After a lengthy and slightly unorthodox (and unnecessarily drawn out) selection process, a production group of six was selected. We were to be known at Group 2B, and it consisted of myself initially, and I was lucky enough to be ‘chosen’ by Georgie Oatley and Elliot Pace (who I had approached beforehand about collaborating with and who thankfully were still up for working with me), as well as Dan Stockmann and Joshua Stack. The latter two being slight enigmas as far as the year group was concerned. I had barely spoken to either of them up to that point, but still felt complimented that after the afternoon-long selection process, they decided to join the group that I was assembling. David Deacon was also assigned to our group after the fact.
We met a few times in the week that followed to brainstorm various ideas. The first meeting was more about genre selection than anything, and we initially had narrowed it down to sci-fi and documentary. After discussing possibilities within both of those genres, we decided that a documentary would not only be fun and challenging, but would be good practice for the documentary unit of Year 2.
I was never sure as to whether being selected as a ‘producer’ meant that I had any more responsibility than anyone else in the group, but even so, I felt that my age (as much as it dismayed me) might have been useful in terms of an unspoken leadership in these early stages. I never assigned myself this role, but nevertheless was happy to accept responsibility for the group and the ups and downs that would follow. I would be the first to describe myself as outspoken and opinionated, and in years gone by those character traits have not always worked in my favour. Being that way works in some situations, but not in others. I believe though, that within filmmaking, taking charge of situations for the sake of moving things along should be encouraged. This was something that over the course of the production I would be happy to practice.
At our second group meeting, we discussed possible documentary subjects and landed on the following as potential possibilities:
- White Collar Fight Clubs
- The Curious Survival of a Local Independent Stationary Retailer
- The KONY Awareness Project
- A Day In The Life Of A Local Comedian In The Hours Leading Up To A Performance
The comedian idea being the subject of our first pitch. As a group, we didn’t feel as if the time we were given prior to the pitch was quite enough time to make an informed decision with regards to the subject that we wanted to tackle, and if I’m honest, our first pitch was simply something we put together for the sake of the pitch. We never intended to follow through with the comedian idea, but we wanted to produce an educated pitch that demonstrated the kind of research we were doing into the documentary genre.
The day after the pitch, ‘Wednesday Screening Chris’ (don’t know his surname) entered one of our brainstorming sessions in C-12. He had obviously expected a larger group of students for his Wednesday screening and stumbled across the five of us (David was absent from this meeting). We told him why we were there and what kind of ideas we had been discussing and asked him if he had any documentary features in the catalogue of DVDs he had brought along with him. He left us with a few, but the one that generated the most interest within the group was a film called ‘Midnight Movies: From The Margin To The Mainstream’ by Stuart Samuels. It was a documentary feature comprised mainly of interviews and archive footage that featured the likes of John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, George A. Romero, Richard O’Brien and David Lynch. It offered eye opening insight into the world of midnight movies and the impact it had on the cinema going public in the 70s. Films like ‘El Topo’, ‘Pink Flamingos’ and ‘Eraserhead’ opened up a world of possibilities in terms of feature film content, and it was intriguing to hear the films’ makers speaking so candidly about their experiences. They addressed everything from the production to release struggles, and something about this film struck a chord with all of us.
As soon as the film concluded, we were all buzzing with excitement. After seeing such raw footage (from many films none of us had ever seen), we knew that we wanted to make a midnight movie. They are elements of a midnight movie that define it as a genre, and we were all in agreeance that it was something we wanted to explore further. The comedian idea was immediately forgotten, and we were all excited about something, and it felt fantastic to witness that kind of unified enthusiasm about a project.
But we still were fascinated with the idea of a documentary. We had already done a week’s research on the genre, and the whole reason we were exposed to ‘Midnight Movies’ was because of our interest in the documentary genre. So, we discussed the possibility of producing a film about a midnight movie. The idea was that we would create a fictional film, fictional filmmaker characters and a fictional level of success for the ‘midnight movie’ that we would birth. Out of nowhere, ‘Orangutang Bangarang’ was conceived.
In terms of style, the segment of ‘Midnight Movies’ that stood out the most was the chapter dedicated to John Waters and the making of ‘Pink Flamingos’. While other segments focused on interviews with the director while showing clips of the actual film itself, we were allowed access to on-set home movie footage of ‘Pink Flamingos’ being put together. For whatever reason, this stuck out particularly, and we had our plot.
