Format: Cinema

Date: 23 October 2009

Venue: London and key cities

Distributor: Kaleidoscope Entertainment

Director: Mark Price

Writer Mark Price

Cast: Alastair Kirton, Daisy Aitkens, Kate Alderman, Leanne Pammen, Tat Whalley, Kerry Owen

UK 2008

97 mins

The new British zombie movie Colin is an ultra-low-budget film that follows the eponymous character around the streets of post-apocalyptic London during an outbreak of the living dead. The twist in this film is that the lead character is a zombie himself for most of the running time… Between screenings of the film at this summer’s FrightFest at the Empire cinema in London, Alex Fitch spoke to director Mark Price about genre audiences, the differences between high- and low-budget film and the benefits of cheap technology.

Alex Fitch: Was the screening at Frightfest the world premiere?

Mark Price: No, it has screened in a couple of other festivals. We fell in with our sales agent when we screened at the Abertoir festival, which is the only Welsh horror festival – it’s in Aberystwyth, and spelt Abertoir like Aberystwyth but pronounced Abattoir – it’s funny…

AF: I guess the low budget of the film is a double-edged sword, because a lot of the pre-publicity has been about how little it cost, rather than about the fact that it’s a very good zombie film.

MP: The good thing about that press is that it’s a platform for us to talk about what we wanted to do with the characters – that’s the heart of the story – and how we went about making the film. But I think that once the film is released the interest in the low budget will go away fairly quickly, even though it’ll be all over the DVD covers and what not. We always hoped that the quality of the story would be the selling point.

AF: At this year’s FrightFest there are a lot of zombie films, and out of the ones I’ve seen so far, the two that have impressed me the most are your film and Pontypool. I think that maybe it’s because when you have a very low budget and want your film to attract attention, you really have to work on the script and the actors…

MP: I was raised on blockbuster movies in Swansea and I still feel a lot of fondness for them, but I think the script and the acting should always be the most important thing, regardless of all the amazing advances in digital technology – they’re just tools to tell your story. Although we weren’t in a position to embrace much technology, we did embrace the ability to make a movie in your own home, in your bedroom on an old wrecked PC. I’m a zombie fan, I wanted to do a zombie movie, but I also wanted to do something that I could be confident hadn’t really be done before, obviously missing the fact that there was a movie called I, Zombie: The Chronicles of Pain. I honestly think that if I’d known about I, Zombie beforehand I probably wouldn’t have made Colin!

AF: I think I, Zombie is probably obscure enough that you don’t have to worry about people having seen it…

MP: …and it’s a very different movie as well, apparently. I haven’t seen it myself, but Andrew Parkinson, the director, sent me a copy of it; he’s a really nice guy. His film is more of a slow transformation from a man into a zombie, so by the end of the movie, he becomes this zombie – it’s more akin to The Fly, I guess. We just kind of skim over that in the first 10 or 15 minutes of our movie and crack on with the zombie part!

AF: I thought the structure of the film was really interesting – you leave the origin of Colin’s transformation into a zombie right until the end. What motivated that decision?

MP: I think it was the idea of rewarding the audience with interesting information. I know giving the back-story isn’t always necessarily the best way to develop a character, but for us, it felt more like a payoff. We always knew how the movie was going to end, but how do we draw attention to certain objects and items? That was the challenge. If you look at a movie that’s shot on 35mm with a budget like Chinatown or Hot Fuzz, when the twist comes at the end, you realise everything you’ve been watching means nothing. But that’s OK because you have a character trying to find something out, so the audience is with him, trying to find that something out. When you have a character who isn’t motivated in any clear direction and because of the low-budget format we shot the movie on, there’s a very real danger that we look like we don’t know how to tell a story, or how to edit a scene. So, we could lose a lot of our audience along the way, it’s scary for us that it all relies on that last 10 to 15 minutes, but we certainly wanted that to be a rewarding experience for the audience.

AF: What kind of camera did you shoot it on? It does have a very sharp, clear image, but it’s obviously not HD.

