A Phone Box Gun Rehearsal....

Drifting Clouds Cinema Blog: "Full trailer for our film noir, Phone Box Gun, is now up!"

 

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, minimal and shot in black and white, which looks at the nature of friendship, storytelling and the imagination.

lick here to read "Why The Panic Set In", actor Alfie Black's thoughts on working on the film.

Click here to read about the acting style of the film

Click here to view still images of the film

Drifting Clouds Cinema Blog: "Full trailer for our film noir, Phone Box Gun, is now up!"

https://vimeo.com/44186381

 

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, minimal and shot in black and white, which looks at the nature of friendship, storytelling and the imagination.

lick here to read "Why The Panic Set In", actor Alfie Black's thoughts on working on the film.

Click here to read about the acting style of the film

Click here to view still images of the film

The Great Acting Blog: "Why The Panic Set In, by Alfie Black"

Alfie Black is a London based actor.

 

Throughout my career I have never really suffered any panic  attacks whilst performing. That was of course until I filmed the pivotal interior scene from Phone Box Gun. Even though I originally met the writer/director James Devereaux whilst working on a Theatre production some time ago, it is safe to say over the years we have become firm friends and the director/friend line may now have blurred. It was with this wrong way of thinking I approached his latest project. Knowing he had written the role for me, I got lazy and showed up at school without doing my homework. I half heartedly learnt my lines and I did not research the structure of the script. Not being too harsh on myself anyone who has memorised Devereaux’s dialogue, knows this is no easy feat. His tricky wordplay is not supposed to be a breeze, just like the man himself, nothing is ever straight forward. I could make excuses,  blame it on personal problems, lack of sleep and heavy drinking. No excuse in the world will save you when the Mike Tyson of acting comes charging out of his corner towards you. My simple lack of preparation was my major downfall. Once I had the added pressure of the camera rolling, it was fully clear I did not know my lines 100%, which is why the panic set in. When you start to worry about each word not arriving it destroys the flow of the acting. The Director who demands truth from a scene was witnessing a fake performance. I threw myself into the deep end and even though I was treading water, the shore was a long way out of sight. I am a fighter myself and I never give up, I was determined not to quit. With each take my confidence grew and I began to find my balance and fight back.  I managed to use the fear and stress I was feeling and turn it into something real. Battling hunger and frustration we got to the end of what was a difficult shoot. Even though I had disappointed myself with a lack of professionalism, I was proud of what we achieved that day. I will never forget the terror I had during the filming and I know I grew stronger as an artist because of it. 

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Phone Box Gun - Full Trailer Now Up"

 

This blog has become a real fulcrum for me, and I’m very grateful to those who take an interest in it, support it, and offer feedback. As it is, I’m delighted to be share with you the full trailer for our new film, Phone Box Gun. Hope you like it. James.

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, minimal and shot in black and white, which looks at the nature of friendship, storytelling and the imagination.

To read previous posts about Phone Box Gun, check-out the links below:

The Acting Style Of Phone Box Gun

Stills From Phone Box Gun

Some Thoughts On Self-Production

Only Worry About Action

To learn about our next film, please visit: Will It Stop Raining In Summer

A thought on Phone Box Gun

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.

The Great Acting Blog: "Only Worry About Action"

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.

I hope you enjoyed the clip.

TThe Great Acting Blog: "Some Thoughts On Self-Producing"

 

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.

 

Woof!

The Great Acting Blog: "Stills From Phone Box Gun"

 

See the full gallery on Posterous

The Great Acting Blog: "The Acting Style Of Phone Box Gun"

 

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.

The Great Acting Blog: "The Independent Actor"

Donald Wolfitt made a name for himself at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1936 as Hamlet, and he tried to persuade the management to finance him on a tour of the provinces. They declined the invitation, so he withdrew his savings and started his own touring company in 1937.

 

 I, like pretty much everyone else, have been indoctrinated to believe that an actor is someone who spends his time asking the powers that be for permission to do work, and occasionally that permission is granted. If a poet wants to work, he merely grabs his pen and starts writing, a filmmaker picks-up his camera, and a painter his brush. This seems patently obvious, none of these people feel that they need to seek permission in order to work, it would be absurd for them to do so. But this is not true for the actor, who is supposed to pass through some process before he is allowed to perform*. And, as always when a new production of my own starts to come into focus, one in which I will not only act, but write the script, direct and produce**, I must once again find a rationale for doing so, or, put another way; make the way clear for artistic freedom by sweeping away the dulling crust which forms around the employee mindset. One of the problems is that there is a tendency to over complicate things – essentially, all an actor does is communicate something to a group of people – but the complications arise when we think of it as a “career”, because then the notion of communicating something to a group of people becomes the holy grail rather than the norm – bizarrely, validation must be sought from outside agencies: attending auditions and meetings, but before we attend auditions and meetings, we have to set up those auditions and meetings, and how are we going to do that, and so on and so forth...yes, it can get complicated, and it's easy to see how the true work of the actor gets lost in the tunnel-vision-pursuit of winning the favour of potential benefactors (as we perceive them) - infact, many who try their hand at acting, quit, as they become overwhelmed, demoralised and exhausted by the constant demands of having to scythe their way through the layers of resistance between them and the audience.

