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Interview with the Royal Festival Hall >>> Simon Rumley is one of the UK's leading independent writer/directors and is now starting to branch out into the American sector. Below is an exclusive interview by the well respected freelance film journalist James Mottram conducted at London's Royal Festival Hall on Friday 3rd June 2005. The Shorts:
A: Well, I did a black-and-white trilogy on Super 8, called Smiles, Laughter and Insanity, initially when I was 22. The first was about a guy who had an argument with his girlfriend and decides to hire a prostitute to kill him as an act of unrequited love or something - fairly typical first film kinda thing. Laughter was about a homeless man wandering around the streets of London. And the third film, Insanity, was almost post-modern in that it brings together the first two. You have two characters sitting on sofa who are very normal but think they re really crazy but it turns out the guy is an author who has been writing some scripts. And whilst they re talking, he says: Smiles, Laughter and Insanity that would be a good name for a film! Then I did a Super 16mm film called Phew, which cost about 1500. Phew is a Tales of the Unexpected-like black comedy, about an older man who advertises in the paper to do something that s unwritten in the advert. It s about who replies and what that unwritten thing is. Even though I did it beforehand, it s quite similar to the Tarantino segment of Four Rooms.
Q: How would you describe the style of The Truth Game? A: In terms of dialogue, it s got a snappy Kevin Smith-Richard Linklater feel to it; in terms of direction, it s much more European art-house It s more looking at how people react in situations, rather than just looking at what they say. It s very much, the camera being quite intelligent. Q: In what way? A: What I ve been trying to do is get rid of boring film grammar. Like cutaway shots. I use a few, but all these shots that directors use to give the audience time to breathe I think are rubbish. Obviously sometimes they server a purpose but often they're counter-active I think Q: It was a rapid process, from start to finish, making The Truth Game A: I do remember thinking, Oh God, not only have I got to write a feature script, I also have to rehearse it and shoot it within eight weeks seeing as most scripts take six months to a year to get down, if not longer. I did the first draft within two weeks. It was a very good process, because you ve got the actors there from the beginning. The reason I chose the actors, to an extent, was that they conformed in some notion to the characters I'd been considering. Q: Where does The Truth Game fit into your youth trilogy? A: It is very much seeing how people change from their early twenties into their early thirties. This group of people are still young at heart; still interested in pop cultural things, like music and books, but their conversations are also beginning to include house-buying, ailing parents and things you rarely consider when you're 21. Q: Can you explain what The Truth Game is? A: The Truth Game is a game that is played by a group of friends and generally drink's involved. You get your mates round and everyone agrees to tell the truth on twenty questions. Inevitably, it turns into a session seeing who can ask the most lascivious questions. It s opening a can of worms really. It s such an embarrassing thing to play. Ironically, the title is the truth game , but they never play it. Every character is hiding something, trivial or otherwise. Q: So it s about lies then? A: It s all about people lying to each other albeit on a smaller personal level. There s that intellectual background to the film, but with say Club Le Monde, there's less obvious gravitas
 Q: What does this film encapsulate about our mid-twenties? A: I guess it s a more generalized overview of life at the time. I conceived it, and shot it, at a time when British culture ruled. Oasis and Blur were very big; John Galliano had just moved to Givenchy and Stella McCartney was getting a lot of press. Irvine Welsh had written Trainspotting and for the first time I can remember it seemed a lot of really exciting things were going on. It was a golden age for our youth culture. When I conceived it, the only youth culture movie I could see from Britain was Boston Kickout - a low-budget film that came and went. Compared to America, where you had Clerks, Slacker, Dazed and Confused, I just thought, What are we doing? Going around various financiers, no one seemed to be that interested in youth culture. I would say, There s a massive scene. No-one has ever made a film about clubbing and it has a big commercial potential. A shame really but ultimately Human Traffic came out and proved them wrong. Q: Did you film it over a series of weekends? How did the shoot work? A: As everyone was doing it for free, we shot it in the summer of 1996. The crew was about five people. As everyone was doing different stuff at the time, we d do it whenever we could coordinate times between the cast and crew so we d film about three actors a day. We shot it over seven or eight different days, just when everyone was around. Armando, the cameraman, was doing pop promos for the likes of Underworld and Skunk Anansie so he was the hardest to pin down... Q: Did you want the actors to improvise, as the dialogue sounds as if it is? A: We improvised before we got down to shooting. Once we agreed on the script, I didn t really let them improvise thereafter. We didn t have the budget as we were shooting on a ratio of 4:1. Sometimes doing one take, often doing two. If things really weren t going well, we d do four but that was all. Q: The structure is rather like word-association, very free-form A: I remember seeing Slacker when it came out, and everyone