Continue reading »]]> I thought I would share on a regular basis progress on my forthcoming film that currently has the working title, The Day Thomas Learned To Speak. I hope to share with you the whole process right through to completion and distribution, whether it fails or succeeds. This is something completely new for me; an experiment and a long journey.

Set mainly in the Lake District of north west England, The Day Thomas Learned To Speak is the intimate story of 8 year old Thomas whose parents divorced when he was 5 years old. He is taken by his mother to visit his reclusive father, who lives on a remote farm, for the first time since the acrimonious split of his parents. As a city boy, he finds himself in a strange and foreboding environment, strung out between the two most important people in the world for him, powerless and alone. Yet, he discovers a vulnerability in his parents and a power in his place as their only child which opens his eyes to a new way of seeing the world. Themes of family bonds, separation and longing lie at the heart of this simple, moving and intimate story. Nothing dramatic happens, in the sense that it is very much an experiential story, one in which we experience with the young boy, Thomas, a shifting of his state of mind. In other words, it is not a classically told story with clear premise, obstacles, aims, climax, resolution and so on. I’m further exploring the notion of transcendental realism, which I have written about elsewhere. In fact, I also want to explore the question of perspective and to try and use the imagery in a slightly different way than most do in terms of what we see and hear. The reason for this is that my subject matter is a very common one: divorce and children caught up in divorce is a very common experience. Not only do I want to tell a story that may give a different, perhaps more spiritual, perspective on the theme, but I also want to play sufficiently with the language of film to try and make my audience look at something they see a lot in a new light.

At this time, I am at the very early stages of the script development. Well, I haven’t started writing the script yet, as I never do this until certain things are in place. I am reminded by something Bresson said about the process of making films. He talked about how the process is a process of living and dying. When the idea first takes form in the mind, it feels like a living thing: the images, the events, the sounds play out in a living form in the mind’s eye. When you write the script, it dies. Then when you have the actors in front of the camera and you’re shooting on location, it comes alive again. Then you look at the rushes, and it dies, again. Finally, as the editing process brings all the pieces together and the whole starts to become more than the sum of its parts, it starts to live again. This is often exactly what I feel. In fact, I believe that the story itself already exists; my job is to see it and give it narrative form.

It is this early part of the process that is important for me. I feel that if I get the seed right, the tree will grow of its own volition and my intervention as I start to give the story form will be minimal. I have seen so many writers spend their time writing draft after draft, slowly killing their idea. The industry often encourages this kind of approach. The more people get involved, the more these drafts go round in circles and then in the end what is arrived at lacks life and is a reconstruction of existing practice and cliches. I work in a different way (and teach my students to work differently). Like Terence Davies, I feel a good script should only come about through two or three drafts – the shooting and editing will, of course, change things further. The key is to get the seed right in the first place and that should happen before a word is ever written.

I spend a lot of time trying to let the imagery of the story come about in my mind’s eye, trying my best not to kill off fragile ideas and imagery with my rational thinking. ‘Rational thinking is the death of poetry’, said Moore and Kipling said about writing: ‘when your demon is in charge, drift, wait, obey’. That is exactly what I try to do. I may write random notes, observations, thoughts. Sometimes, I even have conversations with myself in my notebook, a kind of talking aloud, but in writing. I know the film exists already, because I can see it. Even before seeing it, I can feel it. To begin with it is a hazy picture, but gradually it starts to become more clear. Sometimes, I just feel a scene or sequence, but can’t see it. And then suddenly, a situation or an image, or a juxtaposition of a sound and image, a character trait or whatever emerges, as if from nowhere, and I make a note of it before my rational mind has time to condemn it as rubbish.

My notebook and iPad, two of my tools for capturing ideas

Once I start seeing the film more clearly, I start to make notes of specific scenes. I try to identify two key scenes of sequences before I start to commit to anything structured on paper. One is what I call the key moment of departure, the other the key moment of return. These moments in the story are, similarly to a climax in the classic narrative, the moments of the film where the themes are most apparent. I only start committing to a structure and to specific scenes once I have a clear sense of what these key moments are. The remainder of my narrative is going to be built around them. I would do something similar if I were writing a more classically orientated narrative: I would not start writing the script until I had a clear sense of what the climax scene was, as the central plot and its tributaries are leading to this point in the narrative and this point being the point in the film where the theme is most starkly apparent.