MP: We shot it on two camcorders, one was a three-chip camcorder – both Panasonics – and the other was a single-chip camera, because the three-chip died about half of the way through. This is the little trick to it: you can’t get these cameras to look like 35mm, and if we were to try and make it look like 35mm and light it very cleanly, it would just look cheap. So we really went the other way and embraced the flaws in the technology – we had lots of ‘hot spots’ and dark shadows, and I think that lends something to the visual quality of the film. If I knew as much about cameras as the cameramen I’ve been meeting recently, I would have gone: ‘I’d never have made a movie like this, let’s not bother’, and we wouldn’t have made it! So, sometimes a little ignorance can be a good thing! This idea that you have to spend a lot of money on technology, on HD cameras, it’s really not the case. A low-budget filmmaker only needs to worry about the story and the characters.

AF: I wouldn’t say that you don’t deserve to get a decent budget for your next project whatever that may be, but when low-budget filmmakers get a big budget for their next film, quite often it completely falls apart. What would your ideal next project be?

MP: Well, the idea for our next project is to keep the budget very low, so low that we retain a level of control, but we want the film to look like it cost three million, so we’re trying to find ways of doing that, which is a challenge. But at the same time, I think movie-making is problem-solving, whether your movie costs £70 million or £70. The best thing we can do is to hang on to the team of problem solvers we had on Colin, making sure we’re all working together on the next film. There are elements of the next film that seem easy and there are elements that seem beyond our reach, but that’s the excitement. That’s what it was like with Colin – when we started this, I knew nothing about make-up design and now I can make a zombie! Our make-up guys showed us how to make zombies, so that they wouldn’t necessarily be around all the time.

AF: In the publicity materials for the film, it says you found the actors for the film on Facebook – was it the same for the crew as well?

MP: That’s something that got a bit out of hand, actually. We used Facebook to communicate with everyone, but we didn’t really find many people on Facebook. Alistair, who plays Colin, I knew already, and other actors I met through Alistair. We had two auditions. We were really looking for people who we got along with and there’d be a degree of banter. We didn’t want any egos on the film because it’s low-budget, there’s no place for them. It was such a harmonious experience that if luck comes in quotas, then I’m in serious trouble; I’m fucked, because we used it all up on this film, so the next one’s going to be a disaster!

AF: I hope not! In terms of locations for the film, it doesn’t actually look that British, it has more of an international feel to it. For example, the scene with the hoodies, for want of a better word…

MP: …yeah, the stacked terraces…

AF: … I saw a similar scene in an Italian gangster movie recently, so it feels much more European than British. Was it just that you looked for interesting locations and didn’t have a particular aesthetic in mind?

MP: We were definitely looking for places that had a sense of isolation. For Rowley Way, one of my students – I was teaching low-budget techniques at Kilburn Park – said: ‘You’ve got to see this place, Rowley Way, it’s just off Abbey Road, it’s fantastic above ground and underground.’ What it allowed us to do visually was to really breathe and have that sense of depth. Actually, I still look at the film and every time I see those scenes, I’m waiting for someone to walk out of a door and just blow a take, which I missed this entire time!

AF: You didn’t leaflet everyone who lived there to say: ‘Could you please stay in your homes between the following hours…’?

MP: No, the students were telling us that Rowley Way was quite dangerous and we shouldn’t go down there without them! It was like one o’clock in the afternoon and I guess everyone was still in bed! Everything else there – the tower blocks were just around the corner – was visually so striking. I’ve got a lot of fondness for those places and definitely the ones that were incorporated in the film.

AF: What has been your students’ reaction to the film? Have they seen a complete cut yet?

MP: They’ve seen it and they were amazingly responsive and positive. That’s such a relief, and the response had been great from all of them. And that scene with the hoodie guys – they’re not actors, they’re just giving it a go! One of them was auditioning to get into RADA, the other one was just giving it his best shot. The next day, he just cracked me up, saying: ‘Man, I think I’m the best zombie in your film!’ And I said: ‘You weren’t a zombie, you were a human!’ ‘Was I?’ he says, ‘ah, whatever!’ And they were up against two LAMDA students – Daisy and Alistair – and a very experienced television actor. It was really amazing to see these two guys thriving among all these actors, holding their own. The guy with the samurai sword, he had just come round, giving it a go – he’s the guy who found the location – and he said: ‘I can get a samurai sword if you want…’ I said: ‘It is it sharp?’ and he said no, so I thought, ‘Go get it then!’

AF: Nobody lost their limbs in the making of this movie…

MP: No, we were OK, but it was quite scary, his running around, waving a sword at people going: ‘Arrgghh, I’m gonna cut your head off!’

AF: I suppose in a low-budget film, one of the most important applications of budget and training must be the fight scenes, where people are being beaten up, so that no one gets hurt.

