‘Helen’ interview with directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor

Shot in Newcastle, Liverpool, Dublin and Birmingham, Helen, the final part in the Civic Life series, is the astounding debut feature from Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, otherwise known as Desperate Optimists. It follows the journey of Helen (Townsend), who agrees to play the part of a missing girl named Joy in a police reconstruction retracing her last known movements. Joy, it seems, had everything: a loving family, a boyfriend and a bright future. Helen, on the other hand, is parentless, has lived in institutions all her life and has never been close to anyone. Gradually she begins to immerse herself into the role, quietly and carefully insinuating her way into the lost girl’s life. This moving and mesmeric film is beautifully shot and scored.

Jason Wood: Could you begin by talking about the genesis of Desperate Optimists and your initial work in community theatre, experimental performance and online projects?

Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor: We both started to work together, in what can broadly be described as community arts, back in the mid 80s in Dublin. Initially the kinds of projects we ran were not art form led but instead we allowed the interests of the given community groups we were working with to suggest the art form required. So for example, some projects required writing to be the focus, others were more visual arts orientated and some navigated towards theatre. The side effect of this is that we developed a very eclectic way of working before finally specialising in writing and theatre. All that said however, we guess the art form that has inspired us the most has always been cinema. To our shame, long periods of time can go by now without us ever going to the theatre but we watch films pretty much on a daily basis.

JW: How did this interest in cinema evolve to encompass the production of short films and how was this production informed by other disciplines?

CM/JL: Because we did not specialise early on in our various community projects, but instead kept things very open and fluid, we thought nothing of having live or pre-recorded film and video on stage in our subsequent theatre work. We liked very much sharing the stage with these other art forms and technologies in our live performances. They were a lot of fun to work with in creating more complex and layered approaches to narrative, performance and time. The audience reactions were not always much fun. We made very challenging theatre; maybe too much so. We noticed however, that the more we worked with film and video the more we enjoyed the filmmaking process. We recall on one of our last theatre shows that the moving image component was around 50% of the live experience. We calculated that it wouldn’t be long before our theatre work would be 100% moving image and 0% live and that this could be a real problem for a paying public intent on seeing a live production. The writing was on the wall in that sense and it was an easy decision to make to stop live theatre work and concentrate on the thing that made us happiest. In the late nineties, when we began to move from theatre into moving image, the practical reality of limited access to (then) expensive technology and lack of money directed us to internet moving image projects to begin with before we progressed to video works and finally to short films on 35mm for cinema. One of the things about this progression is that we were always interested in what was formally possible in the medium we were working in. This clearly carries its responsibilities but we also enjoyed pushing the boundaries. Cinema, for reasons perhaps beyond the scope of this response, is a form that is quite conservative and one you have to be careful with in terms of how you push the form. That said, we love cinema driven by a formal bravery.

JW: The notion of community has been a constant thread. Why is this notion so essential to you and what benefits have you found to have arisen from working in what can be considered a grass roots fashion?

CM/JL: Even though we have been working on and off with various community groups for over twenty years it is only in the last six years, while working on our Civic Life project, that something of a certain clarity has begun to emerge. There’s no doubt that much of the impetus for our work as been a certain social and political commitment. At the same time we are fascinated by the interplay of seemingly contradictory processes that underpin our Civic Life films. So, on the one hand, we very deliberately strive for the high production values of big budget mainstream Hollywood films by making use of 35mm cinemascope, anamorphic lenses, elaborate and technically complicated crane shots (or steadicam shots) and highly choreographed long takes. While on the other hand we use ordinary, real people from the community – non-professionals – who we then immerse in this stylised cinematic world. What emerges is a sort of authenticity – that arises from the rawness of the performances – counteracted by the slickness of the production values. We like tension and it is this that has drawn us to working with community groups on these films. The flawed, imperfect nature of the films, we hope, are the very qualities that open up a space for the audience. It is this ‘space’ that we try to create when making the films – a space in which accidents might happen and in which things might come alive. We see Helen as a sort of high point in all of this but the film also exposes some potential limitations in the Civic Life method. We have a growing sense that it’s possible Helen may represent the end of a way of working for us. This might need explaining. In very crude terms Helen has allowed us to imagine our next feature film and because of the ambitions we have for this next film we are aware that these ambitions may not be best served using the Civic Life approach. Some of the methods we have honed and explored over the past five years may have to be attenuated but this is something we are ready for as we believe, with Helen, we have probably pushed the Civic Life project as far as it can go.

