HE in flEXiff Experimental International Film Festival

An Abstract End ( HE ) By Richie Abraham

Redolent of their improvised, ostensibly meandering yet finely structured collaboration ‘Closure of Catharsis‘, actor-director pair James Devereaux and Rouzbeh Rashidi’ s new feature ‘HE’ starts of with a man dressed like an astronaut sauntering through a corridor perhaps looking for something. This exemplary oneiric sequence is characteristic of the dreamlike imagery that abounds intermittently across its running time.  With regards to plot and narrative structure the auteur is far more generous this time; we encounter the protagonist who is contemplating suicide, an act seemingly stemming out of some unexplained absurdity of his existence.  This is a theme that has frequently been explored by several auteurs in albeit traditional ways, from Louis Malle’s bleak investigation into the desperation of clinical depression in ‘The Fire Within’ to Haneke’s virulent attack on bourgeois complacency in ‘The Seventh Continent’.  While every Bresson film yields itself to readings of death and redemption, he made atleast three explicit films on suicide namely Mouchette, The Devil Probably and A Gentle Woman, each significantly in contrast with the next. What Mr. Rashidi however offers us here, is a look at suicidal consciousness at the level of dreams rejecting every banal device.

This has been the defining characteristic of their earlier venture.  While large parts of  ’Closure of Catharsis’ consisted of a tenuous improvised monologue by an actor with a mise-en-scene almost anti-Wellesian in its foreground background dynamics, the most gripping moments came when vacillating images from a seemingly discordant video diary- of a Jonas Mekas kind suffused through it.  Those images form counterpoint to the sere monologue, which at times seems like an experiment in excess of the Cassavetesian or Rivettian nature. Like the introductory extended theatre improvisation that we encounter in Out1 (which I positively assert is extremely crucial to the entire film), the monologue inexorably sets up the crucial theme of the film, that being the subconscious mental-image. This study of the mental image in the case of a suicidal protagonist treads into territories that ordinary filmmakers can never encounter or create.  The interspersing of the monologue, the duologue and the dream like imagery help form a distrait mise-en-scene where in the character struggles between self-revelation and disillusionment.  I am reminded of Kracauer and his essay on photography, especially his emphasis on the relationship between the photographic image and the mental-image. Among the images, which a human being recollects, the ones that pervade across millions of potential snapshots that present themselves to the memory system, what qualifies those selected images to be representatives of the collective truths of certain periods?  Surely it has to do with the truth, the essence that has been liberated through suppressed layers of consciousness or been forcefully shunned out of it.  The memory image might fail to stand up to the technical precision of the photographic image, which is concerned, with the moment of the snapshot and the spatial coordinates presented to it but it sure is omniscient across the vast temporal continuum that lies in memory.  This peremptory choice of memory cannot be obviated. Several of the images here convey the same omniscience that magically encapsulate the ‘history’of our protagonist (to borrow again from Kracauer). In one remarkable action-reaction sequence during the duologue, the camera captures the protagonist’s friend and the protagonist in his dream state alternately.  This has consolidated the character with his mental-image, the present with the history. The chains of temporal context have been broken.  These images might certainly seem out of order, just as very often our mental-images have sought emancipation from the social context that inhibited them from innocent clear synthesis. Once this immurement ends, only clarity remains and verity shines through.

Providing momentum to the plot so that the viewer is not disinterested unfortunately has since always been high on the filmmaker’s agenda. To achieve it lesser directors introduce plot twists, peripheral characters and irritating deus ex machinas, while certain conniving self proclaimed intellectuals resort to metaphysical contrivances that lack a trace of veracity. Rashidi achieves the same almost effortlessly through intelligent manipulation of sound and imagery. The titular character’s introductory monologue merely shows a noirish b/w face while we get glimpses of his condition. Later once the surreal imagery is incorporated regularly into the run time, the subsequent part of the monologue shows him in color but out of focus, a putative acceptance of the inherent disparity in seeing less despite seeing more. The background score works wonders when we encounter sharp bursts amid the somber attentuated ambience. Emotions and awareness are both heightened for the viewer, as they ought to be for the character himself. Every single gesture becomes monumental. Nothing is insignificant. Incoherent stills of a couple and the absence of communication both physical and verbal between them, provide ground to what the monologue conveys.

