"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

"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.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a portrait of three women who live in the shadow of their family’s patriarch. The film opens with Iman (Missagh Zareh) being appointed as an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran; it's a role that will earn him a significantly higher salary and allow him to move his family to a bigger house in a better community. Iman has toiled as a lawyer for years and sees this as his overdue reward, but his more high-profile role comes with dangers. “You must be irreproachable,” his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) warns their teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki).

Read the rest of my review at The Skinny

Hard Truths

We’ve all had days when you wake up in a funk and feel like everyone was put on earth specifically to antagonise you, but that’s every day for Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the protagonist in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths.

Read the rest of my review at The Skinny

"It's not deeply thought-out politics, just surface-level G7 stuff, because that seems to be what the G7 is about." - An Interview with Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson

The first thing you’ll probably notice about the new Guy Maddin film is that it doesn’t look much like a Guy Maddin film. For more than three decades, Maddin’s signature has been his delirious adoption of early cinema aesthetics allied to a surreal sense of humour, but Rumours – which Maddin co-directed with regular collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson – looks shockingly like an ordinary movie. This is no ordinary film, however, and beyond the deceptively placid surface there is all manner of weirdness to contend with. Set at the annual G7 summit, where the world’s most powerful people meet to discuss the pressing issues of the day, the film casts these world leaders adrift in a genuine crisis that their diplomatic skills have left them woefully unprepared for. As they attempt to draft a joint statement on this unspecified apocalyptic scenario, these increasingly ragged politicians spend much of Rumours wandering aimlessly in the fogbound forest, encountering bizarre situations that could only have come from the minds of Maddin and the Johnsons. Rumours is consistently surprising and hilarious, and it will hopefully draw a whole new audience to this unique filmmaker's work. I met Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson at this year's London Film Festival to discuss it.

I just saw the poster outside and I like that you've got "The official motion picture of the G7" as the tagline on there.

Guy Yeah, we just made this claim. We were surprised that our distributor let us say that.

I was wondering if you’d have to get clearances for something like that.

Evan No, there's a joke at the beginning of the movie that we consulted with the leaders in the making of it, and I think we got a note from one distribution person who suggested that you can't say that. But we said it!

Guy I say, G7 lawyer up!

I've been a fan of your work for a very long time, but I never imagined I'd see one of your films getting a wide release with a Universal logo at the start. It feels kind of crazy.

Guy It does, I have to admit I'm in total agreement with you there. But it's a very pleasant feeling. It feels like a strange dream.

You guys have been working together for around a decade now.

Guy A little more, yeah.

Has the process changed at all?

Evan I think the process always starts the same way and the reason the outcome looks different this time is simply because of the subject matter that we chose. Guy is someone who has an established style – although it has changed over the years, it should be said, it was different in the aughts than it was in the early 90s in certain rhythmic and textural ways – but he's always up for wanting to try new things. It's almost shocking to me, it's kind of inspiring.

Guy Yeah, there's no way to justify using archaic, early part-talkie film vocabulary units in something set in the present. I did a bit of that in My Winnipeg where I was mixing memory with present day and fear of the future and stuff, so I had an excuse. I also wanted the challenge of going...the word 'normie' isn't right, but just something that would have fewer alienating effects.

Galen Or alienating effects located in different places.

Guy Oh yeah, it's still plenty alienating.

I mean, it has been described as your most accessible film, but it's still a film that has masturbating zombies, so I guess accessibility is graded on a different scale.

Guy Well that's where the door opens wide. That's the audience to go for. Come on in everyone, plenty of room in here!

So how does the scripting process work? Evan, you've got the sole screenplay credit, but obviously you guys collaborate to develop the story, so what's the process for putting this together?

Evan Everything comes out of the fact that we spend a lot of time together watching movies and just working on stuff. There's stuff that doesn't get off the ground, scripts that bloom and then collapse, and we throw them away. The G7 idea was a subplot in another script we had, and when we decided we were actually going to write this movie we had already talked about the G7 a lot, we'd even written some scenes. I have the sole screenwriting credit because I wrote most of it, but things that these guys wrote and said in previous versions definitely snuck in here and there. We talked about the plot trajectory, we knew where it was going to go, we talked about the characters. I'm the one who wrote the dialogue, because it's really hard to write dialogue in a group, I think.

