"I don't feel like my path is very different to the traditional route." - An Interview with Curry Barker

Curry Barker may be an unfamiliar name for most cinemagoers, but like a number of the horror filmmakers who have emerged in recent years, he already has a loyal following thanks to his YouTube work. On their channel That’s a Bad Idea, Barker and his friend Cooper Tomlinson have posted comic sketches that they've written and performed in, while Barker has posted a series of short horror films on the channel. Barker’s short The Chair (2023) earned him attention from the studios, and this was followed by Milk & Serial (2024), an hour-long film that Barker and Tomlinson made for $800, which became a viral word-of-mouth hit. Barker’s YouTube work showed some promise, but Obsession is a huge step up. Obsession is the story of Bear (Michael Johnston), who harbours an unspoken crush on his work colleague Nikki (Inde Navarrette). When he flippantly makes a wish that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world, he instantly turns her into the girlfriend from hell, unwilling to be apart from him for a moment, and consumed by a murderous rage if anyone comes between them. Obsession is a tight, clever and terrifically entertaining horror film, and I recently had the opportunity to talk to Barker about his hugely impressive debut.

One thing I liked about Obsession is the way it manages to put a fresh, modern spin on the old idea of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ What was it that drew you to this premise?

I was really intrigued by this idea. I have so many different ideas in my phone, I’m constantly trying to come up with cool film ideas, but I was really intrigued by the idea of obsession. I had this idea about a man and a woman who were so infatuated with each other that they became violent, but it didn't work. There was no story, because if they're both obsessed, then what is the movie? I was watching this Simpsons episode one day and Bart had a monkey paw. He made a wish and all this crazy stuff happened, and I thought, 'Oh my gosh, this is perfect for my obsession idea.' It kind of becomes a wish-gone-wrong scenario. It’s pretty simple idea that we probably have seen before, but I just had to make it as different and unique as possible.

Was this an idea that always felt like a feature to you rather than a short?

I thought of it as a short at first because at that moment in my career I was doing a lot of short films. I don't know if you could even call it a career at that point, it was just a hobby and trying to build my resume and portfolio. I thought of it as a short film but I always think about a feature, you know, just to hope and pray that it could ever be a possibility.

When you were writing the film, did it feel like a very different challenge to sustain a narrative at feature length?

Definitely, yeah. I mean, the one thing you don't want is for it to just feel like a short film that's been stretched into an hour and 30 minutes. You have to keep it engaging. The main challenge for me with this movie is making sure it's not repetitive, because there's only so many things you can do with this idea, there's only so many ways she can go crazy. I didn't want to make it a rampage killing movie where she becomes possessed and starts killing people for no reason. If she's gonna kill somebody, it has to be because she sees that as a huge obstacle between her and Bear, so I was just reminding myself constantly when writing, what is the goal of each character? What's the goal of Nikki? The goal of Nikki is just to be with Bear, that's all she wants. What are the obstacles in her way? When you remember that, it becomes a little easier to write a film like this.

While there are elements of violence and horror in the film, I appreciated the amount of time you take to build up to those aspects. For much of the movie, we’re just sitting in these awkward situations with the characters and observing that shifting dynamic.

Yeah, I wanted the movie to have a build up to it, I feel like it wouldn't have been as powerful if some of the crazy stuff happened earlier and it wouldn't have been as effective. One of my favourite movies in the last ten years is Joker, the Todd Phillips film, and I'm always thinking about ‘What's my Joker moment?’ Because that movie is great at showing us, okay, he's definitely not a good person, he's got mental health issues, there's something weird going on here. Yeah, he kills those people on the subway, but it all feels like it's building up to something…and then boom! He shoots the guy on live television. That was such a crazy moment for me in the theatre. So to recreate that was my goal. Like a Joker moment. What's the moment where you're like, ‘Wow! Holy crap!”

A large part of why the film works is Inde Navarrette’s performance. She's great at immediately showing us who Nikki is and then she does some amazing work as the character gradually gets more unhinged. What is your process for working with actors and drawing a performance out of them like that?

As a horror director, it's your job to wrap everybody's head around what you're trying to do, because everyone's first instincts are going to be to do the thing we've seen before. I always told Inde I want her to play a crazy jealous girlfriend, not to play a demon-possessed woman, so leaning into crazy jealous girlfriend, you get a lot of whininess and pleading, and that was what we worked on a lot. Sometimes I would make a fool of myself on set because I would be doing this weird whining and trying to show her what I want, and I like to keep it really light on set. I think just because we're making something with really dark subject matter, it doesn't mean everybody can't laugh and have a good time on set, so we would laugh and I'd show her my whine, and it kind of worked like that. We watched some movies together too. We watched Pearl, that's a movie about being obsessed with wanting to be a movie star. We watched Hereditary, which is a movie that's got very raw and very real emotion, so we wanted her to see that, and just going scene by scene with her.

 
I think the real horror in the movie is when you consider the situation from her perspective, and when you give us these flashes that remind us the real Nikki is still in there somewhere.

Yeah, and you don't know where she is, you don't know what she's going through. You just know that whatever it is, it's bad. There's something really creepy about the unknown, that dark void that your mind goes to when you don't really know, and I wanted to keep it like that. That mystery is so much scarier than flashing to her in Hell and seeing her being burnt by fire or whatever you want to say. It wouldn’t be as effective, for sure.

It’s also an interesting film about the nature of relationships between young men and women today, especially when the young woman can have no power in that situation.

I mean, I was more looking to make a really fun horror film. I think the movies that I look up to push the boundaries, and the movies that excite me have characters that are grey and don't always do the right thing. This movie is a fictional film, so there's elements in it that couldn't possibly happen in real life, when you're dealing with magic and stuff like that. Bear comes from a very innocent place at first. I think we can all relate to having a crush on a girl and that crush not being reciprocated and really feeling upset about that. It's what he chooses to do afterwards, that's very, very questionable. I wanted to write a character that was grey in that way because it's so much more intriguing to me to see him trying to make this work and trying to keep her as his girlfriend, rather than doing the right thing and making the whole movie about him trying to fix his mistake. It felt like a more intriguing story for me, and we don't often see the possessed person becoming the victim.

Watching a number of your shorts this week, one aspect of your style that certainly carries through into Obsession is the way you edit. You seem to really like an abrupt cut, and you often edit in and out of scenes in a way that’s unexpected and jarring.

Well, you’ve got to know the rules to break the rules, and I've been editing since I was 10 years old. It's something that I've been doing for a very, very long time. I know the flow of the scene and I know how it's supposed to go, and yeah, it is something that I really like to play with. These weird cuts and this way of cutting out before something finishes, or even sometimes lingering on something when the moment should be over, these are techniques that you can use to either build tension or make people feel weird. It's a thing that I'm still experimenting with, but I think that's part of my style and I'll continue to do that. 

The other consistent aspect of your style is that you favour a dark image, you use a lot of shadows to obscure what we can see. How did you work with cinematographer Taylor Clemons to create that look?

Yeah, oh my gosh, Taylor is so amazing. He's a fantastic cinematographer and I think that he will go down in history as one of the greats one day. This was his first feature as well but he is doing my next film and he is just so good. But you know, I had to get him on board for what I wanted to do, and I was very nervous about that, having never worked with a cinematographer before. I had to explain to him what I wanted to do with the aspect ratio and the framing, keeping it very still and not cutting a lot and being very intentional with it. But he was so on board that and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is gonna work great!” The aspect ratio really lends itself to picture frames, if you notice the ratio of the film is actually the same as a picture you would take on your phone, but not the same aspect ratio of a cinematic movie. We wanted to create frames and keep the camera very still, almost as if you're just watching pictures of someone's life in a weird way. He's a master at lighting as well and we were having conversations about keeping her in the shadows but also being very intentional with it, you know, it's not every time, it's certain moments.