Another key purpose the inchoate imagery serves to achieve is to develop an abstract framework of the character involved. Something that full-blown specificity quite often falls short of accomplishing. The three aspects of the film (the monologue, duologue and dream imagery) give us fleeting insights into the life of the protagonist. This is very different from the bordering on legerdemain, post-modern brechtian V effect which godard and others strove to achieve. This abstraction is essential and it functions in a style completely in conflict with the post-modern approach.  The unabashed distancing is replaced by an unabashed refusal to complete acquaintance. An Abstraction towards the mental image. This is the same abstraction that makes Ozu’s films universal and independent in essence from the stringent political situation of his country or Rohmer’s films escape the french sensibility that seem to engulf them. In the great Indian filmmaker G Aravindan’s masterpiece ‘Esthappan‘ we see the titular character lead a Christ-like life balancing between fact and fiction. The fiction is created by the inhabitants of the fisherman town while the fiction in ‘HE’ is predominantly created by the actor while he is absorbed in his monologue. Both tales might not seem satisfactory for the spoon-fed hard-boiled viewer but it is this breezy nature of the plot that helps the receptive viewer coil right to the essence of both characters.  Esthappan is only seen as a free floating silhouette, yet is a fully developed mystical character and by eschewing particulars and embracing the mental-image HE manages to create a rich silhouette of an existential end, something hackneyed mainstream cinema can only achieve by obliterating itself.

• Richie Abraham is an Indian cinephile and occasional writer who lives and works in Gurgaon.
• Contact Richie Abraham on richiecseiitb@gmail.com
• Originally published HERE 

HE, Mastering Visual Ostinato By NUTS4R2

I’ve been kind of looking forward to seeing HE because it’s the second feature length collaboration between two people I follow on twitter, director Rouzbeh Rashidi and the actor James Devereaux. I know I’ve reviewed films by the prolific and mercurial Rouzbeh Rashidi before on here (as I have Devereaux’s) but I’m beginning to get more of a handle on his creative signature now, I think (not that he’d neccessarily want a creative signature).

HE has a really strong opening… especially for people of my age and maybe just a little older. A man who may or may not be Devereaux, wearing some kind of white environment suit, is exploring an abandoned and run down office corridor in long shot with film colouring somewhat reminiscent of sepia tone. There is a grating, scratching sound causing tension on the audio track and visual cycling on the picture indicates that we might be watching a surveillance recording, as the man makes his way slowly, over the course of a few minutes, to the front of the shot, armed with his torch, carefully exploring the debris he finds on the way.

It’s a really, really strong opening and most of the films I’ve seen by Rashidi so far have a knack of opening with a really arresting sequence. This one, for me, had a very obvious early to late 70s Hollywood science-fiction vibe to it. The white environment suit giving the visuals a definitive and provocative sense of the sinister and unknown. The sound design is fantastically effective and reflects this sense of unease… coupled with this one long take of a shot, it contributes to a tonal pitch of almost fear and paranoia. Was really impressed with this opening again.

This is followed with a bit of a mood changer as Devereaux delivers a monologue in black and white, intercut with initially sepia footage of him exploring the odd contents of what looks like the same abandoned building (in terms of budgetary influences, I’m guessing it’s the same place anyway). In these sequences, however, the environment suit is not present… which puts this footage in another timeframe, if you want to stick with a conventional reading of a less than conventional film maker.

