Gideon Koppel talks about his debut film SLEEP FURIOUSLY
Filmmaker Gideon Koppel leads us on a poetic and profound journey into a world of endings and beginnings. The film is set in a small farming community in mid Wales about 50 miles north of Dylan Thomas’s fictional village of Llareggub, a place where the director’s parents – both refugees – found a home.
It is a landscape and population that are changing rapidly as small-scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. Resisting any traditional documentary structure, Koppel’s camera very quietly observes this change as the population grows older, the local primary school faces closure, and the mobile library resists a move into the 21st century. Allied to a soundtrack by the revered electronic musician Aphex Twin, SLEEP FURIOUSLY is lyrical filmmaking at its very best.
Jason Wood: You’ve described the film as being influenced by conversations with the writer Peter Handke, what form did these conversations take and what were some of the primary topics?
Gideon Koppel: A few weeks into the filming of Sleep Furiously I was reading Peter Handke’s play Kaspar. The world of Kaspar had a particular resonance for me at the time: exploring relationships between external and internal landscapes; questions about belonging; a sense of what is ‘possible’ rather than what ‘is’, or ‘was’…; Kaspar’s struggle for language, for words – his cry ‘I want to be someone like somebody else once was’.
I wrote to Peter, describing the film I was making and asking if I could come to Paris to talk with him about it. One month later, we talked. We talked about all kinds of stuff, but I remember coming away thinking differently about stories – what a story could be. I really enjoyed the idea of a story as an evocation of a moment, a place in time, a gesture.
But perhaps most important was Peter’s response to the uncertainties I expressed about what I and how I was filming: he said simply and emphatically “follow your instinct”. Peter’s words were and remain very important for me.
JW: What is your direct relationship to the community in which you film and how did this impact upon your decision to film there and how you chose to represent it?
GK: I guess I should start answering this question by saying that Sleep Furiously is not intended to be a film ‘about’ the community of Trefeurig; so I didn’t really set out to ‘represent’ Trefeurig. In that sense I don’t experience the film as a ‘documentary’, or at least what ‘documentary’ has become associated with now.
The writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips viewed two rough cuts of and of the second commented that he felt there was a more developed emphasis on ‘aboutness’. I enjoyed this term Adam coined and recognised my resistance to the demands for ‘aboutness’ and my interest in the qualities of evocation.
I wanted to make a film in which moments of intimacy and human gesture became juxtaposed with the infinite space and time of the landscape. I think about the landscape of Sleep Furiously as an ‘internal landscape’: it has a quality of childhood about it. I suppose my own childhood, although I tried to evolve a film that touches more universal sensibilities. But it is not stuck in childhood, there is a development in the film which I perceived as a passage from nature to culture.
Having said that, my relationship with the community of Trefeurig is rooted in my childhood. We used to go on family holidays there and I often ‘worked’ on one of the local farms with Edwin and Eleanor Hughes. I smile when I say ‘work’ because all I did was tag along with Mr Hughes, but it felt like work and I discovered a deep sense of contentment and satisfaction in that experience.
When I was 12 or 13 my parents moved permanently from Liverpool to a smallholding in the area. Without having had any farming experience, they kept cows, sheep, goats, chickens… and I was roped into helping look after the animals. My parents, both artists and refugees, found a home and a sense of belonging in this beautiful but sometimes harsh environment. So Trefeurig became and in part remains my home too.
JW: Before I even viewed Sleep Furiously I was immediately drawn to the title. It seems so incongruous and yet after seeing the film it seemed so apt in it’s capturing of an environment and a community in what has been described as ‘quiet uproar’. Did you wish the title to reflect this and is the phrase ‘quiet uproar’ one that you feel appropriate in terms of describing the changes that are afoot in rural communities?
GK: This is such a difficult question because at the moment I still lack the confidence to really play with the significance of titles. It seems to me that a title is like the outline of a drawing or painting, which in turn makes me think of Marion Milner’s book On Not Being Able to Paint. Here Milner describes ‘the outline’ as that which separates the external realities of the world from imaginative experience and in that sense ‘the outline’ becomes the containment of what might otherwise be an unmanageable madness.
