Pandora NIKHIL SINGH / witchboy QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY
PHOTOGRAPHY - HAYDEN PHIPPS
“I generally avoid definitions, preferring to grow like a stain behind things, in dark corners, under beds…etc. One day a person might look up and notice me. Dressed as a clown or something ridiculous. I’ll simply be ‘there’ - loitering in the background - an undefined problem, something that should probably be dealt with . ” HOW WOULD YOU INTRODUCE YOURSELF, WHAT YOU DO AND WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN? I generally avoid definitions, preferring to grow like a stain behind things, in dark corners, under beds… etc. One day a person might look up and notice me. Dressed as a clown or something ridiculous. I’ll simply be ‘there’ - loitering in the background - an undefined problem, something that should probably be dealt with. I’ve never been a ‘hi, this is me’ kind of person. I haven’t really been a person. More of an ‘invisible’, an imaginary friend. As far as belief’s go - I believe in many kaleidoscopic things. My investigations into the supernatural and uncanny have painted me into a few dark corners. I’ve been attacked by a succubus, invoked fairies and travelled to their realm, met the devil and peter pan (it’s complicated), had a problem with a poltergeist once (I had to move), been approached by more than a few witchdoctor types asking to take me on as their apprentice. All in all I prefer cartoons and weekends by the beach. I have too many plots to hatch to consider a life in the ‘secret service’. Many great secret shows. I do believe that their are forces at work on this planet that many would like to call ‘extraterrestrial’, but when you make a closer study and become involved you start to see these things as something ‘other’, more ancient, in fact NOT EXTRATERRESTRIAL AT ALL. They are a part of our ‘heritage’ and I have come to believe that we are more familiar with them than we would like to imagine… That being said, I believe we have serious problems in the way we conduct ourselves as a species, simply in terms of resource management, etc. Veganism is something you can actually do to change your carbon footprint and impact on the environment. Whether it’s to your taste or not, it makes a difference. The argument that we are entitled to something simply because it’s delicious is really what got us into this mess in the first place. Nobody is saying your bacon isn’t tasty. We are just saying that you can’t afford it anymore. It’s part of the nature of sacrifice, to be able to give up something you love for the greater good. I believe that the responsibility is ours, to alter our lifestyles immediately to avoid completely annihilating ourselves. If it DOES come to utter destruction, I really want to be healthy enough to have ringside seats and use the opportunity to stride around with a machete, blasting ‘Fields of the Nephilim’, decapitating ‘half crocodile, half human’ mutants or something (not that I listen to ‘Fields of the Nephilim’ anymore). YOU RECENTLY WROTE AND FILMED A FULL-LENGTH FILM CALLED ‘TRILLZONE’ IN ABOUT A MONTH, WITHOUT ANY BUDGET. WHAT WAS THE IDEA BEHIND DOING THE FILM, WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO TAKE ON SUCH A MAMMOTH PROJECT AND TO DO IT IN SUCH A SHORT TIME? Well, Trevor Steele-Taylor got hold of me two weeks before the Grahamstown Festival and mentioned that Lauren Beukes had dropped out of the JG Ballard symposium and would I like to take her place
and give a talk on Ballard, etc? I was like, sure. He then mentioned that all the other participants were screening ‘Ballardian’ movies they had made and would I like to make one as well? I was like, sure. What turned into a plan for a twelve minute short, grew into an hour long ‘beginning of a feature’, which I screened at the festival. I finished editing in the car ride up to the symposium. Cedric Sundstrom (the director of the American Ninja movies) was driving like a bat out of hell and there was no sleep to be had. It was an adventure! After watching the picture, Cedric and Trevor suggested that I add more sex and make it into a full-length feature. I radioed my team (Justin Allart, Lise Slabber, Robert Scholz and Niklas Wittenberg) about it. They were super-keen. So I returned and we finished the whole movie (99mins) from scratch in July (2014). We started July 1 and had it up on Vimeo on the