Guy Yeah, he wrote the dialogue, and I think the credit exactly reflects what happened. We discussed the story, he went away, and he came back with pages of the script.

Evan Especially with seven characters, you need to get the momentum going, because you can turn your brain off a little bit.

Guy You went into a trance, it seemed like.

Evan Well, the dialogue came up very quick, like pages and pages and pages and pages per day.

Guy In real time!

Evan Because they were talking to themselves. Once you get the characters and their names – we were actually talking in another interview about how important names are, like, if you misname a character, I think you're doomed, it sucks. But if you get the right names, you're just ready to go, and we felt we knew these people because of their names. Like, we had the nationalities as well, which also helps, and character is more than just nationality and name, but you have to start somewhere and you learn. It was really nice to just learn from the characters where we are going rather than telling them where to go. That's sort of how it was written. That's why it has an ambling quality, right? I don't think there was another way for us to do it.

Guy So the names came first, with the exception of our Canadian Prime Minister, as I recall now. I can't remember what his name used to be, but we already had a starting point because the part was written with the actor Roy Dupuis in mind, and we knew who he was. I think we were told by some clearance lawyer or something that his last name had to change, but his first name, I think, stayed the same. I can't remember what it was, but they did a search and found out there were five really litigious people in the world with exactly the same name, so we had to change it. I was annoyed, but I now can't remember what that name was.

I guess when you're making a film about the G7, there's the temptation for the audience to look at it and try to identify the metaphors and the allegories. You make a joke about that with the French President trying to come up with his own allegories for what's going on, but was that something you were conscious of and perhaps trying to steer away from?

Galen Yes, absolutely trying to steer away from it.

Evan Steer away from it, and yet it's sort of like the steering away is the subject, like a failure to cohere in meaning or something is what the movie is about. That seems a bit cheap, like you can always say, “the theme of the movie is bad movies.”

Galen But it's right there in the title, Rumours. It's like, nothing is confirmed.

Evan Yeah, exactly. We wanted the neoliberal hollowing out that is G7 summits, the empty spectacle and how to make an engaging movie about that, but it means you kind of have to avoid meaning when you can in creative ways. Or you can goad people, like, tempt people into thinking, is this a symbol? No, it isn't. And sometimes it is! That's the other thing. There are obvious things in there that are metaphors. There are big, clunky, obvious metaphors symbols in the movie, and yet at times we try to deny that that's true.

Guy Yeah, at times the movie takes on a colouring book-like simplicity.

That's how you get the big audience.

Guy It's called pandering. Feed them a bit more colouring book.

You’ve talked about moving away from the silent era or early talkie style and you've gone for more of a B-movie vibe here. You can also definitely feel the influence of Buñuel in this picture. Were you looking at any particular films or directors for inspirations as you were making this?

Galen I think for the opening stretch we just wanted to base it in reality, so we were sort of inspired by the YouTube videos of G7 summits that we saw. A colour palette that was very flag-like, sort of bright and primary, and then once night falls, the fog does the heavy lifting of the atmosphere. I guess that's what suggests B-movies like John Carpenter or something like that.

Evan I guess it's quite soft. There's a lot of soft glow in the movie, soft focus. A little bit of soap opera. There’s a kind of purplish haze, some sickly colours, unnatural colours, I guess, which aren't very Buñuel. I mean when Bunuel shoots in colour, it's quite... It's pretty drab. It's stark.

The Buñuel influence feels more present in the theme of the film. These absurd characters trapped and wandering in circles.

Evan Yeah, and he's a favorite director of ours. I've said it before, but I'm always nervous to even mention his name because I don't want to presume that we're in his company, but he's definitely an inspiring figure. The Exterminating Angel in particular, the circular wandering of that movie indoors, and then obviously Discreet Charm has some great outdoor wandering as well. He's a filmmaker who is an expert in frustration, and I think frustration was on our minds, as it always is making movies. It's so frustrating.

One of the other big differences for you guys in this is that most of your previous films are made on these very artificial sets, whereas here you're on location, you're out in the woods. How did you adjust to that? It’s quite a different way of making movies.

Guy Yeah, I didn't adjust well at first. These location scouts are like forever and you don't even see your location because you’re scouting during the day, but we shoot at night with fog, so it looks completely different. It's tricky, but it's so expensive to build a forest in a studio that doesn't look super chintzy.