has their epiphanies at some stage. I remember thinking, Wow, this guy has done a film that has no traditional structure. It was my Sex Pistols 1976 moment! Linklater has been the main influence on the three films I ve done to date. If you re going to do a low-budget film, it has to be able to compete on its own terms. Strong Language was logistically simple but also unique. At that stage, I d decided to do a youth culture film, and initially I thought it would be interesting to have 16 different people do an A-Z of youth culture. But then I came up with the story. Q: How did it eventually get released? A: I finished it 1997, but it didn t get released until 2000. It s really hard to know when to give up, and say OK, I have done all I can . Or just plod on. I have seen a lot of people carry on longer than I did with no success. With Strong Language, various people had seen it and you generally get an impression of whether people like it or nor. I ve learnt over the years never to ask people, What did you think of the film? If people really like something, they ll tell you. So judging by the response, I always felt Strong Language was worth pursuing. By the time it came out, I d had articles about it in everything from Penthouse to G-Spot, Rasp, Sleazenation, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. A real varied panoply of publications. I finally got it released at the National Film Theatre through Geoff Andrew, having gone to a party that he was at, which I almost didn t go to. It showed there for two weeks and they did a really good job. We had an opening night, and I did a Q&A on stage. It was a really great way to get closure to that film. It also came out on DVD through a different company soon thereafter. At that stage, I was able to hold my head up high. All the reviews were pretty much four-stars a vindication of what I d been doing for the past four years.
 Q: Take us through the history of Club Le Monde, which was the first of your three youth movies to be written but the last to be made A: I wrote it because I'd been clubbing for four years. I wrote it in 1995. At that stage, I had given up my job as a production manager for a corporate video company, where I was working on things for British Airways and Scandinavian Airlines. That was great practice, essentially, for the logistics of producing. But I decided that wasn t what I wanted to do. I gave up, started signing on the dole and writing feature scripts. I had written one while I was still working, to make sure I could do it. As a writer, I was really trying to find my way. The first script I did was called Toffs, a police detective story in retrospect more suitable to TV. I also wrote a romantic comedy about a housewife who becomes a porn star. It was like a more edgy Calendar Girls. And then I wrote Club Le Monde, partly because it was something I knew about. Q: Club Le Monde is not really about the chic superstar DJ clubbing phenomenon be it Cream or whatever A: Absolutely. It was always meant to be a pretty unremarkable club about a pretty unremarkable bunch of people who go out every weekend, take drugs and have a good time. Those three films very much depicted what was going on in my eyes at the time. Q: This dealt with your early twenties, whereas Strong Language was more about your mid-twenties and The Truth Game about your late-twenties. You did that design deliberately, I take it? A: Very much so. It being a souvenir of my youth, by the end of my twenties even if I was still clubbing there was a newfound maturity as I got into a relationship. Club Le Monde was set in 1993; Strong Language was set in 1996 when we shot it; and The Truth Game was set in 1999, also when we shot it. Q: The style was glossier than The Truth Game or Strong Language. Was that chiefly down to budget? A: Well, the whole production was not overly satisfactory. I wanted it to be more gritty and more pacy than it was, which didn t happen in the end. There were a lot of wide, lopped-off shots, which if I d had a different crew, would have been different. I got the essence of what I wanted to do. I didn t want it just to be acid-hazed visuals. I wanted to use the editing as a pacing tool but we just didn t have the material for that. Q: So what happened to make it a difficult shoot? A: It was a four-week shoot and the DP and I just didn t get on at all. I never really felt I had ultimate control over the crew, or respect from them. I felt no-one really cared about the film. We shot underground, on St. Adams Street, just off The Strand and it sounds a funny thing to say, but there was very little fresh air. You d go in at seven in the morning and come out at eight at night, and it d be dark all the time. I remember one time, during lunch, thinking there weren t many people eating. So I went to one of the sets next door, and saw about 25 bodies collapsed and sleeping through lunch. Everything about it was hard. We didn t have much money for extras everyone got 5 a day. And to do a clubbing film, the one thing you need to make it convincing is extras. I remember seeing Welcome to the Terrordome, which is a really early 1990s British film. There s a scene set in a club with about eight people dancing, and it looked stupid. At one stage, we had a scene where we needed a lot of extras, and we were shooting on a Sunday morning. And by ten a.m. none had turned up. In the end, there were two shots where we got everyone from the crew to be clubbing extras which wasn t that hard, as the guys just took their tops off while girls let their hair down! Q: How many speaking parts were there? And was it hard working with such a large ensemble? A: There were 32. It was fun in fact, it was the actors who got me through the film. I didn t have a problem with any of them. They all did a really good job and were happy