Six young directing talents journeyed up to the Edinburgh International Film Festival as part of 4Talent and Film4’s Directors’ Lab. We asked a couple of them to give us a potted glimpse at what they’re up to.

“We started off the day with Mia Bays, the independent producer and Microwave head don,” begins Charles-Henri Belleville. “Mia talked passionately and insightfully for 90 minutes on exactly how the food chain in the film industry works. Very revealing.”

“We then had an interactive session with JJ Lousberg (UKFC), Danny Perkins from Optimum Releasing and Sam Horley, a sales agent. This was superb - we split into teams, each were given a distribution company and their budgets. We had to purchase two films from Sam that made the most money, with Danny supporting us. Sam is tough and Danny is a great negotiator. Very educational, but also had everyone in the room in stitches as us directors pitched our hearts out!”

“Amy and I rocked,” adds Hope Dickson Leach [Day 1]. “We got This Is England and Ratcatcher - I like to think it was because of the photo-shoots we had planned for Shane Meadows in ID magazine…”

“We had an amazing meal at Howies - great fun meeting producers over the best soup I have ever had. Honey and parsnip: sensational,” Charlie continues. “Our fireside chat was with Caroline Cooper-Charles from Warp X and Donkey Punch director Olly Blackburn. It’s clear Warp X has something very special going on, and Olly is destined for great things - he really inspired us all with his humility. If you ever meet him, ask to hear his story about Wild Turkey at sunset…”

Charles-Henri has directed promos for Ashley Walters, MTV and Pathé. His first micro budget feature The Inheritance (2007) was nominated for Best British Feature at Raindance Film Festival 2007 and subsequently won the inaugural Raindance Award at the British Independent Film Awards 2007. Charles-Henri was nominated for Best New Director at the BAFTA Scotland New Talent Awards 2008 and for the 4Talent Awards 2007. He is currently in post-production on his next feature Midnight Madness, a basketball documentary.

Six young directing talents journeyed up to the Edinburgh International Film Festival as part of 4Talent and Film4’s Directors’ Lab. We asked a couple of them to give us a potted glimpse at what they’re up to.

“Day one and we’re off with a bang,” begins Hope Dickson Leach. “We began the day meeting all those people it would take months to see you in their office, and it was great to hear them talk. I’m not going to tell you what they said, as that’s classified and I’d have to find you and kill you all, but believe me, I wasn’t the only one taking notes and raising my hand to ask the questions.”

“We’re all here with a mission, and that mission is to make movies. Despite the fact everyone is doing their best to convince us that making a first feature is impossible, we all know it happens, so why can’t it be us?”

“All six of us are writer-directors and we were lucky enough to meet talented and busy screenwriter David Nicholls (Starter for Ten, And When Did You Last See Your Father?) who filled us with inspiration about how receptive the industry is becoming to involving writers in more than just the opening stages of the film-making process.”

“And then off to the beautiful castle-side apartment for a ‘fireside chat’ with Isabelle Coixet (Elegy) who told us, like your favourite pair of trainers that just keeps on giving, to just do it. With that in mind we were off to the premiere of the Warp X produced (debut film) Donkey Punch, and then their kick-ass party. Which leaves me feeling quite warped myself as I dash off to today’s fantastic lineup. More from us tomorrow.”

Hope made her short film The Dawn Chorus (2006) as part of her MFA program at Columbia University. Her film was selected for Sundance Film Festival 2007, Edinburgh International Film Festival 2006, London International Film Festival 2006, and won Best Narrative Student Short at Austin Film Festival 2006. In 2007 Hope was named as a Star of Tomorrow by Screen International and as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker magazine. She is currently developing her first feature film English Rose, about a teenage girl who hates Princess Diana, which was featured in the Berlinale Project Talent Market 2008.

Next on 4 is Channel 4’s vision for the future. Fresh talent, fresh perspectives, youth, diversity and innovation in all its forms will lead and shape the channel’s content in the years to come. So with our readers in mind, we asked those at the commissioning coalface what’s pushing their buttons in 2008.

Who we spoke to:

Liam Humphreys, Commissioning Editor, Features | Walter Iuzzolino, Deputy Head, Features | Dominique Walker, Commissioning Editor, Factual Entertainment | Alistair Pegg, Editor, Factual Entertainment | Ruby Kuraishe, Editor, Factual Entertainment, E4 | Simon Dickson, Deputy Head, Documentaries | Meredith Chambers, Commissioning Editor, Documentaries | Kate Vogel, Editor, 3 Minute Wonder | Jan Younghusband, Commissioning Editor, Arts & Performance | Shane Allen, Commissioning Editor, Comedy | Andy Auerbach, Commissioning Editor, Entertainment | Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor, Education | Jo Roach, Commissioning Editor, Education | Kevin Sutcliffe, Deputy Head, News & Current Affairs | Camilla Campbell, Commissioning Editor, Drama | Adam Gee, Commissioning Editor, New Media Factual | Aaquil Ahmed, Commissioning Editor, Religion | David Glover, Commissioning Editor, Science | Katherine Butler, Head of Development, Film4 | Ade Rawcliffe, Diversity & Talent Manager | Alison Walsh, Editorial Manager, Disability.

Browse all the responses >

Image by Tom Gaul

Words: Nick Carson
Images: Courtesy of Framestore CFC & Ninja Theory

They were once a printmaker, a NASA shuttle engineer, a sound technician and a software developer. Nibbled by the CGI bug, they changed tack - and left in their wake the likes of Monsters Inc, Batman Begins and The World is Not Enough. Now they’re giving something back: 4Talent magazine grills the battle-hardened tutors at Escape Studios about the many facets of computer graphics.

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Escape’s manifesto is simple: “to provide the global computer graphics community with the best training, technology and talent in the world.” While in-house tutor and recently-crowned Maya Master Lee Danskin insists that there’s “no such thing as a 3D industry” per se, one thing that film, TV, games and commercials share is a voracious thirst for CGI production talent. It’s just the way it’s applied that differs.

Character design

“Character design is about injecting life. You may not be able to draw, but if you can sculpt then it’s much easier,” suggests Escape’s Character guru Nick Savy, whose proudest spot on his showreel is an indistinguishable 3D stunt-double for Christian Bale in Batman Begins.

Playing God with the caped crusader may sound like a small boy’s dream - and Nick admits he’s spent his life sketching comic books and cartoons - but he’s keen to point out that character building, like animation, involves a huge amount of repetition. Woe betides a rigger who puts a bone out of place.

“You have to be precise when building your rig. I once purposely made my students do a rig wrong, and then re-build it,” he smiles. “They were very pissed off, but that repetition is so important - for Batman we did 62 versions of the rig and 38 iterations of the muscle system.” It’s all-too-tempting to quip that character building builds character - although you may well risk repetitive strain disorder in the process.

Nick’s route has been something of a rambling one. When in a band in the mid-80s he became obsessed with synthesizers, mixed some tracks in the studio and ended up working as a sound engineer for five years. It was helping his brother on a corporate video in ‘92 that first broke him into his current trade: “I learned animation; he paid me with a computer,” he states simply. “I’d never touched computers ‘til then.”

When Sega were setting up a new studio, Nick managed to weasel his self-dubbed “crappy” ‘folio in front of them. One small segment made the difference: “A random animation of a psychedelic hippy. He had a pointy hat with a sphere on the end, surrounded by Saturn’s rings. When he bent forward it rotated, dangling in time - it was the secondary animation that caught their eye.”

His seat-of-the-pants journey makes for exhausting listening. He worked in games for five years; was interviewed for Glassworks while his wife was giving birth; eventually became head of the FMV (full motion video) dept, and then moved to into commercials.