As I try to design a philosophy which will carry me through my next project then , I wonder if the modern notion of the jobbing industrial actor need be rethought, and my mind turns to the pre-industrial actor. In the beginning, there was only the actors, who had formerly been priests but were cast out of the church for being too entertaining, moving from village to village, delivering corner-street oration for their daily bread; if they were good, then they ate, if they were bad then they starved to death (perhaps the choice for the modern day actor is not quite as stark, but perhaps that is one reason why standards are falling despite ever more “training”). But the point is, the actors were there long before the playwrights, long before the directors and the producers, and the theatres and the marketing people, and (the most powerful class in our society) the bureaucrats. Long, long before any these people came along, there was only the actor, who entered the village as a stranger, alone and broke, possessed with only his wits and his intent to create a powerful illusion – he certainly didn't ask permission.

 

So now it's the 21^st century, and actors have been colonized by the paper-pushers – the implication is that the courage and generosity of the actor is worthless, that only obedience has any value. The downside risk of starvation is no longer the motor for the drive to greatness. Nowadays, the street corner is the internet, and digital technology offers the possibilty for the actor to reclaim the work which is rightfully his. It's time to cut out the middle men.

*Perhaps that is part of the actor, his psyche, that needs this process, but perhaps we shall reserve an analysis of that for another time.

**The separation of these job titles is, for me, in practical terms, utterly meaningless. I only separate them here to emphasize my point.

 

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The Great Acting Blog: "The Audition Lowdown"

Check out a clip from the film, above.

 

For those unfamiliar with the film, The Audition is about an actor, Tony Wallis, who is being seen for a part in a play. He breaks the ice with his interviewer then starts to speak the lines of the play, and it's here that Tony's problems start. Each time he speaks the first line, the director interjects to explain that Tony is not saying the line correctly, before repeating back to Tony how he wants it said. The trouble is, Tony can discern no difference between the way he is saying it and the director's way, but instead of speaking up, he pretends that he can discern a difference, in order to please the director. I described the film (charmingly I thought) as a “tragedy of manners”, because it is essentially a tragedy in the sense that Tony brings about his own downfall through his own choices*, and of manners because on the surface the two characters, bound by the professional behaviour of their trade, appear to be trying to give eachother what they want (it is more normal for the objectives of the protagonists to butt against eachother). The script is very slight and gentle – had I sent it out into the commercial world, it would probably would have been fed into the sausage grinding machine – and therefore I knew the visual aesthetics needed to be pared down, minimal, in order for the tension of the scene to manifest itself. Co-incidentally (or perhaps not), this is just the kind of cinema I love, and so the film is made up of static, frontal shots, and I tried to find a simple formalism for each. Similarly, the script itself is formalized, with a great deal of repetition, but it's also disciplined and precise, the dialogue appears to be naturalistic at first glance, but each line becomes almost like a mantra as the scene unfolds. I love this deliberateness in conjunction with the minimalism,  the film becomes simultaneously flat and theatrical as a result. And with the sound, I had wanted this hissing background noise which I think gives it that quality of someone-just-turned-on-the-camera-by-mistake.

And so to the acting. I have self-directed myself many times, and do so even when working with a director – I believe it's crucial for all actors to develop this ability to look objectively at their work, in the same way a painter or a carpenter may look at theirs, and make adjustments accordingly.** The Audition is a fiddly, technical script for an actor, largely because the action alters almost line by line, and you have to be alive in the scene all the time, you have to listen and pay attention to your scene partner, you cannot just turn up with your mapped out characterization, kick back and knock the lines out. No sir. Well yes, you could do that but then you'd generalise the scene, and as I said above, there would consequently be nothing on the screen to look at, the nuances upon which the scene depend, will have been rubbed out - then you haven't got a film. So, what you need to do is stick to very disciplined lines of actions, and focus completely on doing the action throughout the scene. Whilst doing that of course, you're focussed on what your scene partner is doing, because what he is doing will determine what you will do next (note – this may not be in line with your careful planning – deal with it, that's the whole point), everything you do is in response to what your scene partner is doing, and in service to your action. What your performance effectively becomes, is a moment-to-moment improvisation (within the strictures of the text – when there is one), continually working out the best way to accomplish your action within the reality of the scene (ie – as it actually unfolds in performance, not as you rehearsed it). You obviously need to be switched on in order to do this, it's challenging and scary, but it means that your acting will be full, you'll express yourself with all your body and personality, every gesture, every inflection, will be true, provocative and various.