and excited about being there. I guess instead of spending six days a week working with six actors, as I did on The Truth Game, on bigger parts I just worked with more actors on smaller parts. Our casting decisions were great; everyone looked the part and was the part. Q: Talk about your philosophy behind compiling the soundtrack? A: We had a relatively small amount of money for the music, but it had to be convincing wall-to-wall dance music from the era. Our music supervisor did a great job. The conceit behind the music was to intersperse the dance scenes and opening and closing credits with tunes that everyone would recognise. In the same way when you go to a club, they ll be a really big tune and everyone goes wild, and then the DJ will bring it down again with lesser-known tunes. We tried to get Chimes by Orbital and Primal Scream s Moving on Up, but everything else we went for, we got. We had a test screening, and someone took an exception to the 808 State song she said, Mr. C would never have played that song, even then. But the irony was that I d actually chosen another song, Lock Up by Zero B, and we d cleared it. But Mr. C had never heard of it, and he didn t want to play a song he d never heard of which was understandable so we flicked through someone else's record collection and all agreed that 808 State was a great choice. Q: Talk about the release of Club Le Monde? A: This is the difficulty of low-budget filmmaking. Even when you think the product is pretty good, it s still hard to convince somebody to think the same and put their money where their mouth is. Metrodome were distributing for a while, but they were lame from beginning to end. Their main guy Rupert Preston left and then they shut down their distribution arm for about a year so that was a complete mess. Momentum almost picked it up but didn t. So in the end, the production company set up their own distribution arm, Screen Projex, and they put it out with UGC, who were very supportive and it went out on 20 screens. But the problem with that was all the money went into prints. Although it got reviewed, there was no advertising for it.
 Q: How did you come across the script for The Handyman? A: The script was actually sent to me by Piers Jackson, who I had worked with on my previous features. He'd joined forces with a guy called Arif Hussein who had set up the British Short Screenplay Competition. They had gone out to short scriptwriters everywhere, around the world, and had about 750 entries. The panel of judges were very distinguished Nik Powell, Stephen Woolley, Charles Dance and between them, they read the scripts and chose this one script, which was written by a guy called Thomas Beach, who is actually from Chicago. They sent it to me and asked me if I d like to direct it. Initially, I wasn t sure, as it was a short, but then I read it and I thought it was great. At that stage, there wasn t any money and I went away and did something else. They then got someone else, but a bit later they came back to me and had the money so we went away and shot it. Q: This was your first experience of working from a script you didn t write. Was that strange? A: No, not really. I guess I would only take something on board, as a director, if I felt akin to the material. This was very atmospheric in its writing, and it was visually very strong. Having spent a lot of time reading it, and looking through various drafts anything that you direct, which you haven t originated, I suppose you have to make your own. Over the months, I guess I tried to do that. I guess if it s not coming naturally, then it s not one for you. But it was nice to do something I hadn't originated. Writing your own material, and then directing it unless you re the Coen Brothers or Abel Ferrara it takes a long time to write and develop them. So it s great to be handed something that someone else has put a lot of effort into before I coming on board. Q: Did it change much from script to screen? A: Ultimately, not that much. Thomas had written a script that had won a competition of 750, so it was a very strong script anyway. He did one draft subsequently, and had done one draft previously, and I think a couple of scenes from different drafts we incorporated into the film we shot. But in the end, it was essentially the script that won the prize... Q: Did you feel responsible for delivering what was on the page? A: I think so. Everyone has different ideas as to what a director should do when they re making a film whether you try and translate what s in the script perfectly or try and add to it. I guess you should do both. Try and make it as close to the script as possible, but also add your own idiosyncrasies where possible. I hope I did a good job. Q: Did you have much contact with Thomas while making it? A: I did, over the last year. I met up with him in Toronto a while before we shot the film. At that stage, he talked about some feature scripts that he d written. And I was very interested in seeing those. So we kept in touch, and I was always keeping him up to date with what was going on. There was also one script that he s written that I really liked, so we re working on that - it's called Dues and is an excellently observed story about a jazz saxophonist who comes to a pivotal cross-roads in his life. Thomas is putting the finishing touches to what will hopefully be, more or less the final draft. so, yeah, we've had a constant dialogue over the last year. Q: How was it filming abroad, and working with a US crew? A: In the end, it wasn t that different. You have the same pitfalls and pleasures, and it all comes down to finding the right people who are going to work best with you, and make the script as visually good as possible. It was actually really exciting. All the heads of department were excellent. Given that no-one knew