After three more years he ended up at Pinewood Studios as a modeller. “They asked if anyone had experience of rigging, and ended up making me Head of Characters. Then I was taken on at Double Negative to work on Batman, where I peaked.”

His first film project, it was a hefty 8-month stint. “By the end I was bored crapless,” he chuckles. “But it’s the only one I actually got my name on the credits: usually there’s a big turnaround of staff - lots of freelancers. People get missed off.”

As the story goes, director Chris Nolan was dubious that a digital Batman would be convincing enough on the big screen, and wanted as much stunt work in camera as possible. Nick was part of a team that set about creating screen tests to be projected next to live action. Christian Bale was body-scanned in full costume, and then the resulting 3D model was equipped with a complex rig, coloured with a bespoke shading system and key-frame animated - no motion capture was used. Thankfully, Nolan was impressed.

“You’re interpreting the world into 3D - not the mechanics, but how something moves,” Nick concludes. “Modelling and skinning is very artistic: how the crease works when an arm bends; how material crumbles under the armpit; how the muscle inflates. It’s how it looks, not necessarily how it works. Then it’s up to the animator to make it move.”

Animation

Seeing animated characters interact with humans in ‘80s toon-gangster flick Who Framed Roger Rabbit sparked creative impulses in Jeff Pratt, an engineer at the time. He opted for a change, went to art school for four years, and fortuitously ended up at the doors of Pixar just as they were gearing up for a second run at Toy Story.

“They’d had story problems, and it was on hold,” he recalls. “At the time I was the fourteenth animator hired; they thought I’d be one of the last. There were 40 in the end.” In such a large team, and with CGI animation requiring increasingly realistic movement, an aptitude in engineering helped him specialise.

“I like the technical aspects,” he admits, small surprise given he started out tinkering with space shuttles for NASA. “Take the spring in Slinky Dog – I was the only animator that could understand how to make it work convincingly, using sine waves and so on.”

And while the traditional process of sketching scenes frame by frame has been replaced by tweaking rigs and walk cycles, roles are also split differently. “For hand-drawn animation, a team is assigned to a certain character to make sure it’s drawn consistently – when you’re working on computer, that’s all defined already,” he points out.

“On a production like Toy Story or Monsters Inc there’s a team of up to 40 animators – you can’t have two animators on one character while the other 38 sit around twiddling their thumbs. You work on the shot as a whole.”

With the whole team dipping into a central pool of characters, it’s essential to get the puppet controls set up properly in the first place. “A modeller and a rigger will work closely with the animators to develop a character and test it,” confirms Jeff. “The more the animator knows about rigging, the better: it helps to understand the whole process.”

Fundamental to all forms of animation is the walk cycle, and as with the character rig, this will be crafted first. “A team of animators will spend two weeks honing it down to minute details, and then it’s used by everyone in production,” he reveals. “You’re always improving: walk cycles are unique to each character, and help to define personality.”

With rival studios pushing each other’s standards higher by the day, it’s crucial to stay across all new developments – and Pixar provides its animators with bespoke preparatory software that’s updated for each production. So with a clutch of seminal CGI masterpieces behind him, what were the peaks?

“For me, milestones are technical ones,” he confesses, perhaps unsurprisingly given his background: “the fur in Monsters Inc; the clothes in The Incredibles. It’s getting close to absolute realism now: motion water works pretty well off-the-shelf; clothing still has its bugs but it’s pretty good.”

So how important were those four years studying tomes of art history, traditional drawing, photography, colour theory and the like? “It’s useful, but none of that is required for animation,” Jeff admits. “A polished 20-second piece will get you a job, not whether you can draw.”

Games

“At some point in the future, the visual quality of Film and Games will be indistinguishable,” foresees Simon Fenton, ex-Sony Computer Entertainment and now creator and tutor of the centre’s Games courses. “But there’s a real demarcation of roles. In film, you could just be a character modeller. In games, until recently a senior artist would do character, environment, assets, everything. Now those roles are starting to separate.”

Equipped with a Fine Art degree in Painting & Printmaking, Simon might not seem like the archetypal gamer – although it was the printmaking process that first got him interested in mechanical reproduction, not so far away from rendering thousands of frames to produce an animation sequence.

“That was 15 years ago, when silicon graphics machines were the price of a house,” he recalls fondly. “The only way to get access to the software was as a runner at a post-production house. So that’s what I did. I taught myself Alias and Softimage in the evenings: I was actually sleeping in the studio to get access to the machines.”

At a similar time, Lee Danskin was starting his career at Alias Research, putting the wheels in motion for the first ever version of Maya. With a visual effects background – he went on to co-found Smoke & Mirrors 3D, before becoming Deputy Head of 3D at influential London post-house MPC – he speaks with a helicopter view.

“Yes, the finished products are converging, but the way you apply tools in the pipeline is very different,” he reasons: clearly the language of a man who’s dealt with budgets and workflows as well as the creative coalface. “You’ll never have to master camera tracking in games, or compositing – they talk about tri-stripping, and how many texels you have.”

Creatively, an understanding of film is useful: “The language of cinematography will come into gaming,” Lee admits. “They’re starting to apply the process of a real-world camera to a virtual camera, so you’re not always bumping into walls jerkily. But you’ll never have to reverse-engineer a virtual camera as you do in the effects industry.”

Particularly with the growth of hi-def consoles, there’s never been higher demand for stunning 3D game graphics – and Simon asserts that the volume of work has quadrupled in recent years. “Studios are outsourcing to India and China to meet the volume, but this can be an unhappy experience if the quality isn’t up to scratch,” he goes on. “As a junior artist in the UK you have to hit the ground running, specialise, and raise your game to make it worth paying you more.”

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Words: Claire Spencer
Images: Courtesy of BAA

Animation in the UK is constantly subject to change. Always up for a challenge, the British Animation Awards (BAA) have tried to keep pace: we chat to some of 2008’s talented crop to gauge the state of the UK scene.

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You don’t need super-sensitive radar to pick up that at a time when computer-aided animation can be produced so quickly, slower techniques have fallen out of favour with many major studios.

This general trend continues despite of the efforts of studios like Aardman, and major film-makers like Tim Burton, who have continued to reap success with audiences through the tried-and-tested methods of stop-motion and replacement. Their success is encouraging, as it shows a real willingness on the part of global audiences to accept animation as a multi-faceted medium: so long as you have the scripts to back-up your chosen technique. And the popularity of ads like Sony Bravia’s Play-Doh, winner of the Commercial Craft and Commercial Direction categories at 2008’s BAAs, suggests that even the biggest global brands can harness the value in variety.

As such, many animators see the BAAs as a useful yardstick to gauge the UK scene. Aardman director Luis Cook praises Britain’s current crop of animators: “The UK, to my mind, produces some of the most original and interesting animation in the world.” He should know, having both won the Craft Award and been a runner-up in the Best Short Film category.

“It’s quite disparate, ranging from kids’ shows to commercials, short films to music promos. Every two years the BAAs bunch it all together, get it screened around the country and then celebrate it with an awards ceremony.” Luis stresses the face-to-face aspect of these kinds of meet-ups as key in what can be a lonely industry: “It also gives animation folk the opportunity to surface and say hello to each other which is great as we don’t get out much.”

In mid-March, this year’s finalists were invited to attend the ceremony at the BFI South Bank. But winning and losing seem to be alien concepts to those involved.

“It’s weird to think about this ceremony as a competition,” muses Tibor Banoczki, a runner-up in the Student Film category. “Who do I compete with? We are really different directors with different tastes and approaches. It’s like a strange Olympic Games where every kind of sport competes with one another. It would be impossible to decide which category was better.”

