Cambridge Film Festival - director interviews

26 | September 19, 2013 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

WHAT’S ON Cambridge Film Festival Festival Choice ɀ The Fifth Season (Belgium, 2012) In a small farming village in the Ardennes forest, the pace of life is slow and comfortable and the seasons come and go. Until, suddenly, they don’t. At a seasonal local festival held to usher out winter and welcome in spring, the worrying signs begin when the bonfire with which ‘Uncle Winter’ is customarily banished fails to light. Soon, there are far graver oddities afoot: trees fall, crops will not grow, cows give no milk, and the seasonal cycle appears to have stopped dead. Paranoia and hostility breeds in the community, alienating friends and neighbours, and casting suspicion on local drifter Pol and his son. Striking imagery abounds, and while The Fifth Season maintains a level of confounding inscrutability, the visual poetry and the procession of curious, elemental symbolism ensures that it remains a stimulating, enigmatic watch right up to its startling climax.

Saturday, Sept 21, 6.30pm (Cineworld), Tuesday, Sept 24, noon. ɀ Folie A Deux – A Madness Made Of Two (UK, 2012) This documentary is a quintessentially English tale with a universal message. Shot over five years, set in Gray’s Court, York – the oldest house in England – this film is an intimate portrayal of Helen Heraty’s crusade to restore the house with all the ups and downs of daily life, and at the heart of the UK financial crisis. An intriguing insight into England’s history, and a nail-biting journey through the economic crash and the biggest gamble of her life as she fights all around her. This is the human cost of the banking crisis. Director Kim Hopkins and Helen Heraty will attend the screening and talk about the film.

UK premiere. Friday, Sept 20, 5.30pm. ɀ For Those In Peril (Australia, 2013) When his brother and four other local fisherman are drowned in a storm, and he alone is rescued, Aaron (Mackay) is left with a huge burden. Numb with survivor’s guilt, and increasingly ostracised by the Scottish fishing village whose loved ones were lost in the accident, he begins to retreat from reality.

Growing ever more obsessed with an old folk tale told to him by his mother as a child, he becomes convinced that the fantasy offers a route to redemption. Soon, his only link to the real world is his dead brother’s fiancée – a relationship that further provokes the ire of the community. Employing an engaging plurality of filmmaking styles, which serves to emphasise the growing disjunction between Aaron’s reality and his subconscious, director Paul Wright nimbly marries folkloric allegory with bleak realism.

Saturday, Sept 21, 3.30pm. ɀ The Forgotten Kingdom (USA, South Africa, Lesotho, 2013) The mountainous scenery of Lesotho provides the canvas for director Andrew Mudge’s profoundly visual story, which tells the tale of Atang: a young man obliged to make a pilgrimage from the bustle of Johannesburg to his native Lesotho upon learning that his father has passed away.

There, Atang is reunited with childhood friend Dineo, with whom he discovers a romantic spark. But her disapproving father whisks Dineo away and sends Atang back to Jo’burg. Resolving to to win her back, Atang enlists the help of a young orphan boy to guide him through the arresting rural terrain. The first film ever to be produced in Lesotho, The Forgotten Kingdom is a beguiling quest steeped in the history and culture of the Basotho people. Cambridge Film Festival hopes to welcome director Andrew Mudge to the screening.

UK premiere. Saturday, Sept 28, 8.45pm, Sunday, Sept 29, 1.30pm.

DIRECTOR’S INTERVIEW

Stephen Finnigan A

HEAD of the launch of the 33rd Cambridge Film Festival with Hawking – an autobiographical account of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s life – Ella Walker talks to documentary filmmaker and BAFTA award-nominee Stephen Finnigan about putting the Professor’s life to film When did you first meet Professor Stephen Hawking?

The first time I met Stephen was actually the opening of the film when we film him going to give a lecture in America, in San Jose. We were filming his daily routine, preparing and giving the lecture, and so we dived straight into it really.

Was it a project you had always secretly wanted to work on?

To be honest it was out of the blue. I obviously knew about him, but I’d never read A Brief History of Time. I was a teenager then so it probably wasn’t on the top of my reading list. But I knew about him obviously and was very in awe of all that he had done, but I hadn’t tracked him all my life or anything like that. He was great to meet and he was great to film which was a real bonus for me.

