On the Noble Art of Paring Things Down

On Monday I met up with our two leads, Adam Napier and Sally Scott to discuss how we're going to approach the whole workshopping aspect of Folie. We've decided to work from a scene breakdown rather than a script to beging with, as a lot of the film will be told through what is not said. Nick Harding and I will also be working on - indeed, are working on - a new draft of the script taking into account some of the suggestions that the actors have made. Not only are Adam and Sally very keen on the idea of paring the whole script right down, but also the entire supporting cast which, at the moment, is Christopher Dunne as the depressed and slightly mad soon to be ex-vicar, Martin Trent as a bartender who swears a lot and Steve Dineen as a vacuous and really rather sad tie salesman.

Another thing we decided on on Monday was the start date. I'm to get the scene breakdown to Adam and Sally within the next week or two, and we'll start knocking ideas back and forth, with a view to starting rehearsals in mid-late August, and shooting the film in the week beginning 11 September. This is the week after Sally's play ends, and we've decided that it will make all our lives a lot easier if we shoot then, and not in July as originally planned. (Apart from Sally's play, I also have a book to finish.) We'd ideally like to get the film finished in time to show it to the Cannes selection committee when they make their annual trip to London in March. Getting into the main competition will be almost impossible, so we're hoping for one of the sidebars like Director's Fortnight to smile benignly upon us.

Speaking of Sally's play, she's understudying Juliette Lewis in Sam Shepard's Fool For Love at the Apollo. Sally will have at least one night of taking over from Juliette, so I'm looking forward to that. Indeed, we may have a cast night out in the West End to cheer her on and generally applaud loudly, shower the stage with flowers during the curtain call and generally be well-oiled luvvies of the first water.

Anatoly Solonitsyn

Today is the 24th anniversary of the death of Anatoly Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's favourite actor. He played the lead in Andrei Rublev, Dr Sartorius in Solaris, the country doctor in Mirror, and, perhaps best of all, the Writer in Stalker. Stalker has some bearing on what we're doing in Folie, in that it's one of the great films of the human face. For minutes on end, the camera simply watches the three actors be, rather than do. The ride into the Zone on the trolley car is perhaps the most celebrated example, where, for over three minutes of screen time, nothing happens, but at the same time, everything happens. A more extreme example is when the men reach the Room, and, after a lengthy squabble in the dirt - which sums up the plot of the whole film, come to think of it - they sit down in a puddle for well over four minutes, and the camera slowly pulls back to reveal that they're sitting on the threshold of the Room, which they are afraid to enter. It's one of the greatest things I've ever seen. So simple, but absolutely stunning to watch. And the last time we see Writer - and in fact the last time we see Anatoly Solonitsyn in a Tarkovsky film (he was too ill to play in Nostalgia) - he's having a contemplative smoke in the bar at the end of the film. Again, so much is conveyed by the simplest of means.

Another reason to cite Stalker is that I've been thinking for months about the look of Folie. I'd originally toyed with the idea of setting the film in increasingly bleak locations (like the world outside the Zone), but on a recent trip to the bank (appeasing the National Socialists) I walked through Weston's Grove Park. It was a warm, but overcast day, and the park seemed incredibly verdant: the grass was long, the trees heavy in leaf, and I thought of the verdant, intense quality of the Zone. It somehow felt right for the film. As we're now shooting in September - that's another story/post - we should still be OK when it comes to foliage. I had the feeling, walking through the park, that I was in the middle of mystery. It was all about me, in the rustle of the leaves, in the swaying of the grass in the wind.

On the subject of anniversaries, yesterday was the 24th anniversary of Fassbinder's death. June 1982 was evidently not a good month for films...

Test Post

This is just a test to see if I can email the blog from Outlook.

Proper update to follow.

Things be afoot...

And a word about customs officials...

