New British Cinema from 'Submarine' to '12 Years a Slave' (eBook)

Ian Haydn Smith, Jason Wood (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015 | 1. Auflage
304 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-31517-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Over the past year the success of British films at international film festivals - as well as the numerous awards bestowed on 12 Years a Slave - have demonstrated that British cinema has undergone a genuine renaissance that has caused new voices to emerge. At the same time, directors whose work has enthralled over the past five years have also continued to develop and expand their visions. The boundaries of British film-making are being redefined. Beginning with a preface exploring some of the factors that have led to this fertile environment, New British Cinema features in-depth interviews with the film-making voices at the vanguard of this new wave. Figures such as Clio Barnard, Richard Ayoade, Steve McQueen, Jonathan Glazer, Carol Morley, Yann Demange, Peter Strickland and Ben Wheatley provide a valuable insight into their work and working methods.

Jason Wood is Artistic Director: Film at HOME and Visiting Professor at Manchester School of Art. He is the author of The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema and is also the editor of Nick Broomfield: Adventures in the Documentary Trade., Jason Wood is the Creative Director for Film and Culture at HOME, Manchester. A visiting Professor at Manchester School of Art, he is the author of various books on cinema and recently collaborated with Bob Stanley on Café Exil, which was voted Rough Trade's compilation of the year for 2020.

Autor

Jason Wood works for the Curzon Cinema origanisation. He is the author of The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema and is also the editor of Nick Broomfield. Ian Haydn Smith is the editor of Curzon Magazine. Formerly the editor of the International Film Guide and series editor of 24 Frames, he has written widely on film and the arts.

Textauszug

Lenny Abrahamson

A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Lenny Abrahamson’s work initially explored Irish life, from both working and middle-class perspectives. Adam & Paul (2004) charts the exploits of two drug addicts over the course of one day in Dublin, as they attempt to steal, score and get high. It showcased Abrahamson’s innate skill in balancing comedy with high drama, which would be mined further in Garage (2007). Starring Pat Shortt, better known to local audiences as a comedian, Abrahamson’s second feature is a beautifully realised character study of a good-natured man with learning difficulties. Josie lives and works in a garage in a small rural town. Popular with everyone around him, he sparks up a friendship with a young lad who works alongside him part-time. However, what Josie believes is an innocent act leads to him being ostracised by the town and left alone in the world. A prizewinner at the Cannes Film Festival, Garage cemented Abrahamson’s position as Ireland’s most accomplished film-maker.

After directing the TV series Prosperity (2007), Abrahamson returned to cinema with What Richard Did (2012), adapted from Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock. The film focuses on Ireland’s middle class and a handsome, popular schoolboy whose affections for his best mate’s girlfriend have tragic consequences. Filmed on a broad canvas and portraying an Ireland rarely seen on screen, Abrahamson perfectly captures the excitement and ennui of teenage life. As with the director’s previous work, What Richard Did presents a subtle examination of the impact of mental illness, both on the afflicted and those around them.

Frank (2014) also touches on mental illness, within the framework of a fictionalised biopic of Chris Sievey, aka Frank Sidebottom. Loosely inspired by Jon Ronson’s experiences as the keyboard player with the Oh Blimey Big Band, the film charts the progress of an offbeat group as they journey from obscurity on the fringes of the British music scene to infamy at the South by Southwest music festival. Abrahamson skilfully shifts from the earlier comedic scenes to much darker territory during the film’s closing moments, aided in no small part by Michael Fassbender’s and Domhnall Gleeson’s excellent performances.

Abrahamson’s next project is an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s Room.

This interview was conducted over a period of two years, between the completion of What Richard Did and the release of Frank.

Looking at the number of people you’ve continued to work with over the years, collaboration is quite an important aspect of your work.

I really like the collaborative process of film-making. Sometimes I have to trick myself into starting work. One of the ways of doing that is to start on something that I can’t extract myself from, usually with me relying on other people who have expectations of me. In that way, if my outlook on a project gets pretty bleak I have to keep going. My sense of responsibility always trumps my innate nihilism about the films I’m making. I always value what I’ve done at the end, and I certainly value the work of everyone involved with me, but when I’m working on a project I can go through periods of self-doubt. One of the reasons I’ve avoided writing fiction, or writing screenplays on my own, is that it’s too easy to walk away from them. However, that’s just the negative side of things. On the positive side, I relish the collaborative environment and the spirit of sharing ideas – the particular stimulus of bouncing different ideas around.

