Picture Locked

After sending Wendy another 10 page memo about changes that we felt necessary, I can now report with considerable relief and even a bit of mild elation - careful, now - that Folie is now locked. The decision to extend all the cutaways has proved very effective - everything now appears as a memento mori - which gives the film a deeper feel, I think. And the new ending certain works a treat. True, we'll need to make a few minor cosmetic nips and tucks - there have been calls for the shot of the cat to be put back in! - but the film is now, to all intents and purposes, done and we are into the final stages of post at long last. Composer Sharon Farber is now busy with the score, and we should be mixing and grading in October. Oh, and did I say, there is even a director cameo in the film now? It's a blink and you'll miss him type of shot. Play spot the auteur at a multiplex near you in 2009...

Behind the Scenes Trailer Online

A taster of both the finished film, and Rhys Hayward's fine 'Behind the Scenes' documentary can be found here:

http://blip.tv/file/337320, featuring Adam Napier summarising the film rather well, and a comparatively young, carefree and happy director talking about how the film was cast.

A full trailer for Folie will be uploaded later in the summer.

Meanwhile, please buy a copy of The Bill Douglas Trilogy, finally out on DVD and with a contribution to the booklet by your humble auteur himself...

Deadline Dates Loom

On the last day we were in Cannes, we had some interest in Folie from a film festival - and a rather good one at that. Their submission deadline is looming - it's in about 6 weeks - so we're hoping to get the film more or less finished by then. We're shooting the final pick-ups this weekend (final, that is, apart from re-doing the final shot, which will have to be done in either early July or early September), and hopefully these few extra shots will be in the cut by the end of this month. Completion can't some soon enough, believe me. I feel rather like the song says, 'Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington', the stage in this case being the whole ordeal of producing an independent feature...

Sturgeon's Law

Someone once told the SF writer Ted Sturgeon that 90% of SF was crap. Sturgeon agreed, but then addded, 'But 90% of everything is crap.'

I had this infallible truth on my mind this last week in Cannes, where there was indeed a lot of cinematic crap on display, and a lot of idiots talking the usual merde.

There was interest in our proposed documentary about Tarkovsky, Cinema of Dreams, and interest in Folie from a film festival. Their deadline is a mere eight weeks away, but we may be able to get it about 80% or 90% done by then, financial fairies permitting.

More anon, once I've recovered from the usual festival rigours (sore feet, bad diet etc).

Blackballing Bastards

Another fruitless meeting with a so-called 'very keen' investor who was making noises about how he wanted to put some money into Folie so we can get it finished has just left us feeling rather like Mr Wiggin, from Monty Python's Architect Sketch:

Mr. Wiggin:
May I ask you to reconsider?

Clients:
Well...

Mr. Wiggin:
You wouldn't regret this. Think of the tourist trade.

Client 1:
I'm sorry. We want a block of flats, not an abattoir.

Mr. Wiggin:
...I see. Well, of course, this is just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement, you whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes. You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards. Well I wouldn't become a Freemason now if you went down on your lousy stinking knees and begged me!

~

It is of course heavily ironic that Weston-super-Mare's not very much missed MP was called Wiggin, Mr Wiggin in the sketch was played by Weston's very own John Cleese (shot at the time Wiggin was MP - surely no coincidence), and Folie was of course shot there. It is verily a town of blackballing bastards. And we're still waiting to get in at Hendon.

Mikloś Jancsó (and the latest edit)

Last weekend we went up to London to see the great Mikloś Jancsó in person at the Curzon Mayfair and the Curzon Soho, as part of the Curzon /Second Run Jancsó festival. The great man was in very fine form, especially considering he is 86 (and certainly doesn't look it or act it). Apart from answering questions about The Round-Up, which was screening to celebrate its release on DVD, Jancsó talked about some of his ideas about film. He complained that many films don't give the viewer enough time to think, which I can heartily agree with. The point of most Hollywood cinema (and western culture/consumerism in general) is not to make people think. If you stop to think, you realise what a pile of crap it all is, and they don't want that, offering instead the vicarious, emotionally dead pleasures of shallow, poorly conceived stories that basically reinforce the status quo, or what Philip K. Dick called the Empire. (A term also used by Alain Badiou - thanks Nathan!) It is of course tempting to add the word 'Evil' before that word. There are a lot of them out there. We need - indeed, must have, films that make us think. And not just films - anything that makes us think: books, art, music, media (the list could go on...).