last day of July. So yeah, none of us really knew that we would be making a movie. It kind of just happened. Like catching a cold. Once you have the symptoms and it kicks in, you just have to deal with it. So we did. We had so much fun that we are planning another one as soon as my book deadline is out the way… I HAVE FOUND A NUMBER OF USES FOR THE WORD ‘TRILL’, LIKE COMPUTER TERMS WHERE TRILL MEANS “TRANSPARENT INTERCONNECTION OF LOTS OF LINKS”. IT ALSO HAS A MUSICAL CONNECTION, WHERE IT IS USED TO DESCRIBE RAPID ALTERNATION BETWEEN TWO ADJACENT NOTES THAT BIRDS OR INSECTS SING OR UTTER IN A SUCCESSION OF RAPIDLY ALTERNATING SOUNDS. WOULD YOU RELATE THE FLOW OF EVENTS IN THE FILM TO COINCIDE WITH THE TITLE OR WHERE DID THE TITLE ORIGINATE? I was very influenced by Neil Jordan’s early movies: Angel, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, The Company of Wolves, etc. With Trill I wanted to create a character STRAIGHT OUT OF an early Neil Jordan picture. Vaguely unreal, like a fairy or an elf that’s forced to live an everyday existence, androgynous, in a natural and almost delusional way. Trill becomes the key to the magical kingdom for Lise’s character, a sort of harbinger. It doesn’t really matter where Trill goes. I mean where was she/he anyway? I wanted to reference every aspect related to the word Trill. For example, the soundtrack is full of bird trills. In hiphop culture it is a combination of the words ‘true’ and ‘real’. Also, The Trills from Star Trek were always my favourite aliens, in that they are kind of dual beings. So yeah - Trill. I think when Trill named his/her page ‘Trill Zone’ it was just because of the hip-hop music she had been listening to. She just thought it was cool because she is so ghetto. Lise’s character sees this name and mythologises it into a whole realm, which she then becomes lost in. However, Trill is also kind of a ‘dumb blonde’ because he/she is, in terms of the narrative, the ‘mystery woman’ in the film noir aspect: the strange, cigarette-smoking lady, who leads the protagonist (Lise) astray. Although, I obviously wanted to mix it up and have weird transferences between the two, like Lise has the cigarette-smoking mystery lady look, but is actually the drunk detective. So I wanted to get all this in with Trill. I interacted with many people in real life, as the character. I made a study of Stanislavsky-based acting at one point in my past (my old Playhouse days)
and have been into ‘method’ techniques ever since. I see them as ‘Castaneda-esque’. FROM WHAT I GATHERED, A LOT OF THE SCRIPT WAS ADAPTED AS YOU WENT ALONG WITH THE FILM. HOW MUCH OF THE ORIGINAL WAS LEFT OVER IN THE END AND WHERE DID YOU DRAW INSPIRATION FROM WHEN YOU STARTED THE WRITING PROCESS? Well, it’s sort of how I work with everything. I like a very clear-cut foundation and then I like to riff off that and go in weird, unanticipated directions. My ‘shadow people’ (Justin, Lise and Niklas) are all multi-talented artists in their own right. We figured that we could ‘wing it’ with what we had and so we did. The story came out of what we imagined was a deeper layer of Cape Town, both oblique and familiar. Many people see Cape Town in a very specific light, particularly in Cape Town, we wanted to sort of draw back a veil and see the city anew and explore more taboo issues. We wanted to capture the mountain more as a constant, oppressive presence - stuff like that. We basically adapted everything to what we could do without too much effort. We are all good friends so everything was one massive party from start to finish. We decided, well fuck the prescribed ‘industry’ way of doing things. We love films, let’s make one as ‘mad artists’. No one was really in charge and we delineated tasks. Justin was the camera guy, but Lise filmed parts on her phone and by me on my laptop. I was the writer, but portions were improvised. We just kind of treated each scene/shoot as a separate thing and rewrote the rulebook every day, always keeping the narrative in mind. I found the film following the usual course of things I write, it sort of became like a dream, which events and people encrusted around like a coral reef. Once completed, it resembles ‘one holistic natural organism’, but it is really the process of thousands of moments of individual growth. I never went to university or art school. I never even finished high school. I don’t subscribe to