anyone on the set, everyone gelled very well. It was only a four-day shoot but you can have problems inside four minutes, let alone four days, so it was a good experience. Q: You were rather fortunate in getting snow, if I remember A: Yeah, the snow was amazing! The film being set in mid-America in the winter, snow was written into the whole script. At one stage, the producers were talking about shooting the film in England, to make it look like America. I just thought, on the budget we had, the production design would be so expensive, that it wouldn t be possible. Also getting East Anglia to look like the wilds of mid-America was never going to happen. I was very insistent that we shot it in America. And one of the reasons I wanted to do the short was because I want to do more films in America. We went there in late November-early December and prayed for snow. Everyone said where we were shooting, there would definitely be snow. Obviously we got there and there wasn t any whatsoever. There was a lot of talk of getting snow-machines people saying they d worked on James Bond films with such equipment. And you have to constantly remind people that the budgets they have on those films are a lot more than what we had! Every morning, I would get up at 6 o clock and the first thing I would do was peep behind the curtains to see if it had snowed and it hadn t. By the third day, I thought, There s nothing I can do about it. It s still a great script. But in my heart of hearts, I wanted the snow I ve always been a fan of it in films, from Gremlins to The Shining to It's A Wonderful Life. On the final day, it was amazing. I got up and there was snow on the ground and it snowed all day. I think we recorded some of the largest snowflakes I d ever seen. Q: Having worked on your youth trilogy, did working on a thriller require a new set of skills? A: Well it wasn t necessarily a natural progression, but the short films I d made before were a lot more psychologically darker. While The Handyman is a romantic thriller, there is very much a dark psychology behind it. It was very much something I was interested in exploring. It s interesting whether you can go from a romantic comedy to a thriller very easily. People like Rob Reiner do it, while others like David Cronenberg, never do it. I suppose it s something that comes from your soul and heart. Q: Did you draw on any films specifically? A: I generally try not to steal scenes, because I think it s interesting to come up with your own stuff. But I guess Fargo had similarities, as well as A Simple Plan - both psychologically dark films set in the windy American expanse. There was a film with Harrison Ford Presumed Innocent that also starred Greta Scacchi. And I re-watched it just before I met with Greta, and that was a very good, tight thriller, in the way Jagged Edge was. Q: Talking of Greta, this is the first time you ve worked with seasoned actors with a big body of work. Was that a different experience to what you d known from before? A: I guess in terms of the procedure of what one does, not really. With Greta, we met up with her to see if we d all get on. Then I met up with her once by myself just to talk about the script, once she d decided she wanted to work with us and vice versa. And then the next time we met, we were in America going through the script. So the process was similar to working with unknowns. In the cutting room, with both Bill and Greta s stuff, often when you re going through the takes some are better than others. Maybe you get it down to two or three. With their stuff, every take was great. It was generally hard to say a specific take was the definitive one. In the final outcome, inevitable the quality was more consistent. Q: How did your collaboration with Richard Chester, the composer, come about? A: He graduated from the National Film & Television School last year. Piers had heard some of Richard s work, and thought it stood out. So he asked me to meet him. The two shorts I saw that he'd scored were very well done, and brought the films up a level. They were very atmospheric and classically done, so I met up with him and he got the job. Q: In terms of style, it s more stately than your previous work. Was that deliberate? A: Yes. I guess it stems from the tone and mood of the script and my desire to do something different to what I've done to date. I've generally let the acting and dialogue run and let the camera follow but here the shots are much more stylised. We also shot it on Super 35mm which gives the film an epic feel. My initial directorial design was to have the first third of the film fairly wide, open shots, where you could let the scenery breathe and let the characters have space and then as the film moves on, the pacing increases and the camera becomes more lucid. in the end I'm not sure that really worked because by the time you drop one scene and change the order of a couple of others and then have a steadicam which doesn't work, things go out the window...  Q: So what's next? A: Good question! We're in pre-production on a pyschological horror film that I wrote called The Living In The Home Of The Dead - something like The Shining in the style of Pi and Memento - but these are our third different financiers who've come on board and have said they're going to give us the money so...Until the money's in the bank I'm always cautious about saying I'm shooting another film but hopefully this'll go through. And then I'm doing this film Dues with Thomas Beach which we're currently talking to the cream of the New York indie producing crop about and similar to The Handyman, that's also set during the Winter. Apart from that I've just finished developing a spec script called Church of the Second Son about bullying, mind-games and Satanism!
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