When you’re making films on YouTube you only have to please yourself, essentially. Here you have a number of producers who are all invested in the film and all have their own opinions. What was it like negotiating that?

Everyone has ideas and a lot of times they're good ideas, so you can listen to those, but people are also really good about letting me do my thing. In a different scenario, maybe I would have been working with people that weren't letting me do my thing and maybe the film wouldn't have been as good, but I'm lucky because they let me do my thing on this one, and now they're letting me do my thing on my next one. I got really lucky that I'm looked at and respected in that way. Even on this next one, all the suggestions that the producers had were actually really great, and I usually ended up taking their advice. I've been allowed to play, which I don't think is always the case, so it's been very good.

I know you made Milk & Serial for $800 so it’s a big leap to the budget for Obsession, but I think you made this for under a million dollars, which is still a very tight budget for this kind of movie.

Yeah, it was very low budget, under a million for sure. You could feel it on set, I mean, we were scraping pennies every single day. It was a very difficult project. It's so funny because we have the premiere in Los Angeles coming up and Focus is showing me what they're doing for the premiere and everything, and there are crazy things that we could not afford to do in the movie, you know what I mean? The premiere is going to have a more detailed XYZ than we even had in the film, because we just didn't have the money to do it. It's really funny and interesting.

Do you feel like your YouTuber background and mindset helps you work within the confines of a very tight budget?

Definitely, yeah. I mean, the only thing that is tough is that it doesn't really matter anymore what I'm used to, because everything takes so much longer. Even just getting an insert of a lamp or an insert of your phone or whatever can take 45 minutes. I'm used to just, ‘Put the camera there, get the shot, move on’. I try as much as I can to stick to my roots and I think, 'There's a scene where we're driving, let's just hop in the car and drive,' but no, we need police escorts, we need to be on a trailer. Like, Jesus Christ, you know? Everything becomes so difficult. I do try to cling on to my old ways as much as possible, but it mostly just becomes an annoyance for people that are used to doing things the traditional Hollywood way, and their way becomes an annoyance to me. Time is money and that can become stressful, because when that stuff takes really long time, I know I could have just knocked out this shot.

When you started making videos on YouTube, was working towards being a feature filmmaker always the goal?

I've been acting since I was four and then I was making little videos with my friends when I was 11 years old. I come from a very small town in Alabama where if you want to act in film, that opportunity doesn't really exist, so I realised I had to make my own films if I wanted to act in them, and I very quickly fell in love with the process of creating films. I mean, I was always looking towards the stars, always was striving to be a filmmaker, so everything was means to an end for me. I wasn’t anticipating how it was going to work out, not knowing that YouTube was the answer to everything. I tried everything, I tried film festivals, I tried local plays, I tried YouTube, and YouTube was the thing that took off.

Your story is not that uncommon at the moment because we're seeing a number of YouTubers transitioning to feature filmmaking. Are you conscious of a growing interest from distributors and the studios in YouTube creators, and what do you think is driving that?

It's so interesting because of course the buzzy thing is to say ‘YouTuber Curry Barker has become a filmmaker in the traditional space’, but my path doesn't feel that different to David Fincher or Steven Spielberg or whoever. I mean, watch The Fablemans. Steven Spielberg was making shorts as a little kid and he becomes a filmmaker, like I made short films over and over again, trial and error, harnessing my craft. I just happened to have a platform called YouTube where they got attention. The discoverability is so much more vast now because of platforms like YouTube, but I don't feel like my path is very different to the traditional route.

 
Do you feel there's a sense of community with the other filmmakers of your generation who are coming up through YouTube? You feel like you're part of a new wave?

I think so because I talked to the Filippo brothers and I'm also super familiar with the influencer space. I've also been lucky enough to talk to Ari Aster and Zach Cregger and I have their phone numbers and they give me great advice. It does feel like a little bit of a community. Anytime we link up, we do talk about it, that we're this generation, this is our moment, you know? It does feel like a community.

One of the things that connects you with many of the filmmakers who are of your generation and some just before as well, is that you're making horror films but you kind of have a background in comedy. I'm thinking of the Filippo brothers, Zach Cregger, Jordan Peele, etc, who all have sketch comedy backgrounds. Do you see that as a natural progression?

I absolutely do. I don't think it's that comedy and horror are similar, because they're very different, but I think what's similar is the muscles and the skills that you use to create tension and fear in a scene can be very similar to the skills that you use to create comedy. I can only speak for myself, but I've spent a lot of time studying the human condition. In sketch comedy after sketch comedy, you start to realise that the way humans act is very funny and you start to find humour in the awkward moments. My brain is always turned on, whether I'm at a drive-through or a restaurant, or I'm in an elevator and there's some awkward beat or whatever; ‘Oh, it would be funny if this happened or it'd be funny if the waiter said this.’ When you're constantly studying the human condition and the psychology of why people say things or how people react to things, that really lends itself well to horror. The horror I try to make is all about dread and discomfort and those things are often very funny too. 

After years of releasing your work on YouTube, it must have been a real kick to see Obsession on the big screen with a crowd.

Oh, absolutely. All that hard work and the time that you pour into a film when you're in the middle of creating it, it feels really great to finally see people react to it. ‘Oh, that moment actually worked, I didn't know if that moment was gonna work or people would picked up on that small dialogue thing there.’ It really all pays off. Sometimes moments don't pay off and you're like, ‘Ah, nobody understood it.’

Did you do test screenings with the film?

Yeah, we did. Small test screenings, very discreet. People had the note of Bear not wanting to fix it and that kind of encouraged me to go even further the opposite way. People wanted him to go on a journey to fix it and it made me go, no, I'm going to make him go on a journey to make this work. Sometimes people don't necessarily know what they want, they know that there's a problem but they don't know how to fix it. I understood what the problem was and then I kind of flipped how to fix it.

Do you see yourself continuing to produce YouTube videos going forward or do you think that stage is behind you now and you're going to focus on features?

There's a couple of short film ideas in my phone that I'm dying to make. It would be so cool to just make a short and throw it up, but oh man, it's so tough because I have no time. I mean, I'm about to hop right into Texas Chainsaw and write that as soon as I have free time, and I'm editing anything but Ghosts right now. It's just me, I'm the editor, so I have 12-hour days of editing until it's done, just refining and perfecting that film. You know, every film is my baby, so I want to nurture it as much as possible. It becomes really hard to do the YouTube thing now, but me and Cooper still want keep the sketches going for as long as we can, it just probably won't be as often as people are used to.

Jason Blum has come on board Obsession as an Executive Producer, and you’re working with him on Anything But Ghosts as well. What has his involvement brought to the project?

Well, it's brought his fan base, the Blumhouse fan base, which is very loyal. You can see the uptick in comments of people that love what Blumhouse does. He wasn't really involved in the making of the film, but he's very involved in marketing and selling the film and making sure people go and watch it, which is very, very helpful for me. He's a huge part of my next film, in this case he is involved in the making of it, and he's a great collaborator. Again, really letting me do my thing, and the notes that he's had have been very short and sweet and helpful. I’ve enjoyed my collaboration with him a lot.

You mentioned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'm sure you can't say a great deal about your approach to that story at this stage, but what are your thoughts on taking on such an iconic property, which will bring a whole new level of attention and pressure with it?