JW: How did Who Killed Brown Owl, the first film in the Civic Life series come about and what decisions shaped your aesthetic approach and distinct take on narrative?

CM/JL: The commission came from Enfield Council. Rather than spending the money on fireworks – which was very much an option – Enfield Council wanted to commission a film project to celebrate the successful completion of the Council’s New River Loop Restoration Project. It was our desire to involve as many local people as possible in the project and to this end we held a number of civic meetings and ran a stall at a local summer fete in an attempt to drum up local involvement. Mindful that we wanted to avoid the pitfall of producing a tourist board film, we were nonetheless convinced we should strive for something painterly, beautiful and elegant to match the setting itself (although we did undercut this arcadian fantasy by lacing the film with a bit of murder, mayhem and dysfunction). Instinctively we knew that video would never deliver the film that we wanted to produce but we had no idea, never having worked with film before, if the budget of £20,000.00 would cover the dramatically cinematic ambitions we were beginning to develop, particularly knowing that we also wanted to output to film. There were two things that became clear to us very early on. Firstly, in order for the production budget to work we would only be able to afford the equipment and crew for one day. Secondly, in order for the postproduction budget to work we would only be able to develop a minimal quantity of stock. The logistical constraints demanded by the limited budget began to force a set of aesthetic decisions on us that very much fell into line with our own desires about how we might ‘stage’ the film event itself and develop strategies for working with a cast of non-professionals. It became clear very quickly that the ‘long take’ would provide us with the solution we required and it is this use of the long take, coupled with the challenge of working with non actors and minimal rehearsal time, that has resulted in the distinctive approach to narrative and performance to have emerged from the Civic Life series of films. One way or the other, given our background in experimental performance in which the ‘liveness’ of the event was always foregrounded, we’re convinced we would have been drawn to the long take and what it offered up to us as short film makers desiring to experiment in cinematic time and space.

JW: Could you talk about the actual process of going from making shorter pieces to the challenges and logistics of making a feature length film? How did you find the transition?

CM/JL: To date we have made nine Civic Life short films. All of these films have been made using more or less the same rules. So, we use long takes, we work with mainly non-professional casts from the local community, we shoot 35mm cinemascope using anamorphic lenses and we output to film, preferably premiering in a local multiplex cinema. Over these five years we have certainly discovered the parameters of what is possible working in this way. After the success of Who Killed Brown Owl we decided we wanted to make a series of films using this methodology and we randomly came up with the idea of seven short films. It was never our intention to aim towards a feature length film. It was only after we’d completed the final film in the series and were receiving invitations from festivals to screen all seven films together that the idea of a Civic Life feature film began to take hold. A well-funded commission from the Liverpool Biennial and the Liverpool Culture Company allowed us to experiment with making a longer Civic Life film. The resulting half hour film, Daydream, was shot over four days and provided us with a very tough learning curve. A beautiful but deeply flawed film – a noble failure we hope – Daydream provided us with the key to plan our approach to the shooting of a feature film. Indeed, if we hadn’t made Daydream we’re convinced Helen would have been a disaster! We learnt that we would have to free ourselves from a strict adherence to the Civic Life rules and explore a more flexible approach to the use of the long take to ensure that we would have options at the editing stage. The realities of working with such a perilously low shooting ratio of only 1:3 and having only 30,000’ of film (equivalent to only 300 mins of exposed film in the can) from which to extract a 79min feature film meant we had to find some new strategies. At the end of the day, this was always going to be the challenge of translating the Civic Life method from a short film to a feature length film – the need to develop the narrative over time. The long take has always allowed us a tremendous sense of flexibility, enabling us to react on the day regardless of the many variables thrown up by our methodology. For a feature film – that is ultimately dramatic in its structure – by its very nature, more has to be pinned down and no matter how loose, fluid and open we might want to keep things as we are filming, the narrative structure has to work. Understanding how we might use cutaways and sequences that were freed up from serving the demands of the narrative – like the sequences in the woods – was central to making the transition to a feature length film.