Evan We got lucky with some of our forest locations that look like sets, like there's one where you bathe it in purple light and then it doesn't really look like a real forest, it looks like a soap opera set.

Guy Yeah, that's where we were most comfortable.

Galen Strangely, even though the forests are huge and incredibly detailed, because they're real, it didn't even look like an expensive set.

Evan You're cheap in nature, that's the goal. Yeah, Guy didn't enjoy the scouting process.

Guy I don't like scouting. But I was sceptical that at night any of this stuff would make any difference, like, picking one patch here and then another patch 40 miles away.

Galen Well, I think it would make a difference, you just don't know what the difference would be.

Guy Plus my thighs were sweating. I was allergic to something.

Evan But a couple of the forest locations were perfect. We loved them.

Guy No, no. I stand corrected. Scouting made a big difference. When you fill everything with fog it makes no difference, but we always wait for the fog to blow away or have no fog at all.

Evan If we had the money and the logistics were simpler, we would have shot it all in a set, probably. Some other script maybe.

How do you work with actors? You’ve got an ensemble of very different actors here and in terms of having three directors on set, how do you communicate what you want with them?

Guy It ended up being easier in this case. One person would talk to the actors most of the time, and that was Evan in this case, for whatever reason, maybe his temperament and the way he got along with the actors. I was worried that with three directors there the actors might be like spoiled children and play one director against the other, but that was never a problem. These people were really wonderful and they consulted with each other a lot.

Evan I think you talked to the actors as much as I did, you just didn't talk about the movie or the previous take. It wasn't like specific to the scene or anything.

Guy Yeah, I made a point of getting to know them, it would get them in the spirit. But where most of our directing together happened was when we were at the monitors together watching a take and talking about whether we liked it or not. Then maybe I would go out and talk to the DOP about the look of something, but I think in the director on actor thing it was mostly Evan. Galen and I were concerned with the many other things to be concerned about.

Galen And also sometimes you guys would just give me a mission. You'd say, “I don't know if I like that. So go tell Charles [Dance] this.”

Guy Yeah, because we were terrified of Charles.

I want to ask you about some of the actors in particular. You said you wrote the role of the Canadian Prime Minister for Roy Dupuis. I know him from The Forbidden Room but I don't really know him from much else. I believe he's a much bigger star in Canada.

Guy In French Canada.

Galen He's medium-big in English Canada too but in French Canada he's enormous, like Brad Pitt.

Guy He's literally had to move out to the country to be less harassed, or just not harassed at all.

And this idea of portraying him as a heroic ladies man, this kind of alpha-male lothario, is that an expression of Canadian pride?

Guy It was in casting him. He just showed up with a man bun!

Evan We wrote for him and we know him a little, but we didn't know him super well. We just wrote what we thought Roy would be like as a Prime Minister.

Guy And he could run for Prime Minister and sweep Quebec.

Evan It's another character where you give him the name and the haircut and he writes himself and you follow him wherever he goes. It's always funny. We're Canadians and we're used to needing a Canadian star for our government financing, and Roy is our favourite Canadian star. We knew we wanted him to be a kind of leader and the idea that Canada would be leading was funny because we're like the 7th most important G7 country. Although interestingly – or possibly not interestingly – Canada was invited to the G7 under Pierre Trudeau, because Pierre Trudeau was the most bilingual world leader in French and English and they wanted someone who could help lead the group, so Canada was added.

Guy And he was actually charismatic.

Evan He was a forceful world leader so he was sort of the alpha of the group. He had more experience than the others. Was it Gerald Ford? I think it was Gerald Ford at the time.

Guy He was busy tripping up stairs all the time.

Evan So there's some historical truth to the idea, but for us it was a joke about Canada.

As ridiculous as the film is I got the sense that you've done a fair bit of research on G7 history. There's a lot of references to historical speeches in the film and G7 trivia. It seems like you’re authorities on the subject now.

Evan Yeah, we wanted the movie to be full of G7 inside jokes, G7-specific language.

Galen Not politics, but just the surface of the G7.

Evan It's not deeply thought-out politics, just surface-level G7 stuff, because that seems to be what the G7 is about. It’s very surface-level, almost like beauty pageants. But yeah, there's a lot of surface-level research rather than deep thinking about policy or anything, because I don't think there's much deep thinking about policy that goes on with these summits.

