appear to be our enemy, but we must recognise it's necessity, if we are to function as reasonable citizens.
So how to remain cool then, amid the frustrations of our trade. While we are working, all is well with the world, we seem to cruise along. It is while we are not working that we feel under pressure; the waiting all year for a job then two come along at the same time so one must be declined, the feeling of a lack of control over our destiny, the unjust slight by a director in an audition, the running out of ideas, the sense that time is passing....We have to pay bills and live life like everyone else, but we must also keep ourselves “ready for the moment to deliver”, which could come tomorrow or never.
Well, one way of staying cool, is by trying to see these as they really are, and not through the dramatic prism. We need to recognise that a bad day is just a bad day, a bump in the road is a just a bump in the road, it's not an earthquake. However, the fear of such reasoned living, is that we may lose contact with our dramatic channels – those parts of ourselves ordinary citizens shut down as they settle into their cosy routine, but which are the very source of the actor's work, and therefore must be kept alive. So then, it is a trade off; we become actors because don't want routine and are in love with the imaginary, and if we are to spend the time needed to continually increase the intensities of our imaginations (which is necessary to produce work over a long period of time), then we will be pre-occupied by our work for what may seem, to outsiders, as a disproportionately high percentage of our lives – ie – when we are not actually working, we will be thinking about our work. Seeing life through a dramatic prism then, is difficult to avoid in a life spent immersed in drama. Perhaps the best we can hope for, is to possess the self-awareness and strength to remove the prism when it may become harmful to accomplishing our objectives.
Meanwhile US 2011 Directed by Hal Hartley Possible Films Region 0
I’ve long held the belief that Hal Hartley is the greatest living director and generally taken every possible opportunity to herald that sentiment to anybody who a) likes movies enough to have heard of Mr. Hartley and b) will actually sit still and listen. This kind of overly positive attitude to people can sometimes make me nervous when I set myself the task of “reviewing” that person’s work... and it’s worse when the person has not, as yet, shuffled off this mortal coil.That is to say... if I was writing a review about one of my other directing heroes like Akira Kurosawa or Andrei Tarkovsky, I would be pretty nervous, sure, in case my personal theories and feelings about their work ran contrary to what their intentions were (and I missed something really obvious, which is always a worry) but the ghost of Akira Kurosawa is not going to come and give me a good seeing to with Toshiro Mifune’s spare samurai sword. Similarly, Andrei Tarkovsky is not going to spring to life, zombie like, and shamble around after me trying to make me drink a good, unhealthy dose of liquid oxygen.Hal Hartley is still alive. In the “extremely remote” chance that he actually might read something I wrote and disagreed with it or, you know, generally disliked it... he could possibly find out where I lived and break my arms.So I guess I’m kinda nervous on this one... forgive me if I stumble.Okay, so Meanwhile is Hartley’s latest feature and, by feature, I mean it in the good old Universal B-movie sense because, frankly, it’s only an hour long (boo, I wanted more). Even so, one hour of Hartley after his continued absences from the commercial cinema/movie scene is like a glass of cool water to a man stranded in the desert.The quality of the... (insert pretty much all aspects of film-making here)... is absolutely everything you could hope for in a distinct return to form for Hartley (yeah, okay, I’ll admit I didn’t like Fay Grim so much... but I loved every other feature he’s made and most of the shorts too... can I be forgiven please? I’m going to give Fay another try sometime soon, I promise!). All of the action takes place in a roughly 24 hour time period in New York and D.J. Mendel, who is absolutely superb in this role (as I would expect), plays Joseph and follows him on his day as he tries to keep his head above water.Joseph, it seems to me, is an eternal optimist. He has no money but he is always giving it away or promising it to people when he is struggling, quite cheerily, to make some money in the first place. He can pretty much fix anything (harkening back to Matthew Slaughter as played by Martin Donovan in Trust) but, although he does go around fixing things for people all day, he refuses to accept any money for his good work. He even fixes a Spanish housekeeper’s back in a scene which is very old school, obvious (almost slapstick) and broad comedy.He continues this optimism all the way through the film, even though he has a crushing weight on him as he failed, to his knowledge, to prevent a woman from throwing herself to her death off the Brooklyn Bridge. This in some ways informs certain choices he makes through the picture... or at least gives his dogged determination in the face of rebuttal a sense of being justified if you don’t happen to share his kind of mindset... but ultimately, as I said before, he’s just the great optimist. At least that’s how I see him. This is nowhere more apparent in his ultimate fate and his last line in the movie. This is "the guy" you would always want to hang out with down your local pub. The talented everyman in pursuit of the break and gently nudging along with the mundane and “everyday” occurrences