JW: As well as community, environment strikes me as being essential to your work. How did you utilise your local environment in Helen and how did you seek to replicate this environment on screen?

CM/JL: As a precondition to how the financing works on these Civic Life films, the commissioning organisation often has strong feelings about where the film should be located. For example, Birmingham was very much interested in us filming not just in their city but specifically in Handsworth Park itself. Now, to some this might sound like a real constraint but we find it helpful to have these strictures. Our analogy is something like a jazz structure. The stronger the structure that Miles Davis lays down the easier it will be for John Coltrane to find the freedom to play. If there’s no structure you end up spending all your time looking for it. So, by narrowing down the locations we can work in, you begin (subconsciously) to work with some parameters. So in effect, the starting points for all these films are, as the question suggests, environments, locations and sites. These become central to everything. Many years ago we used to go through writing exercises. A thorny issue for writers is starting points. How does one start? Over the years this question has become quite abstract for us, as it seems very simple. Yes, it could be a location like a park or a building for that matter. One phrase that came up many years ago was a Williams Carlos Williams quote: ‘In things not in ideas’. Location seems a perfect place from which to build narratives. In fact they are perfectly suited to cinema. We’ll come back to the question of how we seek to replicate this environment on screen further down the line.

JW: I imagine that you also cast from within the local community. If so, this tactic pays particular dividends in the performance of Annie Townsend as the eponymous college girl whose upbringing is in contrast to the missing person she is asked to replicate. How did Townsend come to your attention and given the complexity of the role and the issues that she communicates, how did you help her to achieve her quietly astonishing performance?

CM/JL: Our cast for Helen came entirely from within the local community. As with all our Civic Life films, by and large, whoever turns up on the day is in the film. The exception to this is how we cast the title role of Helen. We knew it would be impossible without a more traditional approach to the casting process. We couldn’t just take the first young woman that came our way and give her the part. In fact, in the end, we really struggled to get anyone even close to what we needed and time was very quickly running out. With only two weeks to go before we were due to begin shooting our film we still hadn’t found our lead performer. In the end it came down to two young women. We were getting nervous, come early October, so much so that we actually approached the agent of a very talented rising star from Dublin and asked if we could arrange an audition. It went against all our desires to consider a professional, experienced actress for the part but our back was very much up against the wall. We liked this young woman very much and might have cast her there and then if we didn’t have the tough skin that many years hanging from the cliff ledge has given us. We went back to our funders to look for their help and the NewcastleGateshead Initiative put us in contact with Open Clasp, a local women’s group. Annie came to an audition we arranged with Open Clasp. We specifically recall taking Annie’s photo and she had a very strong way about her as she was photographed which impressed us. She appears vulnerable but there’s an incredible strength there. She also seemed to have a very clear and strong sense of how she wanted to be presented which wasn’t about what she thought we might want from her. We felt she had a very quiet, restrained but compelling presence on film. The Irish actress would have brought a lot of experience to the shoot as opposed to Annie’s complete lack of experience but it was this quality, this rawness that we loved in the end. We don’t like to over direct so we pretty much wanted to let Annie interpret the role the way she felt it should be done. It was an act of faith that we believe paid off in the end. Annie, will have to take all the credit for her wonderful performance though. She very much led the way and set the tone.

JW: Reading the reviews of the film, all of which seem to be glowing, it is your erring towards understatement and your sense of precision that has been singled out. In terms of the ‘look’ of the film was this the objective?