MP: Yeah. That actually explains some of our frenetic camera work, because if you had the camera smoothly gliding along, you’d see that apart from the two actors we had placed to throw proper hits that registered properly on camera, everyone else is awkwardly grappling. We had some fun with that in the documentary on the DVD, you really get to see some of these guys being quite lame, because it’s really funny! Of course, in the film, because of the camera work we wanted to generate a level of intensity. The camera becomes a character and the idea was to have two camera styles. There’s a dominant human perspective in a scene, which is quite panicky and frantic and handheld, then there’s the zombie’s perspective, which is relatively calm and quiet.

AF: I probably shouldn’t ask this as a film should stand on its own, but the way that I read the final scenes was that when Colin comes home, it almost starts awakening memories in him. Was that your intent or do zombies not have human thoughts?

MP: One of the things we wanted with the film was for the audience to ask themselves questions. There are certain elements I don’t want to address, I want to leave people to come up with their own decisions. The basement scene is a really interesting one, some of the stuff I’ve heard back about that, what people think is going on there is like: ‘You’re a sick, sick man Price!’ And I’m like: ‘Woah! We don’t clearly state that! You’re the one who came up with that…’ I don’t think it’s my place to tell anyone what it was. The film should speak for itself and I wouldn’t want to acknowledge that you’re absolutely correct or rob you of thoughtful analysis. It’s not the place of the filmmaker to do that. That’s the one downside to DVD. You think certain filmmakers are geniuses, and then you hear them talk about their stuff and you go: ‘Ohhh, man, Brett Ratner isn’t a genius!’

Interview by Alex Fitch

Format: DVD

Date: 4 May 2009

Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Writer Nacho Vigalondo

Original title: Los Cronocrímenes

Cast: Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo, Juan Inciarte

Spain 2007

92 mins

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrí­;menes) combines elements of science fiction and psycho thrillers to create a film full of intriguing ideas and imagery. Alex Fitch spoke to director, writer and star of the film Nacho Vigalondo about his influences and love of genre movies. [WARNING: SPOILERS]

Alex Fitch: What was the genesis of this film? Had you been a fan of time travel movies or did the idea come to you as a short story?

Nacho Vigalondo: I’ve been a science fiction lover all my life. I spent my childhood reading sci-fi and I’ve always dreamt of becoming a science fiction filmmaker. But because Spain doesn’t have a sci-fi tradition, it’s very difficult to convince the business people and the industry people here to make that kind of film. It’s easier to make comedies or drama. But in 2005 I became this little celebrity in Spain because one of my films was nominated for an Oscar for best short. At that time, I decided that if I had an opportunity to make a feature film because of my Oscar situation, that out of all my projects, I’d make the crazy, complicated, science fiction one! So that’s why I insisted on making Timecrimes.

AF: The film has a complex plot, but it involves only five actors, and even though it’s science fiction it doesn’t require any special effects.

NV: I think that powerful science fiction comes from ideas, and it isn’t related to big concepts in terms of production but in terms of script-writing. For example, this movie seems very cheap but even a cheap film is expensive to make here. It wasn’t easy to sell this idea because you’re dealing with a time travel device that twists the reality of the character again and again. I tried to make a movie that is easy to watch on the screen, but you can figure out how complicated the script was. Here in Spain, if you want to raise money, you have to go to these commissions related to public funds and the TV industry, and it’s pretty complicated if you want to convince these guys to invest based only on the script. As a result, it took me many years to finish the film.

AF: Still, in some respects, it’s a relatively simple premise: a man observes what he thinks is a murder and then inadvertently becomes the murderer himself.

NV: Yes, of course. But the genesis of the idea for me was this: what if I make a time travel story that becomes a crime story, and in that crime story, what if the innocent guy and the villain and the guy who pulls the strings from the darkness are all the same? What if we push the ambiguity of crime stories like The Postman Always Rings Twice, for example, by putting in a time machine that makes the good guy the villain at the same time.

AF: I don’t know if you’re a fan of classic thrillers like Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage?

NV: Yes, of course! The Italian giallo is one of my favourite genres! I wanted to join my two passions in one film – one of my passions is sci-fi and the other is the kind of thriller that combines a specific point of view, bizarre killers and this kind of erotic stuff. Argento is one of my favourites, but other thrillers I have in mind are Body Double by De Palma, and of course Alfred Hitchcock.