The actual monologue is very starkly shot but not to the point that any excessive tonal contrast pops out at you immediately. In this sequence the acting tour-de-force that is Devereaux, details his dissatisfaction with a recent lover, Mary, with whom he’s presumably broken up. Devereaux’s pacing is deliberately slow, like a man trying to find the words he wants to say… and having an inkling of how Rashidi does things, this may be a very accurate description because it might even all be improvised on the spot. Even so, this is not to suggest that Devereaux is making his character up as he goes along… more that he’s already in the character (to the extent that you can be to create that illusion for an audience), and that character is exploring his words with a sense of slow precision, because they are important to him.

As Devereaux continues what is the first in a series of extremely long, one take scenes and the first of two, quite lengthy, monologues… the shot starts cutting backwards and forwards between the footage of him exploring the building. Sometimes the two bits of footage are cut to a very fast rhythm of roughly a second as shot. Setting up an almost hypnotic sense of pacing, as the fast cuts set up a new mood in your brain. Things settle down a bit then and the cuts to and from the juxtaposed footage come slower as new layers are added to what are presumably memories… which is what the human brain will pick up from the language of cinema as the correct interpretation of the same person being cut against footage of himself (whether this is a correct interpretation or not). Rashedi knows this and exploits that basic self-taught human response to his own uses… I was very much expecting him to pull the rug from under me in this sequence to be honest.

After a while, the director/editor sets up another intense sequence of similar rhythmic cutting within the same monologue. So what we now have is a secondary layer of different rhythms creating a larger, slower rhythm which is being received directly into the mind as a fast series of rhythmic cuts… when what is actually happening at a deeper, and probably subconscious level for the majority of the audience, is that a larger and more serene rhythmic response is being set up… much like the way the music of Philip Glass can play out in the ear as speedy repeat phrases when they are actually piecing together a slower melody inside your head. So what we have is a very striking and initially grating visual ostinato making up a slower piece, which owes as much to Dennis Hopper’s similar cross-cutting effects in his directorial debut Easy Rider as it does to anything else.

The quality of the intercut footage starts to get more colourful and dreamlike in some places and then knocks back down to a state of distress in others. In this second tier of footage, Devereaux continues to wander a rundown building interior, randomly exploring and interacting (passively at first) with his immediate environment on a purely physical level. After a good long while he picks up a load of big Garrick Glen bottles of still water (product placement in a Rashidi movie?) and places them on a ramshackle table he finds. This is a red herring that something pivotal is about to happen because, after undoing the tops of each one and sniffing them in turn before putting the tops back on, he knocks them off the table with a walking stick he’s been carrying and carries on exploring his environment. As I write these words now and revisit the movie in my head… I suddenly realise I’ve got a very strong idea of what he is looking for, but to reveal that here would possibly spoil things a little for potential viewers.

Towards the end of this first monologue section, Devereaux’s HE reveals that he is recording his monologue to send to Mary, because he is going to kill himself. It’s an audio suicide note.

We then have a scene change with a more colourful and sharper picture, as we cut to what can only be Mary herself. She is talking with someone (possibly her latest lover) in a room as they both gaze out of large windows. We cannot hear the actual conversation they are having, however.

At first Mary is occupying the same basic space to the left of the screen that Devereaux was visually filling during his monologue… so this scene cuts very naturally into this segment before quickly cutting to a long shot of Mary and the other guy in profile… Mary still occupying the left of screen so this is already not nearly as jarring as the sequence with Devereaux in it… until the intercut footage of Devereaux wandering the building continues to be intercut into this sequence, enabling a more intense rhythm mixed with a more aggressive, almost musical sound design… we are now entering the realms of pure visual poetry, ladies and gentlemen, which makes Rashidi something akin to a direct descendant, mutant love child of the cinematic poetry of Andrei Tarkovsky cross pollinated with late 50s beat generation writing (somebody needs to give this guy a big budget and see if he can handle it without losing creative impetus… come on all you slap dash producers!).