CM/JL: Just to point out, alas, the reviews are not all glowing. We have read a few unsupportive reviews, which basically say it’s too slow, or it’s a great idea wasted, or it’s emotionally too cold. This does not surprise us and we’re sure that this accurately reflects some of the audiences’ views. Helen is clearly not everyone’s cup of tea and it does little to want to be loved. That said if you can give yourself over to it we firmly believe in the emotional landscape that is there.

We’re not sure exactly why we have arrived at such a particular way of filming and framing scenes (this may answer your earlier point about how we replicate environments and locations on the screen) but we suspect we like to keep the actual technical aspects of what we do very very simple. For example, if there is a scene between people in a domestic place we always try to work out the best way to film that scene and leave it at that. The idea of breaking down the shot doesn’t come very naturally to us and to be honest feels like a very tedious task. Filming the same scene from a variety of angles fills us with dread. When we’ve done it, it feels very mechanical and not something that we find interesting. Now this might sound like we’re slackers but in reality we very much like cinema which has a certain theatricality to it and one formal approach that can draw out this theatrical quality is to keep the cutting down to a minimum. Of course, if you are going to be so minimal with your shot list you have to very very careful and clear about how you are going to set about the task. Perhaps this is where the sense of precision comes in. But in reality its probably just the perception of precision as we don’t imagine our methodology is any more precise that someone who likes very fast cutting. Oddly, when we were filming Helen we sensed in some of the crew a restlessness. It was almost as if they wanted the shooting schedule to be very fast and physically demanding with lots of set ups and location changes. The idea that we might have just one or two set ups in the entire day was perplexing to some of the crew. Perhaps there is such a thing as arthouse crews, rom-com crews, action crews…

JW: In a film that is so beautifully calibrated, it seems unfair to single individuals out for praise but Dennis McNulty’s ambient score cannot pass without mention and I can’t imagine the film without it. Had you worked with McNulty before and what was his brief on this project?

CM/JL: Dennis did a great job. We have known Dennis for several years as both ourselves and Dennis were commissioned to represent Ireland at the Bienal de São Paulo in 2004 and we got on very well. So there was no doubts we could all work together. We approached music for Helen is a cautions way. We asked Dennis to compose music for our short film Joy, a companion piece to Helen, and agreed that if this went well we might move on to Helen. As it turned out we were very happy with the work Dennis did for Joy and so we just kept going. Dennis’s brief was very simple really but we talked a lot about certain sounds we wanted and the simplicity we were looking for, given the fact that we were also using voiceover in the film. To be honest, despite the reaction to the perceived ‘glacial’ tone of the film, we see Helen as a deeply emotional film, where the emotional world of the film is very much raging under the surface. What we find compelling about Annie Townsend’s performance is that she manages to express that hidden turmoil in a very restrained and subtle way. We very much wanted the music to respond to that quality we believed the film possessed. We didn’t want to force or drive an emotional response from the audience; instead we wanted the film to open up a space for the audience. What was probably very good for us in the end was to work the edit almost to the point of picture lock without ever introducing the element of music. We briefed Dennis by giving him a draft edit of the film, by talking to him, by sending responses back and forth and, ultimately, by trusting him to get on with it. The completed mix of the score didn’t arrive in the UK until the week of the final Dolby mix down of our film. Our feeling was, if the music doesn’t work in the end we won’t include it. We had such a strong sense of the film and how it worked without the music that we trusted that Helen could work with it. However, as we lay the tracks on the timeline, we just knew that the music that Dennis had produced would work. In that way our collaboration with Dennis was very much in keeping with the spirit of the Civic Life series. It is a cinema of ‘making do’ whereby, despite the lead in the saddle at the beginning of the race, we trust that the groundwork and preparation we do ensures that something worthwhile and distinctive, if flawed, will make it through to the finishing post.