any prescribed ‘way of doing things’. I basically detest the way people are forced to explain and categorise creative method in institutions of ‘higher burning’. I believe in chaos. I believe that the only good school is one that has been burned to the ground. Perhaps I am being melodramatic here because I do love old school buildings. They are so great as sets in horror movies. I really have no idea how I work, I just do. I always plan to have as much fun working as possible. I don’t believe a person should suffer for art. In fact, it should be quite the opposite. I also see it as a character flaw to live out fantasies through art. I believe fantasies should be acted out ‘with the safety off’, not explored safely through an artistic medium. The experience gleaned from a fantasy can be fertile soil for creative expression. To say something was ‘left over’ would be a fallacy. It was what it was from start to finish and never deviated from its natural course of gestation at any point. YOU CHOSE A VERY RAW APPROACH TO MAKE THE FILM, DOING ONLY ONE TAKE ON MOST OF THE SCENES AND BASICALLY ADAPTING TO ALL THE SITUATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTS THAT YOU CHOSE TO PLACE THE ACTORS IN. CAN YOU ELABORATE ON THAT?
THE LAKE
I like being immersed in another world when I watch a film. I favour a slower pace. I also feel that it is possible to convey plot shifts in more elliptical ways. I don’t like over-explaining anything. I believe that emotional changes can be evoked through atmospheric devices. For example, in the couch scene the one-angle shot and slow pacing reveals the banality (and security/charm) of their domestic existence, life in a gilded cage, you begin to feel how trapped Lise’s character is in there. The fast cuts to the phone text show a hint of another world and prompt her to rise and shout (which is cut to hint that the rebellion of her action is carried through to the next scene). We then shift to dramatic gliding movement into town (another world) and an emerging soundtrack to open up the new world. Basically, this area is actually narrative driven and provides a major plot shift, although it is delivered subconsciously and ‘felt’ rather than discussed. DID YOU CHOOSE YOUR CHARACTERS AND ACTORS IN THE SAME SPONTANEOUS WAY? Well, no. The characters came out of the story, which was crafted around the people I knew who could carry it. It’s a sort of testimony to a facet of Cape Town, which I think people generally ignore, avoid or have never seen. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to be friends with people like Lise, Niklas, Bingo and Rob Scholz (whom I last directed in a school play). For example, Lise is a uniquely gifted actress. She manages to balance the technical necessities of acting whilst at the same time maintaining a fresh, completely naturalistic live quality and it’s on tap with her. Once she understands a concept, and she is remarkably quick, then she just does it and usually does so perfectly. She works in a casting agency as well (along with her regular stint on Black Sails) and is also very mindful of the technical side of performances. I would say that I actually built most of the film on her performances rather than the other way around. In the same way that I edited to the haunting piano score that Niklas produced. Rather than trying to fit sound to the visuals, I let the music establish a pace and let the plot encrust around it (like a coral reef). It affects the entire pacing of the film and gives it a sort of dreamy, introspective air. Events also tend to circulate in dream logic, coming out of random details and spiraling into harshness and then back to buoyancy very quickly. WHAT HAS THE REACTION TO THE FILM BEEN SO FAR AND ARE YOU PLANNING ON TAKING ON ANOTHER PROJECT IN A SIMILAR VEIN ANY TIME SOON? It was received well at Grahamstown and showed at the Celludroid Sci-Fi Fest at Labia, alongside an early screening of Jeff Paltrow’s ‘The Young Ones’. Now it has been accepted into the Bangladesh International Independent Film Festival. I’ve sent it out to some other festivals too, the day before yesterday actually. I’ve been busy. We’ll see what happens. The idea is not to focus on promotion too much, but to do more films. As many more as we can. Right now we have a couple of ideas we are developing and would like to shoot in summer. The same team with the same budget (nil). 31