AF: A recurring theme in a lot of these thrillers is the idea of the doppelgänger and you’ve taken that to its logical conclusion.

NV: Yes. There were several drafts of the story – it was maybe draft four or five when the girl entered the story, and her appearance became the heart of the film. It’s similar to the theme of the doppelgänger and the simulacra because we are dealing with the point of view of a certain character. Later we learn that the point of view belongs to someone hidden from the view of the audience. I love those kinds of games!

AF: The look of the film, the aesthetics, was that influenced by films like Se7en, which have a high contrast ratio? Did you use the bleach bypass/silver retention method to get that look?

NV: I love the look of Se7en, I’m really in love with David Fincher! Se7en became known as a very 1990s film, but the strategy for that film was to make it look like a 1970s picture, like The French Connection, for example. In Timecrimes, we tried to make a film that didn’t feel like any particular decade. Imagine someone watching this film in 50 years – we wanted that audience of the future to feel confused about the age of our film: is it the 1970s, the 80s, the 90s or the 21st century? Some of the elements of the film look contemporary, but at the same time other elements feel like Doctor Who from the 70s or the 80s. Some of the creepy material from Se7en doesn’t feel contemporary, but I feel that if you don’t stick to the aesthetics of your time, you’ll stop the movie from dating.

AF: In a way, watching any movie is a kind of time travel because as a viewer, you’re travelling back in time to the period it was made, so in Timecrimes, you’re playing with that in a way.

NV: Yes, the fact that you have time travel in a movie reflects the fact that a movie itself is something that travels back in time. That’s the nature of filmmaking.

AF: You play the role of the scientist in the film. Was it important for you to play that part? In a way, you have cast yourself as some kind of Deus ex machina, you’re ‘God’ within the story.

NV: I’ve been working as an actor since the 90s, in commercials, short films, in some feature films working with models, but I would never play an important role in one of my films. In this case, it felt funny to me to direct the film from inside it, experiencing all the contradictions related to filmmaking. When you’re a director, you’re like a god, you are pulling the strings, but at the same time you are the first victim of everything. The movie itself is pulling the strings and controlling you. It’s funny because that’s more or less what’s happening to the character in the movie. Some of the promotional stills from the movie are labelled as: ‘This is Nacho Vigalondo directing the main actor, Karra Elejalde’. But those stills actually show me acting in the movie – it was my character directing Karra’s character, and that is funny.

AF: What other time travel films are you a fan of? Inevitably that scene where you draw an arrow on the wall, to explain the path of time, brings up images of Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future?

NV: When we were making the movie, Primer came out, as well as Tony Scott’s Dé;jà Vu and the time travel episode in Lost. But at the time when I was writing the film, it wasn’t common to find time travel plots on the screen. Obviously, some of my big influences are Back to the Future and Twelve Monkeys, but the kind of time travel I wanted to bring to the screen were the short stories of Philip K. Dick, writers like Robert Heinlein or Stanislaw Lem, who wrote Solaris, which is one of my favourites. These writers deal with this kind of twisted time travel in which you’re not travelling far from home, but you are making a trip where you’re multiplying your past. There’s a short story by Heinlein called ‘All You Zombies’, and in this tale the guy becomes his own mother and father! I love those kinds of quirks!

AF: Do you think free will is possible in a time travel story? It seems from the moment that Hector observes the girl, he’s trapped in his own fate. It seems like a mix of the consequences of voyeurism and also quantum mechanics – when you observe something, it’s fixed in its state and cannot change.

NV: The quantum mechanics aspect is the girl. We put an image of Schrö;inger’s cat on the girl’s shirt – there’s a point in the movie where she’s dead and alive at the same time; it depends on what Hector sees, he defines whether she’s dead or alive. The theory of this film is that you only have free will within the limits of your perception. If you haven’t seen what happens inside a room, you can change what happens there, but if you have seen inside the room, you cannot change anything. When I was writing the script it was something that came to me. It’s a quantum physics conclusion. For me, that seemed fairer than giving the character the freedom to change everything.

AF: I suppose that, maybe more so than in other films, the actors must have had a lot of questions about what they were doing in each scene, particularly when there were three different Hectors acting simultaneously! How difficult was that to direct?