That's the thing that makes me wonder why there hasn't been a film on this subject before, because it is so much about the image and the pageantry. I remember there was an article a few years ago talking about how all these conservative politicians did a kind of power stance with their legs apart. It looked so comical and you wonder, do they not realise how it comes across?

Guy No, but it's intentional, it's performative. These leaders didn't grow up with these power stances, they go to power stance school like they went to charm school, baby-kissing school, flesh-pressing school. Yesterday I was doing an interview with Cate, who actually has a lot of experience hobnobbing with world leaders and politicians at the UN summits and things like that, and she's obviously an observer of people, and she's just convinced that these people learn these performative tricks the moment they decide to enter politics. I wonder if there are just people you can hire.

Evan They hire body language experts, don't they?

Guy I'm sure. “Don't make your face too big.” That's like when Justin Trudeau adopted the Korean stance, the wide stance, to make himself shorter so he could be the same height. It's an act of courtesy to your Korean host to make yourself the same height as them so sometimes that means spreading your legs about six feet apart.

Galen Yeah, it caused a kerfuffle back home in the Canadian media. What the heck is he doing? He's actually just being deferential to his hosts.

Guy So the performative has different vernaculars in different countries.

Another actor I loved in the film was Denis Ménochet. He’s always great but we’re so used to seeing him play these intimidating, taciturn kind of characters, and it’s so much fun to see an actor like him cut loose in a way I haven't really seen before. How did you arrive at the choice to cast him in this role?

Galen With him, we thought he was brilliant and he came highly recommended and we were like, this guy can do this. He can just do it. We'll hope it works. And we were not disappointed at all. That guy is a genius.

Guy Ari Aster recommended him and we quickly got enthusiastic about it, and then he went beyond anything we expected, not just on screen but in prep. His character is revealed as being obsessed with building Western Europe's largest sundial, and Denis, in prep for the role, wrote a really beautiful essay on sundials, in character.

Galen Not to include in the movie, just to get into the character. It was really something.

Evan He's a very fun actor to work with. He's very different. Charles always refers to himself as an actor for hire, no fuss, he'll just say the lines and he nails them. If you want him to say the line a little faster, you say, “a little faster, Charles,” and he says, “Right-o,” and does it. But Denis is not like that. If you want Denis to say a line faster and you ask him to say the line faster, he says, “What? Like…what? What?!” and then the next take is ruined because he's looking at you like, “Fast?!” You have to speak to him, not quite in character, but you do have to be like, “Can you believe he said that, Denis? He said that to you. Are you going to take that?” and then he gets riled up. He's always unpredictable and very intuitive.

The film suddenly feels very current with the idea of an AI chatbot being so central to the climax.

Galen No, it was not really as hot a couple of years ago when we wrote this. This was pre-Chat GPT blowing up that we wrote this, and then that blew up and we're like…oh God. It seems like we're bandwagon jumping now.

Evan It came just quite naturally. I think we needed like a late second act turn to send some of them back to the house, the chateau. You need that setback. I think it came out of like a writing session where we were like, what if they get a text that says help? Well, who would send the text? And then the chatbot came out of that. It was just a practical. Of course, now it definitely seems like a sexual entrapment chatbot is the kind of thing that might end the world, and it's a nice stupid way for humanity to end. We thought it was fitting. But no, I think in fact we're always a little nervous when there’s something of the moment, we’re like, oh no, that means in six months it's going to be dated badly. But hopefully not.

And finally, Guy, I know you've been working on 4K restorations for some of your earlier films. I think you've done Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Archangel.

Guy And Careful, my third feature, is going to be restored.

What's it like going back to these films that you made decades ago and working on them again?

Guy I thought it would be worse because I really don't like watching my old movies much. They're just huge inventories of regrets and mistakes and things like that, and then the end credits are like reading cenotaphs of dead and lost friends and failed relationships, they're all accusing me of a life misled. But actually going in and getting a chance to bring out details that I had long ago forgotten, or had disappointed me by not being visible, just with colour correction and things like that, it's been richly rewarding. It’s a little bit terrifying sometimes because a lot of the work is done before I come in, and so there'll be a young colourist who'll have worked on the movie for two weeks, but someone who has never seen a film before. “So I dialled out all that grain…”

Galen The idea of restoring a Guy Maddin a movie is kind of funny.