We cut to a single shot of the guy which holds for a longer time, like the first shot in this section of the female lead and, yes, he’s occupying the opposite space within the frame of the shot to what she and Devereaux did. Is this sequence a mirror image of itself developed through the rhythm of the shots? Well yeah and that’s obviously the intent but it’s almost here as a visual bookend to bring us into a second monologue while still retaining continuity of the cross-cut footage, because as this shot sequence ends we cut to a new scene of Deveraux in a standard colour shot with a new monologue delivery… but intercut with more footage of Deveraux wandering the building, this time (at first) without any deterioration to the quality of the film stock… perhaps symbolic of less mental deterioration as this monologue seems a little faster and more confident… it being another recording, this time to the parents of the character.

The intercut footage grows more angry and destructive and is perhaps a visual echo of the anger that the central character feels to his parents. The content of these shots calms down for a while but the monologue drops out with aggressive audio phase shifting (or some such technique) in what seems like a key place, to deliberately restrict the viewer from being spoonfed certain information and to instead fire the potent imagination, I would imagine… before dropping back into the natural sound of the monologue. It could also, of course, be a way of cutting out material which didn’t, in the final analysis, gel with the tone of the piece… but if so it’s a valid and creative solution to that particular kind of problem and so not to be seen as an invalidation of a piece of work. I suspect half of what happens on a film set is accidental anyway (even with Hitchcock, but I’m not going to try to defend that statement here).

This monologue also becomes an aggressive diatribe against the evils of television and the lack of a role model in the character’s parents which is actually quite heartfelt and somewhat amusing (I can really identify with certain parts of this stuff and believe I’ve said similar about the evils of daytime television to various friends over the years).

We then have another break from the format after a while and various experimental techniques are applied to crosscut footage intertwining with contemplative shots of other characters. Devereaux continues his explorations and antics within the building, this time back in the environmental suit, while sound and atonal music dictates the intensity that these shots are informed by… or at least a retrofitted sense of the informed, if such a thing is possible (and of course it is in cinema).

A sequence intercut to this with the couple from earlier in bed with the guy not being in any way responsive to the world about him, even when aggressively shaken, is cut against a new and hard to digest rhythm.

This is followed by a sequence where Devereaux’s character discusses his impending suicide with a friend, which is a great sequence of two really masterful actors who seem to work pretty well together, juxtaposed against footage featuring a character played by director Maximilian Le Cain, who meets with Devereaux as he assists him by providing him with the means to take his suicide objective a step closer. Le Cain isn’t in it much but adds a little more intensity in his static performance. I once wrote of him in my blog review here that he seems like someone who would “be chasing me down a street brandishing a big board with a nail in it” but in these short scenes he seems somehow less physically aggressive… perhaps more like someone who would be “paying and organising subordinates” to be chasing me down a street brandishing a big board with a nail in it, instead. Either way he has an intensity in this that’s hard to ignore.

Devereaux and his friend explore the motivation and reasoning behind his decision to kill himself and it’s a very rational and almost calm conversation, one that perhaps contradicts the inherent struggle of Devereaux’s first monologue and naked aggression of his second. This gives a sense of depth to the character because it’s clear that he is not telling his friend everything… or at least that’s the way I interpreted it and I’m really not going to say anymore about the content of the film because I think this seemingly inherent but unhighlighted contradiction pretty much sums up Rashidi’s directorial style, which I touched upon somewhat in my review of his movie Bipedality.

That is to say…

In terms of visual aesthetic, this is very much a film which pits beautifully framed, static and crisp shots against more downgraded and less palatable textures and moving camera work. But no answers are provided and visual touchstones are deliberately (I believe) set up to create a “story space” to make up your own ways of reading and interpreting the text. Is the environment suit needed, for instance, because the building is radioactive and Devereaux’s character didn’t know and now he has cancer? Is that the reason why he’s decided to take this course and reexamine his life? Or is he a ghost from the future in a post apocalyptic time period. I don’t know and neither, do I think, am I supposed to.