I’m now at the point where I have started constructing the scenes for The Day Thomas Learned To Speak. I am progressing from just using my notebook to involving my iPad. I have this wonderful programme on my iPad called IndexCard, which is perfect for the job. I start writing little synopses of every scene and with this programme, I can move them around, elaborate with notes and so on. Using this software, I will gradually build what will in effect be close to a Master Scene Treatment for the whole film; the script without any dialogue. Eventually, I will take all this into a programme such as Celtx, which we will eventually use for production planning purposes. Again, I am not committing to a script until I allow the narrative to evolve and grow as organically as possible. It is very easy to see from a synopsis and the visual layout of this software whether scenes are in the right place, where there are gaps and so on. I don’t write chronologically.

So, this is where I am at this point. More to come.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve just got back from two weeks in Cuba, where I was running my regular Creativity Workshop at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television. During the evenings of my second week, I was fortunate enough to attend a series of wonderful evening classes run by Dr Ruth Goldberg from the State University of New York. She was doing a series of screenings and discussions on the work of Robert Bresson. I couldn’t have been more fortunate, because Bresson is probably the filmmaker who, alongside Dreyer and Ozu, has most influenced my work and thoughts on film.

Robert Bresson

And I’m not alone. Filmmakers such as Scorsese, Schrader, Ceylan, Kiarostami, Ackerman, Kaurismaki, Godard, Truffaut and many many others cite him as one of their greatest influences. Not many people know his films. He made 13 in 40 years, not a particularly prolific output, partly because he found it so difficult to get financing for his films. He was uncompromising in his approach, minimalist and beautifully simple. He had a unique approach to acting, which saw his actors – who were always amateurs – perform as what he called ‘models’. In other words, they didn’t perform, but, like the rest of the elements of his films, they were like blank canvases through which we transcended into the real substance of their souls. His visual approach was extremely minimalist and he would often focus on hands, feet and torso of a person rather than the traditional gaze on the face. However, this does not mean that he was disinterested in the face; quite the contrary. He created some of the most iconic images of the face in cinema and his imagery strikes me as very iconic, almost like the icon paintings of the middle ages: the gesture of the hands, the movement of the face and eyes, the framing of posture, all point to his background as a painter. His use of the interaction of sound and image was revolutionary at the time and remains inspiring now. He had an interesting approach to making sure sound and image complimented each other in evocative ways and never used sound purely to help legitimise the image. Even in his editing style, he broke all the rules. He would often cut scenes short, almost as if once he had met the iconic moment it was time to move on, irrespective of our traditional sense of time and space in films.

Mouchette

Joan of Arc

Diary of a Country Priest

In these films, there are no back stories, characterisations and psychological motivations. This is pure Transcendental Realism at its finest told by a filmmaker who had little regard for fashions and what others thought of him. Here was a filmmaker concerned, above all, about the spiritual poverty of modernity, who cared passionately about his themes and the form of cinema and risked everything to make films exactly how he wanted to make them. When he won the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in, I think 1983, for his last film, L’Argent, he was booed off the stage by hypocrite film critics and ignorant so called film lovers. He was 83 years old. First of all, how can one boo an 83 year old man off the stage for making a film. Second, how could one boo an old man with over 40 years of filmmaking behind him. Third, how could one boo an old man who, more than any other filmmaker, has influenced many of the contemporary filmmakers we so love. L’Argent is uncompromising and is perhaps his greatest achievement.

Au Hasard Balthazar

I had been struggling to figure out my next film, but watching these Bresson films again reminded me of the beauty of cinema, the importance of the themes he was dealing with and the importance of having the courage to do what one thinks is right. I was inspired and I now know what I am going to do next. Thanks Ruth. Thanks Robert.

