Splashing in the Shallows

“For me, cinema is the ocean. It’s an infinite, endless form of human expression. The ocean of expression. And it’s enormous. After 120 years of making films, we’re still on the beach – we’re splashing in the shallows, and I believe we have a lot deeper to go. 

“I’m not a philosopher, I’m a filmmaker, but I think we have a long way to go before we fully understand the subconscious. The problem with film is that now people view it as an accurate representation of reality. I’m much less interested in reality in cinema than I am exploring the way we truly experience life, which is far away from reality. Reality is really just memories, little slices of sensation that we interpret as accurate versions of an event or moment in time. There’s a lot of things left to explore, and I’m just scratching the surface of the subconscious, of the spirit world. But unfortunately right now I think we’re going in the exact opposite direction. 

“The Revenant was a way for me to express an extreme human experience through what I call ‘pure cinema’. It was a huge exercise for me to work out how I could tell this story with as few words as possible, in a very emotional and sensory way. When you strip out dialogue you do so in order to understand your subject – to understand what he’s thinking and feeling and trying to do – and by doing that you’re left with the image, literally to moving images and sounds. You have to go deep to really get to what this guy is about. For me, it was an exercise in molecular storytelling.”

from Little White Lies

Galore Glimpses #1

Making films is a focused, catastrophic madness. A whirlwind of restrained chaos threatening to fall apart at any second. And it must be the most beautiful machine there is. 

We're over halfway through Galore and while it's just about impossible to do anything outside the relentless motion of the film, I've been trying to take as many snaps as I can. Here's a few more glimpses of some 35mm bits and pieces from the last weeks. We've got a long haul to go. Some long nights. Some insane setups for a supposedly "intimate" film. But, I can't imagine a more perfect cast and crew to drag through the madness.

Firestorm

Lost images from a film made long ago:

So Close I Can't See You

"There is a verse by William Carlos Williams: "outside myself/there is a world". This verse turned me on because I think it's something that happens while making a film. Outside myself there is a world...

...I always want to be inside and often I feel outside. And I think it's something that cinema can convey better than literature. Cinema has it's own power. And for me that power has to do with exile. I know exile is a very powerful word. It means something very strong and very dramatic. But exile is sometimes in very tiny details.You can be exiled outside a café. This woman is in a car, seated beside a man. He is next to her for a long time and they have nothing to say. They are afraid of feeling that they might be attracted to each other. And it's only when she is outside and he's inside and he's smoking a cigarette, only when she can see him in the distance, that she feels she can make a choice: "I will make that step toward him. I was not able to make the step when he was seated next to me because he was so close I couldn't see him, in a way. I couldn't foresee myself next to him. But by seeing him in the distance, outside my world, means that I have to make that step". And I think this is the essence of what cinema has to do with exile. I'm sure of that. I don't know why, but it has struck me often. Maybe it's because the audience is also in this position. Outside the world of the film and yet so close. And yet you have to make the decision. A film that grabs you and holds you tight and never gives you freedom to move toward – for me something is missing here. There must be, in a film, a certain distance, so that you have to step into it. And that's something–"

words: Claire Denis in conversation with Atom Egoyan in 'Subtitles - on the foreignness of Film'

Changing Tack

These past weeks have been good to me.

Nothing is certain, nothing is ever certain, but it appears that my feature film 'Galore' - which I've been working on for longer than it is respectable to admit -  is in the process of 'getting up'. At the same time, 'The Turning', an omnibus film which I am directing a segment of, is also in the process of 'getting up'. What this means is that, for a time, the fear of not working has been quelled. I know what the year might hold and it's pretty damned exciting.

So, I anticipate and hope for a change in tack in some of the blog posts. Fewer ruminations on writing and solitude and more on directing and the world out there. Which, to be honest, will be a massive fucking relief. And, a blog is pointless without full disclosure so I am sure I'll spill fragments of process, glimmers of anxiety, and documents of spectacular stumbles as the year goes on. I can't promise I won't still rehash the words of endlessly rehashable wordsmiths or glorify these tiny pages with other people's beautiful images, but I will hopefully have some new tacks, new directions, new thoughts to spill.