This attitude is typical of animators, particularly as compared to industries like music or film, where auteur culture can attract hefty egos intent on hogging the limelight. Animation is usually more collaborative, with its devotees seeing themselves as sharing a common passion.

The animators we spoke to believed that animation’s current strengths revolve around its diversity as an industry, which allows animators from all areas to come together and enjoy each other’s work. An event like the BAAs is an ideal opportunity to get the thoughts of a variety of animation talent, and that’s exactly what we’ve done, hunting down insider tips and tricks from the finalists.

Craft

Luis Cook’s comically macabre piece, The Pearce Sisters, was a worthy winner of the Craft Award. The piece tells the tale of two charmingly grotesque sisters, whose desire for human contact leads them down a slightly grisly path. The process for producing the piece was, in true Aardman style, painstaking in its precision and attention to detail – and not a piece of clay in sight. Cook and his team started off by animating the blank characters and the set in 3D, before printing out the frames and animating the details in 2D. Both strands were then matched up in After Effects to achieve a hand-drawn finish. It took 18 months to complete.

The worthy runners-up were Ian Mackinnon with Adjustment – his combination of flip-book animation and live action – and Joanna Quinn with Dreams and Desires: Family Ties, showcasing her refinement with deceptively complex pencil-on-paper animation. Ian’s film follows a close relationship as it degenerates in a world where the line between an artist’s animation and live-action ‘reality’ has become increasingly indistinct.

We grilled both Ian and Luis for their views on what it takes to be a successful animator in the modern market.

Both parties assert that inspiration for their work comes from a wide variety of sources – within animation alone, Luis cites everyone from Philip Guston and Saul Steinberg to Pee-Wee Herman as having had an impact on the way he works.

For The Pearce Sisters, he did a lot of research into outsider art, particularly St Ives artists Ben Nicholson and Albert Wallis. The resulting rough-around-the-edges effect frames the tale perfectly.

Ian, who graduated from his Masters course 18 months ago, has found plenty of mutual inspiration in classmates and colleagues. “We keep in touch,” he says. “Collaboration is so important; there’s a real community element.”

Luis agrees, asserting that the industry couldn’t survive without that sense of community. “A smart director simply surrounds himself with people far more talented than himself – writers, editors, designers, animators, and sound people. He pulls it all together by keeping everyone happy with money and cake and then takes all the credit at the end,” he chuckles.

Luis’ journey from student to animator has been a varied one, passing through Berkshire College of Art and Middlesex Polytechnic before becoming a freelance illustrator and teacher. Subsequently, he produced pieces for the BBC and Royal College of Art (RCA) before becoming part of the Aardman family.

“I never intended to be an animation person; it was an accident really,” he muses. “However, as I was working as an illustrator I obviously drew a lot, so a friend of mine threw me in at the deep end and got me to work on a series for the BBC called Small Objects of Desire. That got me into the idea of moving illustration, so I applied to the RCA and VSO at the same time. VSO didn’t get back to me, so I ended up doing animation.”

Ian is also an RCA alumnus, but his path to the BAAs had a more technical base, kicking off with a degree in Computer Animation – which involved a great deal of mathematics. “That opened up a lot of ideas to me,” he recalls, suggesting that the conceptual end often comes first for him as a result.

“With Adjustment, the medium definitely inspired the story,” he admits. Indeed, the two are inextricably interlinked – the animation is the story.

From Luis’ point of view, the industry has a way of restoring balance, just when it seems as though one medium is reigning supreme. “I think it ebbs and flows. A few years ago we thought 2D was being killed by computers, but it seems to be coming back as a response to the masses of CGI features. Maybe it’s more of a cross-fertilisation. All these ways of working seem to reinvent themselves, forming a collage of old and new technologies.”

There may seem to be less sand animation, or oil-on-glass, such as Clive Walley was making in the early 1990s, in the mainstream in 2008. But rather like the winklepickers, tank-tops and drainpipe jeans of decades gone by, just when you think a trend’s been rightly ditched in the dustbin of history, suddenly it’s everywhere again, perhaps under a new name, or more interestingly, having evolved into a slightly more complex beast.

Short Film

Osbert Parker seized the award for Best Short Film firmly in both hands with his technically-precise masterpiece, Yours Truly. Using a combination of miniature 3D environments and camera-manipulated magazines and movie stills, Osbert has created a thrillingly dark tale of love and murder.

His is a fine example of how to use stop-motion technique to its full effect, as the slightly awkward, jerky movements impart an air of film noir to the proceedings.

The equally compelling runners-up were Elizabeth Hobbs with The Old, Old, Very Old Man, and the aforementioned Pearce Sisters. Elizabeth plumped for watery blue ink on white tiles, inspired by the images of Charles I on the Delftware at the British Museum: “I couldn’t have made the piece in any other way,” she asserts.

Alongside Craft, the award for Best Short Film is one of the most highly-regarded at the BAAs. Elizabeth Hobbs shares how it feels to be recognised in such a category. “I was surprised and delighted,” she smiles. “I often feel a little bit outside the animation industry because I work mostly on my own at home, only really emerging to have a drink with my producer by the canal, or to do the sound design at Fonic. Having invested so much in a film and persuaded other people to do the same, it’s nice to have the film noticed.”

The variety within even a single category emphasises the varied backgrounds that these animators have. Elizabeth, like Luis, started her journey as an illustrator. “I was writing and making artist’s books and prints, and developed the desire to make the narratives work over time. I started by making flip-books and Jacob’s Ladder books, and then took it to the next level by borrowing a camera and making two films using fuzzy felt,” she recalls.

This eventually led her in 1998 to a postgraduate degree in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, where she started to make films using the familiar materials from her printmaking days. However, Elizabeth’s different background and approach makes her consider the process of animation in a slightly different light. “I have the feeling that the best animations come from single-minded, slightly bonkers people working on their own in the dark,” she laughs. “But I do appreciate that it is slightly different for adverts, pop videos and features.” Some types of animation do lend themselves to solo flight, and Elizabeth’s delicate techniques are among them. Ultimately, it comes down to preference, media, and how much you are willing to undertake.

Cutting Edge

This category is perhaps one of the most important, as it represents the crème de la crème of the industry’s most daringly innovative artists. Semiconductor’s Magnetic Movie was the overall winner: shot at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory in California, this stunning short film unleashes itself on reality, exploring magnetic fields by bringing them into a dimension that we can sense and appreciate.

Set to a backdrop of NASA scientists discussing their techniques, Magnetic Movie is a marvellous marriage of sound-controlled CGI and 3D compositing.

The runners-up in this category were Osbert Parker’s Yours Truly, and Interstellar Stella, produced by AL and AL. The latter sees a child model exploring the mystery of herself and her contrasting lifestyle via the advertising stills in which she’s featured. The film is a visually-stunning combination of high definition live action and 3D/2D CGI composited video. As one might expect, the techniques demonstrated by all the finalists were quite extraordinary, making it incredibly difficult to narrow it down to a single winner.

Getting in at the ground floor, we spoke to winners Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor, finding again warm words on the subject of diversity in animation: “The scope of the awards has definitely opened up the field of what is considered animation,” Joe notes. Things that were once products of the underground can use the BAAs to emerge into the mainstream – Magnetic Movie itself would not look out of place as an advertisement, and the techniques it showcases have limitless potential. However, both Ruth and Joe consider themselves to be artists over animators, and Magnetic Movie was the result of introducing time and space into their art. AL and AL also have a background in Fine Art, which they studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, graduating in 2001.