Continue reading »]]> Late in December 2011, I visited Ghana on a holiday. I was in Ghana for the New Year’s celebration. Unlike the UK, where people take to the bars, streets and private homes to celebrate with plenty of drink, I was surprised to find that Ghanaians all go to church to celebrate what they call Crossover. These ceremonies are marked by evangelical singing, chanting and enthusiastic prayer. I went to the national football stadium in Accra and joined 40,000 revellers who were being led into the new year by a charismatic preacher and his entourage onstage. It was like a rock concert and the atmosphere was electric and moving.

In many ways, the energy I saw in that stadium reflected the energy I felt across Accra and to some extent in other part of the country that I visited. There’s an entrepreneurial energy about the place which suggests a growing economy and sense of self sufficiency. The recent discovery of oil lends to that impression, though the ever present issue of how the vast mineral wealth that Ghana possesses can yield benefit for the ordinary person is still a serious one that has yet to be addressed sufficiently. Nevertheless, large modern shopping malls are springing up across Accra and there seems to be no shortage of shoppers. In fact you can get anything now in Accra.

I also met some Chinese investors who are building a very large business and shopping complexion the outskirts of Accra. The Chinese property boom seems to have peaked and these investors are looking to Africa to make property investments. They told me that as far as they are concerned, Africa is the placebo invest at the moment. They were selling shop and business units and there was great demand for these units even before they had started building. Ghanaians were paying cash advances for these units. Corruption and complexities around land ownership remains the main stumbling block to the Ghanaian economy taking off, but despite these impediments, there seems to be a lot of activity. I am convinced that the is a lot more money in Ghana – and Africa in general – than meets the eye. The notion that Ghana is a country that needs aid is far from the truth; what is clearly needed is trade and if the issues around corruption could be dealt with, countries like Ghana would take off economically.

The film business, too, seems to be thriving. walking the streets of Accra, one will see these vans bedecked with posters and surrounded with hordes of sales people selling the latest DVD release of a locally produced film. These are digital films commercially produced on budgets somewhere between £20,000 and £50,000. Because of the methods of distribution – direct DVD and VCD sales – these films are distributed far into the rural communities and the result is a lively film business. They are local films, with local stars telling locally relevant stories and they are very popular. Nigeria, of course,mis the powerhouse of film production in Africa, so the Ghanaian market is also flooded with Nigerian films.

From a Western perspective one may question the quality of most of these films. But who are we to make a judgement; the films sell. What is the difference between rubbish that costs £100,000,000 to produce or rubbish that costs £20,000 to produce? I did, however, come across many Ghanaians that complained about the aesthetic and narrative quality of their films. And when it comes to documentaries, the tradition of locally produced documentary films – apart from promotional and basic training documentaries – is virtually non existent. There will one day be a market for quality fiction and documentary films and it will have to be Ghanaian filmmakers and Ghanaian audiences that grow together to create this quality cinema. The money is there. The entrepreneurial energy is there. The technology is there. The audiences are there. The filmmakers are ere. What is the magic ingredient that will help Ghanaian Film cross over into a new era?

Continue reading »]]> Having just returned from a trip to China – my first visit – I am struck by the sheer scale of the country. I visited mainly some of the biggest cities – Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong and when people talk of the booming economy, I now know what they mean, first hand. Concrete high rises have been erected everywhere over the past decade or so and the traditional architechtural heritage is being swamped, if not lost, in this massive expansion. However, I was very fortunate to be able to visit The Forbidden City, which is an impressive experience.

Inside The Forbidden City in Beijing

Part of The Forbidden City from the outside

Shanghai was particularly fascinating. The colonial past lingered firmly within the impressive new skyscrapers dominating the skyline and, like Hong Kong, had a feel of a long standing trading relationship with the rest of the world.

A glimpse of Pudong from behind the old buildings of the Bund

Hong Kong Island from the ferry

Traditional fishing boat in front of Hong Kong Island

I managed to spend a little time taking some street photographs. I love taking pictures of people. Keep an eye on the One Day Films Website for some street photos from China that I am currently preparing.