I think that’s why accidents and mistakes can be so stimulating. Your films are never quite as you imagine them to be. They’re always going to be a bit different because of something happening on that day, or the moods of the people, or the way that the light works, or you might arrive at a location and it’s changed in a particular way. In those moments, when material is thrown at me, it unlocks an immediate creative response. Those accidents, that kind of unpredictability in a collaborative situation, really suits me. Even if someone has a bad idea, I find the process of addressing it a more reliable and robust process than the part when I’m sat on my own.

You worked with the writer Mark O’Halloran on three projects.

I would love to work on another film with Mark. To be honest, I’m not sure why we haven’t. We’ve never had an argument or fallen out. There have been projects that haven’t worked out. One of the reasons there was such a long gap between Adam & Paul and Garage was because we had a go at something and it didn’t work out. Various things have happened that affected him, but now he’s writing like crazy, so I can see us working again at some point. In the best scenario, we’ve both gone off and done our own things and they have been successful, so we can come back together and, kind of …

… reaffirm your vows.

[Laughs] Yes. Exactly. And perhaps forgive each other our infidelities!

What was the process like between you two on Adam & Paul? The film has a more freewheeling feel than Garage and yet there’s still a precision to the narrative structure.

I am fascinated by how those two seemingly opposite elements can exist. It’s connected to that idea of chance and mistake. Even though I hope each of the films I make is well balanced and has that sense of precision, I hope that the things being thrown at me – the freewheeling element – gives the film a sense of energy. Whatever happens, the structure has to shift to accommodate it, but it must still exist and make sense within the context of the narrative. I think all of my films are a mix of the found and the made. Whether it’s lengthy discussions with Mark over what we’re going to include or, like many of the scenes in What Richard Did, it comes out of watching the kids and how they respond to each other, it all has to fit together to make a coherent whole, which fits in with the film’s ideas.

Adam & Paul was great because we hadn’t worked on a film before. It came about with no pressure. It’s scary on one level, but there’s also a sense of abandon. And when you’re working on your third or fourth film you realise that, by comparison, it wasn’t scary at all.

The tonal range of the film was agreed on at the very start of the writing process. Mark had given me sample scenes for a possible idea, with an overall outline, which eventually changed. But the musicality of those scenes, between those two characters, was there right from the beginning. It was a joyful thing. Even though the film is dark in places, the real heart of it is a celebration of a style – an old-fashioned comedic tradition, mixed with a more modern Beckettian twist. What I think I brought to the project is something that’s fascinated me since I watched Laurel and Hardy as a kid, and that’s the absolute beauty of two lost individuals sitting together and letting the world occur – a certain existential situation. To turn the camera on two addicts and have them be just that – that was there from the beginning.

There is this seamlessness in the way that your narratives shift between comedy and high drama.

It’s a comedy of tenderness. I don’t do black comedy. When you look at people on their own in an environment, if you filter out the noise, what lies at the heart is a sense of uncertainty and need. That behaviour exists on the thin line between the humanely funny and the desperately sad.

I think that part of what allows me to move between different tones in a film, particularly with Adam & Paul and Frank, are the various digressions that unfold throughout those narratives. They allow me to explore those facets of character. Novels do it to an extreme degree. Proust managed to combine the highest philosophical meditations with the comedy of the party scenes.

Another constant in your work is the strong focus on complex characterisation – the nuances in each personality, which surface the more time we spend with them. It’s there no matter how much your style of film-making changes, which it has significantly across the four features.

I’m a fan of story but not plot. Tell me what happens to this person, but don’t give me a mechanism that creates this false, imposed tension. The tone of Adam & Paul is in the frame before anything happens. It’s almost a way of allowing the time that passes to set the tone. I’ve heard conductors talk about the way they respond to the orchestra in front of them – a response to the musicians they see in that moment. It can change the music with each performance. I understand that.

These things have to be thrashed out with the actors – in rehearsals and in the casting – whether it’s a hint that makes them attack the opening phrase of a line that can change everything. When it really works it should appear as one vision. Like conducting, directing is a series of mechanical decisions and instructions, but it should appear as one single flowing action. Look at Kaurismäki’s films. Tonally, he is one of the most recognisable directors at work today. You can never mistake his work. I had seen his films before I made Adam & Paul and they were a powerful influence on me.

There’s also something beyond character. It’s the presence of the person in that space at that moment that I find so interesting. When you’re talking generally about character, that’s something you could transpose from a film to a book. It’s character as presence that really...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.8.2015
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
• ISBN-10: 0-571-31517-8 / 0571315178
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-31517-8 / 9780571315178