Like many of their contemporaries, the idea came before the medium, but the media bring ideas of their own. For their next project, Ruth and Joe are working on a multi-screen installation drawing on the movement of the sun and earth – still animation, but approached in a completely different, more interactive way. Of course, comments-enabled video-sharing sites like YouTube have provided a platform from which the artists can interact with the audience if they choose to do so. But is it a good idea?

“It’s nice to establish a dialogue,” admits Ruth, “and we’ve always aimed to get our work out to people. We released material on a DVD in 2001, and this is just another way of achieving that effect, only faster.”

It doesn’t seem to have harmed their success, although several of the animators we spoke to admitted to having had their hands burned by particularly harsh audience feedback – in such an subjective artform, with so much time and effort invested, criticism can cut deep.

“To an extent, you have to make up your own rules,” Joe asserts. “You have to bring yourself into everything you do, and you have to be willing to spend a lot of time on it. It’s probably one of the most time-consuming things in the world.”

As such, he warns against rushing to get your work out there for its own sake. “Don’t expect it all now – just work through your ideas, work hard, and the results are their own reward.”

Student Film

As the most grass-roots of the awards on offer, it is in the Student Film category that we may peer into animation’s future. “I think it’s good for people to collectively recognise achievements within the industry, as new standards can be set making for better things to come,” asserts George Gendi, the creator of Pingpongs, a runner-up in the category.

“Awards ceremonies also do a pretty good job in bringing everyone in the industry together in the same place at the same time. Everywhere you look you see someone you’ve met or slightly recognise. I think to give awards is to say that this is what people are enjoying at the moment, but it also highlights the direction in which things are going.”

The winners of the Student Film award (and joint winners of the Public Choice Film Award) were Tom Brown and Daniel Grey, with t.o.m., the uncomfortably curious tale of a young boy’s unusual daily routine. Originally produced for their final year project at the International Film School of Wales, the plot revolves around Little Tom’s decision to remove his clothes in order to get out of a day at school.

Using the 2D frame-by-frame effect on the computer, Tom and Daniel have demonstrated how truly flexible animation can be if you’re willing to put the hours in. Short-cuts could have been taken, but the resulting piece sympathises with the young protagonist in a way that a hastily-constructed Flash movie never could.

The runners-up in the category were Pingpongs and Milk Teeth, and we spoke to their creators, George Gendi and Tibor Banoczki, to see how they feel about their future as animators.

Also using a mixed-media technique, Pingpongs deals with the intimacy of relationships in an easily accessible manner, which is undoubtedly what has brought it to the attention of the BAA board. “Its selection affirmed for me that there are certain aspects of the film that are really strong,” George says cordially. “Ultimately, making work that lots of people can enjoy is very important to me.” This represents one of the greatest strengths of the BAAs – by recognising the quality of the work being made by students, or anyone who is at the beginning of their journey into animation, it encourages them to continue working towards their goals.

Tibor on the other hand combined photo-realistic 3D backgrounds with 2D paper cut-out characters to create the eerily tense Milk Teeth. The lack of dialogue is a masterstroke, as it sets the scene for the slightly creepy young boy who follows his elder sister to a secret rendezvous one night, and everything that transpires as a result. “We didn’t start with the story,” he recalls. “The first things we wrote down were the character of the place; the atmosphere. After that we started to think about the human characters and the plot. The medium just came after that. It was a long process to find the right visual word for the film.” He also highlights the importance of his Hungarian roots on his work – inspiration comes from life, not just from art.

As the category title would suggest, all of the finalists are recent students. Tom studied animation at the International Film School of Wales, whereas co-director Daniel studied Fine Art at the University of Wales before enrolling on the same course. Tibor graduated from Moholy-Nagy Arts University in Budapest, and more recently attended the NFTS in London, with Milk Teeth as his graduating film. So, how do the bright hopes of animation characterise the industry facing them today? Nominees in other categories have identified genres that have been less popular in recent times, but like his contemporaries, George is not too worried about what lies ahead.

“Although some sub-genres have become less popular, they can’t be replaced and they can always be found. As long as we make an effort to look for what we like if the mainstream isn’t living up to expectations, then there will always be variety, and nothing will totally die unless technology goes backwards.” Tibor agrees, and asserts that as long as animators care about the message they are putting across, the medium and its surrounding techniques will fall into place.

“Keep your talent busy,” asserts Tibor. “It’s important to have talent, but it’s equally important to keep on working. If you finish a film, start another one. It doesn’t matter what kind of film it is, or whether you have money. Just keep your mind and hands busy.”

Words: Nick Carson
Broomfield portraits: Kate Beatty

“It’s a filmmaker’s responsibility to put together something as accurate as possible,” is the Broomfield manifesto. Following 2006’s acclaimed Ghosts, he’s taken his experiments with ‘real cinema’ to a new level with Battle for Haditha - digging as deeply into the principles of filmmaking as he does the universal issues surrounding this symbolic episode.

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“It’s great fun to play around with style,” Broomfield tells me, citing Day for Night - Truffaut’s much-lauded film about making a film - as a creative influence. Certainly since the journalistic frustrations of 1988’s aptly-titled Driving Me Crazy, he’s carved a name as a figurehead for what pigeonhole enthusiasts call les nouvelles egotistes: a growing breed of doc-makers who are themselves central to the action, together with the likes of Louis Theroux, Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock.

It’s all-too-tempting to pin up his two most recent films as the start of a new chapter in his work, given their deviation from this trademark approach. Both are dramatic interpretations of controversial situations, with no bobbing boom or frantic chase in sight; unlike much of his personality-driven back-catalogue to-date, both stories pivot largely on a specific series of events and the complex repercussions for the many characters involved.

But like his intriguing Anglo-American drawl, or one of his elusive heckled interviewees of past films, Broomfield’s not that easy to box in: for him, both style and substance should remain organic. “I think about one project at a time; I never seem to have a problem finding my next film,” he insists. “I’m not one of these people with a list.”

The latest episode to pique his inquisitive instinct was the death of 24 Iraqi civilians in the small town of Haditha on 19 November 2005, in the aftermath of a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) that killed a young marine riding in convoy. Whilst initial reports from the US military claimed that the deaths were a direct result of the blast and a subsequent gunfight with hostile insurgents, Iraqi witnesses told a very different story - five unarmed men in a taxi shot dead as they approached the scene, and 19 more killed in three nearby houses in an act of violent retribution over the following hours.

It was an amateur video clearly showing the bodies of women and children shot in their homes, passed to an Iraqi human-rights organisation and then to Time magazine, that laced the affair with doubt. It identified flaws in the marines’ statement, prompting a formal inquiry - although the initial conclusion was that it was collateral damage, things soon spiraled into a full criminal investigation, with several marines on trial for unpremeditated murder. For Broomfield, this was motivation enough to cement the blood-soaked incident as an example.

“I’ve researched lots of subjects that I haven’t followed through,” he admits. “When you’ve got to be with them for a year, a year-and-a-half, you might as well do something that is complicated enough, or has enough mystery to keep you going. I don’t like going into films knowing what the outcome will be: often it’s the discovery that’s exciting; changing your mind; meeting people with sides that you’d never imagined before. That’s what makes it worthwhile and fun.”

It’s a compelling approach: filmmaker both directing the action and being swept up in it. “It’s all to do with storytelling. Any way you can tell the story better so it’s more real, more entertaining, more contemporary, is great to play around with,” is Broomfield’s take. In the case of Battle for Haditha, this involved building a framework from what few indisputable facts were available - and letting the cast improvise the rest.