For my own personal wellbeing, I have to push all of that away. I know that the real pressure is that this franchise is so dear to so many people, but that’s not just with Texas Chainsaw, it’s with every film. Back when I was just doing YouTube stuff, I could fly. Whatever I wanted to do, I would do. If it was bad, then whatever, maybe I wouldn’t even post it or maybe I would post it and see what people thought, but it didn’t really matter. It was so low-stakes, so I was taking risks left and right. The thing is, the risks that I was taking were the things that made me the best. I need to hold onto that and not let the pressure get to me, focusing on what made my voice different and what people appreciated about my work in the first place.

Obsession is in UK cinemas now.

"I always have a very strong feeling of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I want them to be." - An Interview with Hlynur Pálmason.

Time is of the essence in Hlynur Pálmason’s films. For his extraordinary epic Godland (2022), the director spent two years photographing the decomposing remains of a horse; in the film, this is presented as a minute-long montage, evoking time’s inexorable passage. A few months before Godland premiered at Cannes, Pálmason screened Nest at the Berlin Film Festival, a 22-minute short that took 18 months to film. His latest feature The Love That Remains continues that trend, as Pálmason follows a single family over the course of a year, with the changing climate and landscapes being as integral to the film as any of the dramatic, humorous and surreal incidents that he captures during the course of the narrative. This is Pálmason's fourth feature and it further solidifies my belief that he is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss the film with him shortly before its UK premiere at last year's London Film Festival. 

One of the things I really appreciate about your films is that every time it feels like you're pushing yourself in a new direction. Is that something that you're consciously striving for when you develop a new project?

I think you at least hope that it's a natural step forward, that you're not forcing anything. I mean, I never think, ‘OK, now I'm going to do something completely different,’ it's more like it's the process that dictates where we're going. When we moved back to Iceland, we bought a film camera because I had this idea of wanting to make films constantly. I didn't want to write and develop for four years and then shoot a film over two months, I wanted to shoot every week. It was more like a painter’s process, just like being a painter in a studio. I felt that if there was such a long time between filming, I didn't feel like a filmmaker, you know? When it came to filming, I was rusty.
 
I also felt that by filming every week, and by creating material and watching the material, I became much more stimulated by it and the ideas came more naturally. The process for the last couple of years has been working on parallel things rather than one thing, and I've found it very satisfying and very exciting. Of course, I’m interested in certain things, I'm always interested in how time passes and you can see that in my films, but I'm always trying – or we as a group of collaborators, we are trying – not to repeat ourselves. We're trying to make things that resonate with us, but hopefully also out there.
 
You work across a lot of different artistic practices. Do you see it all as part of a singular process?
 
More and more, I think it’s just the same. Sometimes it's like, you just work, you just create a daily routine and ritual so that you can be productive, and even that's hard sometimes, because you have to somehow support your family and you have to be part of the world. If you can create a daily routine that is kind of productive, then I have a very strong feeling that the ideas and projects kind of decipher themselves what they want to be and I just have to spend time with it and work on it. The project decides if it's a short film or if it's a little bit longer or and has a bigger narrative. I just try to allow them to decide what they want to be, and then I collaborate with others and try to get things financed if they feel very serious and they feel like they are feature films. But yeah, it's very much about allowing things to just emerge naturally for me now.
 
So, at what point did this story start to emerge and begin to announce itself as a feature?
 
It's a long time ago. I mean, the first image you see in the film was shot in 2017, so it's even before Godland. There are different kinds of triggers and different kinds of seeds that I've planted over the years, but I remember that being the first image that was created for the film. At that time I had the project The Love That Remains, but I didn't know that I was creating an image for The Love That Remains, that came later. I remember one of the most important places in the process was actually when I was shooting this short film called Nest, which was kind of like a COVID project. I was just filming my kids building a treehouse and I wanted the elements and animals and everything to be part of the film, so I had to build this kind of camera house around my camera so the animals wouldn't see me. I ended up spending a lot of time in this small shed, just sitting there and waiting, recording sound and reading and writing, and I started thinking about what the parents of these kids are doing. I was seeing these kids build a treehouse, so I started writing these narratives of the parents, and I think that was one of the places where it began to be serious.
 
We see a lot of movies that are about couples separating and going through a divorce, but generally, the movie is about that subject, and it's the driving force behind all the drama. In this film, it's not really about that. The separation is just one thing that's happening in the lives of these characters. Was that something you were very keen not to emphasise?
 
I always have a very strong feeling of what I don't want my films to be, but it's sometimes a little bit mysterious what I want them to be. You start by saying, “OK, I don't want this film to be another separation film where people are screaming at each other,” because I know people go through those processes, we all know that, and we don't need to always emphasise the most dramatic things. I think sometimes the more effortless things are just as important. They're a little bit trickier to capture, but I think if you really give yourself time, you can capture that also and create a film that is as strong as the more dramatic film.
 
I also felt that I hadn't seen it before. I was more interested in how you spend time with the people you love when a family is fractured and separated, because you still have these kids together. You see it too often in real life, the negative side of people not being able to spend time together anymore, but they still have this history of love and a relationship and all kinds of things that they went through. I just felt there was so much to explore there and it was a very open canvas for people to put in their own experiences, because I really like work that is open for interpretation. I felt like this was a really good concept and narrative that would allow people to put their own feelings into it, instead of telling you exactly what happened, because often when you create certain plots you tend to use a lot of time explaining these things, and that means less time to just experience it. I think I prioritised experience instead of explaining with this one.
 
Was it important to you to have a maternal figure at the centre of it? Your previous films have been following men and very much about male ego and tension and conflict.
 
I think it just happened very naturally because I was looking at a family, and in this family there's one female and one male and then the kids. Then if you look a little bit further there's also chickens and a dog and the horses, and if you go even further there's grandparents and there's friends, etc. So I didn't really decide anything, it was more like I was looking at this very typical nuclear family or this very normal family where both parents are working, which is kind of the norm today, and it was just about exploring them. I didn't have any preconceived thoughts about what this family was, but there were some things I knew. I knew that we would follow him and I knew that one of the threads was following her and one of the threads was following the kids, and I had this feeling that it would be interesting to see these threads weave into each other throughout the film.
 
Very early on, I knew that he was a fisherman. I had been documenting over three summers how you fish during these modern times because it's changing very fast. I was doing this for a company in my hometown, so I was spending a lot of time there and getting to know all these people and seeing a lot of possibilities in capturing this, because it was so beautiful, but it’s a very strange industrial world, not as romantic as a lot of people think it is. I really wanted to capture that, but then I also wanted to spend time with her. He's working the sea and I wanted her to sort of be working the earth, so I tried to find a process for her that could be a nice dialogue with what he was doing.
 
Her artworks are a metaphor for the filmmaking as well. It's about collaboration, it's about the passage of time, it involves the natural world, so it feels like a very fitting choice of process for her.
 
My idea was not to use that at first because this is a process that I've been doing for years. I've always found it to be a very visual and physical process, so I knew that I wanted her to have something similar. In the beginning, I did try to find an artist in Iceland that could be both the actress and the artist herself, and as we go through it we would get to know her work, but I couldn't find a process that fit. I found an actress that I really liked working with in Saga [Garðarsdóttir], so we decided that that she would collaborate with us and would go through what I call a winter process series. You harvest one series a year and you do it during the cold months. You make these sketches and then these sketches become big cutouts in metal, then you put them out during the cold months on top of linen or cotton, and it sort of eats itself into the cotton and makes these paintings or prints. It was so natural for me to do that because it's a process that I've done so many times, but also it's a process that I think fits with the core of the film and it helped to just lift the film.
 
Tell me about casting Saga Garðarsdóttir because she's not someone who does a lot of movies. I believe she's primarily a comedian, is that right?