I was reminded of all this the night before last when I finally got round to watching the latest cut of Folie. The new version of the film certainly made me think, perhaps because it's the first new edit we've had a in a few months, so it was akin to seeing the film for the first time. I found myself wanting to know what was going on in these characters' heads, what their pasts were like - something that would be killed by the inclusion of voice-over. So, in a U-turn worthy of any government (and they're nearly all despicable), I have now decided to omit voice-over from the film, which also means that the dreams will be cut as well. Actually, it's the other way round: watching the film the other night made me realise that the dreams really have to go; they're darlings that simply have to be murdered. I think the film will be better without them. And hopefully it will make people think more, which must surely be a good thing.

Latest Edit

Got the latest edit from the FTP server last night. At only 2GB, it managed to download OK even with my rather slow broadband (surely an oxymoron?). Anyway, the film is looking good - nearly there I hope. For the first time in cutting, instead of getting shorter, it is now getting longer. This present edit is 89 minutes, which is a couple of minutes longer than the last version. We want something that's just right, of course; a lot of the decisions we now need to make are trying to strike a balance between style and story. I'm quite pleased that some shots have been held way beyond their 'normal' time, but obviously we can't do that with every single shot, so I need to try and reign in my desire to make this Weston-super-Mare's answer to Sátántangó. (Maybe that will be a DVD extra...)

Into the Last Stretch of Post

I've just gotten back from Edinburgh, where I spent all day Tuesday making copies of the pick-ups for Folie à Deux. I was originally intending to do them in Bristol, but the price I was quoted by a certain post-production facility near the BBC was a ludicrous £460 + VAT. It worked out to cheaper to get the train to the other end of the country and get the copies done north of Hadrian's Wall, where I have a well-placed contact in post land. Total expenditure: £4.50 (for three new mini DV tapes). The material was shot piecemeal between June and November last year, and will definitely enhance the film considerably. I've also decided that the film will have a voice-over from both Adam Napier's and Sally Scott's characters, which we'll try and record sometime in March. A Cannes screening in May remains a possibility, as does fame, fortune and reforming the Baader-Meinhof gang to settle a few scores with a well-known high street bank... The film definitely feels like it's nearing completion at last, and I'm feeling very inspired by the extra footage and the impact the voice-overs will have.

Director Seeking Inspiration

I mentioned in my last post that it becomes very difficult to remain interested in your own work after a certain length of time. The original plan had been to get Folie finished by last summer, but that didn't happen due to the necessity of getting pick-ups, which was done piecemeal between June and November of last year (with a possible further day of pick-ups still to come). Varying degrees of soul-searching and questioning whether it really is worth dedicating one's life - or at least large portions of it - to making films, while not exactly slowly down the shooting of pick-ups, did at least mean that it was harder than ever to get back into the right mindset to get the film finished.

To that end, I've been trying in the last few weeks to seek inspiration via other means than various ancient country hostelries, and have renewed my Lovefilm.com membership. Almost the first two things I watched were Louis Malle's great 1963 film Le Feu Follet, and Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons (1978). One could say Folie is tangentially related to both in terms of certain themes, while being stylistically very different. What interests me about both films is the use of dialogue, especially the main characters' attempts to articulate their feelings. Fassbinder makes great use of a tape recording at the end of 13 Moons, and this has led me back to thinking that short voice-overs could go into Folie, perhaps over the dream sequences.