As with Ghosts - for which the painstaking research process including hiring Chinese students to pose as illegal immigrant workers, and posing as an Afrikaner worker himself to film the results with a hidden camera in his glasses - finding the right cast to carry the film was crucial. Not necessarily just for their acting skills, but for their genuine deep-rooted emotions, experiences and insider-knowledge that could steer both the general atmosphere and finer details more accurately than any stubborn director with a top-down vision.

Understandably, it feels like a documentary-maker’s approach to drama: letting the action unfold as naturalistically as possible. At first he considered going the full distance: tracking down the marines who had lived and breathed the sweat, smoke and blood of Haditha, and asking them to re-enact the events of 19th November 2005. But in the flesh, as he told The Times, they were “fucked up, much too jittery. Some couldn’t keep still when we were talking to them.”

One of the most shocking elements during this initial research period was the marines’ “distressing and vulgar” sense of humour; arguably a coping mechanism to detach them from the shocking things they’d seen and done, but something Broomfield had to fight through, alongside the jitters and the tranquilliser damage, to understand what they were really about.

Unable to work with those directly connected with Haditha - and with the trial just getting under way - the production favoured a more conventional call-out to casting agents with military connections, tapping into servicemen who had recently returned from active duty to keep that emotional resonance without jeopardising the whole project.

The highlight of their nine-month casting call was unearthing 22-year-old ex-marine and aspiring actor Elliot Ruiz, who at 17 had been the youngest solider deployed to Iraq, and had already had his personal story dramatised in a Pulitzer-nominated play. Corporal Ramirez wasn’t any easy first lead role for Ruiz: dredging up all manner of demons, it was a turbulent process that came to a head in an on-screen breakdown with an uncomfortable dose of realism. Iraqi civilians, many of whom had lost loved ones in the conflict, were also persuaded to lend their stories to the film as part of the predominantly amateur cast.

Despite responding to one symbolic episode, this fresh ammunition for the anti-war canon has an intentionally timeless quality. “Things like Haditha happen in any conflict, any war, anywhere,” reasons Broomfield. “The stuff that we filmed after the IED goes off is all based on reports: that’s all accurate, what happened in those houses. But I don’t want this to be seen as a forensic film. Haditha is a symbolic crime, but not such a rarity that it deserves to be looked at in isolation.”

While it may seem that the collective lens of the world’s media has been on Iraq since those first volleys were fired, it’s the other side’s perspective that has been conspicuously absent thus far: and this is the edge Haditha brings to the public debate.

“It’s a film about the language of war, and the common humanity that people share,” he declares. “In any conflict there are different points of view; it’s rarely good and evil. But most journalists have been stuck in the Green Zone throughout, and genuine Iraqi viewpoints are few and far between.”

Accordingly, the research also included flying to Aman to meet civilian survivors of the massacre - “who were there on the day, and knew the people who were killed” - plus spending a week with insurgents who had been directly involved with Haditha, and quizzing the journalist from Time magazine who first broke the story into public consciousness. The next step was securing government reports and witness statements to build as accurate a picture as possible, from multiple sides.

Iraqi witnesses and insiders in the marines told the same story: that the killings were indiscriminate as a knee-jerk reaction to their colleague’s death. Most shocking of all were the protocols he found through conversations with marines: “Their standard operating procedure rules are so fucking hardcore. If a house is described as ‘hostile’, then you just kill everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter if it contains two-year-olds or the elderly.”

But while he admits starting the project with some bias against the marines, meeting them in the flesh and realising that these were poverty-stricken kids with little or no education, thousands of miles from home in a conflict they didn’t understand, muddied the waters somewhat: “The deeper I dug into the whole story, the harder I realised it was to take a side. It was hard to condemn them out of hand as cold-blooded killers. I hope people will feel that judgment should be passed on the war itself, the architects of the war, and the future of the war. These are just poor bastards who got caught up in it.”

“Everyone has some kind of blinkered view, and it’s interesting that in some of the cinema discussions after the film, the two main camps realised just how blinkered they are. That’s what happens in war - but most traditional war films tend to be black and white, good and bad.”

Broomfield’s already made it clear that beyond the factual framework, the cast should make the piece their own, so I ask how he sees his own role in the production - particularly in still relatively unfamiliar dramatic territory.

“I enable people to deliver their performances in as relaxed a way as possible, and as real a way as possible,” he responds, after a short pause and a contemplative hmm. “It’s creating an environment that people can work in that makes them feel alright to be themselves, particularly if you’re working with non-actors. They shouldn’t be embarrassed: you want them for who they are.”

Of course, dramatic interpretation or not, Battle for Haditha has a grounding in fact - and was released while the trial was still in progress - so surely directorial control was crucial in places? “When dealing with specific milestones in the report, details from a legal document, we had to control people pretty tightly,” he confirms. “They couldn’t say whatever they wanted in those situations.”

“We worked from a pretty rigid structure of the story, but I was often steered by what they had to contribute: ‘We wouldn’t do it this way; we’d do it this way.’ I let them use their own language, being mindful that I didn’t want them acting being a marine: I wanted them being themselves. In a sense, they’re the experts - you don’t need one of those experts standing by.”

Given their deeply personal roots in the conflict, and intimate connections with its victims, surely the cast had their own agendas, even if the director endeavoured to avoid one of his own? “The film is all about agendas,” is the simple answer. “The marines, the insurgents, the people who get caught between those two forces, all have their own rationale for what they do. It’s about presenting those three agendas as accurately as possible, to an audience who probably has their own preconceptions.”

“Showing the film around, an Iraqi audience is very pro insurgents - would they even have taken money to do what they did? They see them as patriots. An American audience is always much more defensive about the marines.”

Three strands of narrative bind the film together, representing these three viewpoints: the pair of newly-recruited insurgents paid to plant the IED, the marines who seek revenge for its fatal detonation, and the civilians who are cut down indiscriminately as a result - several of whom see the bomb being planted in their quiet neighbourhood and choose to keep quiet.

While the brutality of the wider insurgency comes across, the two that plant the bomb are nervous and inexperienced, acting clumsily in the name of patriotism - but tellingly manage to flee the scene unharmed as gunfire erupts. The marines are brutal, dehumanised and reduced to killing machines by fear and rage, but ultimately emerge as pawns in a game much larger than themselves, endorsed by orders from above and crippled by remorse.

Iraqi civilian life is sketched out in various short episodes - a party to celebrate a circumcision, a boy playing with a goat, a family going to market - but this third group is finally crushed from both sides, with nowhere to turn. Crucially for Broomfield, all involved re-creating elements of their own lives, not acting several stages removed from it.

Some 15 years before Ghosts, his first venture into directing drama - 1989’s glossy Hollywood fare Diamond Skulls - he found overwhelming as a process, and readily admits to being embarrassed by the end result. Does mindless escapism and detachment from reality just not appeal?

“All forms of storytelling are interesting; I just happen to have grown up in a tradition of documentaries,” he reflects. “But I don’t like celebrity and all that goes with it: I enjoy getting to know normal people and their lives. For me, it’s about combining that with telling a structured story in an accessible way.”

Unlike that self-confessed blip on Broomfield’s CV, both Ghosts and Battle for Haditha shun the studio lights and contrived repetition of Hollywood to reveal something deeper about those involved.

“These are not pseudo actors; they’re real people who are being themselves,” he asserts. “That means you have to shoot in a different way; in real environments. You can’t shoot them on a set ’cause then they have to act, and they have no training in acting; they don’t know that the fuck they’re doing.”