NV: It was pretty difficult. There were moments while we were shooting when we had to stop everything, because suddenly there’d be a question. We’re shooting in the middle of the night, in a forest, and suddenly a member of the crew says: ‘Wait, if Hector 2 is here, which tone of the lights are we using?’ And we’d have to stop filming and try and solve the problem! Until that moment, you think you have the film under control. The worst thing is when you go back to the hotel at the end of shooting each day and you can’t avoid thinking that nothing fits in with anything and everything’s a disaster. When it comes to editing the results, you come back to life again and realise that somehow everything fits. For me, it’s a nightmare until you see the finished material.

AF: The film has been marketed as a horror film to a certain extent. How do you feel about that? Is it because the plot is quite difficult, so if you introduce it to people as a sort of psycho thriller, you can ease them into the idea that it’s about time travel later on?

NV: There are many sci-fi festivals around the world, but very few festivals where the richness of the genre is not restricted. There are not many mixed genre festivals. There are two kinds of horror festivals: the ones where there are only ‘pure’ horror films and the more open horror festivals that have become fantastic genre festivals. So your film will be seen next to a gore fest or a psycho-killer thriller there. I’m not worried about people seeing my film as a horror film, because while I have this time travel device, I put in a lot of giallo iconography. As I said before, my inspirations for the script were mainly sci-fi, but my inspirations for the filmmaking were closer to Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava, Dario Argento.

AF: It’s interesting to think of Hitchcock, because Timecrimes is like a reversal of Rear Window, where the middle-class voyeur becomes the killer. Do you think there is this tension with the middle classes that they have their new houses and their Ikea kitchens but all it takes is some encounter with the uncanny and they’ll become unhinged?

NV: Yeah. At the beginning of the story, we have this Hitchcock element: we have a woman, who is working and building a table, and all the time she is thinking about putting the table inside the house. And then there is a man looking through binoculars at the forest. This is a real Hitchcock opening: you have a great house in a great forest, you have this great life, but you are looking through binoculars far from home. Why? What is he trying to find? Once he finds this fantasy of a naked girl in the middle of nowhere, he becomes a Hitchcockian character because he’s dealing with his own fantasies.

AF: Just like Norman Bates in Psycho, he’s a victim as well as a criminal?

NV: Karra, me and Jon, the other actor,we watched Psycho together and we tried to Norman Batesify the characters! This is one of the things we brought to the film: we copied some of Norman Bates’s gestures for Hector. While I love the shower scene, my favourite sequence in Psycho is the one after the shower, when Norman is taking the corpse of the girl to the car, and sinks the car in a swamp. All of those scenes where he’s cleaning the bathroom, putting the plastic around the corpse, I love that part of the movie, that’s one of my biggest influences. You’re not dealing with suspense, it’s almost something else; it’s like a musical and dancing. There’s this kind of sinister beauty in the sequence and we watched it again and again!

AF: Like Psycho, your film has a twist in the ending that makes you want to see it again.

NV: We’re in the DVD age, and you have to face the fact that people are not going to watch your film just once, so you have to be prepared to put enough ‘hidden’ elements in, which you might miss the first time, but see the second time. In the Spanish DVD, we added an extra cut of the film from a chronological point of view. Instead of following one Hector, we watch the actions of the three Hectors at the same time. Watching the film again – it lasts 30 minutes – it turns into this kind of gracious filming with a lot of Hectors at the same time! It doesn’t work as a real film because it’s too confusing, but if you’ve just seen the normal version, it shows you how things really work in the story. I feel very proud because you can check that everything matches.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Code 46 screened at the Barbican, London, on 24 November 2008 as part of the Architecture on Film series.

Next Architecture on Film screening: Los Angeles Plays Itself

Date: 21 January 2009

More info on the Barbican website

As part of a series of films celebrating architecture on film, the Barbican recently screened the underrated British science fiction film Code 46, which tells a tale of forbidden love in a city that is futuristic and yet very familiar at the same time. Just before he went on stage to do a Q&A following the screening, Michael Winterbottom discussed some of the themes and ideas raised by the film with Alex Fitch.

Alex Fitch: With Code 46, did you try to capture a particular architectural aesthetic that hadn’t been seen on film for a while?

Michael Winterbottom: No. When we were thinking of making the film it was much more about what the characters were doing, what the society was like. So it wasn’t so much about trying to find a look for the buildings or a style of architecture, it was about the function of the buildings and how the city was organised. It was to do with the relationship between the city and what was outside the city, between which spaces were safe and which weren’t, between the bureaucratic controls and complete lawlessness. It was more to do with those kind of ideas, which connect the story and the characters, than it was to do with looking for a particular style.