Continue reading »]]>  ‘The Universe is made of stories, not atoms’. (Muriel Rukeyser)

‘Every picture tells a story’. So the saying goes. Whether it be Einstein telling a story in order to explain his theory of gravity, an African elder teaching children about the history of their people, Brazilian miners sitting in a bar reflecting on a day’s work, young Chinese men and women expressing their feelings around their love lives, doting British parents teaching their children about the challenges of life ahead, Middle Eastern mystics trying to make us understand the connection between material life and infinity, a German accountant trying to give an accurate feel for the health of a company through the annual accounts, an Indian natural scientist trying to make us understand the significance of the lives of tigers, an American politician trying to express the essence of a national dream, a Japanese physicist trying to explain theories of the origins of the universe, a South African theatre company teaching people about AIDS, or a French archeologist trying to bring the past alive – we are not only surrounded by stories, but we seem imbedded in stories and stories seem imbedded in us; it almost seems impossible for us to make sense of anything, to engage with anything – whether these ‘anythings’ be facts, feelings or mysteries – unless it is through story.

Is there a story taking shape in her mind?

The ubiquitous nature of story means that we are not just consumers of stories, but we are all actually storytellers, employing various narrative forms depending on context, expressive tools and objectives. The computer game, the poem, the annual accounts, the documentary, the mathematical formula, the fiction film, the archeological exhibition, the sociology lecture, the theatre performance, the novel and the conversation are a few examples of the numerous narrative forms which all have the one quality in common: they are telling us a story. Perhaps this is because nothing really makes sense unless we feel it; our emotions and our feelings shape our engagement with the universe. Facts and figures are meaningless, unless they tell us a story that engages our emotions and feelings. Our arts and sciences are enveloped in stories and mythologies that allow us to engage with even abstract notions in a way that we can understand; they mimic the story of lived experience that we live out every day of our lives. Each one of us is a  protagonist encountering obstacles, turning points, climaxes and sub-pots. We are either involved in the battle for survival of one kind or another, or in a more spiritual experience in which stories engage us in the transcendental aspects of life, or, perhaps, a bit of both. No matter what walk of life you’re in, what field you work in, what language of expression you use, if you want to affect or engage another human being, tell them a good story with whatever tools you have to hand.

Continue reading »]]> When I was about 11 years old, I started to learn to play the guitar. I had a music teacher who taught me something very important which has stayed with me ever since. I was at the time very keen to join a band and immediately wanted to play the electric guitar, so I asked my teacher if he would teach me on an electric guitar. He refused to let me do this and insisted that I learn on an acoustic guitar. (He also insisted that I sing straight away.) His reasoning was simple: if I learn to play on the electric, I will be tempted to immediately start using effects and tricks through the amplifier that would deceive me into thinking that I could play the guitar; whereas if I learned to play acoustic first, I would master the instrument and be much better placed to move to the electric from there. In other words, the electric guitar and all its wonderful possibilities might hide the fact that I couldn’t really play the guitar; whereas with the acoustic guitar I would have to truly master the instrument, as I would be exposed and vulnerable. The truth of my ability would be revealed.

He was right, of course. I learned to play the acoustic and then moved on to the electric. Here is an example of the sort of music I used to play in my youth, recently recored using Garageband (Song, vocals and instruments all by me, except the bass guitar which was played by one of my sons):

Darkness Darkness

The ramifications of what he said live on in my filmmaking and my teaching. I believe that a great craftsperson, a great artist, a great scientist or a great whatever is able to express themselves very simply and transparently. The truth that they are trying to convey shines through and they are actually doing very little to get in the way of that truth emerging from their work. There is no pretension, no blustering, no trickery no disguising, no forcing – just pure beauty. Truth and beauty, beauty and truth – are they not the same?

We live, however, in a world that is complex and confusing. There is a lot of pretension, a lot of blustering, a lot of trickery – a lot of noise. In my field of filmmaking and photography, the amazing tools we now have at our disposal give us unprecedented opportunities, but there is a downside, too. The downside is exactly what my guitar teacher feared; a temptation to be distracted by the technology and its possibilities before being able to develop a mastery of the form and a true understanding of what one is trying to express. There are a lot of people who can do wonderful things with visual and aural technology. They can entertain, they can dazzle, they can impress… They can hide. They can hide the truth, they can hide the fact that they have nothing to say or the fact that they don’t know how to say it. They can hide the fact that they cannot really master their medium.