Based in Jordan - Iraq was clearly too dangerous - the cast and crew lived as a community. “I had to create a barracks for the marines to live in, and the Iraqis were living in houses. If you’re shooting reverse angles, lighting the be-Jesus out of something and having hundreds of people standing around the set, you’ve got to have actors. It’s very, very difficult.”

By way of example, the bathroom in which Ruiz breaks down - purging himself of all those years of pent up anguish - doesn’t open up into a world of runners, tracks and dollies. It’s the actual bathroom used by the cast and crew. Maintaining the ‘real cinema’ approach are very long cuts. For the heart-rending mourning scene, the camera rolled for 40 minutes straight - no-one was going to ask the genuinely distressed women to go one more time for luck.

“I think the greatest thing that film has is the ability to describe real time,” argues Broomfield. “I don’t like lots of cuts: it’s really interesting to see a conversation, for example, or how long it takes for an argument to develop, rather than just cutting to an argument. We’re used to seeing things in real time, and cinema has the exciting ability to do that.”

“I grew up with anthropological, observational films, where the most interesting thing was seeing a long conversation between two guys in some weird language with subtitles. You get a sense of their rhythm, how they do things, what their humour’s like - no other art-form can do that.”

For Haditha he picked up countless tricks from special effects supervisor David Harris, including how to set up action shots to keep a lot of movement in the camera. “Certain things, particularly action, are also much more involving in real time than if you cut to the effect all the time,” he concludes. “It’s much more threatening if the human eye sees it as being real.”

Words: Simon Harper
Illustration: Chris Dickason

“We’ve used the internet and so on quite extensively in the shows before, but not in a very organised way.” Award-winning stand-up Mark Watson is explaining the premise of his most recent venture. Renowned for the 24- and 36-hour marathon sets that have distinguished his tenures at the Edinburgh Festival, the Bristol-born comedian decided to take an altogether different approach for a performance on his latest tour of Australia.

Around a week after staging an Al Gore-style climate change lecture, Mark’s interactive comedy show took a traditional stand-up performance and turned it on its head. Born out of collaboration on a global scale, the show threw together a raft of content submitted by volunteers from across the world, gathering information, videos, photos and other material, and drew together simultaneous ‘official’ audiences in Melbourne and London, as well as people viewing the whole day-long experience in the comfort of their own homes, via the Internet. It’s a pretty ambitious multimedia adventure - why bother?

“I think the 24- and 36-hour shows have always been about collaboration and so the next logical step is to unite that team spirit with technology,” explains the 2006 winner of the Time Out Critic’s Choice Award. “What happened is that we did things in the main room - setting challenges, appealing for various things, inventing games - and people following online joined in, sending in videos and photos and so on, so the scale of the show wasn’t confined to the live audience but involved as much international interaction as possible.”

Pursuing comedy in a very non-traditional sense, the evolution of new media has challenged the notion of stand-up as being one man or woman and a microphone; where the audience would be different each night and only the people lucky enough to be in the room are in on the joke. Less exclusivity and more democracy, then. But how does this impact on audience interaction in a comedy setting?

“It’s kind of the same idea really; spinning a show out of a collaboration between audience and performer,” reasons Mark. “Obviously in this show, the audience had to be a lot more creative and resilient. And go without sleep. I think one of the things people love most about stand-up is the one-man-and-a-mic feeling, the simplicity of it and the intensity. You could never lose that from live comedy. But maybe we will see more people exploiting the internet to do different things, like my show, which don’t really come under the bracket of stand-up at all.”

In an environment which feeds off the reaction of a ‘live’ audience, what place is there for virtual punters? Online resources such as 4Laughs and ConstantComedy.com have allowed clued-up comedy fans to heckle from their own desk, with the click of a mouse replacing a roar of disapproval; a star rating in place of a withering put-down. There’s something about stand-up comedy, though, which puts significant emphasis on the rapport between the performer and audience members.

“The reason is probably that live comedy feeds off laughter and reactions in a way which hardly any other type of show does,” says Mark. “As a comedian you literally will be funnier, and better, if you’re responding to enthusiasm. If you’re doing a play or you’re in a band or something, you can always kind of pretend people are loving it whether they are or not. Comedians can’t do that, so the audience’s visible response becomes all-important.”

Certainly, he suggests that the congregation of fans who gather for his now-established stand-up marathons are key to the success of such lengthy jaunts. Keeping the laughter flowing for a full day or more requires a bit of help from those watching his on-stage endurance test.

“The rapport tends to come from the loyalty of the longest-serving audience members,” posits the ardent Bristol City fan. “A lot of people do stay for the entire show and the relationship you build with them is quite an unusual one, because you’re quite heavily dependent on each other as you’re spending that much time in each other’s company. You also get people who come in for short bits and then go again; they tend to be left fairly baffled by the whole experience. So the connection that you get with an audience at a 24-hour show is all about everyone being in it for the long game basically, and the people who get the most out of it do tend to be the people who see most of it. In a way the show is about that long-term co-operation.”

Starting off as an experiment, his unprecedented long-haul shows at Edinburgh were lauded and attracted huge attention, despite Mark never having intended it to become a regular feature of his visits to the festival.

“I never envisaged it as something that I’d keep coming back to, which I have done. I saw it as a one-off experiment and it’s ended up being more of an annual tradition just because of the way that the Fringe has adopted it, as an institution of sorts. I wanted to see how far I could push myself and push the idea of a live show. I wanted to do something that no one had done before and it seemed like a good way of just seeing what could be done, basically.”

“I only ever thought I’d do it the once. It’s become a sort of trademark and it was definitely a surprise because that’s what I’ve ended up being known for. I wouldn’t have guessed it would be for something so off the wall, especially because I did it outside the establishment. Certainly at the Fringe, I always saw it as an alternative to proper shows, and it’s weird that that in itself has kind of become a tradition now. It’s nice that people recognise it but it makes it harder to keep pulling it off when there’s more and more hype about it. The whole thing relies on the fact that it is ridiculous.”

With interactive comedy shows like his latest experiment, the idea of not actually being able to see most of the audience might be quite unsettling for the performer. Far from conforming to a traditional set-up, interactive stand-up presents a dilemma - does the comedian risk undermining the audience gathered at the venue, and are they able to engage with people scattered around the world, who are on the other end of a modem? It would seem that while it might put the relationship between comedian and audience under a lot of needless strain, for Mark it presents an opportunity too good to pass up.

“There are a lot of disadvantages,” he confesses. “It would be easy to try to be too clever, when ultimately people just want to have a laugh. Most audiences’ idea of a good time is to hear good jokes and see a funny person, not marvel at modern communication techniques.”

“However, there is massive potential for people like me to experiment with interaction on a scale never before seen. For me, comedy is a very wide term - anything which is genuinely odd, eccentric and heart-warming counts alongside more recognisable joke-craft. So the internet offers comedy a way of moving forward, or at least sideways into new territories.”

It’s not an entirely new concept for Mark, though. At the Edinburgh Festival in 2006, his 36-hour epic journey or mirth and whimsy - titled Mark Watson’s Seemingly Impossible 36-Hour Circuit of the World - was viewed simultaneously by a small audience in Melbourne. A success of sorts, this was presumably one of the reasons behind his recent experiment, amplifying the principle of an online audience and taking it to a more ambitious level.
“Its impact on the show was that people felt they were part of something bigger and grander than just a lot of nonsense in a dark room. Also, it gave me something to talk about in difficult moments,” deadpans Mark. The idea is beginning to take off, too, most notably thanks to fellow comedian Ross Noble. On his 2007 Nobleism tour, the big-haired stand-up’s performance at the Liverpool Empire was beamed into Vue cinemas across the UK. Reportedly an attempt to reach a larger audience without resorting to playing stadium-sized venues, this is another example of media platforms colliding head-on with comedy.