Amongst the other news of the week is the long-awaited arrival of a Libec tripod, which I ordered ages ago and has been held up for reasons unknown at customs. I don't know whether HM Customs were checking the legs of the tripod for heroin or illegal immigrants, but it has now arrived (sans drugs, Chinese cockle pickers and Vietnamese boat people) and is indeed a thing of beauty.

Due to the horrendous hours I've been putting in of late, I wasn't able to get it back to my flat and out of the box until about 0300 one morning last week, so there I was, in the dead of night in my kitchen, practicing very slow pans.

Ah, little boys and their train sets...

Post Cannes

I've just returned from Cannes, where I was meeting a few people to get Folie on their radars. They're all interested, and all that remains for us to do is shoot the bugger.

In a case of serendipity twice over, the Irish Pavilion were giving away free copies of the current issue (#110) of Film Ireland, which carries a good review of my book on Tarkovsky.

I also discovered that I was appearing in a film screening there, namely Jonathan Stack's Secrets of the Code, a feature length doc about the ideas behind the Da Vinci Code. Yours truly is the first person to appear in the film, saying (while walking down a street in Islington of all places - the interview was shot back in January) that one of the main reasons the book was so popular is that the theme of the Sacred Feminine has struck a chord in people, and the film proceeds to be basically a party political broadcast on behalf of Mary Magdalene. Other people in the film include Elaine Pagels, Richard Leigh, Timothy Freke, a rather cool Kabbala teacher whose name escapes me, John and Caitlin Matthews, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince and one or two rather scary fundamentalists. Susan Sarandon narrates. It's a good film.

So, in addition to my Folie a Deux related meetings, I was also able to flash the Tarkovsky review around, and also wave the Secrets of the Code flyer in people's faces saying, 'I'm in a film screening here!' And not only that, but a film by a double Oscar-nominee. Which was a first.

Cannes

Off to Cannes in the morning, and I've just realised I don't have a bag. Consequently, all my stuff is in carrier bags in my bedroom. Absolutely typical of the chaos that prevails when you make a film. I'll have to borrow a suitcase with wheels on from my mother or sister, one of whom will also draw the short straw and take me to the airport in the morning.

There are two types of being busy: one where you achieve things, and the other, where your blood pressure goes up and you don't seem to get very much done at all, except heighten the likelihood of keeling over and being rushed to the nearest hospital. Or preferrably, pub. It is the latter sort of being busy that has been rearing its ugly head today - and over the last few weeks in fact.

[DOP from Porlock enters the room - blog writing suspended while we go to the pub.]

OK, I didn't mean to end the post there, as I have just had to go out to the pub with a DOP who is interested in lighting Folie. So, now I'm back, and all my carrier bags are bulging with T shirts and the one or two pairs of trousers that still fit me. (After a recent 4 stone weight loss, almost everything I have in my cupboard resembles a circus tent.) Friday is the big day for meetings, but, to be honest, I rather hope that's it, and I can spend the next few days soaking up the sun and doing as little as possible, as I badly need a rest. Trouble is, 'rest' and 'Cannes' are not easy bedfellows. So, I will probably get home next week even more burnt out than I am at the moment.

Oh well, balls to it. We're making a film. It fucks your life up. Get used to it. To keep myself going at times like this, I have to remind myself what the fuck I think I'm trying to do, and I recall something a woman from Gorky (not that Gorky is in itself is important, it's just that that's where I remember her being from) once wrote to Tarkovsky. She'd seen Mirror, and wrote that the film made her feel that, for the first time in her life, she was no longer alone.

Personal Mountains

I remember once reading an anecdote that, during the shooting of Full Metal Jacket, Stanley was so tired from working round the clock that he could never remember what they were supposed to be shooting next. Or to quote Bresson again, 'You will not know till much later if your film is worth the mountain range of efforts it is costing you.' I seem to be constantly behind at the moment, and the exhaustion and frustration are really kicking in. I feel like I'm climbing the mountain range of efforts Bresson talked about. Or the twin peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro, to quote Graham Chapman.