 
Yeah, she wrote these TV sketches, and she was also directing them and acting in them. She was just so natural and funny, and she has a very striking look. I met her and we talked and I immediately felt I could write for her, so it was a very easy process with her. It took a little bit longer to find her husband, but I knew that I wanted someone that was different, you know, I didn't want them to be the same kind of type. It’s almost as if they met very early in their life and then maybe grew a little bit apart, but I wanted to feel it naturally without explaining it.
 
How do you cultivate that kind of intimacy between your actors? When you're watching these scenes of the family together they feel very comfortable and she has to interact with your kids like she's their mother. Do you create a rehearsal space and bring them together before shooting?
 
That was one of the keys for the film to work. I knew that this film was very playful and I knew that I wanted to push it into places where it was very close to the edge, you know? Close to catastrophic, close to not working, close to being too absurd or comical, but I knew that none of these things would work if the fundament wasn't strong. You needed to believe that this was a real family, that was the most important thing. I invited them to come to my hometown to stay over the weekend, and we made this scene on top of a car in a river. We made it almost like a short film where I just tested them together, and they played and they improvised a text that I wrote. I felt very quickly that this is going to work because they're interested in making the film together and they're okay with this very low-key way of making films. I mean, there's no catering, there's no screens anywhere, there's no chairs, it's just a couple of people making some things together, and they were up for it so I felt it would turn out fine.
 
How is it for you directing your children, because on set you have to be their director not their dad. Is that a different kind of relationship with them?
 
I've always been the same with them ever since they were born. I don't have many faces, it's just one, so it's very natural and easy for me to direct them. I'm kind of blunt, just very straightforward, and that's how I am with all of my actors and crew. I'm not trying to sugarcoat it or I'm not trying to be nasty or anything, I just try to be very clear. If something doesn't work I just say it doesn't work, and then we try to figure out why and if we can fix it or do something else. I'm also like that with my kids, and they have been doing it for so long they’re in all of my projects. Right now with this film the boys have a much larger role, but they're very used to a camera and they're very used to my friends, because it's basically a group of friends that we're making films with, so they know all of them and they love them. It's very easy for me to invite them into the process because it's a very homemade. All of my projects, even Godland, are extremely homemade and it's all very family oriented.
 
You need a considerable amount of time to make these projects that span the changing seasons. How do you factor that into the production schedule and a budget? Whenever you talk to independent filmmakers they are always talking about running out of money or racing against the clock because they don't have enough days.
 
I know. One of the hardest things is actually the finance. I'm not talking for everyone, but the problem of making films for me is always money, and we have to go from film to film just to be able to survive, because we're not getting enough money for making a film. I mean, we'll never get the right amount of money for the hours we use in our projects, that's never going to happen in my life, but we are enjoying ourselves and we're making things that we really love, so we have been trying to make a setup where we're always working on a couple of projects in parallel. I just made a book called Lament for a Horse, with the horse I photographed in the process of making Godland. This was a two-year process of photographing and now I have a book probably five years later, so there are these different processes, and for some of the projects there's no money that comes out of it, but I think I'm really lucky that I have a very solid crew of my editor, my sound designer and my producers and distributors. They're working with me not on only one project, but they're working with me on a body of work, so whatever we make they try to help us figure out how we make this so it's never about the one project, it's more about the body of work and the direction. We have a certain amount of time and we're going this direction, and then the projects kind of decide for themselves what project wants to be made now, because I think each project has its moment.
 
You're working without a cinematographer on this one How did that affect your process?
 
I've always worked very closely with Maria [von Hausswolff], who has filmed everything, but with this one I was beginning to stretch time so much and I was filming so much of the material, so it was strange to suddenly invite someone to come in a process where I already shot 30% of the film. It was impossible for her to move to my hometown, I mean it would be impossible for anyone to just move away from their family or bring their whole family there, so it just didn't fit this film. The next one is kind of like that too, but hopefully I'll collaborate with her soon because we still want to work together. Some of the projects don't allow that because the process is just so different, but it was quite natural for me. I've always been very into the process and it's always been a very much hands-on process for me to make films; I load the film, I do the technical stuff, I'm carrying a tripod. It's all very hands-on and homemade, and it feels natural, but of course miss Maria and I hope I'm going to work with her again.
 

You shot A White White Day in 2.40:1, but you've since gone back to Academy ratio in the last couple of features. The Nest was Academy ratio as well so is that your preferred format? How did you feel about shooting wide?

 
I didn't like it. It's a very strange thing because I really like to be excited about what I do, so when I'm setting up the camera and putting on the lens it's something that excites me, but with the wide lens – it was actually spherical lenses, it was only the opening scene of A White White Day that was anamorphic and then we changed it into spherical lenses the rest of the film – I was kind of annoyed the whole time. This wide format doesn't fit my temperament and right now I see the whole world through a lens like this 1.33 Academy aspect ratio, because both of my still cameras are also this format. Maybe this will change, I'm not saying this is going to be my format for the rest of the films, but it's like if you talk to people that write a lot in notebooks [he holds up and looks at his pencil] it's really important for them if it is a 0.7 or is 0.5. It's a huge difference for people that really work with something, these details are really important, because to enjoy the work you have to feel comfortable and you have to feel that it fits your temperament.
 
There are loads of unexpected comical moments in this film that I loved. My audience really enjoyed the guy on TV singing a song about his mother-in-law. It's a really funny bit.
 
I was born in 1984, and if you were born around that era these were kind of the comics that you really loved growing, they were really radical and funny. There was this character named Helgi the Troubadour and he had these sketches where he was singing about really brutal things but doing it in this funny manner like a troubadour. He was singing about his family, his parents, his ex-wife and his children, and he being brutally honest about these conflicts he had in life. When I was writing, one of these songs just kept repeating in my head and I had to have it. They allowed me to have it, thank God!

 
The other thing I wanted to ask you about is Joan of Arc. This is an hour-long film that's connected to the scenes involving the children in this film. Do you know how that's going to be available?

We just finished it and we only screened it in one place. We premiered it in San Sebastian so I have no idea of its future because it's an odd little thing, it's not that long, it's not that short, so it's kind of an in-between film. I'm trying to figure out what kind of distribution it's going to have, whether Curzon going to take it or if they find it a little bit too experimental. I don't know yet, but people are getting a chance to see it now, so we'll know soon what kind of life it will have. It will definitely come out but I don't know what format. I wanted to make a trilogy of short films, Nest was number one and the second one was supposed to be Joan of Arc, but it just became so big that it became a feature. We are actually working on the third one, it's called Blue, so the idea is that it's like a trilogy of films where we are working with time in that way, but each time it's a little different. It's been extremely fun to make these films, for me it's the most fun I have with films, and Joan of Arc was one of my highlights of the year. Just spending time with them and just spending time with the weather, it's something that I really enjoy.

The Love That Remains is in UK cinemas from March 13th

Steven Soderbergh on Black Bag

My interview from the April 2025 issue of Sight & Sound is now available to read online.

Given his predilection for ranging across genres and styles, it can be hard to pinpoint the qualities that define ‘a Steven Soderbergh film’, but Black Bag does feel like an archetypal example of his work. Written by David Koepp, it’s a sly study of relationships among spies, as British intelligence officer George (Michael Fassbender) hunts the traitor among his colleagues from a list of five suspects that includes his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). “I don’t like liars” is George’s frequent refrain, but everyone is a liar in this film, which asks how any relationship can be built on trust in a world in which the term ‘black bag’ – ie, top secret – can be used to evade any line of questioning. A macguffin that could be cataclysmic in the wrong hands adds a sense of urgency to the narrative, but Soderbergh’s real interest lies in the interpersonal dynamics at work, and the way we deceive those closest to us. It’s very much an espionage thriller from the director of sex, lies, and videotape (1989), directed with a playfulness and focus that keeps us intrigued throughout its crisply edited 94 minutes.