We decided that we would invent a film and the history behind it and then film in two different ‘eras’. We were going to cast two actors to play each of our characters. The present day filmmakers would be interviewed to recal their time on set in the form of actors aged 50-60, while actors aged 19-25 would portray their 1979 counterparts who would be shot as if they were ‘on-set’ putting the ‘ultracult’ film together. This meant a casting challenge in terms of finding two sets of actors that bore resemblance to one another, but also a challenge as far as creating ‘aged’ footage was concerned. Both were challenges that we were more than happy to accept.
Writing our film became enormous fun. Once we established names and roles for our characters, we came together to create not only a world for them to live in, but entire back stories for individual characters that would come to be integral to how we expected our actors to present their characters. We had a self-obsessed director, a timid producer who was quietly in love with him, the actress that was the director’s muse, and no-name actors who were forced to take part as a result of a tragic primate death.
Although I originally pitched the name and loose plot of the faux film, most of us played a massive part in the writing of the characters. We started by taking our character back stories (as far back as how they came to meet at St. Martin’s College) and writing a series of questions that we would pitch to them in their ‘present-day’ interviews. These questions were based on the biography of the characters and their relationships. As a result of this, we hoped that if we were able to draw the performances out of our actors, we would be able to edit something that was coherent across our board of characters, that their responses would match up with the answers and anecdotes given by everyone.
I proceeded to write the interviews for Rubik Winstanley (director) and Jacques Mignon (his right hand man and executive producer), while Georgie wrote the interviews for Mia Rosenbaum (actress/muse) and Elliot wrote Dan Manstock (actor). Splitting the writing this way meant that more senses of humour were incorporated into the script and would hopefully provide a broader chance of laughs.
We began to cast. Obviously there are faces that pop up a lot in NUCA films and we wanted to try and avoid that as much as possible as we felt that we really could create a alternate world for our characters to live in if we were able to produce an unrecognisable cast. The only notable face that I am aware of is that of David Frost (or David Norfolk as he prefers to be called for some reason) who has previously appeared in ‘False Reading’. He was cast as the 2012 Dan Manstock (the actor who portrays the lead orangutang in our fake film), while we were able to cast the magnificent Gareth Calway as 2012 Rubik Winstanley and the enigmatic Lucy Holden as 2012 Mia Rosenbaum. I, personally took a rather massive gamble casting Stuart Laidlaw as 2012 Jacques Mignon simply because of the drastic age gap between he and the other 2012 actors. As he is only in his mid-30s, I still found him to be appropriate for the role for two reason; a) he is Canadian as the role of Jacques was orignally intended, and b) his character is extremely gay and without applying stereotypes, we thought that his character may have been more image concious over the years than the other filmmakers which would justify his more youthful appearance. Whether or not this would work would have to be discovered in the moment.
In terms of the 1979 counterparts, the character of Rubik Winstanley was a no-brainer following a photograph of one of Elliot’s friends being presented to the group. Image wise, he was exactly what we envisioned Rubik to look like. Turtleneck and glasses, and a sharp jaw. I pitched the idea of Helen Anderson as Mia which again went down fine with the group. She had the youthful exuberance and floaty hair that we expected from a newly de-flowered muse. For some unknown reason, Dan offered his dramatic services to the dual roles of Dan and Jay Manstock (twins) who would be playing the male lead in ‘Orangutang Bangarang’.
Location-wise, we always had two in mind. The present day interviews we hoped would be filmed at Cinema City, and the ‘archive’ set footage at the Victorian plantation gardens in Norwich. Thankfully, Georgie had some pre-existing connections at Cinema City and they were more than happy to oblige us whenever they were available, which turned out to be most mornings between 930 and 1130.
The plantation gardens were similarly accepting of our proposal and gave us free run of their location provided we left the location in the same state that we found it and donated to their garden in the form of two pounds a head. Actors and crew combined, this came to around 18 pounds, so we happily budgeted 20 pounds on account of their support of our film.
We bought toy guns and painted them silver, and a 18 pound (!) monkey mask. Then, we proceeded to shoot.
No comments:
Post a Comment