Official Film Site

A site for Folie is now up here. It will of course be expanded over time, eventually having clips from the film etc.

The Gospel According to Abbas... to say nothing of Lars

The Gospel of Judas has been much in the news of late, as they've just published the text of this lost Gnostic gospel, which paints Judas in a good light. I've just read it, as I'm currently writing a book on Gnosticism, which is due for publication later in the year. Non-canonical gospels appeal to me greatly, as I think I must have been a heretic in a previous life; I certainly feel like one in this life.

In order to make Folie as good a film as we can, therefore, we need to proceed in a mainly non-orthodox way. We don't have the money to do things normally, for a start, but it's one of those stories that doesn't need much money, as the drive and production value of the story are in the characters, their emotions and the extraordinary situation they find themselves in (and believe me, it is extraordinary. And based on a true story, as I think I've said elsewhere on this blog.) All the actors who are so far on board are very keen on the semi-improvised nature of the film, and we are all relishing the prospect of having this freedom, as we may not have it on the next film any of us do.

To keep the old inner man bright eyed and bushy tailed, I've been watching films by and about Abbas Kiarostami and Lars von Trier. Lars has been one of my favourite directors ever since Europa, and the fact that he could then abandon his style totally and start again from scratch with The Kingdom and Breaking the Waves only makes me love him even the more. My love for him, however, does not quite extend to seeing his johnson, which is on show in The Humiliated, a feature-length doc about the making of The Idiots. I admire him for directing naked from the waist down, but please, Lars, we don't do things like that in Old Blighty! (except in certain parts of Dorset, so I hear). Put it away! But the film is great as it shows him taking ludicrous risks, and, of course, it worked brilliantly.

I've also been watching Kiarostami's 10 on Ten, in which the great man holds forth on his theories of filmmaking. While I don't agree with him on certain things - the notion of what truth is, for instance; I'm much more in agreement with Werner Herzog on this one - he does say some great things. One of the statements I had to go and copy down is this:

I don’t believe a film is to be understood. Do we understand a piece of music? Do we understand a painting? Or the exact meaning of a poem? It’s ambiguity that attracts us to a work, not understanding the subject or the story. However, human beings are standing between heaven and hell because of their existential ambiguity, and art displays this ambiguity. Pascal said that you cannot show a single event in somebody’s life and claim to have said everything about him. The secret department of the soul prevents this, and this is what becomes the plinth, the basis for the art of cinema.

The film also shows him shooting A Taste of Cherry with a crew of about 4 or 5. He's very much against doing things the Hollywood way, but stresses the importance of looking at why American films work. It's a paradox I like. Like the idea of Judas being a good man, and Christ's favourite disciple (after, presumably, Mary Margadelene!). Many people, it seems, can't handle that life itself is one big paradox, and it's up to us as storytellers to remind them. Whether they want to be reminded or not.

Life's Rich Pageant

I can't believe I haven't posted here for two weeks. A lot has happened: I've now got the camera, the small but perfectly formed Sony A1, and am picking up more kit this week - an audio mixer and a tripod. That will just leave a Fig Rig or camera stabiliser and flight case on the shopping list.

We have also been casting the part of Cleo, the female lead. We selected a shortlist of 15 or so actors to see, and spent last Thursday and Friday seeing them all. We are recalling 4 on 10 May. It'll be a tough decision to make - I only hope a gut feeling is involved! I've always ignored gut feelings at my peril, so let's hope the old inner man is in some kind of shape to help select the right person for the job!

The next draft of the script is also in the air, if not actually being worked on at the moment. The general consensus seems to be to pare it right down, and cut any speeches where the two characters exhibit anything like self-pity or self-loathing. They're probably beyond that by the time we see them in the film. I hope I can say the same about myself by the time we come to shoot it.