We'll see.

 image: Roger Ballen

Hauntings #2

Another long day of street castings. Some of the young people we saw humbled us with the most extraordinary stories; of heartbreak and strength, love and loss, of overcoming the most amazing obstacles, missing parents, madness, accidental death and, extraordinarily, murder. We weren't looking for any of these stories but as soon as you take someone into a room and ask for something of their emotions, something of what defines them or makes them who they are, these stories always begin to flow. These were just regular outer suburban kids but their strength and stories were staggering. As well as that there was quiet wisdom, unruly ambition and the usual jittery madness of being in your late teens. This kind of complexity is what made me want to make 'Galore' in the first place as, despite being a simple story, it is all about surviving love and loss at that age. And if all that wasn't enough, one young girl came in to the casting with her finger nails painted like Chuck Taylor sneakers which had to be one of the most achingly cool things I've seen of late. So, we had many reasons to sit back in awe. At the end of the day, after long hours in a freezing cold hall, and with a kind of grave respect for sharing in these moments, quietly, quietly, we went out and chased the last light at some places around town, then boarded a plane to come home. Such rare pleasures. And some more pics of this whole messy, beautiful process.

 

Hauntings #1

Back in Canberra once again, haunting the locations of this upcoming film, street casting for kids who might play the lead roles and street casting for kids who might be extras milling around in the background. We saw around 40 kids yesterday and then, before night fell, tried to catch last light at some of our locations. And we're looking to see another 40 or so today. At the same time, we're walking through the skate parks and shops and hangouts to see who might catch our eye and asking them to come along and talk to us about the film.

Charisma is a strange thing. Some young people just have a formidable presence as soon as you see them and then there are some who are all smoke and mirrors. I don't envy them their age and we all feel bad at the bundle of nerves they bring to the casting sessions. Yet despite the nerves and sweats, no matter what scene they come from, however, or how much confidence they give off, some kids have a weight and a presence to them that is undeniable. It is awe-inspiring. At that age, I could barely tie my shoelaces and I would never have agreed to talk to a bunch of filmmakers with a camera and a light. But something about these rubbish modern times has aged kids in their ability to communicate. They talk with an emotional sophistication that is part facebook/reality TV and partly some new kind of cynicism and awareness that I certainly never had. It is humbling and strange.

We've also been casting at the Woden Youth Centre, scene of some great old hardcore gigs, youth bands and where I also shot a bit of an old, strange little handmade film of mine 'Firestorm'. It's nice to reinhabit these places from childhood and remake them into fiction. It's the temptation of any kind of imaginative storytelling... to erase the past and make fictions that can carry on into the present.

Some snaps from yesterday (with some polaroids to come when I get back to the studio and the scanner):

 

Knowing Something

"I want to make movies that you can't go to in a car or plane or a boat. You've got to buy a theatre ticket to go into that world, to have that experience. I would like to think you could be taken into a space that is film-space, even if it's only for a moment within the film and it needs all the rest of the film to make it happen. In this sound-and-picture space, you should know something, or have a feeling that you couldn't have unless there was cinema. I know there has to be a story. I'm interested in that. But I like the idea that film can be really film as we well as do the other things."

David Lynch

extract from interview with Henry Bromell in 1980 for Rolling Stone Magazine.

dirtsong

A few years back, I travelled with T around a large number of different communities in Aboriginal Australia filming for the Black Arm Band show 'dirtsong' which has, up to now, only ever played in Melbourne for two nights. I might have mentioned this before, but it is one of the things I am most proud of, due primarily to the intimacy with which we worked, the resulting immensity of the images, and the importance of the show and the songs themselves. During the live performance, about 70 minutes of film - a kind of lyrical accompaniment to the many different songs that were written in 13 different indigenous languages - played in inky black and white on a vast 16m x 9m screen. I've never seen images I've taken or been part of capturing projected so large. It is immensely strange that the larger the image, the greater the sense of intimacy you feel when watching them. (So much is lost with the shrinking of the cinematic experience - but that is another post for another day...)

So, the point of this blog post is a little bit of self indulgence - like all blog posts - but also, for once, information; this weekend, to close the Message Sticks festival in Sydney, dirtsong will be staged once more, two years after its inception. Many of the original artists have moved on, one has passed away, but many will perform the songs that they wrote for the original show and I imagine that the songs will be just as spine tingling now as they were then. It's a beautiful thing for your work to be able to accompany something that feels so special... I imagine it will feel like an honour for a very long time. While the films - which act as a kind of conversation and mediation between the singers and songs and the lands and cultures from which the songs emerge - don't really work without the songs, below are some stills from the screen grabs. The images we took were often vast landscapes, sometimes intense moments of connection between an individual and the camera, sometimes intimate moments observed in community, or tableaux staged for the camera. We got to film some incredible things in places I had never imagined I would be able to go but like all filmmaking, all image-making, I now feel like there is a thread leading me back to where the images were taken...