which make up a lot of people’s lives.And, of course, he spouts those great Hartley lines. The real poetry of the way people interact with each other is a joy to listen to, as well as see perfectly and cleanly and, mostly, simply framed in this director’s awesome shot designs. Fans of this writer/director will love this movie anyway but more-so because this one has a distinct retro feel when it comes to this director’s back catalogue. I’ve already mentioned the slight character trait connection the main protagonist shares with an earlier Hartley hero but there are lots of little nods to the director’s early works in this movie. One girl’s initial dialogue/monologue came off sounding exactly like what Adrienne Shelley’s character Maria (also from Trust) might have said... heck, for all I know it could be one of the same speeches with just a few tweaks. There are lots of little moments in this which sent little blips of deja vu echoing through my Hartley movie memories and I really liked this stuff. Hell, even the title of the movie is a visual echo of the captioning in The Unbelievable Truth (I hate mentioning Godard in comparison to Hal Hartley’s stylistic distancing techniques but... I’m sorry... this movie shares a similarly Godardian device in that it uses a series of intertitles which make up chapter references).This is not to be derogatory to the director, of course. The last thing he may want is to hear that this movie looks and sounds like something from his earlier period. Maybe I’m just responding to the directors style on this one... the rawness of the poetry being particularly potent in this maybe just means that the dialogue is, you know, kinda Hartleyesque... which I guess must be a compliment of some sort... or at least a truth, unbelievable or not.This film is very self-referential too. We’ve seen Hartley playing himself before in the third segment of the feature-length version of Flirt and, once again, he’s mentioned in this movie... even though he doesn’t actually show up at all. His wife, a constant actress in Mr. Hartley’s work, does though. Playing herself for a change. Joseph borrows her apartment while she’s in Shanghai overseeing her fashion label and so he goes to pick up the key from Possible Film’s offices, where a woman borrows the novel of Meanwhile overnight. These days I think I’m supposed to describe this kind of element in a movie as “meta-textual”... but I’m really not sure I’m all that fond of the meta word to be honest and, a decade ago, I would have referred to this movie as having a postmodernistic attitude... which would have probably sounded a bit better but ultimately, still means the same thing. Either way, the movie takes place in a universe where the director, wife of the director, offices of the director and the template of the movie you are watching, exist as fictional elements that appear in the story (if you really want to call it a story... I’m not too fond of stories, as you may have figured out by now if you’ve been reading any of my other blog posts semi-regularly). Make of that what you will.Personally, I just thought it was kinda fun.The music is cool on this too, of course. It’s typical Hal Hartley music... which is to say, it’s catchy and works really well laid over the visual images (and probably works really well as a stand alone listen too... “Hartley the musician” has that knack about him). The director comes clean about having composed the music himself this time... none of this Ned Rifle or Ryful playfulnesss on this one. He’s got over that, I think.So yeah, this is a fun movie and a fun listen and there are some little sections of this movie that might also make you think... and the main protagonist is somebody to aspire to be like in their attitude too. How cool is that?I started off this review restating my belief that Hal Hartley is the greatest “living” director working in film. After having seen this movie, I can find no evidence pointing to the contrary... this is another mini-masterpiece made by an absolute genius on the cinematic landscape. It’s also a really great jumping on point for this director if you’ve never experienced his work before. A really solid intro to some of his recurring themes and his ways of expression. I’d give this movie (and this director, obviously) a Grade A recommendation to anyone. A perfect watch. Go to his website Possible Films and go buy a load of his stuff, including this movie. He deserves it and so does your mind!
https://vimeo.com/42264809 Vincent and Bob stick up a jewellery store to raise money so Vincent can get down to Mexico, and visit his long lost sister, who he didn’t even know he had. Written and directed by James Devereaux, and featuring James with Alfie Black and John Giles, Phone Box Gun is a short tragi-comic film noir, which looks at the nature of friendship, storytelling and the imagination.
https://vimeo.com/42264809 Vincent and Bob stick up a jewellery store to raise money so Vincent can get down to Mexico, and visit his long lost sister, who he didn’t even know he had. Written and directed by James Devereaux, and featuring James with Alfie Black and John Giles, Phone Box Gun is a short tragi-comic film noir, which looks at the nature of friendship, storytelling and the imagination.
https://vimeo.com/42264809 Vincent and Bob stick up a jewellery store to raise money so Vincent can get down to Mexico, and visit his long lost sister, who he didn’t even know he had.Written and directed by James Devereaux, and featuring James with Alfie Black and John Giles, Phone Box Gun is a short tragi-comic film noir, which looks at the nature of friendship, storytelling and the imagination.