Notes from the Cinematographer

The title is a pun on Bresson's book, Notes on the Cinematographer. He noted down various thoughts over the years, aphoristically, and it was first published in French in 1975. I had a copy of the English first edition from 1977, but lent it to someone I was involved with and never got it back when we stopped seeing each other. (Moral: Never lend books. Especially to someone you're going out with.)

Anyway, here's food for thought: 'Rid myself of accumulated errors and untruths. Get to know my resources, make sure of them.' And that's just the opening entry. It's something I will need to keep in mind, as the last few weeks have been a bit stressful to say the least.

We're trying at the moment to whittle down the hundreds of potential Cleos (the female lead) who answered the PCR ad to a short list of around 15 to audition in London at the end of the month. I also have to go and pick up the camera, probably next week, in order to start shooting tests. I've decided to go for the Sony A1 in the end, not the Z1. Some of the most important scenes in the film are set in cars, so the smaller A1 is more suitable for that.

Another major factor in choosing the A1 over the Z1 is that it's only half the price of the Z1, something that has been weighing on my mind a lot, as I have decided to use money I had inherited to pay for it, rather than get a loan. Big trauma, as I hate to see all that money leave my account, but on the other hand, I think if I take the plunge and put my own money into the film, it's a sign of total commitment that the Universe can't ignore, and hopefully will help us make a good film. It will also hopefully attract investors. If they can see that I'm serious about the film and willing to put my money where my mouth is, that hopefully will be enough of a guarantee that we are serious about making the film, and serious about making it work.

Well, it's either a sign of that, or insanity, or desperation, and they're not things I think Bresson made notes about. I'd better check Notes again...

Start Date Set, Casting Begins

Since my last post (not the piece of music I hasten to add!), my male lead Adam Napier has returned to Old Blighty after touring abroad. We have had several phone conversations about Folie, and have decided that the earliest we can start shooting would be the week of 12 June, so that is now our official start date. Until it gets put back, which is always possible, but hopefully we'll stick to it, as without a start date, we'd face the almost inevitable danger of the film regressing into the future and never being made at all.

Today an ad went into PCR for the female lead, Cleo, so I am now just waiting for the postman to start taking my name in vain as he will no doubt have to deliver sacks of mail every day for the next week or so, and I'm at the top of four flights of stairs.

Once the part is cast, we'll start rehearsing, probably around the beginning of May. Adam's doing a play at the White Bear in the second half of May, so we plan to take a break and then come back to Folie once he's finished.

I must admit, when Adam first called me to tell me he was back, the realisation that it's 'now or never' with Folie suddenly hit me, and I have to confess to repairing to an alehouse to steady my nerves. I guess this is natural, as making a feature - even one with no budget - is still an exhausting, but exciting journey. 'Once more unto the breech' I think is the expression...

The Mysteries of the Rose

For Folie to work as well as it can, one feature that needs to be foregrounded is the direction. I've never liked most British films because they look like TV, and it's no coincidence that the filmmakers from this country I do admire - e.g. Bill Douglas - look more European than British.

How can we make our film stand out from the crowd? I think the answer is to 'stand before your god and commit' if I can paraphrase one of my favourite writers, the great Paul Watkins. The gods in question are, for me, long tracking shots, their polar opposite - completely static shots, and long takes. I think from these three basic building blocks a whole vocabulary can be built, one which we can use to tell the story we want to tell in Folie. I've always disliked conventional blocking - wide establishing shots, moving in close, shot/reverse shot for conversations etc, which is little more than painting by numbers - and I think that now is the time to go the way I feel I really should be going and shoot the film this way.

The polarity between tracking shots (Gods: Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, Tarr) and the completely static camera (Gods: Douglas, Bresson) also calls to mind the essential polarity of things themselves. For example, if you show a rose, it's just a plant, a flower, the thing itself, but it also has inescapable mythological and symbolic baggage, whether you intend it or not (think of The Name of the Rose, The Romance of the Rose and so on). Therefore, if I make a film using largely these two methods of blocking a scene, I am also hinting that the film is always going to be a case of 'both/and' not 'either/or', such as it's going to be unversal and particular, fiction and fact, real and illusory. Rather like our daily lives.