JW: How, if at all, has the reaction to the film affected you? It has been something of a phenomenon on the festival circuit and now, as I earlier mentioned, the critical reaction is generally beginning to build. Is it tremendously gratifying and what do you feel people are responding so positively to when they watch the film?

CM/JL: Don’t forget that the origins of this film were to make a community project. None of the money (miniscule though it is in feature film terms) came from film financing routes. So there was absolutely no commercial pressure on us, or the project. The aim was to make a film, with local participation that fed back positively to the communities that were involved. Now this other level of the film festival circuit and nominations and latterly distribution has been something of a surprise to us also. That said, we had done enough short films to guess that if things worked out we could make something highly distinctive and interesting for this moment in time. When we use the term distinctive we are referring to a kind of film one doesn’t normally see coming out of the UK or Ireland today. To our mind ‘Helen’ the kind of film that could have been at home in the 50’s in France. It could be argued that the unusual route through which it was funded led to an equally unusual film. At no stage did we have to sell the idea or package it to make it fundable by film financiers. We have a sense we will never get that opportunity ever again.

And yes, you are right, although it is still very early on in it’s festival circuit life, Helen has already been screened in many, many places. How it has affected us is not entirely clear just yet but it’s certainly having a very positive affect on the journey towards getting our next feature film made. We say’ journey’ as there is a long way to go yet but the basic idea and the writing are going well and perhaps we sense that if we aim to have a chance at making a third feature film we need to refine some elements in our thinking and methodology.

JW: I always try to avoid asking about influences, especially the influence of other filmmakers, but Antonioni’s name has appeared once or twice in connection to Helen. Are there any figures whose work has made a particular impression upon you?

CM/JL: Yes, we are big fans of Antonioni. We would also add Atom Egoyan, Barbara Loden, Carl Dreyer, Miklós Jancsó and many others. We’re happy about that. We can’t say how accurate it is but it’s clearly not off the mark and these are all filmmakers whose work we are very familiar with. If you play certain music to a baby whilst it’s still in the womb, or as an infant, it affects the child in positive ways. Lots of osmosis. We love work that makes us think and challenges us and we could just as easily be referring to photography, or literature or writing. Afterall, isn’t that one of the things about work that we love, how it influences our way of thinking?

JW: When I recently worked on the DVD release of Chris Petit’s Radio On many people commented how the film seemed to suggest an alternative British cinema that was not fully followed up on. It now seems with films such as Helen, Better Things and Unrelated that there is a genuine resurgence in arthouse British filmmaking. How do you view the contemporary climate?

CM/JL: Everywhere we go we are hearing that also. Just to expand that list, recently we saw Hunger by Steve McQueen and this is an extraordinary piece of cinema that makes a very significant contribution to the belief that there is a genuine resurgence in arthouse cinema in the UK. We could also easily add to that list the work of Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold. We certainly hope this resurgence is happening. Hopefully it’s not just a weird blip. There’s no doubt that in the UK there are some very fine thinkers and makers of cinema. It’s clear they have not always been supported, despite the fact that there are audiences for the work. For example, our local film shop on Broadway Market, East London is busy every night with people renting out new and old cinema, which will challenge them. Audiences have the desire to shop around and see what else is there and are happy to take risks in their viewing habits, so is seems reasonable that the makers of cinema reciprocate. Taste is an odd thing and is certainly something that can be developed and cultivated. The problem right now is there seems to be very little choice. Sometimes, when looking through the cinema listings pages, it feels like going into a large music shop and they are just selling the one style of music. In the world of music that would be inconceivable. If we look at the range and even quantity of arthouse films that have come out in the last 18 months it’s pretty extraordinary and the quality is as good as anything you will find anywhere in the world. One can only imagine with more support there’s no reason in the world, neither artistically nor commercially, why this trend cannot continue. But we’d do well do be sceptical. I think this struggle to create more aesthetic choices in cinema is not so much about the bottom line but also about culture and politics. An ongoing battle.
Helen is on a limited release from 1 May