So is Mark - who admits to constantly trying to find new ways of challenging himself and his fans - dissuaded by the fact that the idea is starting to catch on with other performers? And can it translate to an ordinary length show, rather than the decidedly looser, free-form stand-up marathons he finds himself coming back to?

“I’ll almost certainly keep trying out new ways of bringing micro-audiences together under one roof. It is difficult to imagine doing something based on mass technical trickery which was short, yet still had enough of a heart to engage the audience. Not impossible, though.”

Words: Catherine Bray

Mike Leigh’s award-winning Happy-Go-Lucky was touted as a change of pace for a director of reputedly dour films. Here, he sets the record straight and tells us exactly why he’s pleased to have made an anti-miserablist, anti-Hollywood piece of art.

Click to enlarge/shrink. Left/right arrows cycle through images.

“People can talk any amount of crap they like. Anyone who wants to say Happy-Go-Lucky is devoid of social commentary is just plain stupid.” Mike Leigh is coming out fighting, or at least wearily prepared to rebuff the flurry of film press articles seemingly desperate to foist a Leigh-goes-fluffy angle on the Brit director’s latest film about chirpy primary school teacher Poppy.

“Obviously this film has got plenty to say about the way we live; the way we teach; the way we learn; the way we have relationships; the way we interact with people; the way people accumulate ideas and don’t know what to do with them. It’s a film about love; surviving; dealing with problems - I mean, you name it,” he continues. “It’s rooted in social issues, so in that sense it’s implicitly political. It’s just not a tract; it’s not a piece of propaganda of some kind.”

In non-descript slacks, military green shirt, navy sleeveless fleece and neatly-trimmed beard, Mike looks more like an off-duty bus driver when we meet in the Soho Hotel than any stereotypical mirror-shaded, mad-haired, multi-award-winning director. Mid-way through the press period for his then yet-to-be released film, the idiosyncratic director has had plenty of chance to get bored of explaining that he hasn’t made a Bridget Jones-style tale of a single London lady’s trials and tribulations.

But at least on the surface, the film in question - Happy-Go-Lucky - confounds some expectations of what a Mike Leigh film might be like. This is after all the man who brought us the neurotic, middle-class tension of Abigail’s Party, the proto-Shameless travails of Life Is Sweet, a rapist for a protagonist in Naked, the bleak backstreet abortion drama of Vera Drake, and countless other explorations of the kind of themes you won’t see Jerry Bruckheimer going near any time soon.

Happy-Go-Lucky, by contrast, follows the mostly cheery everyday adventures of a North London primary school teacher as she begins driving lessons with pitiable conspiracy theorist Scott. There are no abortions, rapes or deaths. As Mike would probably be quick to point out, this is a simplistic, plot-oriented way of arriving at the conclusion that Happy-Go-Lucky marks some kind of Pollyanna watershed in his body of work.

Mike Leigh films do all have something in common, but that something is not misery. Even his bleakest films have plenty of humour, making the Mike Leigh x-factor hard to pin down.”My impulse, my compunction, is to make films that show life in a real way, as it is,” he suggests. “So why manufacture a kind of quasi, pseudo-moral thing?”

It’s clear that in attempting to pin down common characteristics in his work, it’s almost easier to talk about what a film is not. Which is precisely what Mike does when I suggest that it’s good to see a wholesome character not punished somehow for her wide-eyed approach to life: “The putative film you’re implicitly invoking, which is the film where somebody’s goodness comes back to haunt them, is simply another sort of film with another set of preoccupations.”

Such precise, almost lawyerly, language - putative, implicit, invoke - betrays an interviewee who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and, you sense, has had to deal with a number of misconceived interpretations of this film.Mike states baldly: “I’m not concerned to create synthetic plot-lines, and patronise the audience accordingly. People have said, ‘Why doesn’t something horrible happen to her?’ Actually, when she’s finally in the car with Scott in that last driving lesson, it pretty well does, but she knows how to deal with it.”

It’s from the apparent cul-de-sac of imaginary patronising films that one of Mike’s central concerns emerges: the irrelevance of Hollywood to what he sees as worthwhile in film. I ask why films crammed with synthetic plotlines that patronise the audience are so popular - people seem to watch them?

“The question is not so much why people watch them: they watch them because they’re there,” he argues. “Why are those films there? is the question. And the answer to that, I’m afraid, goes back to the roots of how cinema in the world functions. Somewhere during the First World War, and then helped by the entry into the Second World War of the United States, Hollywood started to dominate the world market with the ethos that films have to be simplistic and formulaic. Sadly, we’re all imbued with that.”

As his new film suggests, it’s not all doom and gloom in the film industry according to Mike. “Actually, at any given moment - even as we speak - there are all sorts of interesting, entertaining, important films being made in different languages that don’t embrace those formulaic criteria.”It’s a bracket in which this director would place his own work: “I see my films in a world cinema context, not an Anglo-Hollywood context. But people see film this way, and watch Hollywood pictures, because that’s what’s there.”What’s there is starting to change with the advent of long-tail distribution, something Mike implicitly welcomes: “The good news is, partly because some barriers have been broken down and partly because of DVD, what people are watching is getting to be more comprehensive.”

But what constitutes a good film? The London-based director is certainly not anti-American per se. Just one of his favourite recent films, Irish effort Garage, doesn’t hail from the States, although the directors he salutes - the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jason Reitman - are broadly on the indie side of things.Expanding on what makes a good film, the idea of veracity is crucial to Mike: “To me, a film can only be interesting if it’s rooted in reality. Things can only be funny if they’re rooted in reality, and things can only be tragic if they’re rooted in reality. All those elements, so far as I’m concerned, are on the go in this film.”

All of this is central to understanding how this director works. His ‘process’ is legendary, and it repels some actors just as it repeatedly attracts others, with regulars having included Timothy Spall, Alison Steadman (Mike’s ex-wife), Lesley Manville and Jim Broadbent.There is no script for a Mike Leigh film, simply an idea, and a lengthy rehearsal process will involve workshopping characters, improvising dialogue and scenes, with Mike then tying the emergent material into a collaborative, coherent whole. As the man himself - who has been tagged ‘Britain’s Bergman’ - puts it: “Films like this come out of a warm, sharing collaboration. The whole thing about directing, authority and all those things isn’t really relevant.”

Beginning his career with a stint at RADA and a couple of 1963 bit-part TV and film roles, Mike is hugely enthusiastic about acting as a craft. “I love it. I love actors. Having started life training as an actor, to me my mission in life is to elevate acting to being a creative art, and to elevate actors to being creative artists, not just people who show up, read their lines and, like we used to say, don’t fall over the furniture.”

It’s a subject on which Mike can enthuse at length, and in doing so, he loosens up a lot. He expresses deep affection for his band of regulars and when asked whether he keeps up with the careers of favourites like Timothy Spall his accent broadens as he replies with a cackle, “Can’t help it mate! If Tim’s on I’ll go out of my way to see it. I stay friends with actors and hang out with them.”

It’s a far cry from Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous statement: “Actors are cattle.” Although Hitch would later amend this - “I never said actors were cattle; all I said was that actors should be treated as cattle” - it’s still a world away as a sentiment from Mike’s avowed interest in the actor as an involved artist, and his proud passion for the level of talent on offer in this country. “The thing is, you know, we are blessed with fantastic actors here in the UK. There are too many very good actors I’d like to work with for me to ever get around to working with all of them.”