Rashidi doesn’t tell stories, he sets them up and then leaves them absolutely to the audience’s own struggle to provide a shape to house the visual and aural ideas prevalent in his movies. He doesn’t leave it completely without structure and, as we have seen, there is plenty of structure and rhythm within the editing of his sequences… but he does provide a rough guide to an exploration of the narrative and not the key to a fixed narrative conclusion itself. This is the strength of this director’s films and, I suspect, one of the reasons why they have interest independent of their obvious visual beauty. I won’t say more on this because I don’t want to over think this guys working method but I will say that, while some audiences for this kind of, almost challenging but certainly not passively consumed, cinematic dish may find this kind of meal less palatable than others, I would have to say that I quite enjoyed HE and think it’s an another fine example of a director who is making really unique films which unfold on the director’s own terms and which don’t cowtow to commercial pressures. Seek this one out, if you can, if you are into watching a purer (I hesitate to say rawer given the obvious craftsmanship which goes into these kinds of films) and more demanding form of cinema.

For more information on Rashidi and Devereaux, go here and then follow the links: www.rashididevereauxcinema.tumblr.com

• Originally published HERE

HE Synopsis

HE, the latest work in the ongoing collaboration between Rouzbeh Rashidi and actor James Devereaux, is a troubling and mysterious portrait of a suicidal man. Rashidi juxtaposes the lead character’s apparently revealing monologues with scenes and images that layer the film with ambiguity. Its deliberate, hypnotic pace and boldly experimental structure result in an unusual and challenging view of its unsettling subject.

HE (2012) is completed

The Arts Council of Ireland backed experimental feature film HE (2012) by Rouzbeh Rashidi is now completely finished and ready for festivals and screenings. This two hours dream-like film explores the theme of suicide in a very abstract audio visual approach. The production began in September 2011 in Dublin and finished in February 2012 in Cork and it is featuring:

James Devereaux, Cillian Roche, Maximilian Le Cain, George Hanover & John McCarthy. 

Soundscape composed especially for the film by Mick O’Shea & Emil Nerstrand.

A STILL FROM HE (2012)

James Devereaux in HE (2012)

“With And Without Object” BY JAMES DEVEREAUX

A large part of our work in Cork took place in a empty office block, which had an endless number of rooms, some of them empty, some of them littered with old paperwork and decaying furniture. The whole place had a weird, eerie psycho-geography, just right for the strange dream sequences we were to shoot there. In some respects however, these scenes were the easiest for me to act, largely because many of the tasks I was asked to perform were very simple: sometimes sifting through the debris, sometimes picking up some strange object and studying it, sometimes spraying the place with a fire extinguisher. For most of this work, Rashidi asked me not to have a specific objective, that I was performing these actions without a purpose. This meant that most of what I did I did mechanically – for example; in one room I walked into, I smashed a computer monitor, and I did so not with any anger or even any enthusiasm, but purely by going through the motions – no emotion, no inflection, no point of view. In another room, I had a sack which was full with shredded paper, and I grabbed clumps of this paper, and threw it at the walls, at the ceilings, at the windows, and once I had had enough of this throwing, I simply tossed the sack to one side, and walked off. Again, this was done without object, without intent, and purely mechanically. We worked on in this fashion, going through the various rooms, performing purposeless tasks. The net effect of this approach, was to give my work a certain robotic quality, there was no emotion on my part, nor indeed any kind of expression – very strange, but perhaps just right for the scenes we wanted to create.

Then Rashidi asked me to add a certain upbeat quality, which lead me to behave like some sort of red coat – walking with an exaggerated spring in my step, doing little dances, and which culminated in a little skit: there was a derelict reception desk, and I quickly improvised a scene as a hotel clerk trying to entertain would-be guests. However, during the skit, I did give myself an action: to entertain – which produced some lovely little moments, like when I tap danced on top of the desk. However, if my earlier work had been strange because of my lack of action, this skit was strange precisely because I did give myself an action: being an entertainer amid the dereliction and decay of this abandoned office block, is a slightly freaky combination.