For me, a master always speaks simply, for they have nothing to hide. They lay themselves bare and open, indeed become vulnerable; a real sacrifice. And the truth shines through. I say to my students, if you cannot tell a moving image story using simple cuts, you cannot tell a story. Unfortunately, we have become inundated with visual storytelling that moves so fast, that dazzles. Is this a reflection of a fact that many filmmakers are hiding the fact that if they tried to be simple and transparent, they would reveal an emptiness behind their work? (Remember TS Eliot’s poem about ‘hollow men…’?)

Erik Playing Acoustic Guitar a long time ago

One of our greatest challenges at the moment is how to be simple and independent in an age of abundance and complexity. I have written an article about this in Widescreen entitled Cinema of Poverty: Simplicity and Independence in an Age of Abundance and Complexity. Have a look at it and I hope you enjoy it.

Continue reading »]]> The book, Creative Documentary: Theory and Practice, which I co-authored with Wilma de Jong and Jerry Rothwell has finally been published by Pearson Education through their imprint, Longman. This is a very comprehensive and thought-provoking book about the practice of making documentary films and I hope that anyone interested in making documentaries, or simply interested in the making of documentaries, will find it useful. It’s available now through good bookshops like Amazon.

The cover for Creative Documentary

“A wide-ranging, illuminating and comprehensive book. Simultaneously both very practical and deeply thought-provoking , it is an indispensable guide for people wanting to make their own documentaries.” - Dr Tony Dowmunt, Goldsmiths, University of London

” … with an informed awareness of the implications of digital developments, this is an important pragmatic and conceptual guide for new documentary makers, especially those aspiring to a critical and reflexive engagement with the genre” - Dr Cahal McLaughlin, University of Ulster

“A brilliantly useful and comprehensive book that takes you through the A to Z of documentary filming. Read it, digest it, take what is useful and go and make a brilliant film!” - Nick Broomfield, documentary filmmaker

Continue reading »]]> I was recently in Arles, southern France, where I went to the photography festival they host every year. This is a large and extensive festival and highly recommended. The settings for many of the exhibitions – and there were over 28 venues – were quite stunning and helped bring the photographs alive. Watching the many exhibits, I was struck by something that I have long thought: that when it comes to documentary, it seems easier to make something from situations that are foreign to one’s experience than close to it.

For example, when having lunch with a commissioning editor from the Danish Film Institute a number of years ago, I asked about what the various Danish documentary filmmakers were making films about at that time. He proceeded to list all the various film makers and they were all making films abroad: China, the USA, Latin America, Africa and so on. No one was making a film in Denmark. On reflection, most documentary films and photographs tend to be shot in situations far from the home territory of the maker, whether this be culturally speaking, socio-economically or in terms of physical setting. Even if shooting within their physical territory, subjects are often foreign in a number of different ways. Documentarists seem attracted to the exotic, the deprived, the dramatic, the conflict ridden and the freaky. Perhaps because these situations provide the easiest access to striking imagery that directly evoke and provoke. Usually the consumption of these images are for the middle classes and bourgeoise in the developed and more well off contexts and documentarists are providing images that satisfy certain needs with regard to guilt, compassion, outrage and political expression.

An exhibit from the Arles Photographic Festival 2011

In some cases I would suggest that such documentary making is exploitative. I know many Africans are enraged by how documentary filmmakers come to Africa, find the most dramatic and exotic situations to make a film about or photograph and then take these works back for consumption in Europe and North America with the unspoken tag ‘this is Africa’. But who is making documentary films or photographs about their own home environments? A few, in relative terms.

I notice this in my own work. In my films, I try to only make films about things I can understand my own personal connection to, or that sit within my sphere of experience. From this vantage point, I believe I can reach universal themes to which people can connect their own experience. When it comes to photography, I find it easier when I’m traveling, for example, to capture striking images than when in my ‘home’ environment and it is always tempting to do what many others do; find something foreign to my immediate experience and environment. To see what is immediately under one’s own nose and then to be able to see how that might connect to wider issues is a difficult creative challenge that I think many avoid.