Lanterna Magicka Starts Shooting

On Friday we started shooting Lanterna Magicka (see separate blog here), with and interview with the film critic Ian Christie. It was a little rushed, but I think we got some interesting stuff. We used a Sony Z1, which is the camera we'll shoot Folie with, so Friday's shoot was also a test shoot of sorts for the feature. I'll shoot some more test footage with the camera before taking it back to the hire company. They also sell equipment, and have quoted me a very reasonable price for one. As soon as I've actually bought one, it will bring the reality of shooting Folie that much closer. Once more unto the breech, dear friends...

La Vita Nuova

Here's something I just found on Nostalghia.com, the Tarkovsky website. Tonino Guerra, Tarkovsky's longtime friend and co-writer of Nostalgia and Tempo di Viaggio, is asking the Master about Stalker, which he had then (1979) just completed. Tarkovsky's comments seem very prescient about the advent of digital filmmaking, and sums up very well how we're going about making Folie à Deux.

Tonino Guerra: Someone told me that you would like to completely change your way of making cinema. Is this true?

Andrei Tarkovsky: Yes, only that I still don't know how. It would be nice, let us say, to shoot a film in complete freedom, like amateurs make their films. Reject large financing. Have the possibility to observe nature and people, and film them, without haste. The story would be born autonomously: as the result of these observations, not from oblidged shots, planned in the tiniest detail. Such a film would be difficult to realize in the manner that commercial films are realized. It would have to be shot in absolute freedom, independent from lighting, from actors, from the time employed in filming, etc., etc. And with a reduced gauge camera. I believe that such a method of filming could push me to move much further forward.

London, Berlin, Woodspring Priory

It's been a very hectic month. First of all, I went to Video Forum in London to have a crash course in the Sony Z1, which we'll use to shoot Folie on, and then I went over to the Berlin Film Festival to chase up a producer I know who might be interested in the film. I didn't have his cell phone number, and he couldn't get through to me on mine (he kept getting messages saying that the call was barred for some reason), and I was giving up hope of finding him. On my last night before coming home, I made one last ditch attempt to leave a message at his hotel, and - lo and behold - he was actually in his room. We went out for dinner and things went well. He wants to see the script and roughcut, and we'll take things from there.

I also had a number of ideas for the second draft while in Berlin, which I'm now trying to get down on paper. As we did with The Notebooks of Cornelius Crow, my old partner in crime Nick Harding has written the first draft based on my initial idea, and now I'm once more unto the breech for the second draft.

Amongst the new ideas are to shoot one scene in a mediaeval priory, to make the setting's geography slightly dreamlike (homage to Stalker) and to shoot it all in long takes (numerous homages here: Tarkovsky of course, Theo Angelopoulos, and someone I've been thinking a lot about recently, Bela Tarr.) I've always felt that 'real' films are made in the camera, not the cutting room, but I suppose that's all down to what you do with the camera in the first place. Someone like Martin Scorsese, for instance, is very much a filmmaker who makes his films in the cutting room, and they are certainly none the worse for it, but that's because of how he covers his scenes. Doing Folie in long takes - and I feel as though I'm coming out of some kind of closet here - will mean more camera rehearsals for sure, but I hope that won't elongate the shoot too much. Hopefully we will avoid the sort of nightmarish shut-downs that seem to plague the great Bela every time he shoots a film...