REFLECTIONS ON HE

Both periods of filming, Cork and Dublin, have proved to be mentally exhausting, and not because we worked particularly long days (we didn’t), but because of the intensity of my commitment to the scenes. As an actor, I’m always thinking about how I can deliver something a little bit extra, something more. The audience is extremely important to me – I don’t view them  as an appendage to my work (as many do)*, but the very reason for it: I want to delight them in the way that my favourite actors delight me. My work is always a presentation and a communication. As the great John Hurt once said, the actor needs to earn the trust of the audience, without which the dramatic interchange cannot take place. Audiences make themselves completely vulnerable to the actor – it’s a priveledged position we are in, and one we must not abuse, but cherish and serve as well as we can. HE has been extremely demanding because I set the bar high for myself in striving to go further, dig deeper, and find something extra. It’s also because the nature of the material required discipline and seriousness – my character’s intent to commit suicide always felt like a burden which needed to be carried, and the improvisations needed to be completely focussed. Rashidi will now take the film through the post-production process, and eventually send it out into the world. The next step for me, will be to watch the finished film, and analyse my work to see how I can improve for next time.

What is certain, is that HE is an important and concrete step on my way to becoming precisely the kind of actor I set out to become – an objective I will  never compromise, despite the critcism and cynicism I regularly encounter, and despite the fact that I may occasionally take a wrong turning. It is especially difficult for an actor to create work on his own terms, perhaps more difficult than for any other artist. However, HE, and working with Rashidi, is the embodiment of the kind of actor-director relationship I’ve been calling for : the director trusts the actor and gives him room to create, while the actor serves the film (ie – the director’s vision) totally – a creative partnership**. It’s a richly rewarding way of working, which breeds trust and co-operation, which, in turn, means it’s a pleasure to crack open a beer with the director at the end of it all.

*as evidenced by the recent trend in the West End of London for actors to break out of the scene and tell noisy audience members to “shut-up” when they make a noise by eating a packet of crisps. How weak and spineless we have become. Old barnstormers like Anew Mcmaster would shut the audience up by the force  sheer force of their performances, as when he stepped on stage before 2000 drunken, riotous Irish, but by the end of the play, they could hear a pin drop. An actor who is less interesting than a packet of crisps may want to think about a career change.

**Although we were using improvisations, this stills applies to fully scripted work – it’s a question of how actor and director view eachother, and their work.

Originally published in The Great Acting Blog

“Performance Without Rehearsal” BY JAMES DEVEREAUX

As I noted in the previous blog, there were no speeches or dialogues to motor my performance because all of that work had been completed in Dublin. In Cork, I only had my face and body and pure physical actions to express myself with. As always when working with Rashidi, I am only briefed about the specific actions of a scene shortly before we come to shoot it, Cork was no different. However, and unusually for me, when given my instructions for each scene this time, I didn’t need to convert those instructions into an doable action , as I still felt “full” from my work in Dublin, and I simply thought that that energy would fuel me. Essentially then, I was working almost completely intuitively, however, my tasks for each scene were more concrete than my tasks in Dublin; for example: unwrapping the packaging around a bottle, or making a cup of coffee. So, I had concrete points  in the scenes to give structure to my performance, which is different from only having improvised dialogue where you have to magic something from nothing. Still, without putting my instructions through my usual process, I wasn’t sure what I would be capable of delivering.

As soon as the scenes started, I felt an inner emotional intensity, which rarely manifested itself physically, but it gave me energy, which lead to an intensity of thought. I began to feel as though the stakes were high (which for the fiction of the film, they were), everything I did seemed to take on the utmost importance. There is a scene where I buy some liquid from a sort of apothecary, played by Maximilian Le Cain, and my concentration became furious – it was almost overwhelming, but at the same time I had to focus it and give it direction, which resulted in a tension coupled with control and reserve – a combination just right for the character.

So how can this performance come about without rehearsals or conscious application?