Have you read his book now?

I have! I read as many of his books as I could for research. And I had to come clean with Stephen when we first started filming; I said look, I’ll be honest with you, maths and physics were my worst subjects at school, I got a CSE grade 3 in those, so I’m no mathematician or physicist. But the film is much more about his life anyway, so coming clean with him was quite a good thing to do I think.

What did you think prompted him to make the film – why now?

He’d just turned 70 so that’s a milestone for anybody but for Stephen especially it’s a huge milestone. When he was 21, 22, he was given probably two years to live, so I think he felt it was time to put his own life out there for people to understand more. He’s notoriously guarded about his personal life, as much as he can be, so I think he felt it was a time to give that side of his life a voice.

Was it daunting being given the responsibility to commit his life to film?

That’s a really good questions because – yes – is the answer. Interestingly when I

ᔡ Hawking (Today, 7.25pm)

was interviewing Benedict Cumberbatch, who’s in the film and portrayed Stephen for the BBC drama about his early life, we both said that this was the one thing you didn’t want to mess up, you didn’t want to get it wrong because he’s such an important person. Benedict felt that in portraying him, and I felt it certainly in trying to tell his life story. You’ve got to get it right and that meant, for me, gaining Stephen’s trust; to be able to film his daily life, and also to be able to open up his past life and the people that meant a lot to him – getting them to feel comfortable enough to tell me about it.

Was Stephen very involved in the editing process?

To be honest, no, he wasn’t, he trusted me with the editing. In terms of the script and the voiceover he narrates, he’s written a lot of essays, some of which are published, some of which are about to come out in his new book, so we combined those and I re-wrote them at times to make them more film friendly, rather than book friendly and together we wrote the in between bits in the film.

So he wasn’t involved in terms of coming into the edit suite, but we emailed and had discussions about the script and how we could tweak and change that together.

How did Stephen react to the final edit?

Very warmly. The first time he saw the very first rough cut was just before Christmas last year and when we finished watching it I peered round to see how he was and there was a tear rolling down his cheek. It took him a while to write what he wanted to say, but he said he really liked it, but he wasn’t sure if anybody else would like it. It was a very humble reaction.

Are there any moments you are particular proud of in the finished film?

The thing with Stephen is that his ability to communicate has diminished as his illness has got worse so it can take him up to five or 10 minutes, maybe even longer, to write a simple sentence. I think you have to invest that time when you’re with Stephen to allow him

to use his voice. There’s a scene where we film him listening to some music at home late at night and intercut it with him as a young man listening to music.

Wagner has had a big role in Stephen’s life, he listened to it a lot when he was first diagnosed. I asked him, when we wanted to film him listening to music, what would you like to listen to? And he chose a piece by Wagner and he wanted to explain to me why. It actually took him over half an hour to write two sentences which I quickly scribbled down, and we put them straight into the film. So those moments, when you invest with Stephen and take time with him, you can get real gems from him. It’s giving him that space and that ability to be able to talk to you in his own way which I think is a really important thing.

What do you hope people will take from watching it?

I hope it’s a very inspirational film. I think it’s a great story of, against all the odds, somebody living a very, very full life, so I hope people get that from the film. And I hope they get to see a very different side to Stephen Hawking because, as I hope the film shows, he’s a very funny, very quick witted, very sharp man who is very interested in physics – it’s his life – but he has an awful lot more going on, and I also hope people take from this film that his life has been at times very hard, but he’s kept going.

Cambridge News | cambridge-news.co.uk | September 19, 2013 | 27

For competitions, reviews and news from the festival, check out cambridge-news.co.uk/Whats-on-leisure/Cambridge-Film-Festival

Festival Choice ɀ Honour (UK, 2013) The subject of honour killings has garnered a disquieting rash of headlines in the UK press in recent times. A major issue for the British Asian community, it tragically encapsulates the gap in values, beliefs and cultural attitudes between generations who have made Britain their home in the last century. In his gritty, charged first feature, director Shan Khan taps into that controversy with the story of British Pakistani Mona (Hart), a young woman who ‘dishonours’ her ultra-conservative family by running away with lover Tanvir. Blinded with fury, the family enlist a bounty hunter (a suitably dour and mysterious Considine) to track her down and exact punishment. A tense, pacy thriller that plays on a distressingly relevant topic, Honour is an assured, intelligent and engrossing debut from a promising British filmmaker. Cambridge Film Festival hopes to welcome director Shan Khan to the screening.