On the subject of voice-over, I learned last week that Bresson's Mouchette was one of Bill Douglas's favourite films, and that contains no voice-over at all, so I may go back and watch that again, too. On the other hand, Diary of a Country Priest is a great voice-over film, so one could assume that Bresson had no particular aversion to it as a storytelling tool. My main feeling is that, if voice-overs are used, it would be to deepen the film and, if anything, make it more enigmatic, rather that explaining anything. There are very few explanations in our lives, and most of the time, we are adrift in a sea of seeming certainties, but which, on closer inspection, turn out to be as solid and long-lasting as a cobweb.

Another film that made an impression on me recently was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which I saw at one of my favourite cinemas, the Cameo in Edinburgh. Again, a voice-over film, and one with a voice-of-God narrator as well, which added a sense of inevitability about the whole thing, which I think suited the story. But perhaps the thing that struck me most was the sense that it was a film about the passing of time, and the briefness of meaningful moments, suggested by numerous shots of apparently inanimate objects - various domestic still lives, the sunlight on the floorboards, views through lace curtains or windows, etc. As any good filmmaker knows, there's no such thing as an inanimate object. Everything should play a part in your film; there is only inanimate writing, direction and acting. (To say nothing of inanimate distribution, criticism and overall cultural stagnation... but perhaps I'm going off on a tangent here. Or am I?)

How all this will feed into the last stage of Folie, I don't know, but it feels somehow like it is finally gelling. If I make another film after this, I'm tempted to take a leaf out of Fassbinder's book and do the whole thing from start to finish in 3 months. He averaged one feature every hundred days. No wonder the poor man died at 37. I'd quite like to survive a bit longer than that, Manoel de Oliveira being my main inspiration in this department, still making films in his 100th year. If there's one lesson to be learned from the Portuguese Master, it's this: whatever happens, keep going.

Finishing Folie

We are now hopefully in the final stretch of post on Folie, after far too long in limbo, a limbo largely created by actor's schedules (unintentionally and unavoidably delaying the shooting of vital pick-ups) and the ever present spectre of a profound lack of cash. If the Gods of Post permit, we could screen the film in the Cannes Market in May, and hopefully finally get the film out into the world thereafter.

The main problem with being in post for so long is that it becomes very difficult to remain interested and inspired in one's own work, and the last few months have certainly been an object lesson in how to do so. I can't say I have any secrets, you just have to learn to watch something totally uncritically, and imagine that you are a member of the audience seeing it for the first time. Also to recall what got you excited about the story in the first place, excited/obsessed enough to get tangled up in the chaos and all-round assault course that is making a film.

The main artistic quandaries we have at the moment are deciding whether to add a bit of voice-over to the film, not to explain things, but to deepen the film, and also the vexed issue of music. I'm not sure that it needs very much, and seeing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days on Saturday, which has no music at all, strengthens my feeling that less will probably be more.

Sir Edmund Hillary RIP

More film news anon, but at the moment I would just like to doff my hat to one of the greatest chaps of recent decades, Sir Edmund Hillary (L, here with the great Tenzing Norgay, just after the conquest of Everest in 1953). God Bless You Sir, and may we all learn from your example. (And have a quick single malt for Tenzing, too!)

Pick-Ups Finished

Today we shot the final pick-ups for Folie. Sally came down from London to shoot three shots: Cleo picking up an envelope from a mantelpiece in her flat (a nicely austere shot, a little homage perhaps to Bresson, Dreyer or Hammershøi); Cleo looking through Lucas's photos in the hotel and a close-up of her feet (a bit of Buñuelian foot fetishism, perhaps?). The envelope was deemed necessary, because it later reappears in the film at a very crucial stage in the story, while the photos and shoes were things we could have got on the day if we'd had time. We also battled valiantly against traffic, birdsong and the occasional dog to record a very brief wildtrack. Not the hardest day's work imaginable, but it feels good to finally have everything in the can. Very good, in fact. Once we have the pick-ups dropped into the cut, we're onto music, mixing and grading and hopefully a preview screening within the next few months. And then I can retire/do a Lord Lucan/Reggie Perrin/Jim-Morrison-splitting-to-Africa...