Luckily for Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan and the rest of the cast, Mike did find the time to work with them, resulting in what has been described as Sally’s break-out role, and the latest in Eddie’s string of successful character roles, which have seen him work with everyone from Tom Cruise on Mission Impossible III to Terrence Malick on The New World.

In Happy-Go-Lucky, this collaborative journey of cast and crew has resulted in what the film’s director describes as “a bright, energetic, positive experience that, I hope, makes you feel like life is worth living. But within it are darknesses and sadnesses of various kinds, and in various places, which are there for Poppy to react to, deal with and care about. As such, hopefully it’s a complex film - for all that it has its comic and celebratory side.”

The ‘brightness’ of the film refers not only emotional timbre, but quite literally to its kaleidoscopic palette. With vibrant cobalt blues, tiger-lily oranges and screaming magenta leaping off the screen, Happy-Go-Lucky doesn’t look quite like the majority of Mike Leigh films, and it’s the first time he’s used widescreen. “That reflects the energy and explosiveness of the film, as does the colour,” he explains.

While Mike insists that his directorial attitude has remained consistent across the lifespan of his career, he’s happy to admit to having refined his work stylistically. “All artists, the more you do, the more you learn, you hone your skills, and in some ways you may move on. In principle I’m doing the same kind of thing. Apart from anything else, Nuts in May is delightful - but it’s a very crude piece of film-making, done very quickly. Happy-Go-Lucky is a highly-sophisticated, beautiful piece of film-making.”

He’s also stuck close to home for much of his career: true to form, you’ll see a lot of London in Happy-Go-Lucky, although Mike insists that it’s something of a red-herring to regard the city as integral to the action, as some reviews have. “London becomes an implicit character in the film, but it’s not a film about London as such. You could make the film anywhere. I’ve made lots of films in London, because it’s cheaper. We can’t really afford to go away from base.”

As our interview draws to a close, I wonder, broadly speaking, whether it’s possible to fit Happy-Go-Lucky into a narrative of current trends in British film, or British film, perhaps, as it should be? Mike’s reply suggests that for all his reputation for social critique, he wouldn’t want to be too didactic about things.

“Happy-Go-Lucky is one film. There’s all kinds of stuff that’s going on. I’ve already implicitly expressed a view about films that are made for cynical reasons. But to be honest, I’m not really disposed to say, ‘Well this is how films should be, Poppy’s the sort of character we should see more of,’ or anything like that. This is this film. I think, and I suppose I hope, that it’s quite unique in its own way, with its own box of tricks.”

Love or hate Happy-Go-Lucky - and there will be plenty of people who find a character as determinedly positive as Poppy irritating - in an age in which we’re constantly being told we’re all heading to hell in a handbasket, it’s refreshing to encounter film-making that walks a path between straightforward escapism and miserablist hand-wringing.Mike views this through the prism that is his central character: “Poppy’s a teacher. She’s like many millions of people in the world who are getting on with it. Yes, we’re destroying the planet, we’re destroying each other - it’s bad news. But this is not a planet entirely populated by a lot of people sitting around committing suicide and wringing their hands. People are out there getting on with it, and not least the people who are teaching children. In that sense I wanted to make an anti-miserablist film.”

The type of character who just gets on with it, helps others and acts unselfishly has an interesting history in the Anglo-Hollywood films from which Mike aims to distance himself. Commonly, an impulse to save and protect individuals or people en masse culminates in self-sacrifice, whether of life or self-interest. It’s a narrative thread you can find in most genres, from cheesy big-budget action behemoths (think of Bruce Willis exploding himself to unintentionally hilarious effect in Armageddon to save the world, his friends and especially his hot daughter), to popularly acclaimed classics (see: Humphrey Bogart letting the woman he loves go in Casablanca).

In Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy’s nurturing drive to protect and save people doesn’t demand a sacrifice of this type, placing the film outside of the conventional path followed by this type of character. This is partly a function of the genre - not too many north London primary teachers are called upon to sacrifice life or love for the good of humankind - but also of a desire to step outside convention. Or am I wrong? “No, I don’t think that’s wrong,” responds Mike. “I think the point is it’s not a simplistic film that you can easily sum up. I hope it works, if it works, because it’s real and therefore the characters are real and resonant and layered.”

Clearly Mike Leigh is a director who cares about the experience of watching his films, as well as making them. What is he aiming for in this respect with Happy-Go-Lucky? “You go on an emotional journey when you watch this film. People have said, ‘I watched this film and I felt good and positive,’ but some people have also said, ‘I actually felt I wanted to cry,’ so you go through a lot of things.”

“Lots of people have told me that they assumed because it was called Happy-Go-Lucky, and because everything seemed to be going so well, that something bad would happen. They’ve said, ‘I thought I was being manipulated.’” And here, the man who has just released his first avowedly anti-miserablist film, twinkles with a rare smile. “You’re not being manipulated. Not by me.”

Words: Miles Johnson
Photography: John Stewardson

In a small central London room a fiery debate has just erupted. “I just think it’s not that simple,” says Lucy Kirkwood, 24. “Female friendships are more complicated than that.” The rest of the group sit up from their coffees, awaiting a reply from the middle-aged man chairing the meeting. “Lucy,” he says with a hint of frustration, “for me, female relationships are about power; are about control. That’s what all the girls we’ve talked with have said.” There’s a pause. Everyone sits back to think again, and takes a swig of coffee.

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On first appearances it could be a particularly engaged university tutorial. Ten or so people are stuffed onto sofas, most of them in their teens and early twenties, and each has been passionately arguing their position for several hours. But there are a couple of mature students sat among the youngsters, one of whom looks suspiciously like the comedian Robin Ince.

There’s also a kid in the corner sipping from a juice carton who, from a different angle, could be the spitting image of Posh Kenneth from Skins. Just as everyone is about to leave a cheery announcement comes from the chair that settles any lingering confusion: “Congratulations on the Bafta nomination, guys!”

If you haven’t seen or let alone heard of Skins yet, you’re presumably a resident of a particularly out-of-touch old peoples’ home, or had your cable connection accidentally switched to North Korean state television. In two seasons, the show’s chronicling of the trials and tribulations of a group of sixth-form students from Bristol has gone from a semi-cult hit adored by its target under-25 audience to one of Channel 4’s triumphs of the last five years.

Whereas most depictions of British teens fall somewhere between gun-toting hoodies and bleach-blonde proto-WAGs, the creators of Skins pride themselves on having crafted a show about young people that doesn’t shirk controversy or paint an overly rosy picture. Indeed with awards, high ratings and a new season in the pipeline it seems things could not be going better.

“It’s not usually that heated,” says 23-year-old Skins co-creator Jamie Brittain an hour after the writers meeting, seemingly more relaxed now away from the creative coalface. “This time round was a little more intense than normal; we’re obviously all excited about making the new series.”

It would be hard not to be excited in his position. Not only does Jamie have to sort his laundry for an award ceremony later that night, but his phone has been ringing constantly with mysterious calls from Japanese numbers. “The explanation for that is a bit strange really. When we were filming one of the online bits I accidentally left my phone number in one of the scenes after the edit. Now I am getting constant calls from Japan from people there who watched it.”

Being ‘big in Japan’ is a measure of success in any field, unless you’re Spinal Tap. But it’s not only the show’s ‘conventional’ success of good ratings and awards that have seen television industry types get their pantaloons in a twist. Targeting a teen audience notoriously difficult to pin down, the show’s arsenal of blogs, social networking profiles and podcasts – a development now referred to a ‘360-degree marketing’ by those in the know – has had executives across the land weeping