ALEX TURVEY
IS THERE ANY PARTICULAR PROCESS YOU CONSISTENTLY FOLLOW? I am very, very, very thorough. I over-think the initial idea really. I start off by collecting visuals, finding a visual hook. Whether it’s something from a shoot I’ve done or something off the street, it can be anything. I used to collect odd scenes. I would just think them up and write them down, and I always refer back to those and see if I could make a two or three minute idea or where I could go from that scene. Then I craft a script, write a treatment and then re-write that. I’m really thorough, writing them again and again. I do loads of storyboards, more than most people. I put loads of pressure on myself and then I end up feeling massively dissatisfied because I barely even reference them on the shoot! But I have to get it out of my system to feel like I understand my idea enough. The fear is that I’m on my shoot, I’ve got one day, I’ve prepared for a month and, on that one day if it goes wrong, that’s all gone. There’s no way of recovering it so I over-worry and think of everything at the beginning, then in postproduction I’m much looser.
APART FROM YOUR FAMILY WHAT DO YOU RETURN TO CORNWALL FOR? The freedom and landscape as clichéd as that sounds. It blows out the cobwebs. I go on this cliff-walk from Perranporth to St Agnes and Porthtowan, and I find ideas come to me. The bad stuff just falls out of my ears and I have a bit of freedom and space. It helps me breathe. When I’m in London I force myself onto the next thing instead of letting ideas come to me. I feel like I need to ease up the pressure I put on myself and let it happen naturally like it did in college, when I used to get excited about an idea and it was organic, as opposed to now where its “this is my business and I have to make this because that’s what people like,” which is kind of horrible.
ARE YOU STILL A ‘YOUNG BOY WITH A LUCID IMAGINATION’? * I feel most comfortable when I’m swimming around my own mind. In my head I’m still living in Cornwall and I miss it a lot, I’m not a city boy. My parents still live in Perranporth, I grew up there and I need to back there from time to time. * “One particular favorite is the Obby Oss festival. Each May, a horse-like chap, the ‘Oss’, dons a gruesome mask and a huge black cape under which he tries to catch young maidens as they pass through town. Powerful stuff when you’re a young boy in a small town with a lucid imagination.” http://file-magazine. com/features/alexander-turvey
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