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SHOWFILMFIRST SPECIAL - EVERYONE’S GOING TO DIE

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EVERYBODY’S GOING TO DIE OPENS IN CINEMAS ON FRIDAY 26TH JUNE AND SFF CAUGHT UP WITH JONES TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE FILM...

AB O U T J O NES SFF: How does Jones work? One seems to write and the other one to edit. But how did you happen to work this way? Was it a natural approach for you? Do you think filmmaking can be made easier when you’re not alone (like the Dardenne brothers, Coen brothers, etc.)? And are you planning to work on your next film together?

Jones: Yes one of us writes, the other edits and we direct together. But the whole process is a joint process, so in the writing and editing we’re very much both involved. It’s just about who does the dirty work and gets the final say.

We find working together a lot of fun, and really rewarding. We’d recommend it to anyone, but you just need to get lucky and find someone with the same taste as you, and whose opinion you respect enough to let it influence your own. The Dardennes and the Coens are great examples that prove it can work, which is actually more helpful for the people around us than it is for us because it never occurred to us that it couldn’t.

SFF: WHAT’S YOUR MOVIE ABOUT? Jones: Two lonely people who find and help each other in unexpected ways. Those times in life when it seems suddenly short.

SFF: Tell Us About Yourself We’re from London, England. This is our first feature. We wrote, co-produced, directed and edited it, so if you don’t like it, there’s nobody else we can blame.

SFF: What else do you want audiences to know about your film?

In the bigger picture it’s about mortality and being lonely. We wanted to have a look at those things without the film itself becoming depressing, which is how you come back around to someone who thinks their dead husband has been reincarnated as a cat, for example.

The title applies on a broad level. Nobody actually dies in the film (although that depends how you define ‘nobody’). So if you like action films with a high body count, this may not be for you. If you like films with a sense of humor and moments of unexpected tenderness, come on in.

On the shoot we were always being asked what the film was called by groups of builders or something and we’d say ‘Everyone’s Going To Die’ and they’d say ‘brilliant’ and we’d say, ‘it’s an indie comedy’ and they’d say ‘oh’, and their faces would drop.

If anyone wants to remake it as a martial arts revenge epic featuring Van Damme on the rampage, we know for a fact there’s an audience.

SFF: What was your biggest challenge in developing this project?

Jones: On a film like this it’s all a challenge. You think you’ve written a low budget story and then you realise you need to shoot someone jumping off a bridge into a harbour.

At night.

Predictably, everything comes down to money. How to get it, and how (not) to spend it. The film was funded entirely privately by individuals giving very small amounts in film terms.

We wrote the finance plan ourselves, went out and pitched it face to face and were very lucky to find people whose generosity we’ll never forget.

Although we’d never done a feature, this wasn’t our first time behind a camera, so we knew we could be very cost effective on the shoot and still make something that wasn’t let down by its budget.

SFF: What would you like audiences to come away with after seeing your film.

Jones: A smile on their faces, some things to think about and the feeling of time well spent.

SFF: Did any specific films inspire you?

Jones: It started when we went to see In Search Of A Midnight Kiss in a small cinema called the Prince Charles, off Leicester Square. We’d always wanted to make movies eventually, and that made us realise that a very low budget film could be just as entertaining as any other.

That film feels lo-fi but the quality of the writing and acting is so high you just don’t care. That’s a different thing to aiming at an audience who already watch a lot of lo-fi movies.

It seems obvious now that it’s possible to cross that line, given what’s happened since in terms of movies and also the technology moving on, but this was 2008 and it was a revelation (to us at least).

Beyond that we just thought a lot about what films we liked tonally, and how that affected what kind of film we wanted to make.

THE I NF LU E NC ES SFF: About the climate of the film and its musical and graphical aspects: ‘Everyone’s going to die’ can make the viewer think of both John Cassavetes and Sofia Coppola (among others). Did you have other filmmakers in mind when you wrote, directed or edited the film? And more generally, were there influences that made you want to make this film: like cinematic, musical, literary or graphical?

Jones: This is always a difficult thing to answer because you’re kind of influenced by everything you do, see and think, and everyone you meet. As much real life as other art. And the art that influences you does it in a weird way, so the connections are hard to draw. Like maybe you just admire something for being really singular. Even though it’s a piece of sculpture or a photography project about ex Soviet satellite states.

We definitely didn’t have a model for the film, beyond being drawn more to American Indie films than the British films we were seeing at the time, as good as they were. This really comes down to the idea of trying to be serious and funny at the same time - or using humor to get at drama, which for some reason it feels like you see less in the UK. That seems to be changing though. As always you get generations of work that are reactions against the status quo, so by the time we’re now talking about that absence in UK cinema, it doesn’t exist so much any more.

Both Cassavetes and Coppola are clearly very much a part of that US Indie genre. Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker we love, and she obviously came up at the script stage because of Lost In Translation and the older guy / younger girl dynamic. We talked about that mainly in terms of how to avoid just making another version of her story.

One cinematic point of reference was a little American movie called In Search Of A Midnight Kiss. That showed us what was possible on a small budget if you have great actors and you work hard on the script, so it was very inspiring, although again a very different film to what we had in mind.

THE STO RY SFF: Melanie and Ray’s feelings evolve throughout the film. But their love story never really culminates in a single scene: it rather seems to constitute a stream of feelings, with attraction, friendship, desire… In the end, it seems that the beauty and poetry of their relationship comes from the fact that the kind of « love » they have never seems to be definite, and rather stays mysterious, out of time, which is quite an originality of the film (avoiding the usual sex and passion moments). Did you have this in mind from the start? Or did you define this in the making?

Jones: That’s lovely you felt that. It was always a huge part of the point of the film. There was never any question for us that what happens between them should become physical. Or indeed permanent.

We wanted to capture those poetic moments in life where for whatever reason you meet someone and you’re both in the exact right place to give the other what they need. And you share that, and it helps you both, but it’s not about love in any traditional sense. It’s maybe more about some kind of chemistry, but the moment is a part of that chemistry. Take the moment and the context away, and everything changes.

So what allows them to get close enough to share that chemistry is that one is a guy and one is a girl. But really Melanie’s situation comes from her having fallen into the trap of the way people conventionally think and talk about love - having given everything up for this guy she doesn’t know that well. So to have then done the same with her and Ray, or tried to make him an exception, would have made it seem like she’d learned nothing, and also been morally kind of false from our point of view.

Again, it comes back to that thing of trying to be on the one hand true to reality as we see it, and on the other to have fun with the surreality of their situations - they’re both completely out of place.

BACK TO T H E STA RT. . .

SFF: Where did the idea for “Everyone’s Going to Die” come from?

Jones: Several places. Practically, it started by watching other people making great movies with very little money and support. We just wanted to get out there and do it, rather than wait around for someone to give us permission.

Creatively the story is about how the decisions we make affect the way our lives turn out, and there are certain stages in your life when it feels like that becomes very present. Melanie is at one of those stages, Ray at another - he’s at the end of the journey she’s about to go on, and that connects them in an odd way, despite their obvious differences.

We were also at one of those points ourselves. We either had to take control of our lives or watch them drift, and the film was a way of doing that. Hence the title - everyone really is going to die and it feels like a lot of the decisions you make when you’re mid 20s to early 30s are hugely important but made almost as if that won’t happen.

You think you have all the time in the world, but you don’t. Then you get to mid life and suddenly realise how little time you have, and by then you’re trying to turn round this huge oil tanker when it would have been better to take more care about pointing it in the right direction when you set off.

Finally we wanted to make a movie that dealt with all that but without being depressing.

W R ITIN G AS A DU O SFF: What are the challenges when writing and directing as a duo?

Jones: Our process is that one of us does the main writing work, the other does the main editing work, and we direct completely together. That writing thing where you write a scene each or whatever feels like an odd concept, but then it seems to work for some people.

Directing wise there are far more benefits than challenges. Obviously you need to trust the other person and share their taste, but a bigger danger than disagreeing is actually the opposite - where one of us secretly thinks an idea isn’t great but doesn’t say anything because they think if the other one likes it, it must be good. Only the other one is actually thinking the same thing.

We try to iron that out just by being more insistent that we have to personally love something to let it through. If each of you is doing that, you have a double shitness filter. And the shitness filter is a director’s most important tool.

THE CAST SFF: You cast Nora Tschirner via an audition from Berlin to London via Skype? Can you tell us a little about that?

Jones: We were incredibly lucky to even get the script to Nora. She’s a big star in Germany. The Skype thing was mainly just about chemistry, and to see how good her English was. It quickly became clear that not only was she perfect for the part, and a super cool person, but she speaks better English than we do.

Having her on set was like being given a Ferrari to drive when you’ve just passed your test. You’re very aware that the car is capable of more things than you are.

SFF: The male lead Rob Knighton was laying carpets and never acted in anything before. How did you come across him?

Jones: He was scouted at the age of 50 to be a catwalk model. He was laying carpets one week and on the runway for Prada or whatever the next. A photographer friend shot him for a stills campaign, and we saw the pictures and were like ‘who the hell is that?’

The thing is we already had this idea about discovering someone at that age - because it’s interesting and because we figured if you’ve been an actor all your life and you’re still at the level we could access, maybe there’s a reason for that.

Rob was just unbelievable. He turned up on set in this old Toyota van (RIP silver bullet) full of carpet offcuts, old tools and high-end designer gifts from people like Hermes. Then the camera comes on and he has this presence.

Also you forget that simple things like learning a script full of lines in a few weeks is something trained actors do without thinking. For a carpet fitter it’s a whole new world, and it was almost that which impressed us (and him) the most.

WO RK I NG WI T H T HE CAST SFF: One great thing about ‘Everyone’s going to die’ is that the actors manage to bring a strong reality to the absurd humor of its script (almost surreal, sometimes), which gives a pretty original balance between absurdism and realism (like it eventually happens in « real life »). How did you manage to get this equilibrium? How did you work with Nora Tschirner and Rob Knighton on the original script you had written? Was there a part of improvisation from them?

Jones: Sadly there wasn’t any improvisation. The lines in the film were all on the page. We love improvisation but we just didn’t have time to do it. Plus this was Rob’s first acting role so it might have spun him out even more to have added that layer.

In terms of balancing the absurd and the real, that’s part of the idea for the film really. What would happen if you took two characters from movie genres (her from a rom com and him from a gangster movie) and applied reality to their predicaments?

We thought that could be a funny idea. And of course as you say real life is always more absurd than any fiction. So it felt interesting to try to think of the characters as real people rather than movie characters who are limited by constraints of tone.

We liked the idea of a world where you can be given a gun and maybe get someone killed and also have to act in your niece’s rubbish play all on the same day.

THE M U S I C – S COR IN G THE FIL M SFF: Both of your main actors are also musicians. And music – especially composed by Charlie Simpson – has a great importance in the film, like an illustration or a counterpoint to the characters’ feelings. How did you work on music? Did you take it as a starting point? Or did specific tracks inspire sequences or affected the way you’ve shot scenes?

Jones: Rob would love you for calling him a musician! He’s a really good pianist, and he wrote ‘Ray’s Theme’ for the movie on set, but he’s not a musician in the strict sense. Nora is though, and of course Charlie.

Music was always a huge part of the film because we love music and we love the way it works with film. There’s a magic that happens when you put a track and a piece of film together. They both become more than they were alone.

When we shot the film we made a CD for our crew called ‘Everyone’s Going To Listen’, and many of the tracks in the finished film were on that CD. It’s more about creating a mood. The right music puts you in a certain emotional state. We wouldn’t really ever shoot a scene to fit a piece of music, you always need to start from what the scene and the film needs, and find the music to fit that. But specific tracks definitely inspired certain moods that the film takes.

LIM I TAT I O NS AND C R E ATIV ITY SFF: You’ve also worked with a pretty low budget. How did it affect the way you had to work? Was it a good (creative) way? And do you think that limitations can make an artist more creative, pushing him to do more with less? What advise would you give to an aspiring filmmaker about this kind of « do it yourself » strategy?

Jones: It’s definitely true that out of limitations comes creativity, but there’s virtually no filmmaker out there, certainly telling our kinds of stories, who doesn’t have limitations.