Friday, Sept 27, 8.45pm.

DIRECTOR’S INTERVIEW

Peter Webber SET during the American occupation of Japan after World War II, Emperor stars Tommy Lee Jones as General Douglas MacArthur, the country’s de facto ruler who assigns Matthew Fox AKA General Bonner Fellers, to investigate whether the Japanese Emperor should be punished for war crimes or not.

But Bonner is also on a mission of his own; to find a Japanese school teacher he loved before war broke out…

Ella Walker speaks to the director Peter Webber (director of Girl With A Pearl Earring and Hannibal Rising), about working with Tommy Lee Jones and braving his critics.

Can you start by explaining what made this a story you just had to tell?

I’ve always been very interested in Japan and Japanese culture. I think it’s an interest that started when I discovered the films of Kurosawa and Ozu when I was a teenager. also the thing that made me really interested in this particular subject matter was that it seemed very metaphorical for what was going on today.

It’s a way I could tell a story from the past that had some resonance in the present – it’s about regime change, the battle between justice and revenge.

And I had always wanted to work with Japanese actors and do a film set in Japan; this seemed like a very good opportunity.

Considering the plot is based on true events, did you feel a responsibility to the real people portrayed?

Yes, but you also have to balance that

ᔡ Emperor (Saturday, September 28, 8.30pm) against responsibility to the audience. You can be tugged in different directions. There’s obviously been an awful lot of films, not about this particular subject, – this is a post-war film rather than a war film – but about the Pacific War, and overwhelmingly they’ve put the American point of view. I felt it’d be interesting to tell a tale where you would hear what the Japanese had to say.

What made you pick Matthew Fox for the lead role?

I was looking for someone who was the modern day equivalent of Gary Cooper. Quite an old fashioned, strongly morally centred, very masculine kind of a figure, and it just seemed to me Matthew Fox was perfect for that. He has some of that 1950s leading man about him.

What was it like working with Tommy Lee Jones? Is he as intimidating as he comes across?

It’s scary to begin with, because he comes with a big reputation, he can be quite daunting but actually he’s great to work with. He’s super smart and underneath that rather gruff exterior, beats a heart of pure gold (Peter breaks off laughing). But it is a very gruff exterior.

Were there any tough days when you thought the film wasn’t

going to work out?

Every day is a difficult moment on set because you never have quite enough money and you never have quite enough time.

Stanley Kubrick said making a film is like trying to write War and Peace on a rollercoaster, so every day has its challenges.

Emperor has been considered a critical and commercial flop in America. What do you think of its reception so far?

I was particularly pleased with the way it’s gone down in Japan.

It’s been very successful in Japan, I think it’s just passed the £12m box office mark, so that was important to me, that people went to see it over there. I got a couple of good reviews from my two favourite reviewers – Rex Reed and Roger Ebert. There’s obviously bad reviews out there as well, I’m choosing to ignore those.

Were any moments particularly special to film?

What was really interesting was we got a chance to shoot at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and we were the first fiction film to shoot there. So that felt very special, it was a real privilege.

What do you want people will take from the film?

I hope they enjoy it, I hope it makes them understand a bit about how enlightened American foreign policy used to be, I think it casts an interesting light, especially with current events. It’s very important to remember and understand history. But I hope really that they’ll be plunged into a strange, mysterious and fascinating world and really learn something about a period of history that hasn’t been told before.

ɀ Layla Fourie (Germany, South Africa, France, Netherlands, 2013) Layla is a single mother living with her son in Johannesburg, getting by with casual work.

After training as a polygraph operator, she manages to secure a job with a company specialising in lie detectors and security. On her way to her workplace she is involved in an accident which will fundamentally change her life. Almost casually, Layla Fourie develops into a political thriller which takes the audience into the paranoia, fear and mistrust of a society that is still profoundly affected by racial conflict.

UK premiere. Wednesday, Sept 25, 6.30pm.