Kit and Caboodle

For Folie, I'm thinking of buying an HDV camera, and possibly also a sound recorder of some sort. The idea behind buying as opposed to renting is that the same gear can then be used on other projects (such as a documentary on The Knights Templar, which has been mooted on and off over the last few years - usually after drink has been taken). My first thought was to buy a Sony HDR FX1, which I know has been used for features, but I have since discovered a site selling a better camera, the HVR Z1P. Alternatively, there is also the HVR A1P, which is the cheap option. (There is in fact a cheaper camera still, the HDR HC1, but that would only be used if there was a serious lack of cash. Which is always possible.) I'm off to a trade show in two weeks' time to talk to the good people at Sony to find out the whys and wherefores of these various cameras. Soundwise, we will probably use a Marantz PMD 670, which again, I know has been successfully used on low-budget features. If there's any money left, I can either then buy a microphone, or hire one.

Once a camera has been sorted, I will be shooting a short documentary as a dry run, to get to know the equipment. This will be called - almost certainly - Lanterna Magicka, and will be a documentary about Bill Douglas and his collection of pre-cinema optical devices. We are hoping to get it screened at the National Film Theatre in London in June 06, as part of a season of Bill's films. (June being the 15th anniversary of his death.) I'm firing off letters to potential interviewees over the next few days.

On an artistic note, we now have the first 24 pages of the script done. Or at least a draft of them. No rest for the wicked, or, indeed, the overdrawn.

Simple is Strong

The title of this post is something the late, great Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas used to have as something of a mantra whenever he was working on a film or a script. As I want this film to be something of a return to basics, it's a phrase I think I would do well to recall as often as possible. I also want to study again not just his films, but also those by filmmakers who have consistently used this as a working principle: Bresson, above all, but also Kieslowski, whose relentless paring down was also coupled with a fairly high emotional charge (the same could be said of Bill's films). Of course, I do not want to compare myself to any of these people, but their work is something I think we can keep in mind during the run-up to the shoot.

I may of course post my own mantras, once I can think of some...

The Gospel According to Jean-Luc

Jean-Luc Godard once said that all you need to make a movie was a girl, a car and a gun. I think he also said that films could be described by one word: emotion. (Echoing this, one of Wim Wenders' books of articles is called Emotion Pictures.)

Well, for this one, we have a girl - she's half the cast - and a car (a crucial scene takes place in it towards the end), but no gun. This is England, after all. We don't generally have guns, unless we're blasting burglars in remote farm houses or shooting clay pigeons.

But what the film does have, I hope in droves, is emotion. I sometimes think that a film is like a pair of scales: in order to make it balance - and therefore have a successful (at least on its own terms) - film, you need to make the scales balance. So if you have lots of plot and action, you probably don't need that much in the way of character development, and vice versa. For Folie à Deux, we don't have a great deal of plot: a guy and a girl meet, and spend the afternoon talking. But what happens between them becomes increasingly emotional, so I hope that that is what will make the scales balance. Only time will tell if my scales theory is right, or just a load of old cobblers.

Happy Birthday to Jimmy Page (OBE!), by the way.

Folie à un

On a long nighttime drive last week - 29 December - I was mulling over various film projects that could be done while we search for money for The Gulf Breeze Caravan Park UFO Society. The essential factors would need to be that they are cheap to make - very - and quick to do - 6-8 months from start to finish.

I have occassionally thought about doing something along the lines of Straw Dogs -people in a country house becoming increasingly psychopathic as only the repressed English middle and upper classes can be, and decided that all this would require would be about 6 actors and one or two locations (the house, the village pub), and lots of stage blood. However, the problem with this idea was just that - the bloood and the lack of a redemptive ending, as what I have in mind is basically something that reminds the audience that we're not even noble savages, a pretty pessimistic ending.

This led me on to my other idea, which I've only been thinking about for around a month, after reading something in the paper. The more I thought about this idea, the more it appealed to me. Minimal story, maximum emotion. And very cheap to shoot. I can't tell you what it was I read, as that will give the film away completely, but all I can say at the moment is that it's along the lines of Before Sunrise. With a twist. A big twist.