Shooting Pick Ups

On Monday we shot pick-ups with our male lead, Adam Napier. We've had to wait this long as Adam has been in a play in London's West End all year, and the run has only just finished. It was a long, frustrating wait, but it was good to see him again, and we got some good stuff in the can. We also attempted to reshoot the final shot of the film, but we're not at the moment sure if what we got is useable. It's a fairly simple shot - the camera tracks away from a car - but was fraught with all sorts of little problems (reflections, temperamental smoke machines, bumping into things, the public, shadows, sunlight too bright etc). So: we may have to have another go at that shot sometime.

This coming week, we are shooting pick-ups with our other lead, Sally Scott. Again, we've had to wait all year for Sally's schedule to free up enough to allow her one day in Weston. At the moment she can be seen in Boeing Boeing at the Comedy. Once we've done Sally's pick-ups - and had another crack at the final shot - the film will finally be all in the can, and the final push in post can begin. And not before time. Roll on 2008 and red carpets.

Another Short Post

A few slight changes to my next book, New Waves in Cinema. It was originally scheduled for June 08 with a still from Rivette's marvellous Va Savoir on the cover (Jeanne Balibar emerging through the skylight, a cover I liked a lot). The new publication date is next September, which is good for me, as it's still nowhere near finished, and the cover now features a certain gentleman by the name of Kinksi. More info here.

Mannheim News: Sales Agent Picks up the Film

Just got back from the Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival, where Folie has been picked up by a sales agent, despite being incomplete. More info soon.

Seeking Funding, Meeting Fools

In our current search for a bit of cash to complete Folie, I have been exploring various funding options. One of these is that bastion of filmic culture and wisdom, the UK Film Council. Yesterday they turned our application down on the basis that the acting and directing were weak, despite the fact that these are precisely two of the areas that have been singled out for praise by the various good gentlemen and women who have seen the film as it stands at the moment. What planet are the Film Council on? They are obviously so far up their own arses that they can't see out. Oh yes, and I suppose we did commit the cardinal sin of actually needing money, as it seems they only give handouts to films that don't really need it. And then of course the film is about white middle-class southerners, with nary a member of the lower socio-economic orders in sight, to say nothing of homosexuals (that was my last film), non-Caucasians (the film before that), northerners, Scots or any other group who might appear to myopic fools in plush offices in central London to be worthy of portraying on screen. Oh yes, and the style of the film - decidedly not MTV, Shane Meadows or Guy Ritchie. So, really, we stood fuck all chance of getting money. What a fucking riduculous country this is. Reminds me, sadly, that Truffaut was right: cinema and Britain are incompatible terms.

The Gospel According to PJ Harvey

Just read this interview with PJ Harvey in The Grauniad. This bit caught my eye, as what she says is completely on the money:

'Our time is almost up. In the car park, Harvey points out the remains of Abbotsbury's 11th-century abbey and a chapel dedicated to St Catherine - the patron saint of spinsters, she tells me - and then goes on her way. On my long journey home, I tune into Radio 1, and hear Zane Lowe once again playing When Under Ether, which sounds every bit as singular as Harvey had suggested. By comparison, the music that follows it seems hollow and generic, which rather puts me in mind of something she had said earlier on - an outburst, by her standards, in which she said her sense was that the quality of music, literature and film seems to be going "down and down and down, and I struggle so hard to get excited about anything".

Characteristically, she wouldn't be drawn on exactly who or what she was railing against, but lurking in what she said, there was a kind of mission statement. "There's too much of everything in the world, but particularly too much of everything that's not all that good. The world doesn't need any more art that's just all right. It only needs mind-blowing, inspirational, life-changing stuff."'

Folie: Clip Now Online

A short clip of the making of Folie is now online. Go to www.rhyshayward.com and click on the bottom right-hand image of the four displayed (showing Sally Scott in the shelter scene). The clip is from Rhys's documentary about the making of the film, which I saw for the first time yesterday, and a fine piece of work it is. Hopefully it will be on the DVD, once that comes out sometime next year. Right now, I'm in the midst of trying to get the remaining pick-ups in the can and trying to get things on track for the final stage of post. Watching Rhys's film reminded me as to why we got into this particular adventure in the first place - I only wish it was longer. Perhaps I can talk him into a longer cut, for those keen on the realtime experience...