In the decade since he returned to work following his short-lived ‘retirement’ in 2013, Soderbergh has directed ten features and four TV series to varying degrees of success, but apart from the continuation of the Magic Mike franchise [2012-], Black Bag feels like his boldest bid for a mainstream hit. At the time of writing, Soderbergh and Koepp’s January release Presence has taken $8.5 million at the global box office; a paltry sum, you might think, but it’s a healthy return against the $2 million production budget. Black Bag is more of a gamble because it’s the kind of film – a mid-budget, star-led entertainment aimed at adults – that has become an endangered species. “The general feeling in the business is that these are commercially risky things to do. I mean, it seems crazy to me,” Soderbergh told me when considering its prospects.

One hopes the film does prove there is still a sizeable audience for original, sophisticated and entertaining studio releases on this scale, but he’s not the kind of man to sit around fretting about things that are outside of his control. As is his wont, Soderbergh quickly busied himself with his next film, and he was mid-production on the comedy The Christophers in London when I caught up with him to discuss Black Bag.

Read the rest of the interview at Sight & Sound

"My biggest thing with sex scenes generally is that they don’t feel like sex scenes, they feel like gestures towards sex" - An Interview with Harry Lighton

With Pillion, Harry Lighton has crafted one of 2025’s most eye-catching debut features. His adaptation of Adam Mars-Jones’ novel Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem stars Harry Melling as introverted and awkward traffic warden Colin, who is instantly besotted when he meets the taciturn, Adonis-like biker Ray (Alexander Skarsgård). The pair begin engaging in a BDSM relationship, with Colin finding a sense of purpose through his total devotion to his master’s needs, even as it's obvious that this naïvely romantic young man yearns for much more intimacy than Ray is willing to give. Lighton gives himself some tricky emotional and tonal territory to navigate here and he pulls it off with impressive sensitivity, humour and style, drawing exceptional performances from his two perfectly cast leads. On the morning of Pillion’s premiere at this year’s London Film Festival, I met with Lighton to discuss it.

You made a number of short films prior to this. How did you settle on Pillion as the project you were going to make the leap to features with?

Well, it wasn't the initial plan. I was going to make this film about sumo wrestling and I spent three years doing development on that, but then the pandemic happened and it became too expensive. I was sent Box Hill by Evie Yates and she said she thought I'd like it, probably based on the sumo film I'd been writing but also on my shorts, which have some transgressive sex and tended to have a bit of comedy in there as well. I read it and I was really intrigued by the tone of it, that was the thing which got me. I was like, "Oh, this has made me laugh but it's also made me horny and it's made me think," and those three things are interesting combinations to try and play with. The novel achieved a lot of that through first-person narration, and knowing that I didn't want to make a film with first-person narration, it seemed like an exciting thing to try and translate what I liked about that tone into visuals and action.

Your screenplay departs from the book quite a bit, so how did you approach the process of adaptation?

I knew that I loved the tone and I loved the central relationship, but there was stuff that I didn't want in my version of the film, so my initial approach – which I wouldn't recommend, and it was exhausting – was really to chuck it all up in the air. I moved the first draft to Ancient Rome and then the second was in a cruise ship, and then my producer said, “Get a grip, let's move it back to the setting at least of the novel.” I did that but then moved it into the contemporary period for various reasons, the main one being that if it was in the '70s, the explanation for Ray's mystery could much more easily be pinpointed to something socio-political, like legislation against gay people and the need to be secretive back then. I wanted there to be the very distinct possibility that Ray has chosen this way of living because it worked for his lifestyle and because it contained the erotic charge which is largely what he lives for. So that was one of the main reasons for updating the time period. But yeah, my approach to adaptation at the moment is unwieldy and scattergun, like, break it apart then put it back together, and fortunately Adam Mars Jones was totally happy with me doing whatever, whether he was going to be happy with the end product or not.

In terms of what you said about moving away from the time period and that requirement for secrecy, one thing that I liked about the film is that it's not a coming-out story. Colin is already out, and his parents are incredibly supportive, in fact they are actually his matchmakers and are desperate for him to meet a nice man. That was a refreshing dynamic to see.

Totally, yeah. There was never a version where there was any discussion about that. Personally, I'm just tired of seeing that narrative, and I thought it was interesting in this instance to go from the position of incredibly permissive parents to parents rejecting their son's version of gayness, because it's sort of the inverse of what you usually go from, parents rejecting their son's sexuality and then the arc is towards acceptance. I was interested in this question of, at what point do very liberal, very permissive parents say, "Actually your version of a relationship doesn't match up to what we think a good relationship is"? Where's the line between knowing what's good for their son and just mapping their own value systems onto him? Yeah, it seemed more original as a prospect to me.

Colin is a very open, heart-on-his-sleeve kind of character, but Ray is an enigma and he remains very closed off to us. What conversations did you have with Alexander about developing that character, because we see so little of his inner life?

None. It's true, none. The first thing we spoke about was how I didn't ever want to discuss a backstory with him. The things I wanted to discuss with him were all the practical aspects of what Ray did, what he had in his house, what leathers he wore and those kind of things. But while we didn't discuss backstory we did say, “Here's a moment where I want you to give us some interiority or give us some softness or something,” so there was a dimensionality to Ray's hardness. Again, there was never a version of the script where Ray explained why he was living in this extreme relationship structure, and I can't think of a version of that which would have satisfied me.

Did you explore this subculture and get a sense from people of what they get from this kind of relationship?

Yeah, for sure. I met a bunch of people and the strictness of their relationships varied, in terms of them being 24-7 or being more into doing a scene and then coming out of that dynamic, and it was interesting to see and hear the room for variety. Something which really stuck with me was meeting one sub who said they'd grown up feeling like they didn't excel at anything, and didn't have any status in the looks department, the social department or the intelligence department. In this dom-sub relationship, they’d found a way of feeling good about themselves because they were suddenly being prized for occupying the bottom rung of the hierarchy. It became a virtue. Rather than feeling like they were one of society's losers, it enabled them to make a virtue of what they felt to be their weaknesses, and I think there was something of Colin in that. Other than the barbershop quartet, he starts the film as someone who's without skills and doesn't have any obvious credentials, and then he finds a sense of purpose, so that definitely informed the writing of it.

That's interesting because with films like this, I find it hard to connect with the idea of the sub, and what people get from that relationship. When I was watching Colin’s first evening at Ray’s place there are all these levels of demeaning behaviour, and I found it so frustrating to watch him accept that. I'd never been able to fully comprehend what the sub gets out of that relationship.

I mean, I totally get why some people would watch it and think this is just degrading. For me personally, the idea of cooking someone breakfast to not get a thank you, that doesn't turn me on, but that said, I can totally understand why it would turn people on, particularly if you have desire for the person doing it. The fact that it's Ray, played by Alexander Skarsgård, who's telling Colin to do this, and Colin is someone who has possibly never been on a good date in his life, I think that creates a dynamic where you would suspend your usual your usual conditions. I guess there's a mutual responsibility in that you're doing some acts of service, but ultimately when Colin is with Ray, Ray is calling the shots, and I can definitely identify with the sense of freedom and comfort that comes from abrogating your own autonomy momentarily or permanently. You don't have to make choices for yourself, and that can be liberating for sure.

It's also notable that they just slip so easily into these roles and just go with it. There's never a proper discussion about what are the boundaries are or what are the safe words are, and that's where the dynamic can be abused.

For sure, yeah. It would be clear to anyone from the community, but it should be clear to everyone who watches the film, that this is not meant to be a model BDSM relationship at all. Ray is not a good dom. You know, he establishes some verbal concern in the first scene but there's no protocol established, there are none of the usual ways of safeguarding these relationships, and that's why I wanted to contrast Ray and Colin's relationship with some of the other biker-pillion pairs. You see this scene after they have the orgy and there's various versions of aftercare being exhibited, a lot of which are kind of tender and they're cuddling, and then Ray and Colin are sat apart and Colin's looking at Ray wanting a bit more. So yeah, I didn't want it to seem like I was offering up a blueprint for a relationship, and I wanted that question of whether Colin is being liberated by this or being abused by this to be a live question for the audience.

We should mention your intimacy coordinator, Robbie Taylor Hunt. Tell me about how you approach these scenes, because they are so integral to the film and I imagine it’s difficult logistically and emotionally to put these scenes together.

Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of time spent on that in the writing. For me, those scenes are the most interesting to write because you know that dialogue isn't going to be the catalyst to changes in action or in their dynamic. Trying to think of ways in which sexual manoeuvres or sexual shifts in status can create a shift in a character's mood or can tell the audience something about that character, I found that fascinating. So a lot of that work was on the page and then I brought in Robbie and we did a lot of work with the non-actors, all the bikers and people from the kink community, who weren't actors. Me and Robbie did a lot of work with them, getting them comfortable with the idea of the sex first, but also drawing on their own experiences to inform what they were doing in the sex scenes.

With Harry and Alex, their scenes have been written much more exactly on the page, so then it was just me, those two and Robbie going, okay, where can we add a detail here? How can we make the way Ray pulls out from Colin feel authentic? My biggest thing with sex scenes generally is that they don’t feel like sex scenes, they feel like gestures towards sex, which you get when you see hands clasped like this. That's why I told Robbie and the actors that we needed to avoid that kind of symbolism of sex and just get the clumsy reality.

That's the thing, because obviously you have to choreograph it very carefully, but you don't want it to feel choreographed, it has to maintain this awkward quality.

And Robbie's great at that because the way he works, it's very much not the “Right, move your knee here, four thrusts” kind of work. It's more like, let's map out the sex scene and then give the actors cues where they can trigger a shift in it. You're not just going “One, two, three,” you know, and I've seen those. It's an evolving art, isn't it, in terms of coordination. When I first started working with them it was more prescriptive and felt a little bit inhibiting, whereas now I didn't find it at all inhibiting.

Did you speak to any actors about these roles or their agents who were scared off by the content?

I spoke to some HODs [Heads of Departments] who were scared off by the content, but no, because Harry and Alex were the actors I wanted. So in this instance, no, but it's interesting because I have a friend who's just directed a film that had a queer narrative in it, but it was about a teacher shagging a 17-year-old. A lot of actors were unwilling to go into that territory, and it's a very different thing to what's going on in our film, but I think the fact that the sex in this is so extreme, or relatively extreme, it might liberate an actor who's worried about doing gay sex or something like that. It gives you permission to really go full throttle because it's the essential ingredient of the film, really. It doesn't have to be something which you worry about happening on this day and get nervous about putting it out there, because it's happening every other day.

I guess with a film like this you need to stay true to what the material is and not try to second-guess what the reaction is going to be on the internet or worry about how people will respond to things that they find weird or uncomfortable.

Yeah, and I did think about that sometimes. There was a super close-up of a bellend at one point and I think I took it out because I thought it's going to (a) make the audience laugh at the wrong moment in the scene, but (b) it's probably just going to become the image which defines the film. I didn't want that, absolutely.

How did you find the experience of directing a feature, as opposed to the shorts?

I found the writing a bit painful, because I'm a very slow, painful writer. I found the shooting bit fabulous, I loved it. I always found doing shorts painful during the shoot, but here, I had so many people around me, and when you direct a short you're also the car driver and all of that. I loved doing it over a longer stretch because you've got time to get comfortable with the actors, and by the end it felt very natural and easy. I was coming to work having slept the night before, which is good. In the edit, I worked with a great editor, Gareth Giles, but it was very long and anxiety-inducing, I didn't enjoy that. I didn't enjoy the psychological state I was in, but I've been lucky, because I was always told that producers-director relationships don't survive the first feature, and I'm still very good friends with both of my producers. I had a very young, eager, hungry team around me, and I'll hopefully continue to work with a lot of them. If I get to make more films I want to try as hard as I can to engender that same feeling of, “We really want to make this and make this great, and we all have stakes in it being good,” because it was such a fun set to be on.

You brought over some your crew from your shorts. Cinematographer Nick Morris is someone you’ve worked with a lot. What kind of conversations were you having with him about the look of the film? Did you have any kind of references in mind?

Yeah, obviously because I've known Nick for ages, we spoke about loads and loads. One reference which people probably won't see was Roma (2018), because there's quite a lot of slow developing shots, and there were more which we then cut up because of the pacing, but that camera language was a reference. Then there were a lot of photography references for the quality of light, I was really keen that the aesthetic didn't feel too varnished, it has enough of what I consider to be the real in it, so we looked at photography by Doug DuBois and all your usual documentary photographers. There’s one particular guy called Nick Waplington, who released this massive retrospective book. He's made Christmas scenes in particular, and the Smith house scenes were really influenced by his photography.

Do you know what you’ll be working on next?

I do, I'm writing a film for another director, I don't know if I can say yet who, and that's probably going to take me to the end of the year. I've got a new project with Element, which will hopefully be the next film I direct, and I'm going to write that early next year, so writing basically is the answer.

The part you hate.

I'm ready for that. Directing is wonderful, but I don't think I have the stamina to constantly be in the shooting, release phase of life.

And you like the idea of writing for other directors as well?

Yeah, I love it. I wrote a film for Oliver Hermanus, about Alexander McQueen, and that was my first experience of it, and I really enjoyed it. I found it a lot easier than writing for myself, actually.

Is the sumo wrestling idea over for you now?

Yeah, I think it’s too similar to Pillion. Sumos were here this week, do you know about that?

I know, at the Albert Hall. I was going to say, I saw the poster on the tube.

I felt like this is meant to be! It’s unbelievable. I'd forgotten how much I loved it, and also how electric it is as a spectator sport. There’s this weird dynamic to sumo tournaments, where it starts off so boring and gets more and more exciting as bigger guys come out, because it’s a bottom-to-top hierarchy, and by the end there's these 200kg guys just bashing into each other. But no, sumo sadly feels like it's dead in the water. Someone else can take that idea now.

Pillion is in cinemas on November 28th.

Steven Soderbergh on Jaws

When I spoke to Steven Soderbergh about his latest film Black Bag earlier this year, we spent some time at the end of the interview talking about Jaws. It was such a thrill to see how passionate he was about this film, which has remained a source of inspiration and fascination throughout his entire career. With Jaws celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, Soderbergh's enthusiastic appraisal of the film can be read that the BFI website now.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/steven-soderbergh-jaws-every-time-i-look-film-it-gets-better

Black Bag in Sight & Sound

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Steven Soderbergh to discuss his low-budget ghost movie Presence, and a few weeks ago I was privileged enough to have a follow-up conversation with him. This time we were talking about Black Bag, his slick and very enjoyable thriller about marriage between spies, which is material tailor-made for Soderbergh's style and sensibilities. He is always a terrific interviewee and you can read my piece on him in the April 2025 issue of Sight & Sound, which is on sale now.

Presence in Sight & Sound

I had the great pleasure of talking to Steven Soderbergh about his latest experiment Presence, a small-scale haunted house movie in which Soderbergh, as the camera operator, plays the role of the ghost. You can read my interview with him in the March 2025 issue of Sight & Sound, which is on sale now.

"Marty and I share Michael and his movies, we share that legacy, and both of us want to do everything we can to sustain it." - An Interview with Thelma Schoonmaker

For more than fifty years, Thelma Schoonmaker's name has been associated with two of the greatest filmmakers in cinema history. As Martin Scorsese's editor, she has played an integral role in an extraordinary body of work. She first edited Scorsese's Who's That Knocking at My Door in 1967, before union rules enforced a long separation. They reunited for Raging Bull in 1980 and she has subsequently cut every one of his films, including this year's magnificent Killers of the Flower Moon. Her work has earned her three Academy Awards to date, and her style has encompassed everything from the the drug-fuelled intensity of Goodfellas, to the elegant yearning of The Age of Innocence, the nightmarish mania of Bringing Out the Dead, the wild tonal swings of The Departed, and the overwhelming guilt and sadness of The Irishman.

The other director she has shared her life with is Michael Powell. They were introduced by Scorsese when he brought Powell to America in the late 1970s and they married in 1984, living together until his death in 1990 at the age of 85. During their time together, Schoonmaker helped Powell write and publish his wonderful autobiographies A Life in Movies and Million Dollar Movie, and since his passing, she and Scorsese have dedicated themselves to restoring and promoting his films – both the films he made with his partner Emeric Pressburger, under their banner The Archers, and the films he made alone. The fruits of that three-decade effort can be seen in the BFI's ambitious retrospective Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger, which involves nationwide screenings, screenings of new and archive prints, an exhibition and a number of book publications.

Thelma Schoonmaker was in London recently to promote the BFI season and present a number of events, and it was my great pleasure and privilege to spend time with her at the BFI Southbank to discuss her late husband's life and career.

There was a letter from Ian Christie in The Guardian the other day and he was talking about the Powell and Pressburger retrospective that the BFI held in the 1970s, which began the revival of their reputations.

Yes, it was very important. Marty came over and found Michael, I think in '75, and Ian was working with Marty too, showing him Powell and Pressburger films that he had never seen. That was an amazing retrospective, the first one. It was 38 films, I think. Then the Museum of Modern Art did a really big one in New York, after Marty started bringing Michael to America.

It's really shocking when you look back and contemplate just how forgotten they were before they started being rediscovered through these retrospectives. How do you account for that?

The more I'm here and talking to people, I've begun to see that when there was a big political change after the war, and the Labour government came in with the NHS and all these things, people thought that the films were old-fashioned and colonial, and they just threw the baby out with the bath water. It was terrible. I think the kitchen sink school is what most people knew, they just didn't know about these films. Somebody said to me it was considered almost a betrayal to look at them because they were 'colonial,' which they are not. They're about human beings around the world. Michael always said we should be making films for the world, not for Britain. I was once with him when he was on the stage answering questions, and somebody asked him, "What do you think about the terrible condition of the British film industry?" and Michael said, "Why should there be a British film industry? We should be making films for the world."

Of course, Emeric being European, and Michael having spent a great deal of time in France because of his father's hotel, he was interested in the world, he wasn't just interested in specific things, like the kitchen sink school was about. It was the end of the war, and maybe people had had enough of the war, and the films were made during the war, so maybe they just said, "I don't want to see any more of that, I've seen enough of that, let's move on." It was a terrible, terrible mistake and they suffered so badly, but Michael never became bitter and he kept on dreaming. He dreamed and wrote scripts for a hundred different ideas in the last thirty years of his life, which is astounding. He never gave up but it was a terrible blow and he was so financially strapped towards the end, when Marty came and found him.

I have to say, it's one of my favourite stories in film history, how Scorsese went and found this forgotten great director, brought him back to America, and then he met you and fell in love. It seems he got a whole new lease of life in this last decade and got the happy ending that he deserved.

Yes, and there's a wonderful picture of him in Seattle, where we had just screened I Know Where I'm Going! The audience went nuts, they were a very young audience, and Michael is standing like this [Thelma covers her face with her hands] because he's just so overwhelmed by this reaction! It's lucky that he did get to see it all come back. You know, he was an optimist and he had me put on his grave, 'Michael Powell: Film Director and Optimist,' and that's how he managed to survive these terrible years. Some people would have become bitter, I think.

Oh, most definitely, especially after the Peeping Tom reaction, which was so violent.

And I think that's because the critics couldn't handle feeling sympathy for him, it just flipped them out. Wait a minute, this man is a serial killer and I'm feeling sympathy for him? Michael described him as "attractive, gentle, sweet and completely mad," and that is such a powerful thing about the movie. He never made movies with heroes and villains, it was always something else in between, and that's the way Scorsese is. That's why these movies appeal to him, they are investigating things the way he does. It was a tragic thing but thank God we're living to see it come back, and he saw a lot of it come back.

It's interesting to look back at the reviews from even the celebrated Powell and Pressburger films from earlier. It seems like critics often struggled with these films and didn't quite know what to do with them.

Yeah, because they were unusual and they weren't telling you what to think – Marty hates that, when a movie is telling you what to think. They're full of surprises, they want you to engage. You know, how many films were these critics watching every week? They wanted something they could just write down, but here's this thing that's odd and very, very different, and they couldn't quite handle it. So Peeping Tom needed to be destroyed – this is evil, it's making us feel sympathy towards this killer – and they got so violent about it. Ian Christie says that some of the trade reviews were actually not bad and there was an internal memo about the movie, that Anglo-Amalgamated had hired somebody and he was very positive about the movie, but the distributors pulled it. Michael said, "I know the reviews are bad but leave it in the theatres, let's see what people think," and they didn't, and they should have, because maybe it would have survived.

He writes about that in his book, that he had more faith in the audience being grown-up enough to handle it than anybody else did.

That's right. He said, "I think the critics lead very sheltered lives." Now it's considered a masterpiece, you know? There was one print in America, I think some collector had it, and somehow that group of directors – Coppola, Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Lucas – they all saw the movie and knew about it when it wasn't available anywhere. Then Marty got it entered in the New York Film Festival, where it was a huge hit, and got it distributed in America very briefly.

It's always been a big presence in my life because when I first moved to London my office was right next to Newman Passage so I would think about Peeping Tom every time I went on my lunch break.

You know, he took Marty and me to Newman Passage. We had a wonderful dinner in his favourite restaurant, which was on Charlotte Street, and then walked over to Newman Passage, and that was so great for Marty.

I love reading Michael's memoirs and I know you spent many years in the 1980s helping him put those books together. What was that experience like for you?

Oh, it was so rich. What happened was, his eyesight began to fail from macular degeneration, he could see but he couldn't read. He wrote the first beautiful chapter of his childhood by hand, and it's a beautiful manuscript that I gave to Marty, I think it's actually at the BFI now. From that point on, I gave him a little recorder, and while I was editing, he would spend all day recording. No notes, he had to keep this all in his brain, I don't know how he did the structure of the book that way. Anyway, it was a thrill for me. I would transcribe what he dictated, and then on Sundays, our favourite day, we would never get out of our bathrobes and I would read back to him what he had written that week. We would construct it, edit it a bit, and it was a thrill to be sharing that with him.

There were times when both of us would break down. His mother was a great influence on him, she loved art of any form, and she made an artist out of Michael. At one point, she had never been to Stonehenge, and she was on a bike with Michael behind her, I think he was around ten. They were pedalling towards Stonehenge and there was a terrible storm, and she looked back at her son and she decided that she would never get to Stonehenge and she turned around. Michael and I would just burst into tears! So it was a thrill to work with him on it, and he's such a good writer, he could have been a writer instead of a film director except his mother took him to a silent film, and that was it! [Laughs]

That was also a very prolific period for you and Scorsese, so it must have been hard to balance that work with helping Michael produce these two very dense books.