Well, it’s possible that rehearsals are overrated (certainly lengthy rehearsals are) – an heretical statement in our age of the goody-two-shoes, middle-class, industrial-earnest-pseudo-art, where we’re supposed to have an “idea” for every line of dialogue,  where we pretend that “drama games” are anything other than waste of time, where the actor is  told if he’s not willing “to make a fool of himself” then he is not a real actor (how dare the actor even think he can own his own work) and where we are supposed to pretend that “research” is interesting and useful, and that use of the imagination is a mere self-indulgence – the truth is, acting belongs to the brash, arrogant individualist with a hyperactive fantasy life, and all the attendant gak which has built up around the actor’s ambition  should be shoved to one side, and ignored. The other important point however, is that the actions I had chosen for myself four months previously in Dublin, were now working  for me in Cork. During that four month break, the work I had done in Dublin would have been churning around in my sub-conscious (especially as I knew I would be coming back to do more scenes, and my mind would not have jettisoned the material completely, but put it in storage somewhere), which then expressed itself during the scenes in Cork – hence, I didn’t feel the need to find new actions for myself. It’s a similar situation to the screenwriter, who reaches a dead end with one of his scripts, so he takes a break from it for a few months, but when he returns to it, he is easily able to find solutions to problems which had previously seemed insurmountable. And that is the whole point of using actions : it works for the actor, organizing and directing his performance, which then leaves the actor free to play.

Originally published in The Great Acting Blog

“Poetry Of The Mundane” BY JAMES DEVEREAUX

Readers of my blogs A Very Mysterious Business and Duologue will know that the bulk, or indeed all of the monologue and duologue scenes for Rouzbeh Rashidi’s new feature film, “HE”, were shot in Dublin last September. So, when production resumed in Cork a week ago, mostly what we had to shoot were dream sequences, interiors and atmospheric shots.

As there was no dialogue, the central challenge for me, was to reveal what the character was upto using only physical actions, and I chose to do this by handling objects, or not, as in certain instances. For example, there was a key scene set in the kitchen, where I wanted to show that the character was distracted. I entered the scene with the intention of making myself a cup of coffee, so the first thing I did was to put the kettle onto boil, then prepare my mug. I stand and wait for the kettle to boil, and as I do so, I become lost in thought. After a couple of minutes, the kettle comes to the boil, however, instead of pouring water into my mug, I remain motionless, oblivious to the kettle, still lost in thought. It is only after a few moments that I snap out of it, and remember to pour the water and make myself a coffee, as per my original intention. The failure to maintain my constancy of purpose, to forget my original action, but start on a new one, then come back to my original, creates the idea of distraction. A simple piece of work, but very effective.

In the same scene, I needed to show that the character changes his mind. After I have made my coffee, I lean against the sideboard, and put the mug toward my lips in order to take a slurp, however, I pause just before it reaches my lips, and hold for a moment or two, before pulling the mug away, and pouring the coffee down the sink, then leaving the room – a change of mind – this sequence has a handy, secondary expression: that the character has resolved himself to perform a difficult task which he had possibly been hitherto putting off (which fits neatly with the needs of the film too).

There was another instance where I buy some liquid which is extremely important to the character, a kind of liquid the character my never have seen before. Again, I decided to express the character’s relationship to this liquid by the way he handled it. If the liquid is important, then it needs to be handled at all times with care (as with anything we value highly). I also found moments where I hold the liquid upto the light to study it, largely because I needed the liquid to perform a crucial task, and so it was important to ensure a) it was the real Macoy, and b) that it was in working order. The side effect of this approach to the liquid is that it gives it a power, it’s not just any old special brew, it’s mysterious.

Using objects in this way is wonderfully expressive. It enables us to manifest the complex interior life of the character precisely, economically and organically. Furthermore, and crucially, anchoring the scene in the concrete, helps our performances to be truthful, and in the process, we are able to see that the mundane can be poetic.

Originally published in The Great Acting Blog

The production of HE is completed

The production of HE is now completed. The film is in post-production stage and will be completed very soon. Rouzbeh Rashidi is editing HE at the moment. 

A STILL FROM HE (2012)

John McCarthy & George Hanover in HE (2012)

A STILL FROM HE (2012)

James Devereaux in HE (2012)