Guy I know, I remember thinking they were restoration proof, and now here I am!

Evan Didn't someone take out the audio ambient piece?

Guy Yeah, which I went to a lot of trouble to put in! That was on Archangel, all the optical crackle was removed, and on Gimli Hospital all the film grain was removed. So it actually took a lot out of me, I was getting really exasperated.

When I spoke to you before, you said that you'd always tended to go back and re-edit your films to make them shorter. Your ideal director's cuts would always be shorter.

Guy Always, no, that is true.

Did you have the urge to go back and tinker with these?

Guy I tightened those restorations up a little bit.

Evan Gimli Hospital's a little shorter. Is Archangel a little shorter?

Guy Yep, shorter by few minutes. I didn't remove any scenes or anything, just tightened the pace.

Galen So many dozens of fades to black...

Guy I was obsessed with just the narcotic pleasure I got from a very long, slow fade to…not to black, but to a milky grey, and then with the audio equivalent of milky grey playing. I tightened some of those up, because three seconds of those at a time does just as well as twenty seconds, so I was able to shorten them.

There’s only so much milky grey that people can take, I guess.

Guy Yeah, I took six minutes out of it, and it still reads like there's too much milky grey.

Rumours is released in UK cinemas on December 6th

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

1960 has been described as The Year of Africa, as a wave of political change spread across the continent and led to 17 nations declaring independence. Among the most contentious of these was the case of the Congo, which announced its determination to emerge as a free nation under the leadership of the charismatic Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on June 30th. Three days before losing control of its colony, Belgium privatised the Union Minière mine, the prime source of the country’s enormous potential wealth, and within seven months Lumumba would be assassinated following a Belgium-backed coup d’état. So much for independence.

Read the rest of my review at Little White Lies

Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases

Numerous actors have portrayed Sherlock Holmes on the big screen over the course of the past century, but nobody comes close to Eille Norwood, who starred as Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary sleuth in 45 shorts and two features for Stoll Pictures between 1921 and 1923. The entire Stoll Collection of Sherlock Holmes films is currently being restored by the BFI, and the first fruits of that invaluable effort were screened at this year’s London Film Festival Archive Gala, which took place in the suitably Victorian surroundings of Alexandra Palace.

Read the rest of my review in Sight & Sound

A Beginner's Guide to Marielle Heller in the London Film Festival

The London Film Festival is around the corner again, and I'm excited to be a part of the programme this year. I'm a great admirer of Marielle Heller's films The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and on October 15th I'll be presenting The Beginner's Guide to Marielle Heller, in which I'll be talking through the different qualities she has shown in each of her films to date. This is an opportunity to get acquainted with Heller's work ahead of the UK premiere of her new feature Nightbitch, and as it's part of the LFF For Free programme, it won't cost you a penny! More details of the event can be found here.

That They May Face the Rising Sun

“Does anything happen, or is it the usual heavy going?” a novelist is asked about his latest book in That They May Face the Rising Sun. “Not much drama,” he replies, “more day-to-day stuff.” This response acts as a wry self-commentary on Pat Collins’s film. That They May Face the Rising Sun is concerned with the everyday lives of a small group of characters in a lakeside village in the west of Ireland. A few things do happen in the film – a wedding, a death – but there is little in the way of standard drama and conflict, and no firm narrative shape beyond the passage of time and the changing of the seasons.

Read the rest of my review in Sight & Sound

Fallen Leaves

Coming six years after Aki Kaurismäki announced his retirement from filmmaking, Fallen Leaves feels like a return to very familiar territory. The director’s last two features were unusually explicit in their commentary on the social issues of our time, with both Le Havre (2011) and The Other Side of Hope (2017) engaging directly with Europe’s migrant crisis. Kaurismäki’s new film harkens back to the small-scale stories of ordinary Finns with which he made his reputation; in fact, it has been labelled a belated fourth instalment of his Proletariat Trilogy, which consists of Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990).