It was hard, but of course Marty would do anything for Michael Powell, anything. He was also terribly important in getting it published in America. It was published here first, but the first volume was published in America by Knopf with a very great editor Robert Gottlieb, who has just died, but the person who took over from him just refused to do the second volume. Marty and I found somebody who would possibly publish it, we had him for lunch and we talked up Michael Powell, and the second volume got published by another publishing house. So Marty was always there for Michael, and I must say working on the book was heaven, it was a great thing to share. Marty and I share Michael and his movies, we share that legacy, and both of us want to do everything we can to sustain it. To be working as an editor on Killers of the Flower Moon and often talking about Michael Powell, to see if we can do this or get that done, it's pretty wonderful.

Scorsese also used Powell as a consultant on a lot of his movies in that period. I love the letter Powell wrote to Scorsese with his notes on the Goodfellas script. It must have been a year or so before he died but you can sense his enthusiasm and how fired up he still was by the business of making movies.

Well, he is responsible for it getting made. What happened was, on a Sunday when we had been working on the book, I had been talking to him about how Marty couldn't sell Goodfellas because the studio said you have to take the drugs out. He said, “That's the whole story, I can't take the drugs out!” and he was very depressed because he had tried over and over again. So Michael said, read me the script, so I read him the script, and he said, "Get Marty on the phone." I did and he said, "Marty, you have to make this movie, it's the best script I have read in twenty years. You have to do it." Marty went in one more time and sold it, and then Michael didn't live to see it, which was very sad. You know, he thought Mean Streets was a masterpiece and he would say to me as we were walking down the streets of New York, "Why isn't Mean Streets playing somewhere every day of the year here? This is an outrage!" [Laughs]

Scorsese has often talked about how Powell and Pressburger films influenced his lighting and framing of shots. As an editor, how were you influenced by them? I am always particularly taken aback by the beauty and imagination of the transitions in their films.

Yes, very much so. Scorsese is a great editor, he taught me everything I know. He is always thinking about transitions and he loved the transitions in the Powell and Pressburger films. We often think about them just for the influence of mood when making our films. The one important thing that Michael Powell said to us was, "Never explain," and that's what has happened in Killers of the Flower Moon. Marty said, "I am not making a documentary about the Osage nation, it's got to be something different with them completely involved." Michael also said that you have to always stay ahead of your audience because they are ahead of you, so what we love is that there is no explanation, there are surprises all the time. He's pulling you ahead as an audience, he respects you, and therefore he is willing to give you challenges that might make a studio say, "Oh no, that's too much." I mean, we fight that battle on every movie! But I'll never forget that from Michael...never explain.

He really loved Marty's films. He gave us the ending for After Hours and I'm sure you've read that he said to Marty that there was something wrong with the red gloves when he was watching the video of Raging Bull, and Marty said it had to be black-and-white. We had so much trouble with fundamentalists when we were making Last Temptation, we actually had bodyguards on Marty at that time. We screened our rough cuts quite a few times, and we'd recut and talk to people, and finally he allowed Michael to see it. Michael stood up at the end and there were tears running down his face. I looked at Marty sitting beside me, and I thought, Oh my God, what a gift! He was always there for Marty even in some troubled times.

Well, one of the key ideas in Michael's career is that art is worth fighting for.

Oh, absolutely.

It reminds me of a great bit in 49th Parallel where Leslie Howard is beating up a Nazi and as he punches him he's shouting, "That's for Picasso! That's for Matisse!" It's a funny scene but I think it represents something that he believed in.

That's right. When he made Peeping Tom he knew that it was daring. He always wanted to be ahead of his time and making something new and fresh and interesting, but he knew that if you were someone like that you were out on a limb and you could be easily sawed off, and that's what happened. He said, "I would rather be sawed off than be conventional," and that was very gutsy. He had seen great artists destroyed, you know, like Rex Ingram, Louis B. Mayer destroyed Rex Ingram. Michael adored Ingram and his brilliance. He was in LA when Black Narcissus got an Oscar for cinematography and he went to see Ingram, who hadn't made a movie in years. He was saddened to see him that way, but he knew because he was brave and daring, that's what happens.

Powell and Pressburger had their own battles in Hollywood with The Elusive Pimpernel and Gone to Earth. It must have been so hard for Michael to have his vision constrained in that way, because they had enjoyed such freedom in the 40s.

Exactly, and Marty says that during the war it was the most subversive period in filmmaking ever in a major studio, because nobody paid any attention to them. They were commercially viable except for A Canterbury Tale, so J. Arthur Rank just let them go until he saw The Red Shoes and that was it. He said it was terrible, he tried to kill it, and then it became one of the largest grossing movies ever. It was a very accidental thing that the war came at the same time so they were left alone, I mean, Marty is very jealous of that! We've had to fight so hard. We've fought on almost every movie, not the last couple, against some really stupid ideas, and we fight to the death.

One reason they were commercially viable was because they worked on quite modest budgets, and that's so hard to believe when you watch the movies. I mean, I don't think any film has ever evoked infinity like A Matter of Life and Death does. When I watch these films I often have no idea how they achieved what they did.

I know! Even the opening shot. We do visual effects all the time now, but how did they do that then without digital? Their budgets were terribly low, Michael only shot one take, and if you screwed up he could be rather nasty. But because they did only one take that meant they had less in the editing room than someone like Scorsese, who might do five or six and together we decide. They were very lucky, but boy, they paid so dearly later.

A lot of the conversation around The Archers tends to focus on a handful of great films. If there was one lesser known title you'd push people to see, what would it be?

I think Gone to Earth is one. Selznick was notorious for meddling and so he would send endless notes every day, which Michael would have his assistant put in a drawer, he never read them. But they knew from the experience with Goldwyn to put in the contract that if he didn't like the movie, they could have their own version. Now Kino Lorber has put out a blu-ray with The Wild Heart on the front cover and I'm so angry! That's not the authentic movie. Of course, we want to restore Gone to Earth but Selznick cut into the original negative and I don't know if we can ever get it back together, but that's one I would recommend to people.

I am looking forward to watching it this weekend on 35mm.

Not The Wild Heart!

No, I’m definitely watching Gone to Earth. There is actually a screening of The Wild Heart later in the season. I've never seen that cut, and I'm curious about it.

I've never seen it, I have to admit. In the documentary that we're making, we found a Canadian interview that nobody knew about with Michael and Emeric, and in it Michael says that when Selznick would come on the set, Jennifer Jones would throw things at him because she didn't want him telling her what she should do. She's terrific in the movie. I haven't seen much of her Hollywood stuff, but I'll bet you this is the best work she ever did, and she loved doing it.

I am so excited about Black Narcissus on nitrate as well. That's my personal favourite and I have been waiting for so many years to see it on a nitrate print.

Oh, it's incredible! I encouraged them to bring it because it really is stunning. There's nothing like nitrate, that silver. It's brilliant. Oh, it's so good that you have a ticket. I bet that has sold out.

Oh yeah, I had to be so quick to book it.

Isn't it wonderful, that the tickets are going so well? Sharing it with people too, Michael always said to me, "I didn't make my movies for someone to sit alone at home and watch them." When we did The Red Shoes restoration it was wonderful to be with people watching it, and I just think it's so great to have this celebration. Something has changed with the young people today, I've noticed. Ian Christie tells me they know the movies and they love them. Recently Scorsese interviewed Joanna Hogg for The Eternal Daughter and I went and there were these huge lines of young people, all under 25. I was one of the two grey heads in that audience! So something is happening, and it's so good to see.

Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger is running at the BFI and at cinemas nationwide until the end of the year.