AF: One thing that’s very interesting about the style of the film – in the programme notes it’s described as ‘an architectural collage’ – is that you mix shots of the Jubilee Line in London with shots of Shanghai and various other cities. When you set a film in the future, predicting what things will look like is very problematic, but making a city that’s ‘all cities’ gives it a kind of timelessness.

MW: Yeah. The idea was that we’re in the future, but we’re not that far in the future, so we weren’t trying to imagine a society that had no connections to today’s society. Between starting the idea of making Code 46 and actually filming it, we did In This World, which is a film about refugees, and to a certain extent, some of the ideas about the landscape and the organisation of the story came from working on that. Also, a huge percentage of buildings in London were there 50 years ago, so if you’re talking about a film set 50 years in the future, a large number of buildings from now would still be there. There’s more continuity than there is change in that respect. I wanted it to be very familiar, very recognisable, very real, and not a created world on a stage or on a set, but at the same time feel like you couldn’t quite pin down that it was like any particular kind of place that exists right now. That was the criterion: to find things that were interesting and made sense of the story and gave it a context, but were one step away from the real.

AF:With that sort of retro-futurism, you seem to be following in the footsteps of Ridley Scott somewhat, by retrofitting buildings and predicting things that almost seem old the first time you see them in the film.

MW: Yeah, to a certain extent, although this is different from Blade Runner. I think Ridley Scott’s a brilliant filmmaker but he was looking for an image and a style and we weren’t. We had the experience of doing In This World with the refugees that we had to get papers for – it was incredibly hard to get them across any border. So, the idea is that although things are difficult, and the environment is harsh, and the ozone layer is depleted so people don’t want to go out in the daylight, and it is very crowded, the city kind of functions. Outside, you have a chaotic desert, and all the outsiders are trying to get into a city, so instead of having the difference between different countries, you have just ‘the city’ and ‘outside the city’ replicated in lots of different places. So it was about looking for places that made sense of that idea and the specifics of the story, rather than looking for a retro style. What was brilliant about Shanghai as the core of the city that’s in the film is that you have a whole section that’s only really gone up in the last 15 years with a determined effort to look towards the future and then you have bits of Shanghai that look like they’ve been there for a century and haven’t changed. You have that density of population and therefore the sense of how a society organises itself when it’s packed together – Shanghai is an incredibly crowded city, incredibly full of energy, incredibly full of work; it had the sort of energy you would have if you were in the city that we were imagining.

AF: What was the genesis of the project?

MW: I’ve worked with (writer) Frank Cottrell Boyce quite a few times and with Andrew Eaton, the producer. Andrew, Frank and I were talking about things to do next and I liked the idea of doing a simple love story set in the future. The starting point was that it would be very simple and have a kind of mythic connection or fairy tale feel to it. By being in the future, you would strip out the specific reality of this year and this time and have something more generic, more universal optimistically, or more detached from a social context. That was the original idea but when it came to developing it, it became weirdly more than we were expecting. By the time we sent the script to actors, the actors were talking about what they thought were the politics of the script in relation to the future world, what it was saying about ‘the state’ that they were living in. They took it in a much more overtly political or social way than they would have done if it had been set in a real city. It was almost the fact that it was fictional that made them question ‘is that good or bad?’ – the fact that some people had freedom to move and others didn’t, for instance, which, in a film set today, everyone would accept as ‘that’s how it is’.

AF: I think it’s interesting that a lot of science fiction films set in modern cities seem to have unreliable narrators. Both the two lead characters in this film end up with their memories wiped because they’ve broken the genetic laws and that follows in the footsteps of the replicants in Blade Runner, the multiple motives of Lemmy Caution in Alphaville, Jonathan Pryce’s character in Brazil… Do you think that’s something to do with the multi-faceted nature of cities?

MW: Maybe. I hadn’t thought of it like that. The starting point was a simple love story and then transgressive love. Then you take the Oedipal myth and genetics becoming an issue, which connects the idea of what’s taboo and what’s not taboo. So by introducing an element of not knowing who your parents are, that creates a place where you could break a taboo without being aware of it. At the time, and still now, there was a lot of talk of genetics and artificial reproduction, and how that connects to issues of morality. These are issues that people haven’t had to face before, so it was interesting from that point of view, but as we were making the film it was more about the story rather than any social issue. All the elements, like climate change or population growth or bureaucratic controls, connect to important things going on in the world today, but we weren’t trying to make a film about genetics, it’s more that it just connects into our story.