That’s not to suggest Kaurismäki is turning away entirely from current events. In Fallen Leaves, every time Ansa (Alma Pöysti) switches on the radio, she hears another grim update from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that weighs heavily on the Finnish psyche thanks to the country’s shared border with Russia. The precarious state of labour rights in the modern world is also at the forefront of Kaurismäki’s thoughts here. Ansa works as a supermarket shelf-stacker until she is reprimanded for giving expired food to a homeless man and taking a microwave meal home for herself rather than throwing it into the garbage as instructed. Employed on a zero-hours contract, Ansa is summarily dismissed with no compensation – and it was perhaps serendipitous that on the same day this reviewer watched Fallen Leaves, the Central Organisation of Finnish Trade Unions (SAK) began a series of strike actions in protest at the newly elected right-wing government’s proposed changes to workers’ rights and welfare benefits.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

Peeping Tom: inside the restoration of Michael Powell’s shocking serial killer drama

If you associate Michael Powell with lush Technicolor dreams or spirited love stories and adventures, then Peeping Tom (1960) will undoubtedly come as a shock. Made three years after he and Emeric Pressburger parted company, Powell’s portrait of a serial killer stars Karlheinz Böhm as the young cameraman who murders women with the sharpened end of his tripod while capturing their agonised final moments on film. The way Powell implicates the viewers’ own voyeurism makes it a uniquely disturbing and provocative experience.

When critics saw Peeping Tom, the response was instant and vitriolic. The film was an aberration, a stain on the reputation of its great director, and the best thing for everyone would be for it to be disposed of and forgotten as quickly as possible. As Michael Powell wrote in his memoirs, the film’s producers gave the critics what they wanted: “They yanked the film from the Plaza, they cancelled the British distribution, and they sold the negative to an obscure black-marketeer of films who tried to forget it, and forgotten it was, along with its director, for twenty years.”

Thankfully, Powell lived to see the critical tide turn on Peeping Tom, and in the years since the director’s death in 1990, its reputation has continued to grow, as has much of Powell and Pressburger’s body of work, thanks in part to the ongoing promotion and restorations undertaken by his friend and admirer Martin Scorsese and Powell’s widow Thelma Schoonmaker. It was Scorsese who spearheaded the rediscovery of Peeping Tom, getting it screened to wide acclaim at the New York Film Festival in 1979 and re-released the following year. He brought Powell over to share in the new reactions to the film, paying for the flight to New York, which Powell couldn’t otherwise have afforded.

“To create anything, whether it’s writing or painting or music or dance or cinema, you have to be obsessed,” says Scorsese. “But one can cross the line into danger, easily. Michael Powell didn’t just understand that danger – he lived it. And he actually expressed it in cinematic terms.

“Unlike The Red Shoes, set in the grand world of high culture, Peeping Tom is set at the rock bottom level of low culture, with a protagonist who has already crossed the line. On a plot level, it’s about a serial killer who murders women as he films them. On a deeper level, it’s a portrait of self-destruction by means of cinema – the lenses are scalpels, the splices real cuts that bleed, the celluloid razor wire, and the light of the projector blinding.”

This year, Peeping Tom will be back in the spotlight with a new 4K restoration by The Film Foundation and the BFI National Archive in association with StudioCanal. Ahead of its premiere at the London Film Festival, I spoke to some of the other key players involved in the restoration to find out what goes into such a project.

Read the rest of my article at Sight & Sound

The Future Tense Review

A flight from London Stansted to Dublin Airport takes around 75 minutes. It’s a routine journey that the Irish-born, London-based filmmakers Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor have taken plenty of times, but something about this one feels different. “The ever-present noises of populism and nationalism have moved to the foreground, impossible to ignore,” says Lawlor. While the motivation for this trip is to scout locations for a film, they are also exploring the possibility of a new home in Ireland. As they weigh their growing discomfort with the UK against their ambivalent feelings towards their homeland, their position in the clouds over the Irish Sea is an apt metaphor for their state of being – halfway between two islands, and not entirely sure where they belong.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound

The Swimmers Review

Many athletes have overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve their dreams of competing at the Olympic Games, but few can tell a story to match Yusra Mardini’s. Having fled war-torn Syria in August 2015, Yusra and her sister Sarah embarked on a dangerous smugglers’ route across the Aegean Sea in a flimsy dinghy with eighteen other refugees. When the boat’s motor failed and it began taking on water, the two sisters tethered themselves to the craft and swam towards land, hauling their fellow refugees behind them for three hours. It was an astonishing feat of endurance and survival, and the fact that Yusra then went on to swim at Rio 2016 – a stateless competitor in the newly formed Refugee Olympic Team – is the kind of happy ending that only the most shameless screenwriter would dream up.

Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound