15 minute read
Secret Power
In an age of spoilers, how can you create a cultural phenomenon built around the art of revealing nothing? Secret Cinema spills the beans...
At an undisclosed location in London, the bustle of activity is afoot. Inside a cavernous warehouse spanning 6,000m 2 , contractors feverishly put the finishing touches to a ginormous set that resembles… well, we’d best not say. Performers rehearse routines in a startling recreation of the backstreets of… actually, never mind. A man who looks suspiciously like Daniel Craig walks among them, broodingly scanning his surroundings. Studying him is Barbara Broccoli, producer of the James Bond movies. This scene may or may not have happened; we can’t really tell you, because the first rule of Secret Cinema is: tell no one.
The second rule is: immerse yourself. This is what hundreds of thousands of people have done during Secret Cinema’s 12-year run. It’s a commitment delivered on a promise – you pay more than the regular cinema price to see an old film. You’re told what to wear and where to meet at a certain time on a certain day. You’re forbidden to bring your smartphone inside, or take pictures. And by the time you leave, you’ve had one of the most incredible experiences of your life. If that sounds like a religion, it’s not far off. There are two types of people in this world: those who know the secret and those who don’t.
In 2012, Andrea Moccia attended Secret Cinema presents The Shawshank Redemption. The ticket directed him to an east London library, where he was ushered into a makeshift courtroom. “The judge sentenced you for a crime you hadn’t committed,” he recalls. “Policemen loaded you into a blacked-out van that took you to a school transformed into a prison, where other audience members were shouting at you. You were stripped, put in a prison uniform and locked in a cell. I left that night thinking, ‘These people are insane and I have to work with them.’” Today, he’s one of lead producers for Secret Cinema.
The Empire Strikes Back, Printworks London (2015)
"We didn’t want the audience to know the X-wing was there,” says producer Andrea Moccia. So it flew out of a hidden parking space, shot a pyro into the huge computer structure, landed, and Luke Skywalker jumped out. I’ve never seen so many 50-year-old men filled with joy.”
“The first production I worked on was Brazil,” says Moccia. “Day one, I walked into the 12-floor building they’d transformed into this dystopian world and got stuck in a lift with [the film’s director] Terry Gilliam. That was a baptism of fire.”
This is an apt phrase for anyone experiencing their first Secret Cinema – a six-hour adventure where you enter a sandbox recreation of a movie’s universe with a narrative that unfolds until it reaches a crescendo at the exact moment the film begins. Last year, when Secret Cinema adapted Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet – recreating the landscape of Verona Beach for an audience of 5,000 a night, with choirs, police cars, and a masked ball at the Capulet mansion – the film director described it as “a whole new art form”.
That art involves what Secret Cinema calls ‘mirror moments’, where performers reenact scenes in perfect synchronisation with the on-screen action. Before that, audiences might encounter these characters on their adventure. “One of my friends at Romeo + Juliet texted to say girls were chasing the actor playing Leonardo DiCaprio and crying because he looked so real,” says Susan Kulkarni, head of costume at Secret Cinema. “I was like, ‘We nailed it,’ because that’s the feeling I had as a teenager watching the film.”
For an event the size of Romeo + Juliet, Kulkarni had a team of more than 30 working on as many as 700 outfits on rotation. “The actors have two or three changes throughout the evening, then we costume the bar staff, security, even the cleaners, because one person wearing the wrong thing pulls you out of the world.” Her team has to consider every eventuality. “We create a capsule wardrobe for each character, because if it’s raining you have to imagine what else Juliet would wear.”
Kulkarni also has to consider the look of the general public: “We use the audience to create the world.” After a guest buys a ticket, they’re assigned a character and given outfit suggestions. “For The Shawshank Redemption we asked everyone to come in a suit, but once they were stripped we needed 1,200 prison uniforms. I found a guy with some original ’40s Norwegian prison uniforms in his garage. That made the audience feel part of the world, because they were wearing something real.”
It was very different in 2009 when Kulkarni first joined Secret Cinema for a one-day popup of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. “That was the first that had costumes. It’s just me with a rack of clothes and two days to outfit 40 people,” she recalls. “A tall man came in asking for costume. I put an outfit together and because I didn’t panic I got a call to join the company.” The man turned out to be Fabien Riggall, the founder of Secret Cinema.
Brazil, Croydon
"The main character had to jump off a tower block and abseil wearing huge wings, but seem to be flying,” says Kulkarni. “We only had a couple of days to create the wings. You figure it out as you go.”
The idea came to Riggall as a child living in Morocco in the ’80s. “I was 11 and I went to this fleapit cinema in Casablanca without knowing what the film was,” he recalls. “It turned out to be Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America – an insane film with an epic [Ennio]Morricone soundtrack. The protagonist was this boy a bit older than me – Noodles – who was in love with Deborah, played by Jennifer Connelly. I transported myself and became Noodles.”
Seventeen years later, in 2003, Riggall launched a short-film festival called Future Shorts. “A friend of mine had this venue, an underground bunker in Shepherd’s Bush Green [in west London] called Ginglik, which was one of those lavish toilets from the old days. I put on a night – 12 short films, a DJ, people chatting, drinking, in those days when you could smoke inside. The idea evolved into the feature-length Future Cinema with 1922 horror Nosferatu at London club SeOne. “We didn’t reveal the film or location, and I thought, ‘It’s not going to sell,’ but 400 people came.” He experimented with an immersive adaptation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. “The concept was, ‘How can we make this more real?’ We wanted to play with mystery.” In 2007, this became Secret Cinema.
“The first [Secret Cinema] was [Gus Van Sant’s] Paranoid Park, about a skater accused of murder. We did it in some tunnels beneath London Bridge, filled with ramps and halfpipes, and the audience became part of the skateboard community in this hideout, with staged police investigations.”
Dr Strangelove, Printworks London (2016)
Following The Empire Strikes Back, this adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satire brought back the concept of not revealing the film's identity. The audience had to dress in military uniforms, and the screening took place in the War Room. “The idea was to create a summit,” says Riggall.
28 Days Later, Printworks London (2016)
Participants had to arrive at the 'hospital' in scrubs for a routine vaccination, only to 'awaken’ in a detailed recreation of Danny Boyle's 2002 zombie horror, except with food, cocktails and a blood-soaked rave. The ‘patients’ watched the film from hospital beds.
With each year, the events grew in scale and ingenuity: Alien, Lawrence of Arabia, Ghostbusters. Word-of-mouth built hype, but attendees kept the secret. “I think there’s a real desire to escape the looped existence we have, where everything is revealed and predictable, and everyone knows where everyone is on social media,” says Riggall. “In a world addicted to information, that idea of secrecy is critical, as is a physical, social thing you have to invest in – one you can’t just click and download.”
Getting the audience invested has become a science for Secret Cinema. “Lawrence Of Arabia [2010] was the first time the audience was really asked to participate,” says Kulkarni. “At Alexandra Palace, we made a huge souk [marketplace]. They had to bring things to barter with, and exchanges were happening on the Tube before they arrived. We had Bedouin tents, and camels and horses wandering out of Ally Pally.”
This attention to detail is even brought to smaller events. “Secret Cinema X is an underground format where we show films that haven’t been released,” says Moccia. “In 2017, we did a ‘Tell No One’ production, where we don’t tell people what they’re going to see.” It was The Handmaiden by Korean director Park Chan-wook. “The performance was done with silhouettes and you couldn’t speak throughout the night. Walking into a room with 1,000-plus people, all completely silent. And at the bar you had to order on a piece of paper. It was beautiful.”
Moulin Rouge, Printworks London (2017)
"The cast and team were like family, much like the Moulin Rouge in 1900," says Moccia. "During the run, the Manchester bombings and the Westminster terror attack happened. We got the audience to sing along to The Show Must Go On. I'm tearing up as I speak about it. It was a really moving moment."
In 2014, Secret Cinema delivered its most ambitious project to date: Back To The Future – a recreation of Hill Valley near London’s Olympic Village. “People could write letters to each other and postal workers would deliver them within the venue,” says Kulkarni. “Each house had a telephone you could call the other houses with.”
The sheer scale proved too staggering; the show wasn’t ready in time for launch. “It was devastating not to be able to open on that first night,” recalls Moccia. “But it’s a learning process.” The show finally opened to rave reviews, but nature almost intervened. At 11pm one night, a surprise rainstorm struck. “Every costume was soaked,” say Kulkarni. “We had to find a way to clean and dry 600 costumes in 12 hours. We hot-boxed an entire cabin and put everything in it.”
If Back To The Future was a lesson in untempered ambition, it didn’t shown; the next year, Secret Cinema took it up another notch with The Empire Strikes Back.
“It took a year of talking to eight stakeholders, from Lucasfilm to Bad Robot to Disney to Fox,” says Riggall. “[Lucasfilm president] Kathy Kennedy supported us. As exec producer on Back to the Future, she was impressed with what we did there. But to give us the rights to do that movie in the year they were releasing The Force Awakens – a $2 billion franchise – was extraordinary. Then, to find an old newspaper factory to build Star Wars in… that was an insane ambition.”
“It was an old printing press not fit for audience members,” says Moccia of the building that is now the nightclub Printworks London. “We transformed it and put in three productions: The Empire Strikes Back, Dr Strangelove and 28 Days Later.”
The Handmaiden, Troxy (2017)
"We got the venue at 5am and had to produce the show that night," recalls Bennett. "Following the film's repressiveuncle narrative that no one can talk in his house, the audience took a vow of silence. They loved it."
“I wanted to build a gigantic Secret Cinema that could stay there for ever,” says Riggall. “We put a lot of work into it, invested a great deal, but I know the guys who set up Printworks, and good on them.” He sees Secret Cinema’s contribution to the buildings it inhabits as a positive. “So many are empty, waiting years for planning permission. Developers are opening their eyes to what we do. We can create this ‘meanwhile use’, filling them with happy people experiencing something. I like to think that in the depths of the night, as people are dancing to some DJ’s set, they go, ‘Shit, wasn’t this where the X-wing flew over my head?’”
“The X-wing was definitely a challenge,” says Moccia of the full-size prop that enacted the finale of Star Wars before the celluloid sequel rolled. “It was built from MDF and rigged to an automation system, with projection mapping to look as if it was flying through space. Luke Skywalker was in it throughout. One time, the automation system failed and he got stuck up there for about an hour.”
“The Empire Strikes Back was the zenith,” says Matt Bennett, a DJ who joined to head up the music department. “I just needed a change,” he says. That’s what he got. “I was putting on club nights for 1,000 people in Glasgow, and there are more than 400 people working on Star Wars. The production company, Wonder Works, did the [London 2012] Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. I had three months to figure out the music showcase. It was seat-of-the-pants stuff.”
Back to the Future, Printworks London (2014)
"There was a piece in the Evening Standard saying we’d affected the way people dressed that summer, that women were wearing '50s dresses," says Kulkarni. "It may be just a coincidence or something subliminal. It's extraordinary to think a cultural event can influence what people wear."
Bennett’s initiation was made tougher by a new experiment: alongside the four stages at Printworks was a warm-up gig at an undisclosed location. “It was the little secret behind the big secret. We had all the bands from the main site and some DJs – everyone learnt to play the cantina band song.” Actors mingling with the crowd added a new layer of immersion. “Fabien wanted to open up allnight parties in the style of [Berlin nightclub] Berghain. Thankfully we never got to that stage, because we were consumed by delivering 100 nights of Star Wars to 100,000 people.
After the runaway success of The Empire Strikes Back, the window of possibility was thrown wide open. For last year’s Blade Runner that included building a future Los Angeles with an indoor rain system for 86 nights. “We had a massive pool under the floor connected to a closed loop system that pumped water up to a rain rig on the ceiling,” says Moccia. “We had to clean the pool daily, because people dropped chips in it. “But to see that hero moment, with everybody opening their umbrellas, drenched in neon light – it was like being in Shibuya on a rainy night.”
Every member of Secret Cinema has their favourite moment. For Bennett, it might have been DJing in that acid rain at Blade Runner. “It felt important, but it was just playing techno to people who were totally wet and having the time of their lives.” Instead, he has another: “In 2015, we went to the Calais refugee camp. It was the week that small boy [Syrian three-year-old Alan Kurdi] washed up dead on the shore [in Turkey]. Fabien insisted we stage a cultural protest against the treatment of the people at the camp. We took Afrikan Boy, a Nigerian-born London rapper who sings about global politics and immigration, and set up a pop-up cinema screen showing a Bollywood film to all the families in the camp.
“There were thousands of people who had no home and didn’t think they had a future. They weren’t sitting eating popcorn. It was a very immediate moment of having an impact on people’s lives who maybe really needed to watch a film. The baddies got booed, the girls got cheered. We raised money afterwards to keep the project going, then the political landscape changed when people were killed in Paris and Manchester. But it reflects Secret Cinema’s ethos of getting up and doing stuff, and credit to Fabien for essentially risking his brand with a very divisive political posture.” Raising awareness for social issues is perhaps Secret Cinema’s most hidden quality.
Romeo + Juliet, Gunnersbury Park (2018)
Tied to the theme of youth violence, the show worked with the charity MAC-UK. "We got Loki, a political rapper, to come and work on the project and raise money and awareness on knife crime," says Bennett.
“When we bring films to life, that also means whatever message those films have,” says Riggall. “When we did One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we worked with mental-health charity Mind and integrated fundraising awareness. This year, with Casino Royale, we’re working with Calm, a charity that raises awareness of mental health and male suicide. The film is very honest about what James Bond goes through, and it’s interesting to allow that to be part of the story. One gesture can change your life and sometimes that thing is cultural. For me, it was cinema. It’s important to create experiences that can be a conduit for change.”
Casino Royale is the first Secret Cinema that Riggall has delegated control of, handing the reins to veteran theatre director Angus Jackson. “It’ll be the biggest indoor show we’ve done – twice the size of Blade Runner,” says Jackson. “It’s 1,500 people a night, 50 performers. This is closest to when I ran the entire Rome season at the RSC [in 2017], when we built a four-show Roman world for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus. That collapsed in on itself in the space of a year.”
It also heralds a deeper partnership with the film creators. “I had to pitch to Barbara Broccoli. She listened, asked very astute questions, then said, ‘Yeah, you can do that.’ Next, I got hold of the film’s director, Martin Campbell, and said, ‘What were you thinking when you filmed Casino Royale?’ He said, ‘I looked down the camera lens and asked myself if it was real. And if it was, I filmed it.’”
Blade Runner, Canning Town (2018)
“We didn't want to break the spell, and playing the Vangelis soundtrack would do that,” says Bennett. “So we took the music from Taffey’s Bar, because it’s a place in the film. We stretched 18 seconds of Arabic-style dub into six hours of low-end exotica.”
Jackson, shrewdly, won’t reveal the contents of the show. “We’ve got a casino – that’s not too much of a spoiler,” he laughs. However, fans of the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest may find the prescreening narrative familiar. Jackson also name-drops Sébastien Foucan, the founder of freerunning, who played bomber Mollaka in Casino Royale’s opening chase in Madagascar. “Seb’s been in and out a few times,” he teases.
What Jackson does promise is an opportunity for everyone to live out their 007 fantasy in a way that no one, except perhaps the Bond actors, has had the chance to do. “Spielberg said we go to films to watch people making the choices you wouldn’t make in real life,” he says. “We’re putting these choices in the hands of the audience. You get to a point where the audience are the performers. That’s what a Secret Cinema show is.”
Riggall and Luhrmann on stage at 2017’s Moulin Rouge
Fabien Riggall may be a master of secrecy, but he’s quite open about some of the plans he has for Secret Cinema. He wants to take it global. “We’ve done teasers in Berlin, New York, to see how can that works. Universally, I think people want experiences that are mysterious, to become part of a bigger thing. In the US, cinema has a cultural resonance, and bringing these experiences to a country where entire towns transform for Halloween is interesting. And when we start going to places that don’t speak English, how do we translate that?”
As for which films he’d like to do next: “Titanic. The richness of that world could be huge. The question is, how are we going to build it, sink it and then get it back up every night? I’ve always wanted to do Secret Cinema on a train. And ET – to have everyone cycle to a forest on BMXs, strap them onto wires, then they fly over the screen and we never see them again.”
Riggall may be joking about ET, but there’s one idea for the future that he’s serious about: “Once Upon a Time in America, set beneath Brooklyn Bridge. Transforming a district of Brooklyn into prohibition New York, with Morricone and a live orchestra. I’m definitely going to propose that to whichever mayor of Brooklyn we have to talk to. I think that’s possible.”
Secret Cinema presents Casino Royale launches on June 5; tickets.secretcinema.org
Words Tom Guise