Why We Need Art

Mikhail Kononov, who played Foma in Andrei Rublev, has died. Obituaries can be found here and here. Something he said which is reported in the latter of these two articles reminded me of something I've been thinking about in the past few days. To quote:

"I am guided by the precepts with which our generation regarded art. This is why I desperately refuse to act in the TV-serials I am offered. I am terrified by the scripts I read: they are horrible! ... I have no right to allow myself playing in such nonsense. During one role test I even burst into tears. They all thought I was weeping because of growing into my role, while I cried for the horrible state of today’s cinematography and TV. I rejected the role, though it offered big money. One cannot meet the viewer on such a low moral and intellectual level. If we follow the mass public tastes we can lose our way. This is what is happening in cinema today. This is anti-art, anti-aesthetics. We must not support vice and mass psychosis. Otherwise our profession is not needed. Neither artists nor writers are needed."

It occurred to me that one of the reasons why arthouse/world cinema - call it what you will - is needed more than ever is due to the psychotic nature of Western civilisation. The film The Corporation makes that clear: that putting profit about all else has lead us into a state of cultural pyschosis. Money matters more than anything else. Now, I'm not against making money, but it seems fairly clear that we need to value other things as much as, if not more than, making a profit. These other values could include nuturing the imagination, pronoia, fostering the idea that each one of us has repsonsibilities for our own lives and other people, that every decision we make matters, etc.

This is where so-called unprofitable arthouse films come in. The best of them do foster, I think, some of the values mentioned above. In order to make these films more viable for exhibitors, maybe we need to change the whole cinema-going experience. Your average multiplex has perverted the whole idea of a 'House of Culture' that the French were trying to establish in the 50s, where you could go to the same place for films, dance, galleries, theatre and music. The multiplex simply gives you a dozen or twenty choices to choose from, and they're mainly all crap, junk food for the mind and soul. Plus you can't even get anything decent to eat or drink: it's all sugary crap. (Popcorn ought to be illegal at film screenings. If you eat it during a film, you are effectively saying you are a moron.)

We need art and culture (high culture) more than ever to fight against the relentless drivel of our society. Tarkovsky quoted Gurdjieff in The Sacrifice, and it is a quote worth repeating here:

"If sin is that which is inessential, then our civilization is built on sin from beginning to end."

Mikhail Kononov was right to cry: we should all be crying. The inmates have been running the asylum for far too long. It is time to pity them, and begin their re-eduction, otherwise the asylum will turn into a prison, from which there will be no escape.

Sunset Song

Now that we are out of the Dog Days of August, which have been very frustrating with little progress on the project (July remains largely unspeakable - never my favourite time of the year), I have a few updates: we should have the film finished in time for the Berlinale deadline (around 01/11/07), as we now have a smidgin of cash potentially in the bank. More cash is of course needed, but I am now starting to feel that the whole bloody film will finally finish itself by the end of the year, meaning that 2008 will be our year! If we miss the Berlinale, we'll show it somewhere else instead (somewhere slightly warmer would be nice!).

I have also had some interesting conversations with people who have seen the cut. All have been positive, but a chat I had tonight in Glastonbury (of all places) has made me wonder whether we should add something else to the film, namely a voice-over. (Think Sunset Boulevard or American Beauty.) What Folie is about, in one respect, is the sense of being alive in the world, the sheer strangeness of being in a body, of feeling the wind against your skin, hearing a dog bark or a church bell, smelling the sea or a bonfire, smelling the salt of the sea. So the idea of a voice-over adds to the general ontological conundrum posed by the film. In other words, I want the film to ask the viewer, Is It Worth Being Alive At All? And If So, Why? Why Do You Appreciate Life? You should, because one day it will be taken from you. As The Doors said, 'Someday soon you're going to die.' This is the inherent tension at the heart of Folie - when will they (we) die? And how?