"My cinema consists of taking things out rather than putting things in. It's about removing the pretension & fussiness...to reveal the truth." Luc Moullet, The Wild Man of The Badlands.#LucMoullet #TheWildManOfTheBadlands
Check out this quick teaser for our new short, Phone Box Gun.
My action in the scene above, was to get my scene partner to agree with me (within the fiction of script, this amounted to Bob getting Vincent to let him buy him a ticket to Mexico). Now, the scene itself is a fiddly one because I want the guy to agree with me, but sometimes I want to be forceful in order to accomplish that, but not too forceful, otherwise he's going to be offended, and then my task will be made that much harder. So, in a gentle scene as is the one the above clip is taken from, the actor needs to be very self-aware, self-controlled, yeah sure, there'll be moments when passions rise, and the actor will lose self-awareness for a moment, but he will quickly need to regain his self-control or risk blowing the deal. That's why the whole notion of “becoming somebody else”, or “losing yourself in the character” is such utter nonsense: a) you cannot lose yourself because you've got a performance to give, which requires discipline and precision, and, b) you do have an actual task within the scene to complete, and you mustn't take your eye off the ball.
Actors are told “not to think”, but to “just do it”. When we are acting well (which is to say, truly) we have rhythm and grace, we are energised, the performance seems to carry us along, as though riding the crest of a wave, but we still must observe ourselves to ensure we remain on the right track. Again, these are not special rules which only apply to acting, they apply to real life aswell – when we function well, we seem to be self-conscious and instinctive at the same time. When we're doing a task we enjoy or is important to us, we may become engrossed and forget ourselves, but it is beside the point to actively not think, so why should actors not think in performance? The counterbalance to not thinking, is “characterization”, whereby the actor plots out everything, every little movement, every little gesture, every emotion, and does it in the way they think “the character would do it”, and regardless of what is actually taking place in the scene, thus murdering spontaneity. In the scene.
When playing, overdoing instinct or self-awareness can be damaging – if we operated purely instinctively, then our work may lack shape and become a meaningless mess, or alternatively, trying to control the results of our performance too much, can lead to a bland stodginess (ergo: most acting) – the pressure is removed from the actor, he becomes complacent. I say, don't worry about thinking, don't worry about not thinking, and don't worry about how instinctive you are or lack thereof, but concentrate only on doing your action as fully as you can, and putting your attention onto your scene partner, adjusting your performance in relation to his responses to you. This will bring you, an thus the scene, alive.
The Deauville Casino heist scene, is surely one of the most exquisite in all cinema. Its the irony produced by the conflict between the character's nature and his objective, ie; his nature is that of a compulsive gambler, but his objective is to rob the casino.Here's the trailer for the film:
The Deauville Casino heist scene, is surely one of the most exquisite in all cinema. Its the irony produced by the conflict between the character's nature and his objective, ie; his nature is that of a compulsive gambler, but his objective is to rob the casino.Here's the trailer for the film:
Allied Film Makers was an early independent production company/co-operative, founded by Basil Dearden, Richard Attenborough, Bryan Forbes, Jack Hawkins, and Michael Relph.