The point at which limitations are not a good thing comes when you can’t do what you know you need to do for the story because you don’t have the money, which pretty much always means not having the time. Sometimes you have to just move on from something you know is not perfect because if you don’t move on, you can’t do the next thing. Working with the comparatively small amount of money we shot the film for (around 70,000 Euros) meant there was a real concern we wouldn’t finish the film at all - just simply getting every scene in the can was one of our main goals. That’s probably not helpful. On our next project we’d want to at least have enough to know we could finish the shoot! Then you can concentrate on creativity a little more.

I T’S ALL ABO U T JO N ES . . .

SFF: You’re hidden behind the name “Jones’, but who are you really? And why did you choose to use that pseudonym?

Jones: Like that you describe it as hiding. There’s some truth in that.

We are really a ghost who lives in the basement of a film studio and comes out to make films. The title of this one is autobiographical. Actually we have one name because although there are more than one of us, we try to speak with one voice, and a single name helps people to think of us in that way. The reason for the name Jones itself is a secret known to only ourselves and Jones.

M ES SAG E TO F U TU R E FIL M M A K E R S SFF: What advice have you got for someone who is about to jump in and make their first feature film?

Jones: It’s dangerous to give advice without knowing the person and the situation, but what worked for us was to keep a constant balance of unfounded confidence and irrational fear.

You have to constantly feel like the whole thing could be rubbish, or you won’t question yourself enough. But then you also have to feel like it probably won’t be, so you trust the decisions you make and don’t just listen to what everyone else says, or run around in circles waving your hands and panicking, which is what the sane part of you wants to do.

Also - we feel like as directors our job is to help everyone to feel confident to do their best work. You’re captain of the team, not the star player.

That seems obvious but people sometimes equate being creative with being practically inept and an aloof, dreamy genius, or worse - being difficult and troubled. Actually this is a young idea. Keats and his mates put it about as a way of not having to get a proper job, and it’s done much harm since. If you think about it, surely storytelling is connected to intelligence - both practical and emotional. So treating people badly is not only a dick move, it’s intellectually bankrupt.

I F JONES WE RE TO G IV E A DV IC E …

In terms of advice for aspiring filmmakers, it would depend on their circumstances really. Generic advice is very dangerous, but here’s some anyway: Firstly - Do it. It’s amazing how many people spend all their time talking about making a movie and expect the world to somehow deliver them the opportunity. It might do, in which case great, but if you create the opportunity yourself, you take that out of the equation. Doing it starts with thinking about how much money you can get hold of and what you can shoot with that money. It’s no good having an idea about intergalactic war when you have 1000 euros. But a film about a guy trapped in a coffin for 1000 euros could maybe work. For us, a part of directing is being able to triangulate your story, your budget and your taste to make them all meet at a happy place.

Secondly - Be confident that you can do a good job, and that your ideas are good, but also be afraid that they might not be. The balance between these two means you’re not scared to make decisions or just listening to every input from everyone, but it also means you don’t assume everything you’re doing is brilliant. Sometimes it’s crap, and that’s fine. Everyone has crap ideas. Our motto for EGTD was the inspirational: ‘Let’s not make a crap film.’ Who knows if we succeeded?

It’s often very hard to find the money to make a first feature film, to convince a producer, etc. How did you manage? And how did you manage to shoot the movie with such a low budget?

This question requires a book-length answer. But the short version is - we raised the money privately, asking a large number of people for a small amount of money and being very honest with them that we couldn’t guarantee they would get it back, but we would try our best.

We pitched to them more like entrepreneurs who had a cool project rather than the movie /glamour route of promising Oscars you know you can’t deliver. Many of them invested in us rather than the idea of a movie. It’s amazing how helpful people will be if they believe in you.

Shooting it on such a low budget succeeded because of the following things: Great actors.

An outstanding crew.

A chef cooking great, healthy, cheap food for everyone.

A good camera (Arri Alexa). This is not just about the look, it’s about the time you save by not messing around trying to work out why it’s gone wrong.

S FF: THE FU TU RE What’s next?

Our next project is called Firebird.

It’s about a guy who comes back to the hometown he left years before, expecting to pick friendships up where he left off, but everyone else has moved on. He also happens to be a famous magician, and to have lost an eye, and to be followed around by strange creatures. There’s a lot going on and fortunately it looks like we’ll have a little more support and money this time because we’ll need it.

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