I would like to explore further the notion of people within a professional context, I.e.- scenes like The Audition, where the character may be feeling all kinds of emotions under the surface, but is bound by  professionalism to maintain self-control, and continue to go through the motions of a business meeting, even when the character clearly isn't getting what he wants. I think this situation creates a very interesting tension, an ambivalence is brought forth, and watching someone wrestle to keep his professional dignity in place is interesting, it also helps to create that "theatrical flatness" (or, "flat theatricality") I was talking about. Similarly, in terms of the visual aesthetic, I would like to develop further the notion of deliberateness with simplicity, within a naturalistic setting. Next month, I hope to do another script of mine, Phone Box Gun, which is a short film noir, so perhaps I will be able to employ these ideas there.

 

* all the way through the film Tony thinks he is doing the right things in order to get what he wants, but he is finally frustrated from accomplishing his goal by these self same actions.

** On the subject of actor's self-direction, it's worth reminding ourselves that Sir John Gielgud directed a production of King Lear, with himself in the title role, when he was aged just 25.

The Great Acting Blog: "Flipping Between Mindsets"

Before I head back to Ireland to complete filming on Rouzbeh Rashidi's HE (which is going to be an utterly sublime feature, by the way), I intend to squeeze in a quickie short film, called Phone Box Gun. It'll be a Kaurismakian film noir, about a jewellery heist, where I'll finally get the chance to wave a Beretta about and wear a false beard, and further, just because I enjoy making life difficult, I'll also be directing the film aswell as acting in it.

Whenever I've tried my hand at filmmaking in the past, I've gone into it with too aggressive a mindset, which I think is inappropriate. An aggressive mindset is very good for acting (or, indeed, writing) because acting requires short bursts of heightened intensity, which are generated in the moment of performance. Filmmaking, I believe, requires a slow burn kind of energy – a filmmaker needs to be able to function consistently well over the period of time of the shoot, making many decisions, being alive to mishaps. The filmmaker is required to manage other people, which means he needs to ensure he is available for them, and create conditions whereby they can work happily.The filmmaker is at the centre of everything, all eyes are on him. The actor need only concern himself with himself, and the singular act of his performance, and all of his attention is dedicated to that, he need not multi-task – and that's just the way most actors like it,  because most actors are minimalists, it's the philosopher aspect of their work, favouring clarity and simplicity (this becomes very evident when actors move behind the camera), however, this is not a pre-requisite for the job, but certainly a common trait I have witnessed. It's also worth noting that a relaxed body and mind is crucial to the actor's work, and so another reason why they don't want to be pre-occupied with anything else. The poor filmmaker is often under stress, as he skits around, trying to keep all the plates spinning. The life of the actor sounds positively leisurely in comparison to that of the filmmaker, which of course it is, apart from that battle with the awesome which takes place during the performance (I've met more than one director who started out as an actor, but switched because they could not cope with the pressure of the performance). Acting requires a laser-like in-the-moment precision, and to deliver that requires immense discipline, mental strength, and self-control, all difficult, improved only over a long period of practice. Directors need a certain kind of generosity, a magnanimity, because they are handling different personalities, with differing talents – a director needs, to a certain extent, a big tent, whereas actors needs only a sleeping bag. 

To be a filmmaker requires a certain kind of humility: he is responsible for everything, yet much of the production is out of his control. Setting up the shot may take time, it may not go according to plan, but the key is to accept this state of affairs, not grind against it, which will only lead to fatigue and a diminishment in the quality of the work. It's also being aware that everybody else is doing their best, and it is upto the filmmaker to be able to articulate what he wants in a way that is useful and practical to the person he is speaking too. Much of this then, is a preparation issue, being ready to explain yourself, being ready to communicate – if the filmmaker cannot articulate himself properly, he should refrain altogether, and let cast and crew go about their work. I think this is the  aspect I need to work on most. I find managing people to be tedious, which is why I prefer to work with independent types, who think for themselves and take their work seriously, just getting on with it. Also, so much of acting is about energy conservation, and articulating what you want is energy draining. Therefore, directing and acting in the same production, requires compartmentalisation,  flipping between the two mindsets as and when. The point is, committing totally to the scene when acting in it, then, when the scene is over, stepping out of it, and looking at it with a director's eye. 

On Phone Box Gun, I intend to be more relaxed about how the production will unfold, and flip flop more consciously between the mindsets of actor and director, as oppose to jumbling it all together, and pushing it through by force of will. Hopefully, this adjustment to my previous approach, will lead to greater productivity, and ultimately serve the film better.