I'm often an advocate on this blog, of actors being their own bosses, creating their own productions, the reasons for doing so are too numerous to mention here, but in the modern era I would say it's essential rather than an option. Having recently produced Phone Box Gun, a short film noir, I would say one of the toughest parts of self-producing is ensuring that the quality of your own performance doesn't diminish due to multi-tasking. Typically, on productions where I am the actor only, what I would do going into the take, is relax, and let my mind rest onto the action I was about to perform, then go for it. However, on those productions where I am director aswell as actor, I may go through my usual routine but at the last minute, some problem with the shot may crop up, which I as the director need to address, so I have to turn my thoughts away from my acting action and onto the said problem. Once the problem is sorted, I then have to let my mind find my acting action again, and go into the scene – not easy to do, especially if fixing the problem has flustered you in any way, and some other detail may have entered your thoughts in the meantime. In order to keep making this adjustment, the actor needs to have total confidence in his technique, and the will to forget about everything else, and trust that everyone around him is doing his job, and focus only on doing his action in the scene, and doing so with total commitment. I have self-produced on stage and in cinema, and would have to say that stage is easier. Why? Because it's simpler. Assuming rehearsals have done the job, you just have to step on stage and do it. Whereas in cinema, there's all those nasty bits of technology which don't always do what you want them to do, and, if you're shooting on the streets of London, the general public don't always behave in a way that's best for your film – on Phone Box Gun, one scene was set in a public park, but we only had to egt one very simple shot there, unfortunately, a dog decided to join us, and starting barking at us to throw the ball he had just dropped at our feet. My relief at the arrival of the dog's owner quickly turned to despair, as the owner thought it was very cute that his little doggy had interrupted our schedule, he was proud, and he seemed genuinely bemused when it dawned on him that we did not share his sentiment. A small issue, for sure, but one which caused a little bit of anxiety, especially when spots of rain began to appear, and suddenly, what had appeared on the shot list to be a very simple task, had infact sent the mind off in all sorts of directions – I never thought I'd find myself in negotiations to get a dog moved. So yes, actors self producing requires; total confidence in what you're doing, iron discipline, and enormous mental strength.
Phone Box Gun, my new short film, will be a minimalist heist movie, which I intend to shoot in black and white. It's about a young man, Vincent, who needs cash in order to visit his long lost sister in Mexico, and so, under the influence of his blustering best friend, Bob, decides to stick-up a jewellery store. Visually, and in terms of rhythm, the film owes a little to the film noir of Aki Kaurismaki, especially his London based film, I Hired A Contract Killer. I always try also to give the dialogue a certain rhythm and structure, which owes less to Kaurismaki and more to American auteur, Hal Hartley. When I started writing screenplays in my late teens (for fun), I instinctively wrote dialogue that was highly formalized, deliberate, but was told that this was wrong, that dialogue in films had to be “naturalistic”. It was years later I discovered the films of Hal Hartley, and for anyone unfamiliar with his work, Hartley crafts his dialogue until it is a “beautiful object”, and is infact one of the most distinctive features of his cinema, and a joy for the viewer. And so upon discovering his films, I decided that I would continue to write crafted dialogue. While what I'm doing is not going quite as far as Hartley, what I hope to do is structure the dialogue such that it compels the actor to say his next line, it thrusts him forward – here's an extract from Phone Box Gun to show what I mean:
BOB So, you're short of money.
VINCENT Nah man, it's not that bad.
BOB You're short of money.
VINCENT It's not that bad.
BOB How much do you need?
VINCENT I'm saying, it's not that bad.
BOB How much do you need?
VINCENT I've said, it's not that bad. BOB Tell me.
While this is not a particularly high stakes, heightened dramatic scene, it's clear that both characters want something different – if played properly, ie; each actor working off his scene partner (as oppose to merely trotting out the lines as he rehearsed them, ignoring what his partner is doing in the scene), then the result will be a snappy intensity, bringing the actors alive. In addition, the actor needs to bring a concretely doable action into the scene, in order to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the scene. And crucially, what the actor is doing in the scene, is not the same as what the character is doing. I'll explain.
In a quick analysis of the scene above, we might conclude that what Bob is literally doing is; “trying to find out how much money Vincent needs” (you may find a different analysis, there is no perfect analysis). However, the actor playing Bob will never be able to convince himself that he actually is Bob and that the other actor actually is Vincent, and that the money actually exists, and that the scene is anything other than a fiction. So, the actor needs to get away from the fiction, and give himself something in the scene which he can actually accomplish, something he can actually do. If I was playing Bob in the scene above, I might give myself the action; “to get a straight answer” - this concretely doable, I can begin doing it immediately, and it is in line with the intentions of the script, and it's interesting to me. Armed with that action, I then take the attention off myself in the scene, and put it onto the other actor, responding to him in relation to my action. This enables the actor to perform fully and truthfully. But note that the action I have given myself has got nothing to do with the money, or Vincent.
Overall, the acting in Phone Box Gun will be fairly minimal, not bravura, but pared back, simple, perhaps alluding to classical noir. The world of Phone Box Gun is shabby and tired, the characters are low-grade, and they have a purposelessness, it is as though they are treading water and marking time, they act merely to avoid stillness. Perhaps then, this minimal quality, marks a deadness within the characters, they are not real people, they exist as images of figures occupying a certain space during a certain moment - as in a memory or a dream.