‘A small subject can provide the pretext for many profound combinations. Avoid subjects that are too vast or too remote, in which nothing warns you when you are going astray. Or else take from them only what can be mingled with your life and belongs to your experience’. (Robert Bresson, 1975)

Continue reading »]]> I was in London the other day doing research for my next film. Research for me means speaking to people, listening to their stories and digesting what they are going through and also, critically, imagining. I’m doing some preliminary work on a new film project with the working title of Flight. Flight is a feature length fiction film poetically integrating traditional approaches to fiction and documentary genres. Set amongst the Ghanaian migrant community in the UK, and in the home community of  the rural Eastern Region of Ghana, the film tells the story of a young migrant and how his experience of separation from Africa, in the midst of contemporary Britain from which he is also separated, changes the very nature of being African in terms of cultural and spiritual values.

As I did with Heart of Gold, so I am doing with this project. Listening to the stories of a range of people and eventually incorporating the very people who tell me these stories, their real life situations and their locations into a story I create with my imagination. People play themselves and will take part in actions and events they themselves have experienced or witnessed, but which I have shaped into a new narrative.

What has struck me ever since the experience of making One Day Tafo in Ghana back in 1990, is how close my imagination is to reality and fact. I generally close my eyes and the film starts to take shape in my imagination and as I then start to journey into the practicalities of real people, real lives, real events, I find that what I imagined is often uncannily close to what people then tell me about their real life experiences.

Sometimes, too, imagery I imagined also materialises. The first time I experienced this was when shooting a scene in Ghana, West Africa, at a petrol station for One Day Tafo. I imagined a scene in which a car pulls up for petrol in a dilapidated petrol station with my main character running across the petrol station pushing a car tyre, but I wanted to contrast this with a woman carrying firewood. Initially I thought that I might have to compromise and just have the petrol station and my tyre boy, Daniel Opong Amoah, running across the empty forecourt. However, in the midst of a rather chaotic situation of preparing to shoot, which involved my production assistant having to deal with a gathering crowd and an armed policeman who had doubts about our permission to film, I saw through the corner of my eye three young women carrying firewood on their heads, just about to enter the petrol station in a beautiful diagonal line. At the same time, a taxi was pulling in to fill up with petrol. Apart from that, the petrol station was completely empty. I asked my camera person, Simon Wilkie, to disregard everything going on around us, including the agitated policeman, and start shooting, and sent my tyre boy running across the scene. There was no time for explanations, or time for directing or intervening with the scene. Indeed, no time to think. I was seeing in the reality of the situation unfolding before my eyes, something I had vaguely imagined at one point, slowly coming alive before my real eyes. It was sublime. To this day, this remains one of my favourite shots in all the films I have made.

This sort of thing happens consistently when I start work on a project. It happened, for example, in Signs of Life, where the experiences of my character, Sarah, were completely imagined, yet verified by subsequent things I learned about persistent vegetative states and locked in syndromes; and in Sea of Madness, by way of another example, where I imagined a number of things about how identical twins would behave which were then verified and wholeheartedly embraced by the real life identical twins, Amy Fallon and Kate Fallon, playing the lead roles in the film; or, indeed in The Silent Accomplice, by way of a final example, where the mother, Joanne Mawdsley, at the end of the film dabs holy water on her son, William Mawdsley’s, forehead.

And as I start work on this new project, Flight, likewise when talking with people, I find a strangely powerful correlation between the imagery and events of my imagination and the factual events and imagery I hear from those people I subsequently go to speak with. Likewise, their factual experiences also help feed my imagination and what I like is to work in that space where there is no difference between fact and imagination or dream and reality; they are all part of an emerging story that somehow already exists. Research for me is not about establishing facts, or authenticating reality, or about seating my film in a paradigm of empirical truth. For me, research is about exploring that very interesting territory of experience where there is no separation of imagination and fact, where a story needs to emerge and finds its way through the people involved in the creation, no matter in what form. When my imagination is at its most vivid, I now know that it will also be very close to reality. I imagine the facts and reality takes shape in my mind as well as in the physical reality of the actions that unfold before my camera.