I suppose what I am saying is that for me the title can generate boundaries in which the film evolves as an autonomous world with its own logic, moralities. Sleep Furiously had a working title of The Library Van, which I liked for its direct simplicity. For me this title suggested the possibilities of the van as an actual and metaphoric vehicle of stories, but I feared it might reinforce the film being perceived as a documentary ‘about’ a library van.
I used the cutting room as I would a studio space – covering the walls with images and text. My eyes, my mind could wander away from the screen I was working on to these associative elements I had found throughout the making process. One of these elements was a large graphic of the Chomsky phrase ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’. At one point I removed this sheet from the wall and paced it directly under my monitor. In this act ‘sleep furiously’ became the title of the film. I don’t really want to explain my thinking about the title beyond that point.
JW: It is perhaps unavoidable that some moments in Sleep Furiously evoke a bygone era but the film, because of the issues it seeks to address, never settles for mere nostalgia. Was this, and overtures towards sentiment, something that you were keen to avoid?
GK: Almost every story in Sleep Furiously suggests both beginning and ending – the circularity of life. The owl dies but then becomes something else – a sculpture; the piglets are cute and loveable but will be equally appealing when unrecognisable – grilled with a little salt and pepper. I guess that the paradoxical and contradictory in life, however difficult, are important for me. So it is not that I set out to specifically eliminate sentimentality or nostalgia, my intention was for the film to create its own moral constructs rather than use assumed values.
JW: It strikes me that sound as well as image is particularly important to you. This is a film that I could imagine experiencing with my eyes closed. I would still take enjoyment and enlightenment from it. Was sound design something to which you paid particular attention?
GK: I trained for three years as an sound recording engineer at Utopia Studios in London, working on all kinds of music projects from the Queen soundtrack for the feature film Flash Gordon to Neutronica, an album by Donovan. It is funny but I wasn’t interested in the music bit at all, but was really curious about sounds and used studio ‘downtime’ to make sound montages.
That later developed into a fascination with the juxtaposition of sound and picture. Jean Luc Godard’s Prénom Carmen and Passion had a big impact. I thought it was magical to be immersed in an image of the sea at night time while hearing the sound of a train… then propelled into an acute sense of the infinite as the sound of the train was suddenly replaced by the distant waves… .
I think about the microphone like I do the camera – as a kind of microscope on the world. Not merely to record sounds that accompany or illustrate the image, but to create another dimension to the picture. This approach was developed in post production by Joakim Sundström – a brilliant sound supervisor – who created movements of sound which evoked the character-like presence of ‘the land’ and the ever-changing light, skies and weather. We talked about juxtapositions of scale – for instance rather than losing the tiny figure walking in the vastness of the landscape, she is given a particular presence as sound of her footsteps cuts through the gusting of wind.
I remember that my original notes for Joakim include a quotation from John Banville’s novel The Sea. Banville describes silence in terms of sound and questions whether this is a quality he brings to the environment or something which has its own presence. Throughout the ‘sleep furiously’ I am asking the audience to listen to the silence – a silence equivalent to the stillness of the camera.
JW: The overall impression I was left with was one of tranquillity and disruption. How are others responding to the film, and as your first feature, how gratifying is it to experience such positive audience and critical responses?
GK: It is funny because a lot of my work has never been seen publically. Ooh la la and the art of dressing up was the last film I made for television. Set in a world of high fashion – Julien Macdonald and Givenchy – it is a modern day Faustian story which explores the psychopathology of celebrity. BBC Wales really hated it and it was never broadcast. So the positive response to Sleep Furiously is all the more gratifying.
Most people seem to be genuinely touched by the film. But perhaps the greatest reward for me is that against all odds for a £200,000 film it will be seen in the cinema. That was my and Margaret Matheson’s ambition right from the outset – right down to shooting on film, at 24 frames-per-second. I love the sense of occasion and the spectacle of cinema – sitting in a dark space, eating chocolate peanuts and raisins while gazing up at vast photographic images, cloaked in a world magical of sounds.
And although Sleep Furiously is an unusual film, I think that it has a haunting beauty and speaks to something universal. Unlike much of contemporary culture, it is neither sensationalist nor prescriptive – so it offers the space for people to think and imagine for themselves.