AF: It’s interesting to see Code 46 again in light of the other films you’ve made recently. In Code 46, Samantha Morton’s character has to be shown the photographs in her album to remind her of what happened, because those memories have been taken from her. In 24 Hour Party People, when the fictional version of the narrator meets his real self, he says, ‘It didn’t happen like that!’ And in A Cock and Bull Story, you have the film within a film and the actors playing versions of themselves. Is that a theme you’ve become very interested in?

MW: It’s an area that’s interesting to work in. In one way, In This World was creating a fictional journey to bring over two refugees, but they were nevertheless real refugees, so we had to get real paperwork to get them across and deal with real bureaucracy on how to get that paperwork. And finally, when we took them back, one of them came back over and became a real refugee! So it’s fun if those areas between the story you’re telling, the world where they are set and the world where you are making them, are integral and complex and have different sorts of connections with reality. It’s done in a serious way in In This World, or in a comic way in 24 Hour Party People, but it’s still enjoyable to play in that area. I like to film on location, and the reason we shot Code 46 that way rather than in a studio is to place characters in real situations and see what happens.

AF: It’s almost like you’re bringing a degree of psycho-geography to the filmmaking process by putting actors in interesting locations.

MW: Completely! You hope the places you take them to aren’t just photogenic or just some kind of background, but if you get the story right you feel you understand the characters because of the world that they’re living in, and you understand a little bit more about the world because of the characters. I remember when I started watching films as a teenager, watching something like Breathless, it’s so great when you see the characters walking down the streets of Paris because on one level you can see people looking into the camera as they walk by, and you’ve got two main actors who don’t, so you can tell the other people aren’t really in the film, they just happen to be there. That makes it more real in a way because it’s really the streets of Paris, and those people are really walking there! It also makes it more fictional because it makes you very aware of the camera; there are your actors pretending the camera isn’t there, and there’s that guy looking at the camera who knows it is there. So in a way it both intensifies the fictional and the real aspects of the film.

AF: Regarding the creation of the futuristic world, I remember when Minority Report came out, Spielberg said something along the lines of, ‘Oh yes, we hired all these scientists to come up with things that would be coming true shortly’, but it all seems absolutely ridiculous. By contrast, your film is spot on with video iPods, etc.

MW: Exactly! Minority Report came out while we were in preparation for ours. At one point, as a joke, we were going to do this big pseudo-scientific document about all the science that we’d drawn on to make our film because Minority Report was completely based on that ludicrous gadget/gimmick thing. For us, it was a question of looking at the way societies work now in different places, taking some of the issues like genetics and refugees and just move one step away from that. In the opposite sort of film, it’s great to watch something like Alphaville and just pan across a random skyline of Paris and that is the future. It’s as realistic a vision of the future as you’re going to get.

The only leap in a science fiction direction was that Tim Robbins’s character – by having this empathy virus – could sense what people were thinking, which I think is probably quite a long time off! Apart from that, it really was quite a retro story, quite a classic, conventional story about a man who goes away, meets a girl and falls madly in love with her. The initial idea for the love story was that you cannot explain why someone falls in love with this person and not that person.

AF: It’s interesting that at the end of the film the other characters try to explain away the love affair by saying, ‘it’s a side effect of his empathy virus’.

MW: It is, isn’t it? A side effect of being empathic! The idea at the end was that it’s about two people who can’t be together. They want to be together, but the reality of their worlds is that they’re opposites and they become victims of the transgression, and as usual as in today’s society, the man’s okay!

AF: Do you have a particular interest in science fiction or did it just feel like the right world for this story?

MW: I occasionally see science fiction films and read science fiction books, but I’m not a science fiction fan in the sense of reading or watching a lot of it. It wasn’t even to do with dealing with issues, it was more to do with it being in a fictional world. The futuristic world allowed us to simplify the story. That was the initial impulse, that it would be nice to do a story that was very, very simple: man meets girl, falls in love, they can’t be together and they end up apart. It was the idea of the fictionality of it that was appealing, and as I said, weirdly, as you go on, that fictionality can get lost in the world that you create. You have the extra problem with science fiction, ‘what are we supposed to understand about this world?’, which is a given when you do a film set now.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Listen to the interview.